How to Swallow a Pig

by Robert Priest

  ORDNANCE IN SODOM

  Do not pick up the sticky bibles. If one hand gets stuck, do not try to remove with the other or you’ll have two hands stuck. If you’re already in this predicament do not try to pry yourself away with your heel or your heel will also get stuck. If you are flexible you must not do what the stupidest do — try with your final foot to push yourself off the sticky bible. Otherwise, they will find you like that when they come to harvest the casualties. Stuck like a wolf in a trap. A rare few have even managed to get their faces close enough to the sticky bible to attempt a chin-push. These poor yogis are attached at five points — a most excruciating position to endure for any length of time. Especially in Sodom.

  WMDs

  What Massive Deception! What Malevolent Drivel! What Malignant Dogma! Whoosh More Doom! Whack More Disease! We Make Death — Watch Many Die. Weeping, Mourning, Dread. World Mass Disgust. Way More Divided. Way More Debt. Way More Destruction. Wasted Murdered Detainees. Wild Manic Denials. Women Mowed Down Won’t Make Democracy. Wanted More Draftees!

  THE EXECUTION OF MALNUTRITION

  They took Malnutrition out. They put it up against a wall and shot it. A billion bullets as it bucked and jolted, taking on a different shape with each blast: bird, star, stone, old man, woman, child, child, child. They riddled Malnutrition remorselessly but there was no killing it. Not the fire, not disease, not the explosion of hunger, not the haunted faces of billions could end its life. Malnutrition just took them on and stood there, wide-eyed and staring, its long overdue ticket to the banquet, its death warrant still clutched in its infant fist.

  HATING OUR CHILDREN

  Yes, our children incense us. We fall to the floor screaming at them, we sputter and shriek. Words fail us. We want to beat them all the time. Put them into corners. Cane their buttocks. Burn their hands. We want to slap their faces all day. But none of this is really legal. We have to work within the system. Hence the corporations which have given us superb technologies for poisoning the soil. For torturing the trees of the neighbourhood and killing off the atmosphere. Thank you, elected officials, for this great leap forward in achieving our revenge against our children and our children’s children. Our hate reaches on, seven generations long. We’ve worked out how to get the most for us and leave the least for them. How delicious, then, to take them out for a joyride in the chief weapon we are using against them — the car. Snickering at their happy faces, knowing that every mile eats up another minute. We feed them the hunger. Eagerly we pour them libations of liquid thirst. We betray them with kisses. Brand them in weird rituals, snip their foreskins. And if their poor faces should cause the hate to soften we have circling places, communions of hate where the hate can be strengthened and again made strong. A whole faith of hate that beats the hate into shape for the deeds, the terrible things it must create. Because God is hate. Because a sudden stop of hating might be dangerous. Hate might move at speeds beyond our bodies’ will to resist it. All we need is hate. Hate is consciousness. Hate will keep us together — the hate we have for our children.

  THE STARVED MAN

  The starved man has always been a popular figure: those familiar eyes huge with suffering, bigger than his belly, his mouth set firm in the sadness. We have always watched the travels of the starved man. The starved man and friends shot one by one in the back of the head, blown over into Cambodian graves. How well he dies, that man — pulled under by the sharks — his old act with the napalm, running screaming into the jungle. No one has ever died in so many places. The starved man goes to India. The starved man in Ethiopia. The adventures of the starved man in Uganda. How the starved man ate dirt. How he was tortured in Chile. The starved man goes to Haiti. No one has ever died as often as the starved man, yet somehow he manages to keep on starving. One day he will be recognized for this great talent of his. One day he will get an award. Ladies and gentlemen, a man you’re all familiar with, my good friend, the starved man.

  THE STARVED MAN GOES TO AMERICA

  When the starved man came to America, he began clapping his starved hands and chanting. As he was wearing only a diaper, the children followed him and soon all of America walked behind the chanting of the starved man. He led them to their houses and said, “Now, these are your temples.” And he took them into the fields and said, “Here are your holy objects, here the sacred seed and the kernel of wheat. Here is the holy corn and the water that is a godhead.” He took them into their kitchens, their cupboards and their earth and said, “Here is the paradise, the reward, and the work.”

