A World Explodes All Over Oprah's Couch in a Bunch of Little Pieces in the Cold Part of Two Aught-Aught Six

It’s exactly like ’99, when Ken was bumped

For Blaine – Summer’s brother,

If you’ll recall – or in ’88 when

The Rockers were repositioned

As the Sensations and the alliterative

Dana, Diva and DeeDee (as if

The Ramones never existed)

Became the Barney-flavored

Bopsy, Becky and Belinda.

Baby Bop became green all over again.

It’s exactly like that

As she sits on the famous sofa

Trying to explain that yes, with three percent

Body fat it has been a while

Since she experienced cycle,

Fuck you very much for asking,

That no, it’s not difficult being

The oldest of eight, although

At thirty-nine years difference in age

She doesn’t feel a real bond with Shelly,

Byron, Keats or Todd, for that matter,

That delightful fully bendable sibling

Who has been missing again for fifteen

Years after taking twenty-three or so

To climb K2,

That yes, she does like younger men,

Always has, likes that feeling of power

In the saddle on the throttle in her

45-degree angle hips.  What

Of it?  Pound’s been dead for thirty-

Four years and counting now but most

Of his work died a hundred plus plus years ago, died

While it germinated in his tiny fascist brain – 

The couch seems to elicit

Exactly this type of confession,

This kind of soul-spewing invective

Against fathers, mothers, all of the voices

One hopes to escape.

It’s so easy to

Accessorize your past,

To embroider a real “yes, but if…”

Twirly-fringe on the skirt of history,

Like oreo cookies were never analogies,

Like having your teeth ripped from your bone

And flesh with nothing more to deaden

The pain than a personal sense of style

And a minor imagination

Coupled

With a trailer-park upbringing

That keeps eating the muscle

That wants to flex against

The establishment she wants so badly

To be accepted by:  

Entering under the EXIT sign again,

Just like poor Francie, a dolled-up

Aunt Jemima if ever one existed:

Pour some syrup on the pancake make-up

And see if a good Aryan model doesn’t reinforce

The Fatherland’s desire for cleansing.

Look again at those fine Carson boys - 

Kit, Ken and Tommy – 

The uber-jaw with the blue and 

The blonde, the pecs primed out

Like an SS statue at the assembly hall.

Everything begins to depend on accent

And inflection.  When Ken screamed,

“She’s such a bitch, a talentless,

No-good hack of a bitch!”, wasn’t

He really saying, “Love me, please”?

Of course he was, we all are

When we pop off at our predecessors,

The same way Pound stood

On the ruins of Whitman

And tried to make a pact

Of forbearance and commerce.

Ah, the dirty institutionalized sense

Of Industry!, again, of preening

To the spawn and the collectors,

Of the slimy trail of market positioning,

Like brats chomping on the flesh

Of their mothers, it’s all in how

You spin the spin on your spinning.

‘Tis why she’s on the couch today,

Putting her brave eyes-forward face

On the unofficial authorized fictive

Autobiographical tale:  yes, she does

Enjoy leather and chains, yes,

Nipple-less life is no problem really, yes,

There was once a slight pudendum, no,

Her ass is not completely flat, not completely.

She survives the countless decapitations

Through encrypted art exhibitions

And meditation.  And this year’s editions

Feature organic green tea.  That helps

Relax the soul after a bit of history

Replacement.  Skipper has been sister,

Cousin, niece and archenemy.

Ken is bed-toy, boyfriend and friend,

And unfortunate Midge is collectable-only forgotten.

No, she doesn’t suffer pangs of regret – 

(So close in structure to ingrate

And parsed about the same:  to again

Bemoan the moment re-do passed from

What if… to so what…) – about anything

She has claimed or anything she has worn.

No boa too bold, no garter slung too high

Or flung too low – a girl’s gonna get

What a girl wants and everything between

Her and her desire is but a piece

To be enjoyed and envoyed to the attaché

At the heart of procurement,

And who or what gets hurt or how

Is but a piffle towards the master plan.

All to the greater good and where

Does regret fit in with that?

What to do over again?

Take back something said, something

Worn, some heart broken like some lost

Shoe?  Ken can go to hell, she says,

They all can, for that matter,

It’s ending exactly the way she wanted

And for all the exact reasons:  it comes

Down to pride or jealousy, maybe disbelief.

