I had my first Christmas brunch: three of my new friends from one of the punky cafes downtown I hung out in, along with a new artist friend and the Very Nice Young Man, my former roommate. I served up a huge bread pudding with cream. They all greedily demolished it and Christmas brunch for me, featuring bread pudding, has become more or less an annual tradition.
Cenotaphs
First Cycle
I
Tender is the music of the fresh young leaves
As the cool wind passes through
The tall lombardy poplars
That sway like weary dancers in the night.
Under these trees last week
Lay two young lovers
Skin to skin
In the cool damp grass,
Unaware of the voyeur known to them both
Who was masturbating just ten feet away.
Tonight, in this same place
Where the lovers lay
Dines a raccoon on a half-eaten cat
That once belonged to one of the houses that line
Like landing lights on a runway
This vast field and lake
Where people walk their dogs,
Where they fly their kites,
Where they do tai chi in the mornings,
Where they gossip together
Or where some walk alone
On summer evenings.
In one of these houses,
Where the cat once lived
And is now expectorating hairballs in feline purgatory—
Its punishment for relentlessly clawing the livingroom drapes
And for sometimes shitting in the philodendron—
A respectable father is fondling his daughter,
Or beating the brains out of his little son,
Or both,
While his wife, touching up her make-up,
Still hasn’t decided to leave him.
In a few short years
His little son will be running
With other battered little sons,
Fatherless boys
Wearing each the same kind of track suit
And the same kind of baseball cap,
And they will likely gang-rape underneath
Those same lombardy poplars
Some one or two unfortunate young fatherless girls
Who can never seem to get away from this neighbourhood.
And some of these boys will wind up either dead or in jail,
Others will be doing time in job and marriage hell,
Where they’ll be screaming for a freedom that is just
Another face for the bondage they love to hate,
By which time they’ll have long forgotten
The steps in the dance of love
That would imprison them again inside its indelible matrix,
Losing them like comatose rats inside a sterile white maze,
Where they’ll meet their first and their only true love,
Their jailers spinning them in vertiginous pirouettes
Across ballroom floors of elusive desire
Lit all around with lurid red exit signs
And no open doors of escape.
The wind moans through the lombardy poplars;
The lovers are sleeping.
II
It’s really an obelisk,
Though they call it a cenotaph,
Honouring the one hundred million war dead.
An architectural feature of Ancient Egypt,
Aped but not imitated in the phallic Washington Monument.
Its squat little granite clone
Is festooned now with fake poppies
‘Round which doddering old soldiers
flirt with senility
and their approaching death
in a raw November squall.
Their freshly polished war medals alone suggest
The cannon fodder that was made
Of their transient gleaming youth, long ago
By generals, presidents and kings.
These superannuated men of war
Swell now the nursing homes
And the extended care units;
Young again, this time as shriveled and withered infants
Who need to be diapered and spoon-fed.
Later on they’ll drink and remember inside the legion halls
What those who’ve see war
Would sooner forget,
As they too prepare to die,
Forgotten, unsung, unheeded,
With only fake poppies
That’ll never die
Festooning fake obelisks
Like red pubic hair
On erect granite penises
To suggest that ever
A single shot was fired or heard.
Sons and grandsons of soldiers
Carry now their fathers’ war-legacy
And honour the war dead,
The slain of Dresden and Hiroshima,
Of Awschwitz and Bergen-Belsen,
And the war survivors
In battlefield re-incarnations
Play out now in corporation takeovers
And in marriage-hells,
Such battles as can never be properly
Won or concluded,
While others have laid down
In peace marches and sit-ins
Foundation stones for a fictional peace.
Under the swaying lombardy poplars
The raccoons are fighting over what remains
Of the dead cat.
In one of the houses a child is weeping.
