Foggy morning along a beach populated
by shadows. Two in the shallows,
man and woman, she giggles, No, it’s
not…. His voice low rumbling, she says,
Because, it’s because, that’s all….
Atop each breakwater a solo
shadow, one taking morning
exercise in front of a small
jumble of bikes, two others sitting,
legs dangling over the sand while they
face the beach and wait for
what they’re waiting for. In the park
behind them, three workers
in yellow vests shovel something
from the bed of a city truck.
Back up on the streets, parents
escort their children down designated
safe routes to the stops where
yellow buses wait to carry
them to their hot and crowded
schools. A childless young
couple open the trunk of their
sedan, load it with a blue
picnic cooler, her easel and paints,
his two sets of golf clubs.
The sun is rising and the fog
will burn off long before lunch.
“You can spend paragraphs describing an old mill under the cloud-streaked moon, Chekhov writes somewhere, how the water rushes over the wheel, how heavy and dank its stones are, and nobody will actually see it; merely mention, however, how the moonlight catches on a bit of broken glass lying on a mossy flag atop the millrace … and the whole structure rises, vivid and visible, before the moon-slashed night mists of the reader’s mind!” — Samuel R. Delany (from interview by K. Leslie Steiner in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1996, Vol. 16.3; ellipsis in original)
Out back of the main building
in the hard-packed khaki dirt
there’s a long and narrow tin awning
supported on slender steel poles
painted a nubby industrial beige.
Young people wearing jeans or
cargo pants and white t-shirts
and protective helemts swing
baseball bats at each other, not
attempting to make contact and do
each other any harm. The supervisor
tells the visitor, It’s just a game
to develop their martial-arts
skills, see how they smile?
The visitor sees how they swing
their bats and sweat and dance
about in the dust, hears their
calls and shouts, notices a skinny
girls whose pointy breasts poke
against her shirt. He tells
the supervisor, This is bogus.
They should be making contact,
breaking bones and cracking
open skulls, develop some
real-life skills. Give me
a bat and I’ll show you how.
The visitor is given a bat
(the skinny girl’s?) and directed
to a place at the far end
of the awning. This is where
we do that, the supervisor says.
The visitor is shown how he
is to whale away at the fender
of an old red car, scratched
and dented and the metal showing through.
This is how we make our art,
The supervisor tells the visitor,
who begins hitting the fender
with the bat as hard as
he can. Damn, this feels good!,
he grins and checks his backswing
so he doesn’t accidentally hit
any of the t-shirted participants
who have gathered round to watch
and cheer him on. Look at him go!
Beyond the fender, shaded under a tree,
there’s a pond with tiny fish.
When any piece of gravel
or splinter of wood or flake
of paint falls into the pond,
the tiny fish dart to it and
gather round it for a moment,
their noses all pointing to it
and their bodies stretched
so together they look like
a momentarily undulating asterisk.
A moment later and they dart away.
“I’m a writer. My thoughts are formed by writing. When I want to think with any seriousness about a topic, I write about it. Writing slows the thought processes down to where one can follow them—and elaborate on them—more efficiently. Writing is how I do my thinking.” — Samuel R. Delany (from interview by K. Leslie Steiner in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1996, Vol. 16.3; emphasis in original)
“What a mad, unhappy animal is man! What strange notions occur to him; what perversities, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestialities of idea burst from him, the moment he is prevented ever so little from being a beast of action!” – Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (trans. Golffing)
Families gather in the small lakeside park
every evening. The parents and aunts and uncles
sit in folding chairs and talk. Someone grills
meats on a portable grill. Children play on the beach
and in the shallows. They squeal and scream
and laugh and shout and run around and dig
holes in the sand with toy shovels and their hands.
The children range in age from tiny
toddlers up to young teens. Missing are
the older teens. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen,
nineteen, into their lower twenties, they don’t
come to the lakeside park to be with families.
They do other things, rites of power and sex
and death. A seventeen-year-old boy was
shot last night just after midnight,
his body laid out in the street,
covered with a sheet by police.