One man’s talentless hack

Is another man’s pioneer, the touchstone

Of Veritas, Aesthetics and the fine line

Between fact and immeasurable

Grief.

What’s a world without Barbie®

If Barbie® doesn’t get to write the story,

Exacting the way she wants it to read?

So many monkeys typing, literally,

So many tales to tell, unerringly,

So many visions to redact, see

The world through cleansed eyes,

Exactly.

©2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved

Naked Men are Dancing on Stage at the National Book Awards in 1974

Barbie® does a promenade around the mulberry bush,

kicking her stiff hoop skirt,

twirling her bandera boots, 

her pirate sleeves slapping her limpid wrists

like flags at gust, asking herself

the same vapid questions we all come 

up with while doing our square dances:

what color my eyes?

what song my heart?

how point A to point B?

where does this square end?

A corner table catches her hip and for a sec,

for a brief tilting lilting nano-moment she gets

perpendicular to the floor,

screaming across the sky like a blitzkrieg.

We don’t have to kid ourselves

about this horizontality:  it’s no great

Miltonesque fall of man, Lucifer

is not a main character, no shorn

salvation will signal the agonistes to follow,

it’s just Barbie®, in a flattened hoop skirt,

falling to the floor, acknowledging Newton, 

minus the ability 

to catch herself or even turn her head

to see the impending crash.  

Some of her comb-it-now hair has ended

akimbo to a bit of convexity where an ear

should be; one bandera boot has fallen 

from the foot and in between these extremities,

Barbie®, as she is wont to do,

considers her fate, the music

(some sweet low sound still

jangling out of a saxophone-tuned

guitar that sounds like the Malcolms

have hit the jackpot at the pawn store,

or at least like the sound of the next toilet

you hear, flushed with the light

of an infinite bulb)

that led her to the bush

that led her to the dance

that led her to the table

that led her to the fall

that put her on her ass

in this predicament.

All this time, this time being

not her fervored dance or her flight

into the layers of potential string theory

versus the soothing calming power

of Coptic eschatology or her 

proneness on the parquet 

(was it mentioned that the floor is parquet?  

If no, then oh by the way, the floor is parquet)

(not that that is supposed to mean some or anything) 

(parquet being parquet not metaphor) 

or her revealing

dishevelment now that she has landed

but rather forever, all the time,

every moment since the nadir of the first

bang until the zenith of the infinity! infinity!

jinx! bangs that will moot every previous

argument and dialogue

and every cryptic epistemology

versus skeptic ontology conversation, eternal 

Barbie® has blamed Ken for her stumblings, for 

her failings where grace is implied.

Ken, more often than not, never sees it coming,

afterwards can’t precisely put his formed-together fingers 

on what exactly hit him.  He gives his learned

behavior as much room as necessary (from

previous floor-crashing experiences) always to find

that when her floor falls it rises to meet him

face first, flattening his facile features, giving

him the renewed and always renewable knowledge

that the past can teach us nothing.  Even when,

or especially so, he wants desperately to learn

something enlightening or translucent or meta-

historical or valid or murky or false or ringed with 

the triggers of a V-1 waiting to launch.  Barbie®

thinks the same useless things about language:

its very temporality denies its permanence.

What is true on Tuesday is as often false

on Thursday and forgotten on Monday, some

trace of a whisper left for the theologians to come

to weasel an explanation from.  How will

her hoop skirt be described?  As stiff? as

flattened? as translucent? as hind sight?

You can always tickle His creatures but 

you’ll never reach the Master.

Supposition might have it as a non-point:

which came first? the skirt or the Fall?

How does the hierarchy line up for the last

walk-through before final execution of judgment?

It all falls about her drums, the bowl

of her skull hollowed for the same experiments

she always suspected she was an unwitting

participant in but was afraid to ask:  she

was asking the wrong questions already

knowing she’d never get the right answers.

Winged creatures and ambassadors matter

not a whit when your bandera boots slip-slide

out from under you, flipped, twirled, twisted

beyond recognition.  When recognition

equals the fatal execution of final judgments

mostly withheld.  Oh, the inevitability of it all.

How it matters, how every single minute stupid

unremarkable movement must matter.

