Nightmare on Glassell

Posted on January 20, 2005 in Compassion Poems Poetry

I have a hard time getting over being shamed in public and have a hard time talking to the person I’ve been castigated for hurting, even if they don’t feel hurt. Last week at a poetry reading, I teased a woman with some banter we’d exchanged a few times. This woman reads racy poetry. And wears a silver cross. I noted this and pointed out the discrepancy. She laughed and told a story about how she’d gotten drunk in a Minnesota bar. Another patron had asked her to go hot-tubbing. “You know what this means?” she said, brandishing the silver cross. “It means no Pooh-tang.”

In subsequent weeks, we bantered about this. “Is there Poohtang in this?” I’d ask. Then last week, one of the leaders — Ben Trigg — shouted at me “You said that last week.” (Which was not true.) “Say it again and you’re banned.”

When the woman sat down next to me, I apologized. “There’s no need for an apology,” she said.

Last night, she asked me how I was. Told that she was planning to make a shirt with a Winnie-the-Pooh clutching a bottle of Tang, both crossed out. I reminded her that if I commented, I’d be banned, then sullenly ordered a wild raspberry tea.

When Ben and Steve — the self-appointed arbiters of poetry ettiquette — choose someone to collect the money for the poets, they coerce a young pretty girl. No, no sexism here.

I read two less than one page poems. As I was shuffling my pages to go on to a third, Steve Ramirez said “Joel, you have thirty seconds.” It’s the second time he’s done that and I have never seen him do it to anyone else. Last week, I watched him sit stupidly as some angry ass from Riverside went on for four pages about an ex-girlfriend who, he said, wore “black-fuck-me-pumps”. It was clear that he went over the five minutes but Steve did not say a word. I listened as the featured Cuban American wowed an audience of white boys with the declaration that the people of Watts should stop their whining and get jobs. He even went to lengths to deride the Watts Towers.

I read my own poem (see under more) about that performance last night. I skipped over the title and just went into it. I call the work apocalypse because it speaks in code as the authors of the Book of Daniel and Revelations spoke in code about events of their time.

There was a gay poet on last night. I’d like to hear a gay poet who was a real poet. This fellow went through the usual litany of inside queer jokes, made the usual complaints about heteros. Unlike other gay authors and poets who I love and respect, he did not expand my sense of the world. Instead, like many bad heterosexual poets, he stuffed his sentiments into cereal boxes. It was interesting to some because they hadn’t seen much of the brand.

A friend tells me that I am becoming an entertainer, like it or not. I feel it is time to run into the hills and hide if that’s the case. I just want to write and when you start writing for others, you stop being a writer.

I used to believe that this would be the year of my coming out. But now I think that will never happen.

Apocalypse on Glassell

To the gods we give today our sacrifice of Picasso’s Guernica.

We throw to the ground the bull, the light bulb, the woman-eel squirming in black water one softened-oil-pigment-laded palette knife at a time.

As the acolytes sit with their arms squared to their legs like sandstone-embalmed Egyptian princes, the young hierophant rouses the legions of lovers of new black-face minstrels chanting their hip-hop and their rap to misogynist white-face-soon-to-be-fretting-accountants, programmers, lawyers, engineers and malpractice-fearing doctors rich before they have really started to work, who have never known an uncertain hunger,

All this so that Franco, the loving keeper of St. Theresa of Avila’s hand, can have the second largest cathedral dragging in the planet‘s winds;

So Castro can be a useful radio and billboard antichrist for the television and Internet antichrists who hide behind bare navels, soda pop, and reconstituted news of the world;

So the priest can strew his sermon page by page, please his bishops watching from the back row, and hear the shrapnel bursts and flaming applause of the Faithful.

Beneath the embossed metal ceiling and the chandeliers, the Heinkels, the Savoia-Marchettis, and the Dorniers fly low, laying down turpentine. We barely feel the blue burning.

Who will sneak back after the servant-king restacks the tasty burgundy chairs?

What curate of the temple will it be who licks up the poisoned frosting, his liver becoming one with the holocaust peeled off the canvas?

I, Joel, heard this voice in a vision upon a fossil dune. Out of the depths it cried to me. It is an acupuncturing revelation of things that will be said and not liked.