Secretly Ironic

I may have posted this before, but it’s still amazing.
“I was raised like a veal in the Orthodox Jewish town of Monsey, New York, where it was forbidden to eat veal together with dairy….”

A poet’s trick for getting unstuck, although it probably applies well enough to other art: Take a stack of index cards cut in half, or blank business cards, or something similar. Write a single word on each one: About 80 to 90 percent concrete nouns, with a handful of verbs and adjectives, maybe a couple abstract nouns. Mix well. Draw three. (Glassine. Ignite. Stamp.)

Got an idea? No? Try again. (Cement. Bile. Plasma.)

I learned it during the CTY poetry workshop I took about fifteen years ago. The instructors called it a personal universe deck. (Rare earth. Extinguish. Bait.)

I’d more or less forgotten about building one since then. But writing more than occasionally requires a bit more effort, and that requires some kickstarting. So I made a new one this week. (Squash. Arsenic. Crutch.)

It’s kind of fun. And sometimes you get poems out of it. (Appendix. Air-filter. Larva).

i. The Epiphyte
Sprouting from folds
of trunk and branch,
it reaches up to sun and down to soil.
The narrow tendrils twist and choke
to gain support.

The scaffold dead, the vines persist upright,
supplant the frame that formed them.

ii. The Brood Parasite
Before she killed her stepsisters,
she’d memorized their mother’s plumage
Her brighter mouth the most insistent,
the others starved to weakness,
she pushed them off the ledge.

Laying now herself, she picks the host
who most evokes the nest that she destroyed.

iii. The Blood Meal
Buried in the skin, swollen
she awaits the males.
Spermatophores with legs,
they exist to mate and die,
and to renege:

They turn their pointless mouths
to her immobile bulk.

iv. The Adelphophage
Each womb’s a feeding ground
where sharp-toothed fry first learn to hunt.
Of eighty young, just two survive to birth,
their brothers sacrificed
to bring them up to size.

We know the strong
by how they thrive.

God bless the pretty girls
in skirt-suits and sneakers
office shoes in plastic bags
swaying up the subway stairs.

I stare; they look away.
I follow them up
outdoors up
through the park up
indoors up
among the flickering cubicles —
We’re all alone on this train.

iii. The Blood Meal
    Up to four males have been found feeding on one female Ixodes holocyclus tick…

Innate imperative:
Seek a host, dig in, and swell,
and wait.
The males, spermatophores with legs,
don’t even feed.

Or shouldn’t.
Their stubby mouthparts useless on a mammal host
They climb aboard their mate’s immobile bulk:
the doomed stealing from the unborn.

iv. Adelphophage
We don’t pick the winners in this game,
just set the level field and watch them run.
Unkind, perhaps, but fair:
You’ll know the strong by how they thrive.

Each womb’s a feeding ground where
sharp-toothed embryos first learn to hunt.
Of eighty fry, just two survive to birth,
their brothers sacrificed to bring them up to size.
We know the strong by how they thrive.

Good Enough
It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us — Robert Haas

Breaks my heart to see that smile
and know it’s not for me.
I know better than to play at make-believe
but I still miss the fantasy
of being more than good enough.

Every day I march past thick bromeliads in the tower’s lobby:
Deep-green and hothouse-reared,
rubbed twice weekly with Shultz’s Leaf-Shine polish
by a man who spends his breaks napping in the service elevator,
wilting slowly in a sterile breeze.

Recently, a men’s lifestyle blog called The Magnificent Bastard hosted a cocktail contest. Which I didn’t win. (The winners do look pretty amazing, so I’m not actually disappointed to be found wanting.)

Here’s my losing contribution:

Combine the juice of 1/2 grapefruit, 1 lime, and 1/2 lemon. Set aside.

Over Ice:
2oz. gin (Boodles, Greylock, Tanqueray, whatever)
1 oz. mixed citrus juice
1/2 oz. St. Germain
1 tsp Creme de Violette
Dash Bitter Truth Bittermens Grapefruit bitters

Instructions:
Shake, strain, serve up. Garnish with lemon twist.

1. The Epiphyte
Sprouting from the folds
of trunk and branch,
it reaches up to sun and down to soil.
The narrow tendrils twist to gain support.

Once the host is dead, the vines persist upright,
supplant the scaffolding that raised them.

2. The Brood Parasite
Before she killed her stepsisters,
she’d memorized their mother’s plumage
Her brighter mouth the most insistent,
the others starved to weakness,
she pushed them off the ledge.

Laying now herself, she picks the host
who most evokes the nest that she destroyed.

GE is loving on Ronald Reagan like white on rice.

And I can see it from GE’s perspective – Reagan’s signature accomplishment was spending the USSR into the ground, and it worked, and it helped companies like GE and Bechtel and Boeing along the way. (We’d do well to recall this lesson when setting economic policy, but that’s another story).

The important lesson is that Reagan was, essentially, a terrible president, ignorant and reactionary in the George W. Bush vein. Despite his big smiley friendly veneer, he was a monster. Let us remember his attack on Medicare:

So, the CBO estimate of the health care bill is out, and the headlines are all screaming about it. The AP headline, carried on CNBC and elsewhere, reads “CBO: Health bill would cut $138 billion from deficit in 10 years.”

The Wall Street Journal gives a big shocking number: Health Overhaul to Cost $940 Billion Over Decade. In the online version, that’s the page title, but in the print version, it’s the headline, which is then followed by three paragraphs before the article explains that, despite the big number, it’s actually a savings.

Maybe it’s not just a WSJ thing, but it sure seems like it to me.