III
We weep silently into our empty glasses
Such tears as we could never have shed
But in the silent knowledge
That this life of restrained, and sustained,
And constraining conflict
Will soon give way
To a universal holocaust of the soul;
And living remnants of vanished ages
Are raised up again,
Prophets, priests and sages
Who signal a new way
Which is the ancient way
Which is the way through
Post-modernist jigsaws
And into the promised paradise
That hangs now before
Our sleep-deprived eyes,
And over our heads like a sword of Damocles,
Tempting with visions that can never be grasped
But for a slight altering
In the rhythm of the dance;
And the ballroom boundaries are dissolved
Into diaphanous mists into which we must plunge
Like comets and wandering asteroids
Negotiating, but never quite spanning
That difficult chasm
Between inner and outer space
Where new age rainbows lure and entice
Though long ago their pots of gold
Were cashed into investments, stocks
And world web gadgetry;
And so our hunger grows
With the festering discontent
Of ideals and cosmic delusions
Being harpooned like graceful dolphins
On fiscal demands wielded by corporate czars
Who traded in long ago their Volkswagen vans
For a BMW, a bag of golf clubs,
And a security-monitored condo.
Second Cycle
I
Their voices rustle like dead leaves
And snap like dry twigs;
Accents of business, commerce
And fiscal growth,
And not even the double lattes
Consumed at a café table
Can synthesize what passion they must have
Bartered out of existence
Along with their wild youth.
No longer young, they are too soon old
With six figure incomes,
Faltering marriages
And progeny who are wise enough to hate them.
And none of the blood of their payroll wage slaves,
Nor their regular hookers,
Nor the waitress they are indiscreetly leering at,
Neither the squatters, the homeless, the beggars,
Or the aged war veterans
They have squeezed out of poor neighbourhoods
Where they wallow now,
In gentrified squalor—
None of this blood,
And none of this human flesh
That fattens but can never feed them,
Will grant them a return
To the life that they sold
In barter exchange for this rusted pot overflowing with fools’ gold.
Fear is the voice that trickles out of their mouths
In a thin and colourless ooze,
Such men as can be allies;
And perhaps, when they were younger, studs,
But never friends, and hardly lovers,
With their hardened hearts and flaccid dicks,
And their slowly hardening arteries.
Nothing remains in them of the passion
That drove their warrior fathers
Into battle fields and body bags;
And they will never know until it’s too late
That they too are squatters in the global abattoir;
That their lease is expired—
That it is time to collect the rent.
II
On battlegrounds and in hockey rinks
They soldier on,
Through soccer fields and squash courts
Into corporate boardrooms.
The foe is everywhere,
And women join in the battle—
Corporate amazons and Boadiceas
Reading faithfully every morning over designer coffee beans
Like nuns with their prayer books and rosaries
The Report on Business, the Financial Times
And the Wall Street Journal.
Allies, enemies, lovers;
But who are the friends,
The sisters and brothers
Who won’t be revealed
Until the last rattling sabre
Is thrown down
With the last dismantled terminal screen—
But the slaughter persists and the slaughter continues
From chessboards, through international conflagrations,
And generals and kings
Fatten themselves
Along with the corporate moguls
On the lean flesh
And drink themselves into bacchanalian stupor
On the red blood
Of children, youths, mistresses, whores,
And Third World labourers,
Making the streets safe for free enterprise,
Making the world safe for democracy,
Making money and bombs,
And laying out feasts of the dead
On antique mahogany tables,
For the plundering harpies of cosmic vengeance
And the global deforestation continues,
But for the tall lombardy poplars
Under which the young lovers are sleeping.
III
The middle-aged husband who beats his wife every night
Is the teenage boy on a skateboard
Is the computer geek who can’t get a date
Is the old man being spoon-fed in a nursing home
Is the soldier bayoneting his psychic twin on the battlefield
Who is the actor who enshrines the amorous fantasies of women and not a
few men.
And the precious art-fag in the aisle seat
Is the little gang war thug
Is the priest hearing confession
From the woman who lost her young virginity
To one of his colleagues
Who is the corporate slut
In the power suit bought at a sum
That could feed for a year
The single mother and her son
Who offers up his young body
For a profit
To the honoured suburban family man
Who is also the construction worker
Ripping up the pavement with a jackhammer.
And the husband who caresses his lovely young wife
Is the startlingly lovely youth
Giving head in a public toilet stall
To his brother’s former science teacher
Who privately promenades in bedroom ecstasies
Dressed in his wife’s panties, her garters and her fishnet hose.