  Soon the starved man had walked all over America and the footprints of the people were everywhere. This being accomplished, he stepped back into the ark of pitch and ribs he had come in, and, paddling with his hands, began to make his way out to the horizon with all the eyes of America watching him. Out in the sunset, as it seemed his frail craft would burn up in its light, the starved man blew a kiss and sent it out over the world. The Americans gasped and swooned with love as the kiss landed huge and fiery on their coastline. There was a small hiss and then the whole country, like a silver sheet of gasoline, went up in the inferno of his kiss. All were disintegrated in that kiss — the beautiful kiss of the starved man.

  The starved man sailed on. He sailed on full of love until he was much closer to God.

  POETRY RULES OK

  At last poetry is in charge. From now on trains won’t run unless the word runs. Poem is the switch. If it’s not poetic, it’s stuck or stopped, nixed in mid-verse. The hearse stalled halfway to the funeral, the nurse freeze-framed in mid course. Poetry is the fifth force. The organizing principle of matter. To its gravity we surrender these dust motes: law, love, trust and — of course — our votes. “Yes, Poetry rules OK” we say. “Poetry is power.” But Plato interrupts, “Doesn’t power corrupt?”

  So why were we surprised? Ideals are always compromised. But a deconstructionist in charge of housing? Is that wise? Then we had a dada foreign war to pay for: a surrealist air force, clear financial suicide! And now this new constitution of constraint — with just the vowel “I”? No wonder the dictionary’s been privatized. The word as cash: their new battle cry — slash. Modifiers/slash, articles/slash, apparatus of the sentence/slash/slash. Does that make sense? And now the scandals. The sonneteer claims innocence. But really, fourteen “gifts” to fourteen “men” fourteen times? And the fifteenth — a man named Mr. Orange — the minister of Rhymes, has just declared the penal code defunct for “lacking assonance.” So much for crime. I think you get the grift. Poetry’s into poetry. It’s self-interest, it’s only there to feather its nest. Why, it’ll sell the light right out from under those who write and then sit there in the dark, drinking their ink, singing Night? What night?

  PEOPLE WHO LOVE US

  People who love us hide in these hills waiting for our passing. They will emerge from the scenery, melt out of the night and accost us with flowers, with small gifts they have shopped for all day. They will walk at us like zombies, their eyes full of kisses they haven’t had yet. We have forbidden them to love us. We’ve made it dangerous to love us but still they come with promises of tenderness. Assurances about tomorrow. People who want to do us good. People who will be devoted to us. People who will do more than half the work. They are always after us and we have to protect ourselves. They are mumbling tales about past lives now, offering to do our laundry. We do our best to keep the lovers away. We have an armoured bus for moving from point to point. Their faces, through its thick windows, are blurry masks, primitive leers. When we get off the bus some of them will be there, waiting for us. Some of them live near our homes. They will have innumerable opportunities to shout poems at us. We might wake up and find one of them weeping in the yard. Some might be building swing sets, cradles, and love seats for us. They have promised to round each other up, but we’ve noticed they go off kissing and then come back hungrier than ever for our love. We have given them psychiatry gratis; we have returned their importuning with nothing but o
ur honed hate. If we could only stomp out love altogether, then we could be rid of them. But as long as there is love anywhere in the world it is on our doorstep; it is gazing into our windows.

  JESUS AND THE PLUS SIGN

  Pontius Pilate said, “Jesus, you are too positive. You push everything toward affirmation, falling never into negativity. You add to the world your gallant and wise soul. You add to the environment your healing walk, your caress of the waters, and to humanity you add some sense of divinity in the flesh, some meaning, some worth. Too damn positive. Add. Add. After I wash my hands and clean my teeth you must carry a huge plus sign up Golgotha so that you can come to know the over-bearing mass of your positivity on the great Mathematics of Rome.”

