lady gaga prose poem

fan letter to lady gaga

after Terrance Hayes

dear lady,

there has been so much discussion about whether you have a cock or cunt.  frankly, i like to think you have a psychic dick.  disco stick, i guess.  you must have one, since you sing about it, right.  i sang along to one of your songs today in my car.  at the end of it i wept like a lost child.  it made me think of sad things, but in a good way.  i heard yet another music video of yours isn’t allowed to play before 8pm.  after 8pm is officially my favorite part of the day.  lights, sequins, piano, & sunglasses.  you are so fabulous.  do you think people hate us because of fear or jealousy. 

do you think about the fag in ohio who has to hide your cd under his mattress.  let’s say his name is chad.  he wants to move to new york, where you got your start.  my mother told me a joke on the telephone.  how do i get you to cry.  she said poker face.  get it.  chad thought it was funny.  i rolled my eyes.  chad thinks you have a cunt.  if he let himself think you have a disco stick, his head would explode.  no man is an island i tell him. 

this morning i turned into a robot.  this was before i cried in the car.  my face rusted.  chad says it happens to him, too, but doesn’t know why.  did i mention he turned into a robot, also, just he ain’t aware of it.  he definitely turned robot before i turned robot.  when we dance it sounds like cookware banging together on a beat.  pots & pans & woks.  the media hates us because we aren’t human.  something about the fact we can’t procreate, yada against god’s will.  they assume we’re made.  it’s the electricity that scares them.  when i finally convince chad that you have a dick, fragments of metal will hit all the other islands.  the sharper pieces of shrapnel will slice & slash innocent bystanders.  for now, i let him think you have a cunt.  i let him believe he’s still human.

emperor's-new-clothes kind of moment

I was forwarded this article, written by Mike Young for HTML GIANT, by a few different classmates, on the some of the most common moves by contemporary poets. I guess it has been circulating for quite a while and I've managed to inadvertently avoid it until now. Anyways, here are some analogies I've come up with that summarize my response to it:

It's like that being naked in front of your homeroom dream.

It's like someone has found the magician's handbook.

It's like that scene in I Heart Huckabees where Jude Law's character hears the recordings of himself telling the same joke over and over again. [Unfortunately, I could only find the clip in Italian. On second thought, perhaps it's a good thing. Jude Law's American accent is rubbish.]

But, really, I find it funny mostly. It is comforting to know no poet is that original. Also, some of the items on the list are just things that occur when we use language.

Regardless, it's a good thing to be aware of what we instinctively do, repeatedly. I don't think we're meant to take the article as being judgmental, just a little self-ridicule-y. I actually wrote a poem recently that operates almost entirely on items 1b and 30, but I'm sure in a large way fulfills many of the other items. See if you can identify more:

takebacks

it left my house
i mean it left my mouth
as if it were late
to an appointment and couldn’t
waste any time getting there.

i didn’t mean to say i love you.
i was meaning to say i hate you, instead
i showed you with my actions.

it’s called parapraxis—freudian
slip, colloquially—so
when i said good-bye, i meant please
don’t ever leave me.

i was alone in my mouth
and something was missing my lips.
i was alone in my bed
and i gave myself a paroxysm.

i looked at myself in the mirror
and then at a photo of you and saw
a parallel, i mean a parallax (it lacks
paratactic syntax; i also mean parallel
structure), what i mean,
succinctly, is that you were further
than i wanted you to be.

i wanted to be you
for at least the duration
of us fucking so i could make sure
it felt as you pretended. i mean
as i intended.

you left my house and my mouth
was full of snow. it was cold
and uncomfortable, and when
my tongue was fully numbed
i said i hate you instead of what i really meant,
spitting pretty snow flecks at your face.

I was also impressed and surprised by the variety of sources Mike Young used for his examples in the article. He called out some pretty big names, and curiously some of the lesser known, but emerging, contemporary poets. It points out that we're all in this together.

Since I brought up I Heart Huckabees, here's a scene I think is perfectly germane and we can all enjoy--in English!

poem; or, truths about having a sister

that you cried at her wedding reception while you gave your toast the way good brothers are supposed to cry at their sister’s wedding. that you cried the way bad brothers who want to be better brothers cry at their sister’s wedding.

that you would have waited for your baby teeth to fall out on their own had she not knocked a few out during races in the backyard.

that you gave her a scar on her finger fighting over which one of you would cut the apple.

that you never think to thank her until she asks. that that’s what brothers do.

that you are a better writer because of her. that the way she ripped into your middle school essays which made you literally rip them up then rewrite them and hide the second, third and fourth drafts from her, but turn in the best middle school essay you have ever written. that she believes in you and that’s why.

that you were nested in the same womb, listening to the same heart beat for nine months, the same experience five years apart.

that you both have inherited nagging.

that she resembles your younger brother more than she does you.

that she is, too, a gemini, and when you get along you are the same person. when you do not it is the end of days.

that you share gray-area truths, like both hating and loving a father. possessing a fear your brother born in the states never knew. and straight out dark truths about ghosts and wars and suicide attempts and hating your bodies and vomit and the infidelity of parents and men who are flawed who are uncles whom you despise and the love that ferries you through it all.

that she has more handbags than you do. that she steals your clothes.

that when she wants you to be proud of her it takes you by surprise, because you seek her validation as if it is the sound of your mother’s heart beat. that her pride is a version of your mother’s beating heart.

