Born in the Year of the Butterfly Knife: 1

by Derrick Brown

  Why do I care for you so much?

  How bout You made me laugh like a maniac and cry like a bum.

  You looked into this tinfoil chest.

  I was cooking old vegetables.

  I am being ripped by these looped sentences.

  How could you sleep with someone you hated?

  You are dating a fella whose head spins in a zillion directions.

  Maybe I want to lock fingers and shut up.

  I wanted into your skull to undo some sentences.

  How can I measure up to the rich older fellas,

  The hip art sensibilities,

  when a bit of flatulation in January made me laugh through all 1998?

  I goof off. I am poor. I live on a little ship.

  My job isn’t stable.

  I have no mystery or rebellious grit.

  I like dumb magic tricks, skateboards and being tackled.

  When you told me about losing your virginity

  do you know I wanted to be there

  to shake you and say Wait dammit

  wait for me.

  I think of how I’d feel without you

  and I am ripped into freeway trash.

  I fell for you twice.

  You’re a big fat fuckin’ wow,

  so where do I belong?

  You used to kiss me mean and good.

  You don’t anymore.

  I don’t know what you know about me.

  I don’t know what you wanna know.

  I am the kinda guy who will call too much,

  make mistakes on the suave scale,

  say the wrong things to your friends,

  play American music,

  kiss you like hell.

  I wanna fix what the other upstanding Christian boys wrecked.

  I wanna punch out all the smart, clever

  and coy billboards you dated before

  and stalk all the boys with secret crushes

  and places their hearts on Pungee stakes and say Suck it

  she’s mine.

  One survivor.

  I needed to flush it all out on paper.

  Karate chop!

  This isn’t an encoded message.

  This is me being as honest as I can.

  You may have learned nothing from these ramblings

  and Jesus… wait

  I don’t even know if I’ll ever

  show this to you.

  VENTOM

  I love women. Just not this one.

  CONQUERED VENTOM

  When a writer is wronged

  in comes sweet, sweet shiv-in-the-spine revenge

  in a public fashion.

  You said Run like the wheelchair is calling.

  Kiss hangmen cause nooses can’t hold you.

  Love like a leprous woman.

  All of it—piss in the mouth of a Bedouin begging for water

  And let’s talk about our so-called sex,

  the sex…Ha!

  The sex…was …was… beautiful and meaningful…but the lies!

  Your vagina is a white lie.

  Your vagina is Virginia spelled wrong and packed with just as much boredom.

  Your vagina is a body bag for fraternity dropouts and once-hopeful fetuses.

  Tear me from your lizzie borden modeling agency.

  Tear me from that pink community axe wound forever.

  How could you not tell me that they used to bottle your mother’s saliva

  and used it to taint the punch at Jonestown?

  How could you not tell me her maiden name was… Beelzebub.

  Your heart-colder than a necrophiliac’s first entry

  Your pop astrology has already made your decisions for you

  Your sun is in drama

  Your moon is in bullshit and an American planting his flag in you.

  I could use a bear rug

  with your head in its mouth

  to remind me that someone else

  is tasting you right now.

  This is my confession

  This is how I repent

  This is how I pretend to be OK

  in a public fashion.

  The polar bear misses his eyes

  but most of all—misses his insides.

  Oh gosh kitty,

  how long must I wait covered in lemons,

  crippled in this chalk outline

  unable to trust—

  sour milk at every table?

  I am worn like the steps to a children’s mortuary.

  When the poetry vending machine breaks—

  all that comes is—I am so worn.

  When you said you loved me so hard,

  you’d kill for me,

  I didn’t know

  it would hit

  so close

  to home.

  THE WRINKLES UNDER LIPSTICK

  Most old people don’t talk to each other when they eat. What day in a relationship does that become O.K.? I’d rather drive off a cliff naked on a motorcycle than live a dead love life. No love is better than lethargic love.

  There is a man

  sitting across from his wife

  in a senior citizens’ buffet joint.

  He loved fixing broken things.

  She loved the garden.

  He likes cornbread.

  She always been partial to muffins

  and neither ever knew.

  His cameras zoom in on her lips

  lipstick on coffee mug

  on napkin

  on partial muffin

  on everything but her lips.

  Remembering his lips painted with hers long ago

  Remembering how they’d laugh when he was wearing more lipstick than she.

  She only kisses the grandkids now and his mind carousels around

  “…she used to…”

  Creamed corn-bi-focals

  Prunes-pill box

  Mocha mix-lipstick

  Cornbread.

  He swallows and leans forward slow.

  He waits until the wrinkles are ready to speak.

  “When are we gonna die?”

  Plates full of mistakes smeared in front of them.

