Tired of Vatican politics, endless videos of mourners and retrospectives on Catholicism's newly minted saint (courtesy CNN, MsNBC and FOX)? Then take a dip into the cooling waters of that genre of literature known as online poetry.
Each Monday I offer up for your delight samples of the work of a poet who emerged from the online poetry community, someone whose poems I find worth sharing. Last week's diary in this series can be found here. By clicking on that link, and similar links located above the fold in each diary in this series, you can track back to, and catch up on, all the great poets and poetry I've introduced in this series.
Today's poet is a young Cuban American, Kemel Zaldivar.
More after the fold . . .
Kemel Zaldivar is the quintessential angry young man as poet, 21st Century edition. He came to the U.S. in the Mariel boatlift when he was four years old. He received a bachelor's degree in English from FIU, and then accepted a scholarship from Cornell University, for full tuition and a $15,000 fellowship per year for five to seven years. He's led an interesting life (by his own account) including addictions to heroin and other narcotics even as he pursues his graduate education at Cornell. Brilliant, brittle, and boisterous are my three b-words to describe him and his work.
Now, on to the poems. The first selection is from the online journal, Melic Review:
Song of Innocence
When it comes, the oceans
will repossess the sun. Vines
will burst from the earth,
strangle the lawyers, bankers,
usurers, yank their slack corpses
down to its seven-bellied broil.
It shall come swiftly
and with trumpets. The ribs
of old lizards will gather air
and clay, compound mud
and fire, rise belligerent
and muscular. Beware
the elms are blood-suckers,
the sparrows sly assassins
and the grottoes trap-doors
to the pit. Beware of beavers;
on that day they shall gnaw
men's ankles, topple them like pines
and call up the venom-bearers.
Your hide shall be apparel for foxes
and mink; children will skip rope
swinging your intestines. Ah children,
they shall inherit the earth; shall run,
shall climb, shall never even speak.
Next, a poem from the journal
Can we have our ball back?:
Merci
Her gown continues to drop.
Her soul, elastic and moist,
catches the day's last flits,
glows, believes not in ash.
All she remembers is my face
splashed by the climbing half-moon,
swollen and lifted, pressed
to the concavity of twilit
sky. It makes sense, I think.
She has burned for God
knows how many trillion years
and is no less beautiful
than the night I lost her.
Firelight poking the sheets,
reek of hickory and rustle
of hungry sloths--all washed
when her silver-scaled gown
dropped, when the slip straps
oozed off her shouders and hips
as she bled, and sank, and sang.
Up next, a poem from the November 2004 edition of Shampoo:
Aarat
All of a sudden, forty cobras
hurried out of the bush.
The hikers ran.
We sat on a log
a quarter block away.
The bush had hissed for days.
One click cocks the hammer,
one click drives it home.
A blast, and forty snakes,
ran as if on legs, at legs;
and forty quail
fled the cedars,
forty plovers dove.
Remember my sweet
the years in the wastes
so long ago?
Here, again, a poem of his I found at Can we have our ball back?:
Hosea Kaplan
The word of the Lord comes crippled
to me these days, scrawled
in chickenscratch over the sky
or cackled among the avenue's screeches
and squeaks. Were it not a hundred
motherfucking three in the city, I'd partake
of that mystical platter, now wafting
through the warped heat, now vanished
in a splatter of sunbeams over the bay's
waters--as if galloped on. But I've got
five minutes to get from Hooters
to the Lexus-laden lot and dart
back into my cubicle for the afternoon's
mass of market orders. Even as I fly
under the drawbridge's falling barrier,
even as I tailgate that bunny-rabbit-
looking bitch in front of me, I can hear eke,
in tongues I've forgotten, the song
of 10,000 angels, whose trill, to my indemnified
ears, mimics the drone of a million flies, plump
with the blood of a billion camels in a trillion
recurrences of the dream in which, sucking
in heaven the blondeness out of virgins,
you watch wheat fields and vineyards rust.
Next up, a poem that won second place in the Interboard Poetry Competition ("IBPC") for September 2004:
Study on Ashbery
All is just warming up; the whole thing
won't be like this: already someone has flipped
our snowglobe on its head,
and the little white flakes swim angrily
beneath the statue's face. It is right,
I suppose, that we airbrush a Colgate smile
on the dilemna, no matter how yellow
it becomes: for it's clear, unstated
but clear, that things will fulfill
somehow--the future wears a garland.
But though we know this even beyond knowing's
equipoise, we insist on reiterating it
each time there is some kind of silence
in the heavens, when only the wind ravages
the medlars. After all, it's not so bad:
a little painful, but definitely worth
the little sweat that falls.
Last year's rutabagas are yesterday's tomatoes,
which in turn will be next year's rubies.
We can study every stage of the project,
and give each back a solid pat.
Remember when Dawn with ineluctable song
carried us like a mom totes her young?
Or when the sky's wrath was so pervasive
it could not even be looked away from?
These, as all meanderings over petals,
mean nothing, do nothing but warm us
on cold nights, when the fire within goes dark.
Finally, a particularly blasphemous (WARNING: Kemel strikes me as a very angry ex-Catholic here) poem from the Winter 2001 edition of Melic Review:
Wait Till I Tell Daddy
Yeah Dad, I heard that squat son of a bitch wind up,
wind up and flag me good across the butt cheeks.
Then the tall one lashed and he knew
how to swing a whip, nine swine skin thongs
trimmed with twin lead rays flaying broad
across my trapezoid. Then the short one hit,
and the tall one, and he hit, and he hit,
and Israel sung Hossana, falsetto Alleluias
as skin tore, veins and capillaries juiced.
Arteries sprayed as Judea raved and centurions
driveled to naked muscle of whimpering messiah,
backskin red in dancing ribbons, flapping
to Zion's chilly gusts. My flesh was made
an octopus of tissue, so the Italians stopped.
And I slumped to the courtyard, cramping,
cursing, sticky. Centurions sang my kingdom,
robed my wet topography in purple velvet,
tacked some thorny firebranch to my scalp --
veiny as your Hebrews. They shouted,
touting the centurion stour. Stew them
in pogrom, I prayed. Evermore spit baptismal
pogrom -- cook the Levites in rank sulfur,
hurry patience to Armageddon, boil kike
fungus in Gehenna! your hell smear peace.
And they gave me a branch for a scepter,
and bitchslapped me and called me pretty,
then cudgeled my crown with that branch, slurping
when my scalp blood blotted their headgear.
But Dad, I loved Italian virtue, cried Eloi
Eloi Lama Sabachthani and Fuck Elijah!
And tearing my robe off they crabbed the flogging,
stripping blood and serum from suckling clots.
My wounds curdled, caked, were splashed
in lime juice; my eyes gargled crimson.
They membraned my shit-meat to humor
your people, and saddled the cross arm --
the hundred-pound timber gouging the armspan
it would sport. The splintered lumber nested
in your pigeon-king Father! I hit the deck.
Write what you will of my piety, but with Skull
Hill 650 yards away, you think I did not bitch?
Yeah, Mikey and Gabe strained their collars!
Enjoy the poetry and have a great day. See you all next week