My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

Get out of hell—

  Whispers—

  You big poet

  We soldiers from hell’s country

  Here

  Safe as you are

  You write poetry

  For dead persons

  To begin with, I could have slept with all of the people in the poems. It is not as difficult as the poet makes it. That is the reason I was born tonight.

  He wanted an English professor—someone he could feel superior to, as a ghost. He wanted to eliminate all traces of the poetry. To kiss someone goodbye but you people out there know none of the answers either—even the simple questions the poet was asked.

  I am the ghost of answering questions. Beware me. Keep me at a distance as I keep you at a distance.

  Cegeste died at the age of nineteen. Just between the time when one could use one’s age as a power and one uses one’s age as a crutch. (cf. A Fake Novel About the Life of Arthur Rimbaud). At 35 one throws away crutches. (cf. Inferno Canto I)

  The two loves are the pain The Poet had. I do not think a doorbell could be extended from one of them to the other. The letter, naturally (as will become more apparent in the conquest of Algeria or outer space) was written to somebody else.

  The cocks want to be sure of themselves.

  “I like it better in L.A. because there’re more men and they’re prettier,” someone said in The Handlebar tonight.

  “Intersections” is a pun. “Yellow stars” are what the Jews wore. The stair is what extends back and forth for Heurtebise and Cegeste and the Princess always to march on.

  Actually, L.A. is Los Angeles and there was a motion picture that showed everything.

  “Conquered Him” is a poem by Emerson.

  The Dead Seas are all in the Holy Land.

  If you watch closely you will see that water appears and disappears in the poem.

  Jacob’s coat was made of virgin wool. Virgin wool is defined as wool made from the coat of any sheep that can run faster than the sheepherder.

  There are steps on the stairs too, which are awfully steep.

  This is a poem to prevent idealism—i.e. the study of images. It did not succeed.

  Edward Lear was allowed to say this some time ago in his books for children. Actually The Poet thought of himself as “oily eyes.” That is why The Poem could never prevent idealism (Idealism).

  Orpheus and Eurydice are in their last nuptial embrace during this poem.

  The goop was a criminal organization long since dead like the Holy Roman Empire. The singer is unknown.

  In hell it is difficult to tell people from other people.

  An obvious attempt of The Poet to bring The Poem to a close. Its failure is obvious.

  “That boy’s pants” is an obvious reference to Eurydice. What doesn’t cast shadows is obvious to everyone.

  There is a universal here that is dimly recognized. I mean everybody says some kinds of love are horseshit. Or invents a Beatrice to prove that they are.

  What Beatrice did did not become her own business. Dante saw to that. Sawed away the last plank anyone he loved could stand on.

  Alice’s mirror no longer reflects storybook knights. They reflect the Thirty Years Wars and the automobiles people rode in during them.

  Cocteau invented mirrors as things to move through. I invent mirrors as obstacles.

  This is called I-IX. I see myself reflected against it.

  This is definitely a warning to Orpheus which he does not understand—being an asshole. This is too bad because there would have been just as much poetry if he had understood it.

  The definition of warning has been given constantly. The fact, alone, that Eurydice’s head was missing should have warned him.

  II.

  For the Princess

  Awkward Bridge

  Love isn’t proud enough to hate

  The stranger at its gate

  That says and does

  Or strong enough to return

  Or strong enough to return (and back and back and back again)

  What was

  A Poe-

  m Ronnie Wrote the Other Evening

  Jack

  Of lack

  The back

  Of our hands

  Tattooed

  With you

  Wherewithal appalling

  Willows

  In the trees

  And that boy’s knees

  Or anything we sank

  In tanks

  Thanks

  To you.

  Who Knew

  Ghosts drip

  And then they leap

  The boy sang and the singing that I heard:

  Wet shadows on a stick.

  Magic

  Strange, I had words for dinner

  Stranger, I had words for dinner

  Stranger, strange, do you believe me?

  Honestly, I had your heart for supper

  Honesty has had your heart for supper

  Honesty honestly are your pain.

  I burned the bones of it

  And the letters of it

  And the numbers of it

  That go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

  And so far.

  Stranger, I had bones for dinner

  Stranger, I had bones for dinner

  Stranger, stranger, strange, did you believe me?

  Ferlinghetti

  Be bop de beep

  They are asleep

  There where they like us

  It goes

  From nose to nose

  From stop to stop

  Violations are rare

  And the air is fair

  It is spring

  On the thing

  We sing.

  Beep bop de beep

  They are all asleep

  They’re all asleep.