  She is staring at a young man to her right. “Whaddya mean we?”

  The old man stands and steps outside.

  He stares at nothing on the asphalt

  waiting for something to happen.

  A SHORT SONG

  A SHORT SONG

  This was a very hard day.

  Lo-fi ultra sound photo sat on your lap

  like a war letter to a mother

  delivered by men in uniforms.

  An infinite grief

  wrapping your shoulders in a black mink

  and dark ink.

  The nauseousness left covert,

  snuck from the theater of your gut, whisperless

  and your new feeling of healthiness meant terrible news.

  Like a lover with fists you will miss,

  if you could still be sick for two more months

  you would.

  What do I say?

  The vacancy signs of motels made you weep.

  Secondary drumbeat please come in,

  heaviness in your hollow.

  It is a sleep that is breathless and safe.

  No heartbreak, no failure, no words,

  just fuzzy pictures and

  the option of funeral

  or leaving it at the hospital.

  A doctor voicing it with the importance of fries or soup.

  Maybe the child was too amazing for earth.

  Maybe God is an Indian giver.

  Maybe the angel of death is as fast as a bored policeman

  and just as dangerous.

  Now you are tested and created to carry on

  to begin again.

  You were created for creation.

  You are not a morgue.

  You are a factory of mud fights and beauty

  and if the assembly line goes on strike

 
just negotiate

  and things will start running again.

  When the doctor told you a day before the funeral

  that is was actually a girl, I know it hit you harder.

  The confusion. The name change. The small clothes abandoned.

  Girls seem to deserve to die less.

  I watched your boys play on the cemetery trees during the ceremony.

  How I wanted us to join them.

  I noticed

  at most funerals

  the only room for an audience

  is among the grass and graves

  seated on plastic chairs with velvet covers

  upon the sloganed tombstones of the departed flights.

  I wept

  sitting on a man’s grave with a long name—

  wondered if someday

  a boy would come

  sit upon mine,

  not wonder about the huge way I sneezed

  or kissed nervously

  or idea’d my way through cashless lonely nights

  inventing ways out with pens and garage-sale lights.

  And when his plastic chair rickets back

  he might see my name

  and notice that graves are things we walk upon

  and must walk away from.

  If I could un-invent shoebox sized caskets

  I would do this for you.

  We are mist.

  THE ABSENCE ANTHOLOGY

  THE ABSENCE ANTHOLOGY

  Besides living on a boat, the best place I ever lived was on the roof of Casa Grande apartments near the Belmont Pier in Long Beach. I could see Vons and the ocean. It was actually an old laundry room. I had to move downtown cause I couldn’t afford to live there and tour doing poetry. The woman below me would make very jilted sounds when her older, richer lover would come visit. She was always wearing designer gear and such. You know the type. Thirty-five or so, hungry to be married, has to say ‘I’m worth it’ every time she goes shopping. It made me think about perfection.

  In a bar where everything is new

  but beaten up to look old,

  a player piano played perfectly.

  Ghosts of elephant tusks in the keys.

  I wept the color of smokers’ bones,

  the color of night breath packed in whiskey…

  Or I guess I could’ve just said my breath seemed orange.

  I don’t know what’s with me these days,

  the older I get

  the more I try to force things to be beautiful.

  The cowboy fight songs pours forth

  guided by the vanished.

  Some people know this feeling.

  No one claps for a player piano

  I stumble into the night.

  Sober up hours are spent in a small Long Beach apartment

  bending away the foghorn sounds launched from ocean.

  The sound crawls up my stairs

  like rapists on Valium.

  As an interlude

  I get an equal share of the young woman below me in apartment 10

  begging her older lover to unRolex and turn on the water

  to bless her sugar walls with the crush of Jericho

  to rock her trench into something hot

  codes in the ‘keep trying’ curve of her moans.

  They are a passionate bag of chips.

  I’ve never seen her face

  but I know her moans.

  Her moans are surrender,

  like a coach that puts you in at the end of the season

  when you’ve way lost.

  Coach waits till the last minute to put you in

  and it doesn’t feel good to be in the game at that point.

  It was over when you got on the field.

  What you once thought you wanted you don’t want anymore.

  Every time she squirms or breathes out her tense sweet,

  I become more alone.

  My bed grows larger.

  My body heat drops. Addresses vanish from napkins.

  The phone line incinerates.

  The foghorn slips to the ocean floor

  and my only consistent company

  of cars outside grows silent.

  The only tail I get

  is when I bet

  on heads.

  So I focus on the sound like the player piano and move my fingers.

  Stuttering them in the air like a pianist

  till her moans become music.

