It is easy, when confronted with a mirror that presents an unsatisfactory image to complain about faulty optics.
So it is with John's poetry. The settings are surreal, nightmare places, populated with calloused and vicious people. The things these people do to each other make no sense, and offend our values.
But does the world depicted herein not resemble the one we think of as normal because it is distorted, or rather, because the pretty distortions we cling to so desperately have been stripped away like the bark of a rotting log to reveal the grubs and insects living in the decaying flesh of the dead tree?
Sometimes a mirror is a difficult thing to look at.
Mirrors can reflect more than just one's hair or clothes; they clearly show us all the aspects of what it is to be human that we can be honest enough with ourselves to see. Fears, doubts, petty things that gnaw on our souls. Sure, imperfections and shortcomings like these are rather obvious in others, but as we gaze carefully at the mirror through louvered blinds that block that which we would rather not acknowledge, we do not admit that the polished glass exposes all without judgement.
Words can be every bit as reflective and showing as glass. Displayed in the poetry now before you are the best hidden sides of that most peculiar condition we know as humanity. Greed, jealousy, fear and loathing, anger, pain, and sufering, loneliness, all splayed out like the innards of a dissected lab frog, neatly pinned to black wax.
Frustration may set in as you mingle with the characters found on these pages, as though you were a guest at a stranger's party, invited only to repay some obscure social debt. Small groups huddle together all speaking, none listening. Couples argue bitterly, sloshing drinks at one another. an occassional lost soul stands alone in the corner muttering to himself, dropping oyster crackers into the fish tank.
At first, you look for someone to talk to, but your words are lost in the din as swiftly as they leave your mouth. After a while, you decide you would settle for finding someone worth listing to, but all the guests here merely issue an endless stream of obscenities and non--sequetirs. Then you only want to escape to a quiet place so you can be alone. Only there are no doors. Panicking, you dash about, following the walls with your hands, groping for some hidden portal to flee through. There is none. And only when you lose all composure and lash out violently at the insensitive and incessently blathering loathsome creatures around you do you find yourself alone, utterly alone, in a room that is empty save your reflection in a dozen or so mirrors.
And sometimes a mirror can be such a terribly difficult thing to look at.
B.J. West
5/22/88
Garianette was being fitted for one of those neato fabric faces.
It was a lot of strings, but if you tuck them in they don't show.
"Now, why didja go an' do that?" Her husband Harb
wailed.
"You just had to have a new nylon face and then it was a
new vinyl kind,
and oh, you were gonna just die if you were the only one on the
block
without the black velcro straps. And now what did you blow our
money for?"
You could just see those little muscles movin' around behind the new white face.
"It's canvas." Little water spots began to show through. "I thought you'd like it. After all we're going camping."
"Honey, you don't need a new face just to go camping. Any old thing will do." He swaggered suggestively. "You don't even have to wear a face if you don't want to." He stuck out his tongue and wagged.
"Oh!" She gasped, "Harb, that wouldn't be decent. What would the Forest Service say?"
"I'll just tell him you're park of the pork!"
She clapped her hands. "Yes, Harb, yes. Let me be meat again! Oh, Meat - I want to be meat!!"
1/25/88
Porcilaingrin, resentful breakfast
"Where do we go today?" Mother beamed
"I will leave you." The son said to his plate.
"Don't be silly." she sweetly sang.
(Porcilain lips do not move.)
"Where shall we go today?"
"I will leave you."
Porcilaingrin turned quizzical, sideways
Like a creascent moon on a mad mad night
"Then I shall stitch the skin of my palm to the skin
of your back. Yes." She straightened out with resolve,
"A skinhandle, so as never to be apart."
A thoughtful moment passing
"Then I shall saw through your arm at the elbow."
porcilaingrin, takenaback
"That would hurt!" she gasped.
"Yes," he replied, "and it will be hard to find comfortable shirts."
1/19/88
A brilliant fight, seeking peace through danger
Other's words will not do; my body aches for wounds of it's own
Certainly I have been wounded and agonize still over grief
Inflicted on beloved by this very and scabbéd hand
But remembrance bursts with tales of times angry and hollow and
full of ecstacy, pining and pain.
And not for all the gold of earth would I trade them away
Too precious are my years of rage and wrestling
with love, identity, danger and damnation,
Fear and forboding, trial, tears, and God.
Like Jacob, I limp with pride.