  Booth Tarkington

  No

  Thanks to him you’re a poet

  Begin to recall

  Cegeste’s voice

  (Distrusted as if there were any number of statues speaking)

  Strange how the sound of wings comes through to it

  As if the act of having sex had a meaning

  Beyond

  Recalling.

  The Tragic Muse

  She isn’t real

  She isn’t pure

  Aside from that

  Her teeth are poor

  If you listen to her

  You will listen for real

  Her front and her back teeth

  Will bite you for real

  And you go to bed

  With a sluff and a sigh

  And listen next morning

  Whatever you said

  Partington Ridge

  A white rabbit absolutely outlined in whiteness upon a black background

  A ghost

  The most

  We can say or think about it is it stays.

  Not as a memory of something that happened or a symbol or anything

  We loved or respected or was a part of history

  Our history

  It stays

  In a closet we wear like a ring on our fingers

  The rabbit

  Ghost of them

  Most of what we knew.

  Hisperica Famina

  Joan of Arc

  Built an ark

  In which she placed

  Three peas

  —Can you imagine translating this poem into New English—

  In the ark

  Were three ghosts

  Named Hymen, Simon, and Bynem

  —Can you imagine ghosts like that translating these poems into New English—

  I, they, him, it, her

  I, they, him, it, ourselves, her.

  Coda

  Love isn’t proud enough to hate

  The stranger at its gate

  That says and does

  Or strong enough to return

  Or strong enough to return (and back and back and back again)

  What was.

  T
he Princess has a special form to function as a Representative of The Dead. She is almost a Congresswoman for them.

  “Don’t stand there with your fingers in your heart. Do something,” she says as she kidnaps Orpheus along with the dead body of Cegeste. Eurydice is miles away.

  She is almost the function of them.

  A statement dating back to the wars between the Allies and the Spartans. Love is mentioned with a certain metrical coldness—proving only that the poem will go on.

  In this poem was a bridge between love and the idea of love. Tentative, rustling.

  The figure of Jim begins to emerge in the poem. The Poet uses all his resistance to us to try to create the figure of a person at once lost and unlikely. The unlikelyness is also the first hint of metaphor.

  The tanks (and what they store in them) remind the reader. That the Muses are daughters of Memory.

  The Poem is for the Princess.

  “Tanks,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” they said.

  The singer and the song are something The Poet did (does) not understand. He had posited something.

  Orpheus was never really threatened by the Underworld during his visits there. In this poem they present him with a diplomatic note.

  Honesty does not occur again in the poem.

  The numbers do.

  The car is still traveling. It runs through the kingdoms of the dead picking up millions of passengers.

  Like most motorists, the Princess is bored on the road she is going.

  Ferlinghetti is a nonsense syllable invented by The Poet.

  Booth Tarkington is used in various psychological tests to prove whether persons are artistic.

  The recalling of Cegeste’s voice was done on a horse in one version and on a car radio in the other. Both made it seem natural. A crystal set, in this version of the legend, would not be inappropriate. However there is no crystal set. Cegeste never speaks after he is spoken to.

  The Mouses are the daughters of Memory (they become Rats later) and Mrs. Siddons was an 18th century actress painted by Gainsborough or somebody.

  Tragedy has exact limits that Hell cannot enclose. This spoils the trip of The Poet and The Poem through Hell and is the point at which they both protest.

  “They ran through the briers and they ran through the bushes, and they ran through the brambles where the rabbits wouldn’t go.”

  Rabbits do not know what they are.

  Ghosts are very similar. They are frightened and do not know what they are, but they can go where the rabbits cannot go. All the way to the heart.

  The madmen who drive cars into the distances of dying or who predict football games are celebrated here. Hisperica famina means western words.

  The three ghosts have names that are mockeries of your names.

  Your names (and theirs) are the afterwords mentioned pronouns.

  The cactus needle of the past that could be broken by a mere earmuff, plays the phonograph record of its record never again. This is called the concerto form.

  The Princess is so absoullutely independent of such tracing (since they sent her back to hell) that she can sing the whole song again. Who had forgotten that her head was missing.

  III.

  For Heurtebise

  Drugs

  The bell went “rrrrr”

  And we both went “rrrrr”

  And there was a beauty

  In talking to him.

  But angel-talk howls

  At the edge of our beds

  And all of us now

  Are partners of hell.

  For the crocodile crys

  Every tear that we know

  And our tears are our blankets

  Wherever we go.

  Fort Wayne

  The messages come through at last:

  “We are the ghosts of Christmas past

  Our bodies are a pudding boiled

  With sixteen serpents and a narrow blade.”

  I asked my silly messengers to sing it again

  “We are the advantages that hate all men

  Our bodies are a pudding boiled

  With sixteen serpents and a narrow blade.”