“Priests are the most evil enemies to have—why should this be so? Because they are the most impotent. It is their impotence which makes their hate so violent and sinister, so cerebral and poisonous. The greatest haters in history—but also the most intelligent haters—have been priests. Beside the brilliance of priestly vengeance all other brilliance fades. Human history would be a dull and stupid thing without the intelligence furnished by its impotents.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (trans. Golffing)
Eight dollars is the cost of admission to Greenwood Beach.
Seven dollars and a quarter is the federal minimum wage
for hourly workers under certain circumstances. The state’s
minimum is eight and a quarter. These are the wages
beneath which it is considered no worker could be justly paid,
unless that worker is a tipped employee dependent upon
the largesse of drinkers and diners sated with food
and beverage. Or unless the worker is an intern—
interns can be had for free—or a migrant farm worker,
shuffled from field to field, sleeping in a shack, drinking
tepid water from a rusty bucket—or an illegal immigrant
shoehorned two dozen to an apartment, never let out except
to be taken to the job, working sixteen hours a day
for room and board, exhausted sleep filled with American dreams.
“As soon as you get away from actual poetic forms, rhyme, meter, etc., there is no line between prose and poetry. From my way of thinking, many poets are simply lazy prose writers. I can take a page of descriptive prose and break it into lines, as I’ve done in Exterminator!, and then you’ve got a poem. Call it a poem.” — William Burroughs (interviewed by Philippe Mikriammos in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1984, Vol. 4.1)
A slender boy of about twelve
wears a black t-shirt
and black exercise pants with a silver stripe
up each leg like a cavalry trooper’s pants.
He has a stick about as long and curved
as a cutlass. He stands lakeside
at the water’s edge. Waves that reach
to his knees and sometimes up his thighs,
he slashes at them with his cutlass stick
as they come in, wave after wave after
wave after wave, they don’t stop,
he can’t defeat them, can’t drive
them back. With each slash he
gives a high-pitched yelp, but even
these cries don’t stop the lake.
“What we call the ‘novel’ is a highly artificial form, which came in the nineteenth century. It’s quite as arbitrary as the sonnet. And that form had a beginning, a middle, and an end; it has a plot, and it has this chapter structure where you have one chapter, and then you try to leave the person in a state of suspense, and on to the next chapter, and people are wondering what happened to this person, and so forth. That nineteenth-century construction has become stylized as the novel, and anyone who writes anything different from that is accused of being unintelligible.” — William Burroughs (interviewed by Philippe Mikriammos in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1984, Vol. 4.1)
The gulls circle above the lake,
searching for supper. They eye
the clear waters below, spot
fish, pause, turn, empty the air
from under their wings in a fall
that looks as if their wings
have suddenly broken, hit the
water beak-first, dive to catch
their meal, come back up and beat
their way back into the sky,
shaking the water from their wings
in a quick shudder as they go.
“A human being who strives for something great regards everybody he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and hindrance—or as a temporary resting-place. The lofty goodness towards his fellow men which is proper to him becomes possible only when he has reached his height and he rules. Impatience and his consciousness that until that time he is condemned to comedy—for even war is a comedy and a concealment, just as every means conceals the end—spoil all his association with others: this kind of man knows solitude and what is most poisonous in it.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Hollingdale; emphasis in original)
It rained last night.
(This is not the weather report.)
Current conditions: the sun is soon
to rise and the cardinals chirp their high,
metallic, scrapy chirp that sounds like an effect
from German techno-pop of a generation
ago (Trans-Europe Express! First In, First Out!)
There is a man who goes every morning
and every evening to the lakeside park.
He has a black fuzzy-furred dog
who goes with him. The dog sniffs around
as dogs will do while the man walks slowly
and pensively, his head down to watch the lawn
he’s walking on, or up from time to time
to look out at the lake and its deceptive
horizon. Is he watching the lawn? When he’s
looking down, is he watching the lawn?
What does he look for out on the lake,
what does he see, is he looking for anything,
or is he looking for nothing, or is he
looking for the sky to open and show
him the way out? There’s no denying
he has about him an air of the sad.
I could ask him.