And behold these wounds with holy fear
A personal stigmata, of sacrifice and plight
A sure and present witness of this strange and brilliant fight.
JRM 1/24/88
Don't look at me in disbelief
Because my plate is void of beef
I much prefer my rice and peas
To bloody slabs of carcassees.
How can you eat dead muscles, pink?
How can you boil blood and drink?
You call it broth, but do you think
That justifies such awfulness?
You use your muscles, likened to
The very muscles that you chew
You cannibal! You vicious beast!
You could apologize, at least
Before you slather and sink your teeth
(I hope it sticks in your esophogus)
"But what about Peter?" You plead "He saw
The sheet descend, and watched in awe
As God said 'Rise, be not discreet
For all is clean, so kill and eat!'"
Good Point! Admittedly, 'tis true
You may feel innocent when you
Fix pork chops - no need to hide
The cockroach salad on the side
How often do you reach for snake
When you are craving broiled steak?
Tell me now, how frequently
Do you find scorpion fricasse?
Served on a steaming bed of grubs-Nauseas now? Ah, there's the
rub.
You're more selective, as to type
Prefering London broil to tripe
If certain cuts just turn your gut
Why then am I such a nut?
Just because I may deplore
The foods you fancy and adore.
9/24/86
I spent 20 nights in the Fear Infirmery, where phantoms of
my Darkest Dreams
wore fine-tailored Italian suits and carried tiny Trojan Horses
shaped
like chifflera and shell-pink shoes.
"Who," I would wail, "In this haunted huddled
mass
Is secure or sure or safe or something similar?"
And Dabney beside me would roll his eyes and reel, and clasp
my arm in fear
of becoming broccoli in the night.
And this unlikly litany led late in dawn's early light
Kept us present in our fear until the coming of lunch
And choke down whole the Lunchbox of Hell.
1/28/88
Greedily Gregory grabbed at gobs of salad croutons and began stuffing them up his nose. Margley Hattbatten was combing foriegn hair.
"Crumbs are the number two cause of asphixiation." She said, combulating.
"Carp." He gasped and fell over dead.
She glanced at him and combed some more with that same smug
little pout that also meant "I-know-what-boys-have-in-their-pants-so-there."
When she had decided he had suffered long enough she knelt by
him and
combed him back to life.
"You're really very good with that thing." Gregory said and sniffed behind her ears. "Carp" he said, mildly surprised.
"Yes." She said, and kissed his crumby nose.
1/20/88
St. Francis must have liked tangerines.
What if your hands had tongues in the palm?
Let us watch the executive officers delouse each other.
Friends give you straws when you're tired.
Enemies make you touch your lips to waxed paper.
The number 4 is solid and dependable and is easily bored at operas.
It is amazing that gasoline never needs to go to the dentist.
Excrement is your pal.
1/28/88
Pharnum smiled a smug one. "We have an understanding."
Pharnum's wife was strangely silent.
"Oh?" Said Tedd. "And what if I punch your gut?"
"Simple. I will simply punch her gut."
Mrs. Pharnum hadn't blinked in twenty minutes. Strange.
"And what if I were to staple your eyelids to the rectum of a Lebonese fur merchant?"
"Oh, she wouldn't miss it." tight-lipped grin. And her skin is green.
"Well," said Tedd, "what an asinine relationship."
"Not at all. We're partners in pain."
Without a word Tedd began laying in to the dead woman's skullwith a ball-peen hammer.
"Gosh," Pharnum chuckled, brushed a bit of brain off his collar.
"Apathy is so. . . so . . . "
"Liberating?" Tedd offered, dabbing his forehead with a hankerchief.
"Yes, that's it. Apathy is so liberating."
1/21/88
"Look, there, Father, a bird," said the son to the father who replied,
"No, no, it is not a bird, it is a parking meter."
"But Father," the son protested, "It must be a bird, for it has wings, and look there, Father, it is flying."
"What a wonderous world we live in son, when even parking meters can sprout wings and take to the air." Sighed the father, picking his ear.
2/5/88
The people who live next door are mostly hearsay
I've never seen them but sometimes a nightmare preys
with no thought to justice or prudence,
Sauntering in with joy or abandon or something equally morbid
The next door yard is hid from my eyes, but sometimes
slivers of vision leap through the fence and I hide
Sometimes I close my eyes, walking by, in self-defense
Anything so beautiful must as a matter of course be equally dangerous
I say nothing to my wife of it
Though she makes no secret of sitting many hours, eye to a knot-whole
A favourite subject of friends
The conversation shifts and so do I in conscious discomfort
I daydream of moving, of poison, of guns
And scandle and black mail and threats and the guts to follow
through
And I pray for peace by means of conflagration
And cower that even unseen their prescence is sure and dangerous
more
than any flesh of mine could be
1/20/88
So is the whole world grey?