  For there are poems and Christmas pies

  And loves like ours while you blink your eyes

  And love rises up like a butterfly

  “Our bodies are a pudding boiled

  With sixteen serpents and a narrow blade.”

  Surrealism

  Whatever belongs in the circle is in the circle

  They

  Raise hands.

  Death-defying trapeze artists on one zodiac, the Queen of Spades, the Ace of Hearts, the nine of Diamonds, the whole deck of cards

  Promise to whatever is promised

  Love to whatever is loved

  Ghosts to whatever is ghosts

  In our mouths

  Their mouths

  There is

  Hope.

  Prayer for My Daughter

  Our father that art in heaven

  Christmas be thy name

  Our father that art in hell

  We’ll tell

  Them

  The Man in the Wall

  Orpheus

  (The bus crashed

  It takes ninety days

  To call them up from hell)

  Heurtebise, well

  The whole bus crashed with all the bus team.

  I mean his lyre

  Soured up his lyre

  Everything on fire

  (It took ninety days

  Before the bus crashed.)

  It Is Forbidden to Look

  I couldn’t get my feeling loose

  Like a goose I traveled. Well

  Sheer hell

  Is where your apartness is your apartness

  I mean hell

  Is where they don’t even pick flowers.

  Dillinger

  The human voices put the angels

  Pretty far away. The sleigh-bells

  In the distance go

  As if we had never seen snow.

  Pray for the right of the thing of the universe

  The knot which is unknotted by something other than our hands

  We, ghosts, lovers, and casual strangers to the poem.

  Me, the ghost says.

  Dash

  Damn them,

  All of them,

  That wear beards on the soles of their feet

  That ride cars

  That aren’t

  Funny.

  It comes with a rush

  And a gush

  Of feeling

  Everything is in the street

  Then they meet

  It with their automobiles.

  Crabs

  Daughters of memory

  Our grandchildren swarm

  In buckets and pails

  And leaden images

  Keep us warm while the night grows

  Too cold to bear

  Or too hot to carry

  A single light.

  Blood

  The jokes

  Are ghosts

  The joke

  Is a ghost

  How can you love that mortal creature

  Everytime he speaks

  He makes

  Mistakes

  Two for one

  Three of us vital

  The bell is the connection—which is more than junky-talk.

  A definition of hell hovers over the whole poem. It is the first (and the last) mention of angels.

  The crocodile, like so many things from either of these universes, is from Lewis Carroll. The blankets are sleeping bags.

  A dialogue between The Poet and passed Christmases.

  Fort Wayne stands on the American fortress between California and reality. It is a geographical point.

  The passed Christmases want to know more than they have any right to. So does The Poet. Neither in the last analysis is satisfied.

  The pudding is made of a number of serp
ents that move among us and a knife to cut them with.

  Poe predicted the whole Civil War.

  Jim discovered Christmas and the diamond in back of the diamond. In spite of The Poet’s invention of his name.

  They are the people we expected on Halloween who never came—in spite of our good wishes. Hell is where we place ourselves when we wish to look upward.

  Eurydice and Orpheus and Hermes were all simple-minded.

  Imagining, at times, a mirror two sides of which are a mirror. Heurtebise is an angel which means, at the Greek of it, messenger. Orpheus is a poet. The bus that crashed with all the bus team, was going to and coming from an athletic event.

  The edges of a mirror have their own song to sing. The thickness seems alien to The Poet and he equates his own hell with what is between them.

  He refers to Persephone as vaguely as she could be seen there.

  Not anything real. The snowflakes are equidistant from themselves and fall slowly. Almost impossibly.

  There is nothing left of it. Not even the water its crystals puddle into. These persons know reality for what they are.

  Cegeste comes back to a big meeting with his personal fate. He lacks knowledge of the driver’s seat as did Cegeste, Creeley, and all of us. He intends to spend his fortune in banks, on the banks of some rivers. He will wreck their cars if he can have to. He.

  The crabs are crawdads. They move in their random fashion back and forth toward the tanks which are also a bucket and take the heart out of things. One fishes for them with a long spoon.

  The Muses, according to Musaeus, are the daughters of Memory.

  “They took (the Sheaves) into the wide barns with loud rejoicing & triumph

  Of flute & harp & drum & trumpet, horn, & clarion.”

  “O.K.”

  A FAKE NOVEL ABOUT THE LIFE OF ARTHUR RIMBAUD

  BOOK I

  Chapter I

  The Dead Letter Office

  “You can’t close the door. It is in the future,” French history said as it was born in Charlieville. It was before the Civil War and I don’t think that even James Buchanan was president.