  PSALM I

  God has an endless name. She can never finish writing the cheque. She needs eternity just to identify herself. God’s name requires goodness; it needs love to represent itself in nature fully. There must be infinite alphabets. Endless new letters to pick from. New numbers to equate. There must be multifoliate increments of pitch, tone, and colour. To shape just the first great consonant of God’s name, we need all the lifetimes we can get, perfecting ourselves for the ultimate diction. Accepting that we are only a small part of one pronouncement. A word that may emerge over generations and still never have begun. God can’t just hand you her card. God can’t be expected to have a passport. For God there is no “other.” No loneliness. Shantih. There are no commandments for God. God listens to all infinity at once. Almost knows who she is. Almost knows us.

  THE NON-VIOLENT BOXER

  He came from nowhere. The quickest ducker in the world. The fastest chin in existence. The non-violent boxer, just deking and dodging, while his opponent flails away. Thwip! Thwip! Look at that guy move! Look at the way he pops that light bulb-like head straight down, almost as though into some turtle hole in the top of his torso. Shhzooopp!And a fist cuts through naked air, the little guy’s legs shooting wide apart. Five rounds and he hasn’t been touched. If you listen you can hear him over the ring mic trying to persuade his opponent. “Do you think it would be a victory if you beat me?” Thwip! “That would be just one more loss for both of us.” Thwip! Thwip! “The greatest victory of all is in our grasp, but I need you my brother.” Thwip! Thwip! Thwip! Thwip! Thwip!

  INTERVIEW WITH THE NON-VIOLENT BOXER

  How do you account for your win?

  “Well, because I am using non-violent techniques I have not only the strength of my body but all the force of truth and history at my disposal. This, coupled with my great agility, is what makes winning possible.”

  How important is the agility?

  “These battles might be fought without the agility but it would be infinitely more painful. I would have to allow myself to be pum-meled many times. This would make me less durable as a boxer, and less engaging as an entertainer and artist. My agility is very important.”

  BOOK 6 LOVE AS THOUGH

  THE KISS I JUST MISSED

  The kiss I just missed giving you wound up later on another mouth, but by then it had become a little cold and cruel. It wanted to be just burned off in sunbursts and cleansed of its longing. It imparted only melancholy. Where it goes now I don’t know. Probably to be used and used on other mouths. Each time, worn down a little more, like a coin, to its true longing. Perhaps it will reach you then from some impartial lover — from some dispassionate goodbye — like a stem cut from its rose. The kiss that didn’t make it to your mouth made it instead to Toronto, for I could not be rid of it in Palo Alto. It stained my lips even in Mendocino. In a Triumph Spitfire I could not, by singing out the window, leave a long, burning stream of it hissing in the air. It has become an irreconcilable wound now. A grand comparer. It lands on lips in a regular autumn but it will never be severed from its mouth. I wash it in water — it is there. I wash it in wine — still it is there. Drunken then, singing your name, mouthing it hot and burning into my mind, it has shown me its red edges, its arms and legs that didn’t ground. It has talked to me sadly of clothes, of beds it didn’t lie down in. What a weeper! It has dragged me under rain. Indelible. Indelible. Wants to go finally to the graveyard of old kisses, each one with its denied rose strolling ghostly over. Each one with its sunset nova quenched in amber on its headstone. Each of its stopped explosions driven down to juice in some white withering berry there.

  SINCE YOU LEFT

  “Since I left you there seems to be so much more between us.” — in a letter from my ex-wife

  Since you left, there are more mountains between us. More wheat fields and winters. More fried people running out of forests, more frazzled antelopes writhing in pain. Since you left, there are more car accidents between us. I could infect cities with my wonder at your absence and all the roads would curl into question marks and point towards each other in a useless period of pure distilled perplexity. They would put up road signs asking “Why?” And many wise scholars would stand by them all day saying “Because.” Because we are obedient. Because we have followed the roads to the ever-present period and are now ending all our months with circular, unanswerable confusions. Because there is a vast ignorance larger than my mouth and I can’t get it out of me — I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t exist. I should be half a tiger. A semi-butterfly. I should be a spider without legs, but you are there, and I am here, and like infinity it boggles me. Since you left, astronauts have danced on the moon and there are more footprints between us. More closed doors and sick Indians. More pipelines and Canadians. Big hooting ones with flags and borderlines. I would have to go over many jingoists to get to you. Since you left, several foetal mayors have been aborted on Main Street and there is more semen between us. I am sending you a picture of the doctor at work now on one of our streets trying to remove a suicide from it. He’s saying, “He’s malignant! He’s huge under there — already bloated into sewers and subways.” Since you left there are more black doves in oil slicks between us. More levity and false laughter. More orchards and suns and stars. I have made a round ring of helium and send it to you now without regret. Catch it as you would a quoit. One on each appendage. O, I would come to you. I would come to you but everywhere I turn there is this old lady in my way trying to scrub the shadow of a “Z” off the sidewalk. I say, “Hey look, it is just part of the word “Zoo,” you know, why not wait for night and begin again in the morning?” But no, she just moves onto the “O’s” and throws me a little bit of meat. If I ever get to you, I will have to be jumping and hungry. I will have to be very happy. If I ever get to you at all, it will be like scissors getting to the other edge of paper. Two slices will fall away from everything and with a strange sliced face like a kiss I will say “Hi” and perform several miracles while you’re not looking.