I thought so.
Two sides to an issue is one side too many
And only succeeds in making us squirm and sweat and
snort at each other and then we're in no mood to watch t.v.
It's much easier to repeat what I've heard.
After all, there's too much grey
and they're probably right anyway.
A gift? No thanks.
I don't know how to make it work.
And it's too much trouble.
And it doesn't look like much fun anyhow.
So what good is it?
1/26/88
Gad! The fish are chirping - and the whole damn universe is off track.
I mean, the stocks are healthy
the kids are averaging B's
the sun is visible
krishnas are chanting
and babies everywhere are taking their first tottering step
the cat isn't pregnant
the Russkies are backin' down
the deal went through
traffic is light
my corn flakes are new and improved and stay crunchier in milk now
the bills are paid
and there's money left over
Captain Kangaroo is back
and my hemorrhoids are being civil.
But the fish are chirping. and damned if the whole fucking universe isn't off somehow.
1/26/88
Grandma Food came around the corner
Carrying brown paper bags and ashtrays in her paws
"Look out!" cried the Carrot Children, "it's Grandma
Food!"
And they hid underground, stalks up.
Grandma Food walked right over them
Not noticing that she crushed their feeble stalks
and bumped their carrotine nostrils all to hell.
The Carrot Children wiggled out of the soil and writhed about
Their stalky legs having been crushed beneath her oily claws.
"Oh-Oh," sang the writhing, crippled Carrot Children.
Their voices, high and sweet like death,
Somber and sad like the Partridge Family
"Oh, Grandma Food," they sang
"She is so old "She has such fur."
"He who crushes the snail," began the sage, long
of eye
and crystal shelled, "is guilty of all things."
"What things are these?" Ask slug advocates.
"Disregard for Life and damnation of Love. Excesses of Emotion - a stronger power than earth can know, able to destroy all. He is his own god in search of a hell by which to purge his minute afflictions. This quest disrupts all that should be right, and he is thereby the sinner of all sins."
One advocate slithered forth. "Crush me for he hath crushed a snail."
The sage shook it's eyes in delight. "No. That which is meant must not be mourned. If a snail be crushed, damn not the foot of the crusher - for it is the foot of God."
It was anything but silent.
The wind whined, broken by the rough shuffle of cloth
Occasionally adjusted against the chattering cold.
The fire cracked and spat.
The pacing man was nervous, sniffing, coughing.
Animals snorted, blew and the woman was crying, sighing
And far away the dim echo of Mighty Voices rang on the
heels of running peasants, laughing, hooting, still dazed
by the awesome din.
More awful still was the tuneless wail of the raw, fresh infant.
Uncomprehending protest of the violence of sudden being.
The stones, then, could listen.
2/9/88
Mr. Gertrude was making introductions.
"Gertrude, this is a man with a smelly cigar. Mr. Friedman,
may I introduce
my wife Gertrude who hasn't shaved her armpits yet this week."
"OHHH!!" Gertrude cried, and rent her garment in
grief while Mr. Friedman
looked on. "I have married a nasty man...." Sobbing,
now.
"...and what's more," continued Mr. Gertrude "soon she can dust the furniture when she pirouettes."
Reporters and cameras flashed smiles and bulbs respectively
as Darby celebrated his seventh year of celebrity status.
One reporter asked "How do you feel, selling out three straight nights?"
Another asked "Do your lyrics faithfully represent your political views?"
And "What are your next projects going to be?"
He sniffed and replied "I have lost my youthful idealism." and "Most people are too lazy to bother to think." and
"Sometimes I hate myself. Sometimes I hate you." and
"Terror and pain are real things. I like real things. Even when they hurt."
"Hey" yelled one reporter, "why are you such and asshole?"
"I'm going home. I don't want to play anymore." he responded.
"Don't you have a responsibility to your fans?" They cried "Don't you think you're letting them down?"
"Go fuck yourself." He answered. And just then the bitter wind that had dried the skin of his soul moistened a bit. He could soften.
Maybe he could sleep.
