Compulsion / Shame / The Infinite
- Compulsion
It was a boundary
crossed and recrossed
until it was just a habit.
It was the worst thing in the world
until you’d done everything
worse.
- Shame
The one who looks like Gollum
hovers wide-eyed
and wet in the doorway
the black-light basement shuffle &
party & play &
slip & slide
on spent soldiers
the one who looks
like Gollum works his scaly fingers
trying to get a hand in
silence or acquiescence, a steamed silhouette
of body shame double-wrapped
in a bear size towel but
one more wave-off
from another twink face
and even Gollum starts to look good.
I was once like you, he says
as he reaches under.
III. The Infinite
My God, it’s full of empty
no matter how much death
you spit or swallow
or take lying down.
Think positive no don’t
think positive no don’t think
a little like Vegas oddsmakers
think that they always said they were clean
if they spoke at all and Asian guys,
you know, statistically,
at least you think you read somewhere once
you think preliminary think this is routine
think this is just a sore throat think
this is just another tested-neg to wave
in front of tricks and hookers
but if they close the door
when the timer goes off
you know the blood that drains
from your face is poison.
So much science so close to home
but it still takes three months
for the darkness to reach you.
Sing It For Me
At the Kubrick exhibit
we saw the best
bits of Lolita.
We read the scribbled
script note that all work
and no play makes
Jack a dull boy.
We saw Dave Bowman
unscrew the covers
from Hal’s memory bank.
Dave
Stop
Stop will you.
That’ll be me
pulling the plug
on your grandpa
one of these days.
I’ve talked about doing it
so many times
I’ve talked it into
a tidy abstraction.
It’s just a thing
I’ll do some day,
a bland fact of life
like trading in my car
or getting a new tattoo.
I’m afraid, Dave.
This takes too long.
He shouldn’t have time
to be afraid.
It should be like
flipping a switch.
My mind is going.
I can feel it.
I’ve read
that the shutdown
of the dying body
is like taking a big ship
out of commission.
The engines spin down,
great boilers blow off steam,
parts cool and
creak and
groan.
Pumps click off,
one,
then the next,
then the next.
Heating systems
dwindle and fade,
electricals
blinker out.
Everything in
its proper order,
in its own time,
til all that is left
is the captain
on the bridge
pausing once more
to gaze down
the length of
the dark main
deck before putting
on his cap
and departing.
He taught me to sing a song.
If you’d like to hear it I can sing it for you.
I’d like to hear it, Hal.
Sing it for me.
Marching in Circles
So I was in AA in France.
We marched around in circles.
Just marching, marching, marching
was all we could do because
the French, they have wine
and they’re giving it away.
They give away cabernet. In bottles.
So all we could do was march, march,
march around in circles, to try
to stay away from the cabernet.
It was the most boring fucking
AA meeting I’ve ever been to.
The French are like Louis the Fourteenth,
the Sun King, like Louis the Fifteenth,
Louis the Sixteenth, the French have a lot
of Louies, they have an awful lot
of Louies, they always get a new Louis,
the French. Every few years or so, every
hundred years they get a new Louis.
This is how the French tell time,
because they count off a century
with another Louis. But then they had
the guillotine, which is why the French
can’t string together any sober days
because they don’t know which Louis
they are on any more and only a couple of
Napoleons is not nearly enough.
We marched and we marched but
when I got back to Texas I ended
up six years back on the whiskey
losing my head over
some goddamn woman.
Things I Learned from the Twilight Zone Marathon
That beauty is in the eye
of the beholder
but not the nose.
That poorly translated cookbooks
are unreliable guides
for living.
That when all the meds
you take still don’t let you
shake the feeling
that you’re in an alien zoo
it’s not the pills’ fault.
That if you feel like everybody
in your world has disappeared
they weren’t ever there
to begin with.
That you should never trust anything
that looks like people,
like dolls, like mannequins, like Satan,
like robots, like people.
That you should always trust dogs.
That if you hate
your life and you think
you will never escape,
jump off the train at Willoughby
(unless you’re in Brooklyn on the G
and then you might as well stay on
till Greenpoint).
That no matter how old you are
your friends will always
run off and play
Kick the Can without you
if they get half a chance
but that if someone thinks
bad thoughts about you,
wish them into the cornfield
and they’ll never break your heart again.
That though your dreams will have
their own nightmares, it’s actually not
too bad here, I mean if you look
real close all the kitchen drawers are fake
but there’s plenty of time to read, Shatner
is still looking hale and boyish,
and if you win at pool then you can play it
until the sands of time run out
of your shoes onto the hospital floor.
Thelonious Monk
(film erasure #3)
A sense of a multitudinous
narrative forgotten
destroying this young woman
myself.
I’ve misled you. I’ve given
profoundly complicated
testimony under oath.
In therapy surrounded
by a thunderstorm of things
of oceans and vines
my own expectations.
I have a thousand names
like the cats
like Thelonious Monk spinning,
always spinning.
~~~
Ray Shea’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Weeklings, Fourteen Hills, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. A native of Boston and New Orleans, he lives and writes in Austin, Texas.
REVOLUTION JOHN 