Hey, mister
mister
hey
Why do you seem so sad?
Did your wife die? I might be sad
if my wife died, at least for
a little while. I’ve never been
anything other than alone, so I suppose
I’d be fine after a while.
Mister
did you lose a child?
Did you lose your fortune?
Did you miss all the best chances?
Is your time running out?
Were you awake when it rained last night?
Do you know why the police cruiser
was stopped at the corner this morning?
(Neither do I, but I saw it and decided
to throw it in here with all this other stuff.)
I could ask him? Could I ask him?
Then what? If he tells me his truth,
is this still my poem?
Hey, mister
mister
I’m going to put you in my pome
you and your dog
right here in my pome
where I can call all your shots
and get them every one
right here with the techno-chirping birds
and the rain and the cops
it’s—oh, and my wife, she’s not dead,
and not all my children are lost,
not all my fortune’s been pissed away,
not every opportunity has been blown—
here is the one place I can call home.
“He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, the superabundant of will; this shall be called greatness; the ability to be as manifold as whole, as vast as full.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Hollingdale)
The British litmag Litro published my short story, “Lost Things and Missing Persons,” at the end of April this year. I’ve added it to the Previously Published Stories sidebar to the right.
“There comes a point of morbid mellowing and over-tenderness in the history of society at which it takes the side even of him who harms it, the criminal, and does so honestly and wholeheartedly. Punishment: that seems to it somehow unfair—certainly the idea of ‘being punished’ and ‘having to punish’ is unpleasant to it, makes it afraid. ‘Is it not enough to render him harmless? why punish him as well? To administer punishment is itself dreadful’—with this question herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its utmost conclusion.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Hollingdale; emphasis in original)
Fat boys with the breasts
of pubescent girls
take off their shirts
do cannonballs off the dock.
Toddler soils his pants
squeals on the beachfront.
Auntie strips him down
washes him in the lake.
Devil’s darning needles
stitch the fading sky with
random dancing patterns
of appetite and death.
“When the highest and strongest drives, breaking passionately out, carry the individual far above and beyond the average and lowlands of the herd conscience, the self-confidence of the community goes to pieces, its faith in itself, its spine as it were, is broken: consequently it is precisely these drives which are most branded and calumniated. Lofty spiritual independence, the will to stand alone, great intelligence even, are felt to be dangerous; everything that raises the individual above the herd and makes his neighbour quail is henceforth called evil; the fair, modest, obedient, self-effacing disposition, the mean and average in desires, acquires moral names and honours.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Hollingdale; emphasis in original)
I’m Kelly. It’s an Irish name.
I’m black Irish. I’m not from
here. I’m from farther south,
from that part of town where
five people were shot in front
of the church last night. On the steps
of the church, they were just
standing there. Not hurting anyone.
You don’t have a gun, do you?
I don’t, either. People with guns
need to take lessons so they shoot
who they’re aiming at and not just
anyone. (I won’t mention it, but
I want to thank you for not saying
anything about how you can smell
the liquor on my breath. And the
sun’s just barely up.)
I come here and I sit and I look
at the lake and the sky
and the sun and it’s my peace.
It’s how I get my peace.
Are you a therapist? It’s going
to be hot today. My sister
tells me bring a bottle of water
with me when I go out. Ice-cold
water, a bottle. I’m very
religious. I have to start
my day soon. Go home and shower
and get dressed. Clean clothes.
I like the lake. The sky and
the sun. Bright yellow sun.
“‘Thou shalt obey someone and for a long time: otherwise thou shalt perish and lose all respect for thyself’—this seems to me to be nature’s imperative, which is, to be sure, neither ‘categorical’ as old Kant demanded it should be (hence the ‘otherwise’—), nor addressed to the individual (what do individuals matter to nature!), but to peoples, races, ages, classes, and above all to the entire animal ‘man’, to mankind.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Hollingdale; emphasis in original)
He told his wife,
When I scratch my face
I am scratching my face,
not making secret baseball signs.