2/4/88
Mother, with her head hardened into a bucket of quick-dry cement.
"Time for television." We say
But she points to her head which I suppose to mean "I can't hear you."
"We have ice cream with terracotta cheese!" We scream.
But she turns her head sideways and that is all.
I am mischeivious and say "Father was teasing the trout and it ate his groin."
She paused for a moment and headed for the toolbox.
"Break out the ice cream." She announced in semaphore code.
1/28/88
I know to worry when the ketchup bottle scares the shit out
of me.
I jumped three feet at the sight of the potted plant
and was terrified that it may begin entertaining potted guests
which could be on their way to the door even now - NO! NO!
No potted visiters! No green friends!
First I will thrash this plant and then I will snarl aggressively
at all the condiments in the fridge lest they get any ideas.
And I shall leap about visciously. And I will salivate on the
furniture.
And I shall go to the bathroom, where I have friends and search
every inch of my skin for the Fear Fine Tuning knob.
1/21/88
At every transmission, distortion
At every communication, loss
In every generation, curruption
Hand pass to hand smudge, grime and mix
Oil and sweat and longing for vision
In every dream, restoration
At every turn, imagination
In every ache, longing for the Image
Fact weaves into Faerie
Glorious Myth, Mother of all
2/5/88
Mrs. Danny, under cover of night plucking slender baby toadstools
with her favourite tweezers
And squirrels them away to her bed where nightly she rolls
in parasitic ecstacy
smelling of must and loathing and chlorophyll theivery
There is no one to say
"My dear, you have a fever" or
"Why don't you like 'em green?" or
"Grapefruit are ruder than bottles of pain"
to her
So Mrs. Danny under cover of night lusts again in her lungs
And dreams of delicate tan stalks, dark hearts and the tiny
snaps
under the weight of her steaming body.
1/21/88
Danby cared little for Moosy's pearl.
"Cant't eat it. He said, swallowing it and vomiting it back into his hand.
"Can't drive it. He said, trying to find the ignition with a key.
"Can't shoot it." He said, throwing it at a stranger and watching him not fall over dead.
But Moosy picked up the pearl and threw it at Danby, who clutched at his chest and fell lifeless to the soil.
"It was never meant to be questioned." Said Moosy, petting the pearl and mooing slightly.
THE PRESIDENT'S BOWLING FANTASY
They never said anything to me, you know
But they sneered at me all sideways
Grunting in my direction and thinking cruel hamster thoughts
about cudgels and ganglia
and intestinal fluids.
And Shiela Kirtz who looks like a kangaroo
in a see-through skirt is heaving chocolate
and clutching her gut
and the air around me is taking on a luminous quality.
And this woman waves a five in my face and declares "Lotto!"
and while I'm counting them off,
she says "Can you ever remember a better time?"
So I told her about the time some crazed degenerate
with a luger shaved my testicle on the crosstown bus
while the cruel, stretched, disembodied ghost of Jack Palance
cracked and waved over the heads of the city
moaning for the lost dreams of man.
There were three children waiting for breakfast wagging empty
spoons
and screaming missing food.
"Wife," the man called, "the children scream for missing food."
"You must wait" she called, "for I am sniffing the dog."
Later, children wept over un-ironed shirt, skirts and sandles.
"Wife!" the father wigged out.
"Stick it!" she screamed, "I am sniffing the dog."
"Why must you always sniff the dog?"
"It makes me see pretty colours and tells my nose such wonderous tales."
"Oh," said the children, "we need hugs."
"Wife!" He cried, "You must fulfil your hug-quota."
"Bite it!"She screamed. "I'm going to shave my lungs."
As soon as mother had left the dog, Father torched it.
Instantly it was ablaze.
And as soon as it stopped kicking, Mother cried from the bathroom
"What is that glorious aroma?"
1/29/88
Gurney and Matilda had only been there a few minutes when Kevin said:
"I'd like to play a song for you."
Gurney tensed up and groped at Matilda's arm.
Matilda patted her hand and smiled.
"Of course," she said. "One of yours?"
"I wrote it while you were entering the door way." He grinned.
Gurney began to whimper and claw and Matilda's dress.
"Shush" she whispered, still trying to smile.
He reached for his guitar.
Gurney was trembling and began to cry.
"Stop it stop it stop it." Matilda scolded. "Act your age."