that she wants you to write a poem about her. you’ve tried and there was this: the poems display her in a light that isn't flattering. that it doesn’t address what she really wants you to do, compliment her. but they show her importance to you. that they end up being about more. more than her. but because of her.

t.m.w.e. #3 - swine flu over the cuckoo's nest

This exercise assigns the poet to write a poem where he or she brags. Addonizio and Laux suggest starting with a list of things at which I may be good. The further along in the writing process I got, the more the poem started to sound like a slam. I committed to that sound and it was like riding a bike; it had been at least four years since I'd written a slam poem. On an obliquely related note, I've recently grown disgruntled by the lack of traffic on my blog; albeit, I haven't been trying very hard to generate it. So, as a cyber-social experiment, I threw in some currently popular Google search phrases to see if it may have an effect on this post's popularity. Admittedly, this admission may skew results. This will probably be one of the few times I'll create site links in a poem.


swine flu over the cuckoo’s nest

it is the ‘oh’ i will manifest
take a read, deny or attest to the best
poet blogger, i jest, lest you dig
what was just confessed;
the cat has run out of the brag.
this is a slam that doesn’t take the cake
it takes the bakery, rollin’ out dough and siftin’ out the fakery.
it is the sneezy sick snaz of a slam
poem that sneaks in some glam
for the moment, like adam lambert
or rock like daughtry of american idol idolatry,
idly i’ll try to win your clicks, so quickly
pick me, squeeze my juice and drink
my shit so good it stink, from toilet bowl
to kitchen sink, i’m gonna run like water
to the brink, tickled pink, then disappear like missing link.
i’m the gay marriage storm arriving to do harm,
get beyonce to ring the alarm and create buzz
like a killer bee swarm, consider yourself warned.
i’m gonna wreck like britney, spear
like aborigine, clown like circus, and just
when you think i had enough, you’ll see me
break from a cocoon, rising,
like the moon, like the hole of a cartoon
ending, that i’ll pick up and emerge from and
blow up like vesuvius cum, but taste
like gumdrops--covet me kookaburra--like cocoa,
chocolate, hot, need me like coke, coke addict,
feenin’ like whitney, the diva not the mountain,
i’m the fountain of youth, my words new forever,
my words stay for always more clever, better
than yours, got you on all fours, whore, literally floored,
huffin’, nailed you into a coffin, dead cause
i coughed in your face, this is a slam and a murder case,
kill like phil spector then ghost like a spector, start war
over beauty like hector, teach you lessons like lecture,
feel on my tectures, stack lines with architectural
integrity, its gritty, my dirt, my spit, my squirt, my shit,
i blurt, i slit, i skirt, i hit the nail on the head
i’m hurt, i’m fit, i’m curt, i’m long like wind
i’m bucky done gun, dmc run, a girl who just wants to have fun
the good son, mcauley culkin calls me a monster, mon
djs spin me like spiral, md’s can’t cure me like viral, disagree i’ll
fire yall, i’m trump, i’m oprah winfrey, there’s no stopping
the juggernaut, the every thing you’re not, the beast,
the disease, the tsunami’s coming, flee, the i-got-your-crazy crazy,
the no other possibility, the who else is it gonna be but me.

i had a tapeworm - michael ryan

I read this poem for the first time a few months ago. Then, I knew very little about Michael Ryan, with the exception that he was teaching at the University of California, Irvine, where I quite wanted to receive my MFA. Though things didn't pan out in that direction, I'm glad I recognized the name and gave this poem a few reads. The tone immediately resonated with me. I am drawn to its beat-ish qualities, its prosaic style and confessional tone. Its assonant-driven sound reads like a slam poem, playing on tension between public declaration and intimate subject matter. The poem moves from out spaces like the Y to the inmost tunnels of the speaker's body, from a public pool into a secret inside a secret. On a personal level, I appreciate how the speaker addresses a complex nest of emotions that surround affairs from a temporal distance and within such a short poem: tender remembrance, guilt and regret, jealousy of whom the ones with whom we cheat are with and their other possible lovers, severe contemplation of the past, the haunting of a beautiful mistake. The tapeworm is within the speaker and eats at him, though his true fear isn't the decimation of his insides, but the betrayal of exposure and the unforgiving nature of age over memory.


I Had A Tapeworm

I had a tapeworm, and imagined it
flat—paper-flat—like a strip of caps,
pallid red, a quarter-inch wide
with bulbous BB bullfrog eyes
peeking out of my asshole as I lolled
in a crowded fetid basement swimming pool
(the kind that used to be in inner-city Ys:
windowless; steamy; concrete-block moldings
chalky-cracked), and you whom I’ve neither
seen nor heard of for thirty years
were saying I’d give everyone in the pool
my tapeworm, which you knew had eaten
my insides and now had threaded through
both my intestines and was trying to get out.
Where were we? Everyone was old, old—
gray, infirm; flaccid and thin
or fat and bald, all ill flesh drooping—
the women in rubber-flowered bathing caps
and black one-piece suits as if we were all
on an outing from a nursing home.
I couldn’t see myself to see how old I was,
but you were thirty, at the peak of your beauty,
as when you knelt naked on the motel room bed
brushing out your thick dark waist-length hair
after cheating on the lover you were cheating
on your husband with, who was at that moment
waiting for you in another motel room
from which you had slipped to meet me secretly:
a secret inside a secret, buried, encased,
as if if we dug deep enough into it
we’d find what we were trying
to get or stop.