The power that we wield is the power that we love
Is the power that smashes and grinds to a powder
Our misappropriated lives
That we have never truly owned,
We who are slaves,
We whose touch can either murder or heal,
We whose clever abstractions
Will do not a blessed thing
To shield our fragile flesh
And our delicate souls
From the terrible beauty
That yawns wide open to receive us.
Third Cycle
I
They teach us well,
Long before that final suck
On mother’s breast or synthetic nipple;
The lie carries us,
Bearing us through
The peer-group horrors of grade school
And past the biological nightmares of puberty—
The all-powerful male,
Straight as a faltering zipper,
Only a little bit whiter
Than dirty yellow snow;
Every woman’s dream and fantasy
Personified
In strapping young studly,
Braggadocio virility,
The other Janus face
To the terror that every little boy experiences
On his first entire day away from Mommy.
And women who are wiser
Than to believe the lie
And to swallow the lie
Along with their dignity
And the squandered semen
Of their would-be Romeos
Are slandered as dykes,
As man-hating or man-eating bitches,
Denuding the emperor who is already naked,
Laying bare to reviling eyes
His silly little jewels.
Do guys who play sports together
Ever wonder
What they like
About standing together naked in a communal shower?
Look but don’t touch?
Desire, but don’t feel?
Or don’t acknowledge,
Since what you might feel
Or desire
Could be struggling
As manfully as you are
To quell that betraying hard-on.
Not all are covert pansies,
Queers or closet-cases—
Such suspicions
As are easily taken care of
In a vindicating screw
With any willing female or half-convincing trannie
Who is stupid enough
To let us swaddle our gay-curiosity
In the warm and comforting denial
Of their tenderly proffered flesh.
II
Do men exist
Who know what it is to embrace love,
To be embraced by love—
Love the hermaphrodite,
Love the androgyne,
Love the freak, the outsider, love the gender-fuck,
The love that sees no genitalia?
Who will be moved by love
Into alliances
That are not merely convenient,
That are not merely self-serving, servicing, or self-defending,
Alliances that are not merely alliances,
Neither sexed nor sexless,
But something other,
Something that will challenge and undermine
That will liberate us from
Our stupid and foundering virility?
So the soldiers swarm on
Across battlefields,
Across hockey rinks and chessboards
Across corporate empires:
Homeboys fighting each other for turf,
And would-be rock-stars
Stroking phallic electric guitars
In auto-erotic ecstasies
For the back-combed groupies
Who will never raise to them
So much as a willing black-stockinged leg.
And so our ancestral bondage
To power, to dominion and illusions of control
Have held each of us hostage,
Barricaded, inured
From the faltering, emasculating vulnerability
That will set us free
From our precious testicles,
Making possible a new intimacy,
A new trust, healing,
Making real the restorative virtues of love.
III
The young men stand all in a row:
They are felons in a police line;
They are resistance heroes facing a firing squad;
They are schoolboys being picked
For floor hockey;
They are naked:
They are being auctioned off in a slave market
In Athens, in Rome,
In Mississippi or Alabama.
Subjects for marble statuary,
Since western civilization is founded upon
Images of naked men and their exposed phalluses;
They are naked;
They are lining up for the showers
After the game;
They are naked
And they are lining up for the gas chamber.
The heroes live on—
After the wars,
After the battle fields,
After the games,
And emasculating unions with amazons,
And beyond the ritual stone phalluses
Of ancient pagan fertility rites
And cenotaphs of granite,
Beyond the nakedness
Of communal showers and gas chambers
To the naked hill
And the three naked crosses,
Stark as three defoliated lombardy poplars
Where the raccoons and the cat
They are eating,
Where the sleeping lovers,
Where the voyeur and the rape victims
And the battering fathers
And their preyed-upon offspring,
With the frightened little boys wearing track suits
And power suits
May be one day reconciled
Beneath the naked man who is God
Dying between two naked thieves,
And so the world’s redemption
And the reconciliation of the cosmos
Pivots around the exposed phallus
Of God breathing his last,
His final cry shaking the earth,
Awakening the dead,
And rending in two
The golden veil
That obstructs our progress
From the most sacred place
Into the holiest of holies.
Love
Is
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