"But when he plays, I get smaller..." she whined. "And if I like it I get smaller still. And if it's really really good I will get too small for you to find me and you might step on me or spoon me into your coffee or laugh at my tiny breasts or suck me into your nostril as you breathe unkowingly. And I hate being small."
"Did you like it?" Kevin asked.
"I hate you," said Gurney in a tiny voice that they could not hear.
2/4/88
"Yes, like that, ahhh..." and a sigh that
lasted an eternity floated from
Gray Kevin's rounded lips
Pleasing well the world's only board-certified
trained penguin masseuse, Binky, who,
flapping his rubbery wings with precision and abandon, struck
Gray
Kevin in all the right spots
And it was suddenly clear to him that no
mere amphibian or aquatic mammal would do -
No, it was this bird, or it was nothing.
Talent is like a slippery toad
You are in love with
And everyone is afraid to touch
And thinks it's ugly
And all you want is friends
Well. Excuse me.
2/3/88
A snake vision, far on the course of the pulley-cord
Had Jacob Furr bound for two one-inch holes in his larynx
full of Cream cheese and Leslie's toes.
"Pass the Captor!" he chokes and then he falls through
a hole in the earth and shoots into clammy dreams
Of wet women fondling faintly with frail and fractured fingers of ice.
"Tell me more!" sighs the young Furr
and he sniffs and gets up to go to the bathroom.
2/3/88
God dropped in on Ungar Belfast just around lunchtime.
"AAARRR!!" God roared, and Pastor Henri Todd was suddenly there to translate.
"He says 'The cold are yummy...
"AAARRR..." Ungar shrunk in terror.
"...and the hot are extremely tasty with a bit of red wine."
"AAAARRRR!" God was enraged.
"...but the lukewarm, those he would spew out of his mouth!"
At this, God completely flattened Pastor Henri Todd with the
flat of his hand
and ate him.
Then He spewed forth the Pastor, who was whole again, if not a little shaken.
"Well," Stammered the Pastor Henri Todd, "In my case he would vomit perpetually."
God patted him on the head and smiled, showing Ungar Belfast
all his huge
pointed teeth.
"Let us say that there is a nose proceeding from the crust
of the earth."
The man was staring straight ahead an fumbling for his coffee
cup.
"Oh, must we say that?" Asked the Man's mother. "Can
we not say that the
oceans are sprouting genetailia."
"No for it is not so. For I was in a forest and came upon the earth's nose. And the world was breathing deep and sucking in rodents and butterflies and exhaling warmth and purity. And it came to me that this is the path to the lungs of the earth. And it was as if a bolt of blue had lightened my mind's sky and I suddenly knew the purpose of my life was to be servant to the nose of the earth. It's all so very clear now. Yes, and I shall say 'Blow' and will wipe in humility and dignity forever and for a little while. Amen."
"I thought we were talking rhetorically." Said the Man's mother.
"Indeed," said the man. "So let us say that I am going now to serve the earth's nose. And I am taking many sheets as hankerchiefs and lots of warm wrappings lest the earth take cold. And let us say I have gathered these things and have packed my toothbrush and have gone to the bathroom one more time. And now lest us say that I have kissed you goodbye and am off to seek my destiny." The man stared straight ahead and did not move.
"Three pancakes or four, dear?" The Man's mother asked.
"Just three thank you." He said.
1/22/88
A father and his son were walking after supper and the son
said to his
father "Father I had a dream last night."
"As did I, my son."
"And in my dream, Father, the universe was as a table-cloth which one could peek under at the the guts of life."
"It was even so in my dream, Son."
"And I dreampt that I was connected by a bright silver cord which attached to our wrists and compelled us to serve one another."
"A glorious vision. That cord was love, and it compels us even now."
"And I dreampt that the cord to Mother was broken - "
The man sank to his knees and wailed. "Even so, you have named my shame."
"No, no, Father; the cord from me to Mother."
"Of course." Said the father, walking on with composure.
"And my cord was connected far away within the guts of the Universe to-"
"To a lovely blonde with distorted facial features. Keep it quiet, Son, or Mother will hunt her down and kill her. It is the way of Mothers so to be."
"You talk funny," said the son.
"It is even so," said the father.
"Would Mother really do that? Why?"
"It is the way of Mother's to despise the woman who replaces her in the hearts of sons."
"But Father, the cord was connected to God."
"I hate you," said the Father.
"Yes," said the Son, "the Universe is very large."
JRM 1/22/88