  PROPOSAL

  You can have my magazine of flesh, my tattooed book, my sick face corrupted by the heart. I’ll bring you a bouquet of little angers broken open, my ivory dog’s head, my flaccid chairs, my bed of noodles. I’ll bring you the burnt apple-black moon, the sick moon of my longing. I have an appetite for you. It is a little black bag with an elephant in it and a pinhead that he jumps on. I have all the quicksilver ever knocked from an apple with an axe. You can have the Hershey cows, the television coats. You can have the great Broadway orange, my crow of talcum, my monkey Madonna shrieking in the moonlight. I will give you nerves and the wool picked from daisies. I will bring you ten cups filled with dew, a table made of peas. You may have the impossible dancers, the giddy, the staggering maple. You may have the poplars drunk, the laughing antelopes. I will bring you ears, ointments, wigs, and jewels $$$mdash; just stay.

  MORE!

  More! More! More! Bring down your miraculous mouth over mine and make me green to the throat. Make me plush velvet to the breast. Leave a kiss at the base of me, at the broken axle where the blood spins ’round. Kiss me where you can with hot kisses you have saved up, soaked through your weeping body in nights of longing — kisses caught in you — captured like shoals of
struggling fish desperate to get out and melt at my mouth, to be immolated by the heat of having me. Save up for me those kisses I save for you and we will let them, like a horde of crimson warriors, destroy one another. Then we will be locked together — share the same bone of pleasure, the same ache of fulfillment, to ease, afterwards, the soft words out of us, all stored up and unspeakable for so long. And let us keep kissing even then, like animals who have fainted by the water and unconsciously lap there, long past satisfaction, till we are brimming over with each other, aching with intense pleasure.

  POEM FOR A FISHERWOMAN, 1983

  On a long holy strand of my finest spit I am fastening a hook to the heavens — a silver hook and a wish made of will. You, my love, are the bait — you and the boy and the family. If they will swallow that, then we just might catch an angel. We just might fly. Otherwise we will climb, fixed to one another by faith and suspicion — man, woman, and child high in the sun — that thin strand stretching beneath us, threatening to break. I am drawing in a golden globe of undying fish, flipping even now in my palm, holy and alive in my lips. Ah sweet love, on a thin green strand of phlegm I am drawing a hospital in — a holy hospital of brutalized angels. Angels who won’t do. Big church angels and some commercial angels too. I have caught a bottle of holy glue, the same holy glue that God uses, fastening himself to the religions. Fast holy glue that sets in a second and I am spreading it on the earth for you, hoping for just a touch of paradise, some little soulbit of me in you to settle down. We will touch, we two. We will embrace, and afterwards, because of it, no matter how thin, our bodies and our souls will always be joined by a little strand. So, babe, wind me in. Take me down off the rooftops. Pull me out of the deep rapids, the highest part of the sky where the cold wind goes by. Draw me in from streets, miles away, by magic. And never cut this strand. Never even try, for there is not one blade, not one twilight, not one sharp mouth deep enough for that. You will always be joined to me now, slender fisherwoman. Just you and Saturn on a string. You and the world hanging from a thread with your heart and your lust and your blood. So draw down heaven, love. Tug that silver string and drag this kite out of the whirlwind. Come, into this gamble, this boat pulled into the unknown — this journey in the wild current.