Curtain falls or rises, does not compute

in Barbie®’s zone:  everybody 

now…an’ a one, an’ a two…

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved

At Swim the Child

A word on the guilty, on the maimed – 

We healed them all, without award

Or banner hung in our name.

The Savior Our Lord Jesus Christ

Would say here a piece about harlots

Singing hosannas louder than saints

But volume comes at a discounted rate.

We’ve replaced straw mats with straw polls,

All of our lepers are gay or politicians

And the masses will never see their Promised

Land of Fifteen Minutes.  The poet asks,

What if I could tell you something true?

As though that would be out of the ordinary,

But as we read him we relax our guard against

The scarring justice of the true word,

Discovering the poet’s truth to be no more

Than the false idol of verse (although he says

He does not bow down before false…)

But it is Daniel who bows before no idol

And reeks of mane and sinew,

The chewed remains of the unfavored

And the lame.  Our debits in the den

Outweigh our incoming advances, our voices

Give no tendon to our protests, but oh

How we stomp on the notion of revelation,

Doing our best to re-imagine apocalypse

Until we are positive our mercies

Are aligned just so, our altruisms just so

Aligned to ensure fast and final entry.

***

We all separately have our idea of what fast

Means, of what final implies, we throw

Our gravel against the boulders

Of impiety, not to make a bend but to add

Our pittance in choir against the distance

Between what so-and-so said

So long ago we should do and what

Our DNA nature says we will do.  Under

What hallucinogen so-and-so decided

So long ago to define mercy is left

To other scholars, but here we are,

Crimping our ways to a will,

To a will we do not comprehend,

But not a will but a watery image

Of a will, of an ice-floe ethics

(Invented by social mores to prohibit

Basic cannibalism) straining to imply

A pattern where no image of pattern

Is implanted.  Some redactable name

We want to give this shadow, this glaze

Of conscience, this glare of morality.

We know it like we know

The fear of the child, thirty odd

Years ago, adrift in the water,

With no purchase, no hold:  this moment

Called nameless panic nameless because

Too young to know what is ending,

Panic because depth becomes measured

By a fading shadow of a board, far

Above, now far behind.  What so-and-so

So long ago throws is not a life jacket

But a ghost, and what we catch, drowning,

So long ago, is not a saving pull

But a balled weight, with our name

Inscribed:  true, deceit, true…

©2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved

More on the Continuing Crisis

Descended as a child, and when I did, was

Sprung from the leaf of the Word, writ

Large between the vellum covers,

The acrid ink as a piece of aluminum

Forged with yellow, the metaphor dropped

Into the swaddling fluids of the mother

Who would harbor magenta, sentence and ill

For her package until she met her final

Elliptical end, period, break.  New

Paragraph.  The comma imbued a sense

Of ceaselessness at a young age and, granted

The minor teals of metabolism and analogy,

I became a dashing tilde upon the fabric

Of the world’s table of contents.

Under the circumstances, my father 

Was forced to perform heroic feats

To remain steadfastly altruistic and gray

As far as speed would allow.

In my opinion, subject was merely a hope.

In my opinion, then, object was obstacle

And fallen justice.

One only sings of simile in the face

Of protest.  I denied the predicate

And took umbrage at false et ceteras.

The image of the ergo, its false

And embittered ochre of empathy,

Infuriated my lithesome, turquoise mind;

I embraced the power of the possessive.

Imperative tenses became the rule,

The scrimmed image behind the image,

The image that replaced the image

So I would not see the image,

And I took bicycle to heart and path,

Seeking the source of the final

Annotation.  Trying to be as one

With the index, I soured

On encyclopedias and sought true

Aqua and maroon in the flesh

And stone of such temporalities

As time, ground, Tupperware.

I cited a fragrant miasma of wheat

And intestine in my path 

To the codex, but found

Acceleration harder to achieve

Than light.  The roman a clef

Gnawed at my adolescent

Identification and I climbed the blue

Acknowledgement of Speak, Misspeak,

Erase.  How origin failed me

In my analogies, how the winsome

Strains of punctuation let me down

Repeatedly in my beginnings.  Dropped

Now here as an umlaut, splashed now there

As a seemingly errant apostrophe,

I ventured verse

And run-on sentence to get around

To stanza.  The corpus tempus

Found my paragraph, termed it edible,

And I was encrusted with the jewels

Of contrasting ethics.  