When I say I’m going to clean the couch,
it’s not because I think
you “did something dirty” on it or to it
(no one says you did), it’s because
the generous people who gave it
to us—religious friends of
your sister’s—gave it to us because
their cats had ruined it by pissing
on it and it stinks. And I am
tired of the stink.
When I set up my stereo it’s to hear
my favorite music, not to spy on whatever
you are not doing—you are not doing
anything but staring out the window—
and certainly not to broadcast sounds
of screaming children. The screaming
children live right next door
and need no amplification by me.
There are other things
he might have told his wife,
but after he had told her these things,
he had had enough.
“A man with genius is unendurable if he does not also possess at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Hollingdale)
Evanston is a town that sits
on the left shoulder of Chicago, facing up
(right shoulder if you’re facing down).
It is protected by an asphalt moat patrolled
by civilian traffic, a vast cemetary where
fog twists around large monuments to people
barely otherwise remembered, and a train track
fatally electrified and lined by deciduous jungle.
Once the visitor passes the city’s defenses
he (or she if she’s a she) finds himself
in a pretty little city almost as pretty
but not as fragile as the words “pretty
little city,” complete with tall trees,
three-story buildings, squirrels, rabbits,
university professors and students, joggers,
dog-walkers, cyclists, all sweating, some
discussing topics of interest. The cars are
all relatively new and not ostentatious,
though the same cannot be said
for the houses. Construction is underway
in front of shops whose windows hold signs
reading, “We are still open.” Sunday mornings
find the pretty little city very quiet.
“It has never been faith but always freedom from faith, that half-stoical and smiling unconcern with the seriousness of faith, that has enraged slaves in their masters and against their masters. ‘Enlightenment’ enrages: for the slave wants the unconditional, he understands in the domain of morality too only the tyrannical, he loves as he hates, without nuance, into the depths of him, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness—the great hidden suffering he feels is enraged at the noble taste which seems to deny suffering.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Hollingdale; emphasis in original)
There’s a party in the alleyway every night.
It’s August, it’s hot, what’re you going to do?
Sit in your stuffy apartment, puny wall-unit
wheezing a lie of cool, refreshing air?
Watch some fast-food brain shit on the box?
Drink thin beer from cheap cans, scream at the wife
who screams at the boy while the baby
screams at everyone? Fuck that. Get your ass
downstairs and out back to the alleyway. Bring your
30-pack of cheap beer and share it around.
Bring the wife and the boy and the baby,
the neighbors are grilling burgers and dogs
and the cars are idling, their doors open
and their sound systems thumping loud.
“What makes one regard philosophers half mistrustfully and half mockingly is not that one again and again detects how innocent they are—how often and how easily they fall into error and go astray, in short their childishness and childlikeness—but that they display altogether insufficient honesty, while making a mighty and virtuous noise as soon as the problem of truthfulness is even remotely touched on. They pose as having discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic (in contrast to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and more stupid than they—these speak of ‘inspiration’): while what happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an ‘inspiration’, generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event—they are one and all advocates who do not want to be regarded as such, and for the most part no better than cunning pleaders for their prejudices, which they baptize ‘truths’—and very far from possessing the courage of the conscience which admits this fact to itself, very far from possessing the good taste of the courage which publishes this fact, whether to warn a foe or a friend or out of high spirits and in order to mock itself.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Hollingdale; emphasis in original)
You didn’t ask—no one has asked
but this is why I’m afraid of black people:
I’m afraid of black people
because television shows, movies,
newspapers, magazines, and popular songs
have taught me that black people
hate me and want to hurt me
because I’m white and because being white
makes me guilty both of injustices
being committed now and injustices
that hang from our nation’s history
like a stinking dead albatross around
a maddened, decrepit mariner’s neck.
And I’m afraid because
I cannot understand
what it means to be an American
and be black.
“Nothing is so infectious as example, and we never do great good or evil without producing the like.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
The weeping man lied to God.
He—the weeping man, not God
(who may well be a she,
or an it, or all three, plus…)—
he is in the basement laundry room
pulling the clean, wet clothes
from the washer to put them
into the dryer, where they will
spin around for sixty minutes
and he is weeping, doesn’t matter
what he lied about.