  I turn over

  and slide down the bed a bit

  (which is now a quarter of a mile wide)

  and aim my mouth right at hers

  so we are aligned

  and not in a metaphysical way.

  I catch those sounds

  brand them into my throat like a blacksmith’s kiss

  and memorize the nights she is alone.

  The next day,

  smell of diesel.

  I see a moving truck outside my window.

  I ask the manager why she’s moving out.

  He told me someone was actually moving in,

  a young Marine and his Korean clean-cut wife

  which is about time

  since Apt. 10 had been vacant for over nine months,

  partly because of the high rent,

  partly because of the woman who hung herself.

  CHEAP RENT

  The Jewish, the Irish, the kid of the UK and the Aussies have the best senses of humor in the world. I think this poem came out of the idea that a town exists somewhere and everything is happy and fantastic, but there is a small boy locked in a cellar that must starve so that paradise can exist and have a point of reference in regards to defeat and heartache. I think I started wondering about what that boy would snack on, that is, if he was the snackin’ type. Also, who doesn’t imagine having a little Jew baby every now and then?

  She, a strange landlord,

  pointed to her chest and said

  If you lived here

  you’d be home by now.

  I, the stranger with no deposit,

  pointed to my chest and said

  If you lived here

  you would have to be

  very…tiny.

  I think of her smart hips

  and the days left before their unhinging.

  Our love was redder than the eyes of McCarthy.

  Our love was blacklisted and strong.

  Our love was a brawl in the street

  with spectacles on.

  Eyes of bayonet knives,

  Brass-knuckle sex,

  crowbar quarrels

  and the nunchakus of my mouth

  which I tried to use with great aplomb and theatrical flash

  but always ended up knocking myself unconscious.

  ‘No, you don’t look fat in that dress.

  Yes, that sentence does assume you look

  fat in some dresses.’

  Kapow. Right in the face.

  This love remains a tongueless boy

  in a basement

  that you snuck graham crackers to.

  He loved to see the glaze

  of your hammer-and-nail-polish.

  You kept him alive.

  He paid you with a finger every time you arrived:

  One to clean your elfish ear.

  Then two

  to check your pulse.

  Then three

  to make

  an unbreakable Boy Scout oath.

  Then four

  for karate.

  Then five

  so you could rest each one

  of his loose fingers in between yours

  like couples do when they stroll

  through shitty carnivals.

  When we first met

  she told me of the brilliant in Israel

  and the erotic vision of the cynic.

  I tried to turn her on by talking to her about

  skinning animals.

  She kept hunting for a metaphor.

  I wa
s actually just talking about skinning animals.

  Now I can’t stop thinking of how our baby would look in a perm

  with massive elk for eyebrows

  and then in comes the Tel Aviv

  of her mouth on my dirty neck.

  Our mouths building a jangly, red swamp

  they will call weirdo Louisiana.

  This kiss spills her silent resume:

  She is the poster child

  for the Willy Wonka suicide camp.

  Her stomach is a summer full

  of black ice-cream-truck hijackings.

  Her eyes are highway fatalities

  you can’t stop staring at.

  Her skin is rehab for sandpaper junkies.

  She is my landlord

  and she lowers the rent,

  points to her chest and says,

  “Man, if you lived here

  you’d be home by now.”

  LAST NIGHT IN PARIS

  LAST NIGHT IN PARIS

  Someone told me that Paris was the city of lights when Joel Chmara and I drank our brains out there. It was a terrible time and the boat thing actually happened at the end of this poem. Blasted in Paris is nice. To me it is the city of love, a sewage kind of love. Let’s just say they didn’t like this poem when I read it at La Sorbonne.

  For the delightful Maureen Hascoett, the last great French woman.

  Say bonjour!

  Say au revoir!

  Say si vous plait,

  or the French will hate you.

  I assured my well-traveled friend

  that in the City of Love

  all I needed to speak was the language of love

  (which is of course…English)

  and they will come around.

  They did not come around.

  Was it the Austin bats in my jaw?

  The Brooklyn fuck-you in my stride?

  The Long Beach bar breath in my fists?

  The South Side in my desire?

  The mutt in my blood

  that sent the foreign legion scrambling for American poets on the radar?

  ‘Hu hu huuuh. Les are ruining everyzing. Les american poets are stealing all

  our mademoiselles, pumping them with their inspiration, and now France is

  full of ugly babies with crazy nipples. What do you do with a silver dollar nipppple!’

  We will bleed all over this town

  and make you think Hemingway blew his

  brains out

  because he had to live here for his daily intake of crazy.

  We plant a flag here tonight and this-here Franceland is ours.

  All you have to do is plant a flag these days.

  That’s why we got the whole moon and all you got is Tahiti.