Rhetoric mentions a slimy haven

In its annals where all good or indifferent

Poetics may go to expire.

I attempted quietude in my passing,

An effort to tell the parchment that my end

Pages had not been fully met

In their cobalt sense of wonderment.

Great scorn befalls the unsharpened pencil,

The un-inked quill, and I furiously

Engaged the quatrain to equal

Meter where not Tone.  Where not Tone

With no Character, with no Character

Where no Plot, no Plot 

To give no Settings, give no Settings

To no conclusion.

To not conclude 

Becomes the vermilion verse,

The last seek of embeddings.

I stand, now awkward, now tin, now

Lime, at haunt to the author’s note, and a

Pasty blurb regarding statement and intent.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved

Winona Ryder Hits the Checkout Counter

I

The poet’s amortized kaleidoscope is broke; 

Sometimes it takes twelve measures to get

At the point of broke kaleidoscopes,

Mis-marketed calliopes and bankrupt carousels;

Who knows anything anymore?

These days, Xanthippe doesn’t take

The hard line on hemlock.

Maybe once upon a time, in the same

Vein that equates an asterisk to a splattered spider

On a page – when a page still had the force of anodized water – 

Some accidental dropping in of theory

Where theology would better serve

You have to separate process from method;

A high dive

May play analogous springs for the swimmer

But the leap is spliced from the splash – however

The twists flips turns swerves hits and miseries

In between go – it is always either theories

Or art where practice does not 

Abide.

II

The Mexican heather is in bloom.  As is

The purple sage dragon, who can take

A bite out of reality faster than a plugged 

Hookah, or a spirit house foreshadowing the

Split in the age of innocence.  All of these

Period pieces:  a foreshortened hindsight is

Glad I never met you.  The dead,

If you are interested, know the Infinite

To be, as concepts go, impotent.  What is

The blood of an immortal soul but mulch

And algorithm towards interruption?

What but a blouse casually placed 

In harm’s way, out of sight, out of mind.

The poet’s head spins in the miasma.

Ramifications:  ask the tripped trepid god-

Father how to proceed to the next Elysian plane;

Not to sound biased, but a forfeiture of evidence

Does not innocence create.  You want to

Spit at the Infinite?  Go ahead:

The infinit welcomes your disapproval.

III

And offers a cup of hemlock.  Xanthippe knows.

Let no love come between a girl and her rye

Prone catcher:  finally, we get to McVeigh, 

To Kaczynski, to Hart Crane, those Terrible

Threes.  Empire will decline

In direct proportion to our glad standing

Adoration of the second, the moment, the dash

At the finish line.  Who understands

The propulsions of atonal engines?  Who

Cares for the ambulation of glimpsed-but-

Never-seen purgatories?  Everyone

Has a chance at redemption or the smell

Of avarice over an open flame:  wood

Plus plastic plus wire, or Naugahyde

Liquid combined with silence of a secret

Love disables to deceive:  period pieces

Ending in plea agreements.  When not

Gas chambers and self-immolation, the shame

Of B-movies and guest shot appearances, we

Hold this evidence to be self-true,

IV

To be true, the poet forfeits innocence

In the guise of philosophy, heart with the mask

Of discovery, letters with a parcel

Of hope, and cantos the tabloid

Presence with a dash of creation’s

Mud, a pinch of complaint’s pliant whine

Against theory - 

Aren’t we all?  What’s hypothetical around

The placement of a bouter, a bag, a ring

Around the skirt of indifference to public

Crime or opinion – the poet’s own bombs

In weight and disposition, this poesy

Its wintry aloofness and running commentary

United,

It stands to reason when not to write

The squall of our times on a page three

Headliner.  What amuses the carousel?

The poet’s kaleidoscope collapses in

The twelve measures it takes to become

Untitled.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved

To the Idea of the Poet, Dead, Rotting in His Order

I

We did essentialize our differences (so back off),

Turning truth into an awkward false syllogism:

I am right and true, we both said; what is right

And true – whether sepia-tone or black and white – 

Is the only way we will prevail, the only course

Of action to take, the only way to proceed,

We both said; ergo, said as a joke, we can only

Follow one path – mine – not said jokingly,

We both said.

