For the late Poet, Joel Oppenheimer

Words spill into corrupt streams:
the wrinkled gutter on the house
will not sustain them. Do not spindle
words or arrange misery on IBM cards
coding compassion, fear, pathos,
polite sexual fondling as demon
poets might to lift the roof off Bleak
House while that ruffian Dickens
burns fake fiction and poetry spit
on toilet paper is glued to ancient
banisters as if by extension
the Bates Motel, and dear
Sir Alfred Hitchcock had burned up
in napalm set by two former
Vietnam war philanthropists
who hacked art and genuflected
to the screams, moans and trembling
of the dead as they rode their fingers
on the fourth rail from New York
to London and back to Dublin.
As they watched, the night behind
became the night before and relief
that numb black wall without medals
rises as ghosts from inside the stems
of daffodils, risen from heaven's swamp.

No, I haven't forgotten, --
We sit, softly, melancholy
in the corner eating plum pie
watching TV, laughing at laugh
tracks racked up and down and
placed before us to keep us still.
We read that the programs were
arranging by mad credulous Masters
of the Master. He speaks as if we we're
ignorant, and he our mentor, our puppet
master drove his fist into our skull
to find the secret of our illogical
stampede from where Alice in Wonderland
ran to find the rabbit, to the edge of
the grand canyon where we fall
half asleep drifting in a great river
we cannot name but add to our list
of places where we have visited
the impossible dead soldier, rock
stars and easy drunks who die
frozen in the basement of a New York
whore house with no love to spare.

It's an old story where Brothers Grimm
set fire to the roots of words and has
a bloody good show playing with human
ashes, and rancid DNA, and I know we
suffered from madmen but we cannot say
they didn't exist to be blind--
once upon a time, and when we cheer
we revive the Ugly American.
Yes, pedantry had its insane flash-point.
Now, such definitive words combust to
" hearts content", eschew clichés.
No, I want to write funny about emotions
with toilet paper handy and my lover
opening letters with her teeth while
I am light years away finding
the "truth of civilization" in isolation.

Who gives the orders? Who directs silence
and conversation, stops and starts?
Yes, I want to be witty, elegant---
but never learn supple ruminations
or speculations on the big bang.
Everyone loves an orgy, don't you think?

Learn how to ask questions --
challenge your maker or you are done for.
That's my warning, and the one written
on every package of cigarettes sold.


I have been charged by the elite with that
duty as if I were a dangerous murderer
of language riding poems through fear.

I confess I am. I do not spell surnames
correctly. It is not a sign of disrespect
but comes from a loss of concentration,
and then too I get involved in writing
about what was song or a poem
as if I really cared. I don't. That intensity
of choice does not concern me as today I
write in the almost voice of my mentor
Joel Oppenheimer, -- unfortunately dead
the son of a bitch, and he would in his
toothless way push my words that way
to keep me from the sin of pride, or is
that sensation, emotion, fear. I never
had a father I adored. I can't use the L
word as that is against rules men set up
to keep genitals out of bounds.

I loved Joel and his death left me without
one person who knew that I fought being
a fraud as a poet as hard as he did. He
knew the danger. He understood that
that being able to manipulate words
does not make you a greater human
being. I mourn him. I wish he had not
smoked those silly French cigarettes
that gave him his six foot six style, so
slender a man, so bearded, so full of
great testimony that dark matter defined
by him was more than our Jewish origin.

Yes, Joel and I are two Jews. I was a
Catholic Protestant Agnostic one, and
he and Helen, his down right gorgeous
wife sat there in his living room with
his new sons, old sons, old poets and
new ones to draw maps of great temples.
He imagined he had become at some
miserable magnificent time in the future
the architect of buildings that will be
born out of the were the supreme
creator of life without robber barons,
the dead WTC or gun totting war
mongers hunting quail for Christ sake
in the heart land of Texas. Yes, Christ
sake was one of his favorite words.
It ran from his lips with his honor
and testimony so clearly righteous.
He was the best Jew I knew. He would
call me mad for that observation. I hope
he would say. Sean, I can't comment on
this poem. It is about us. And he would
put it down, and I would understand
but feel such a terrible loss, a terrible
disconnection from our love affair.

Shit, I broke the rules again. Forgive
me. I will have to clear my head when
the dead birds return to life
with red and violent feathers,
lips, and movements from
the great depth of the hereafter. How
wonderful sex can become when it
is only of the spirit first and perhaps
always. Hell no, Joel, I know you
said you like girls ripe, not too ripe
but ripe, and I agreed. You always
asked on our ride to city talking poems
and shit, was she raw, Mike? Did she
make your mouth pucker again like
in the old days when no one looked
because you were invisible or pebbles
gathered at the bottom of the stream
where, in the Assent of Man
Jacob Bronowski runs the ashes of Auschwitz
through his fingers to condemn the arrogance
of power and its deadly romance.


2-18-06