Monkey Friend

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And the monkey breath!
You gotta pack that up, my friend
all smelling of termites and sticks
and other monkeys.
No one asked you to smell that way.
In fact, the assignation specifically connoted
replicating a contrary stench, to whit:
the non-monkey stench.
So why carmelize your ack ack ack ack ack, my friend, my friend?
Instead, hey —
flatten out your wallet.
Hey narrow your eye-wear.
Hey surge-protect
your estuary
knowledge core.

Graffiti Glass Breath

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Gathering glass breath
into slushed dixie cups
chimney’d through milk wood
through worm weed
in whispers.
Marked pies with iron-crossed crust.
Heartfelt. Growing.
Red whispers.
Sliding up against
red-veined wood fences.
Slipping into character such that
white curves
twist toward
fading blue words.
Graffiti glass breath, my sweetie.
Popular chain-gang motif.

My unkind moment

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He looked like he was drawn
not with a pen or a paintbrush
but with the dull wet end of a used toothpick.
A dent. An imprint.
A soft image.
Leaving behind
a flaw designed primarily
to gather dust.

Russia Me Lap Am On (for Kenneth Koch)

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Artichokes with dark splotches, dry stems,
peeling soft near avocado papa-san.
Pump cheese? Please — pump chew. Pump chew, you bastard!
Pump cheddar!
Fact: Belgium bats its Belgian eyes.
Hungary honey-shaded my heart.
Luxemburg — well, you know how I feel about you, Luxemburg.
And Russia
me lap
am on.

The Pale Fire Deathmarch, Week 6.5

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Pale Fire Peoples!
As suggested last week, here’s a bonus round for folks interested in re-reading the first section, talking about the Richard Rorty introduction to the Everyman’s Library, and/or bringing other external sources to the party.
My 2 cents: I was a bit disappointed with the Rorty intro. Seemed to me he was commiting a Kinbote of sorts — putting himself too much in the center of things. I kept waiting for him to say “When we first encounter so-called ‘Gradus,’ we are wearing those pants we thought we’d given away, but then it turned out they were just buried under some other clothes on our rocking chair in the back room.”
Some of what he described as what the reader would go through rang true for me — in particular the section on page x where he talks about the experience of reading the intro and the poem. But after that, I started writing “no” in the margin of my copy every paragraph or two. “The awed sense that royalty has condescended to treat us as a confidant”? no. “the revelation of some new and surprising fact about our remarkable host and commentator”? no again. I just didn’t have that experience — at the start, for me at least, Kinbote was a clown. It was only toward the very end that I was surprised to find myself getting a wee bit of sympathy for the narrator.
Those are quibbles, I suppose. My biggest beef is that so much of Rorty’s essay hinges on the idea that Nabokov wanted us to forget about Hazel and then only come back to her in the end. (1) did we really forget about her? didn’t seem that way to me. (2) I don’t recall N. swinging her story back into view in the last few pages.
Still, it made for an interesting reading. Your thoughts?
Next up: starting on August 16th, Deathmarch 3: At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flan O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan), which, according to James Joyce, is “A really funny book.” (I’m not making that up.)