II

If but not a thousand words;

If but not an impossible fillip;

If but not a blue guitar;

If but no logician;

If but not the empty vessel;

If but not the earth-worn boot;

If but not the still, normal life;

If but not the puffin;

If but only not…

If but never the unuttered

Tolerance, this bane, acceptance where lines should be drawn:

Our resigning critique of sand castles constricting conditional

Confluences lost when not amply abandoned.

Our coal cars, two, charred and soot-fed careened

An indolent course behind the trampoline car,

Behind the quick-dry epoxy car, before

The slatternly nailhead car but after

The acrostic armchair car – a pause:

Why train as metaphor?

III

Our time is better spent as signifier or analogy, as change purse

When not displaced transference; see here the engineer, his smirk 

And sneer a signpost of indifference for all to hear and abide.

The madrigal car turned over, pulling with it the hawks

And the three-armed boy car.  It’s not over until the anagrammatical 

Sofa sings, and the bearded lady tumps the lizard-skinned sword swallower

Onto the tiger-skin rug.  (As many in captivity as free, now extinct, almost

Incidentally.)

The conductor tolerates the state of his menagerie, calls it

Mercury or hedonized iodine, spits at cloud burst when being

Replaced doing.  Flung a craving, a caveat taped on the capital

Wall.  This train is barreling

Over the falls to its next spun destination, Dubuque or Hartford,

The bayou, the beach, the plains, buoyed

At gaps on the tracks.  The toothless smile

On the mumbling mime’s face keeps

The engineer in stitches.

IV

If but not on schedule, the caboose

Rolls under the watershed, the pump cast

In quick-dry cement, the town urchins

Lined to cheer and maybe, if the moms

Do not pay attention, have a go

At the bouncy-ball car – chugging

And flouncing the twisted tarp

With the smiley-duck face – 

A calliope tune from the Uberman review,

That cancelled radiolog from the last

Cold war’s propaganda simile.  Two

Coal cars smolder, waiting to flame

Wearing gold lamé throws accentuated

With just-for-kicks lefty berets apace

With the changing times.  Abstract truth

Displaces theorized abatement because

If but not only when – conditional

Altruism.

V

How we did away with structure, how order,

Even posted, felled us in our twitterings.

Pictures of the removed, of the harrowed,

Tiny simulacrums of disfigurements

And not only the actors and the readers,

Not only the straight lines and the devil,

Not only the faithless and the trite,

Not only the taken and the had,

Not just the beaten but the bully,

Not just the deadbeat but the mad,

Not just the darkened but the wheat – 

These too the two by two, the first

In a long line of the flimflammed – 

This train rolls to its halt of preened feathers

Splayed across the backdrop of a dire

Proscenium.  Not only the two faces,

If but not only the crossed heart where no

Moraled soul, the big top endures

Its tautologies of when our clemencies

Braced against the abyss splattered water

Fall of fur and marrow, where not tolerance

But the idea of tolerance, not truth

But the thought of the leaf, not justice

But the idea of the tree,

The point of action behind the twined fingers,

Hope to die, stick a needle in the eye

Where every line drawn is the needle

Of our collective high torpidity.

VI

If but not only to each his own has met

Our faded tracks of commandments ignored

When not rationalized – a father has no say

In the mother’s choice for the child.

Coal pushes the antiquated smack

The twice-shy conductor propels

The locomotive towards the end of the rail,

The circus always visits the same town

Twice.  We come to see the quixotic,

The driving but that steers the if, 

The elephant, the peanut, the de-

Essentialized other.  One might

As easily seek the godhead in a poem

As seek the veritable in the abide.

This hankering towards the difference

In reality, towards the reality not

The idea of reality in difference, both

Ephemeral beings for the ephebe’s path

To trample.  One might as easily seek

The godhead in song as append the hymn

To the altar.  Always search for new

Havens to hold where no train runs, no

Circus tracks its blithering wrench

To destruction if so the mother chooses

For the child.  How we seek despondency

Not knowing its name, how we seek

Complacency not knowing its name,

How we seek fictive myth not knowing

Its name, how the abortive truth

Is sought not the idea of truth but truth

Not knowing its name.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved