Youngblood Eternal

When he was a kid, tight and fierce, they called him Youngblood. “Youngblood from around the way,” they’d say, and by that they meant “watch yourself.” He’d proven himself the way kids always did in that part of the city—fistfights in an alley surrounded by other kids who bet dimes and quarters on the winner. His buddy Drell Swilla would guard the kitty while Youngblood stepped to his sparring partner, plowed right through the flat spasm of punches coming at him until he could almost bite the other kid’s nose off. Nobody in those alleys ever played defense. You drove forward punching and tried to knock your guy off balance. If you got him on the ground, it was over. The kicking began, and once it started there was often very little to bring back with you, once you stood up. Youngblood never took to the ground, but what set him apart was that, if the other guy did, he’d make way so he could stand up. He was only content to kick you with his fists; a toe in the ribs was low-brow. When the other guy fell, he brought a world of blood with him and when all bets were paid out, Drell would bring an old t-shirt or a hand towel over to the other guy, even crack open a beer so he could wash the tooth-flecks from his mouth. The bruises and cuts on Y’s knuckles rarely made it back to full health before someone else was throwing down a challenge. The best alley fighter in Grilltown three summers running. Then this other guy came around, big, shoulders like two trucks double parked, a few years younger than Y. He had no problem with kicking folks. It was a trademark of his style, actually. He was Brazilian on his daddy’s side and there was this style of fighting from the jungle country, the street style in Rio and San Paolo a century ago, really old hat and a bit flowery. From the few times Drell saw the new guy take to an alley, he said it looked like the whole point was to get his guy to the ground as quick as possible, so that he could get down there with you. Then he’d do these low round-house looking kicks, like he was doing a backspin, some real antiquated breakdancing shit. But true to sight: it would mess you up. People got to talking and pushing at Drell to get a fight going; some boys from the block even said they’d put down some bigger money to make it happen. Youngblood and this new guy could get a cut right from the get-go. So Y said sure. The other guy said, When? In an alley between Shakespeare and Halster they set things up, a few boys at either end and some others down the block, all with walkie-talkies, to keep a look-out. Youngblood did his usual thing, spat on his fists and rubbed them together. The other guy—and this part is still legendary—did deep stretches, these moves that looked, to about everybody there, like warm-up exercises for the ballet. The kitty filled up, they took to fighting. Y took straight at him and this guy, he moved like water slung from a bucket: quick and splashing away from any punch Y tried to land on him. It wasn’t but half a minute before he had Y on the ground, and from there it got nasty. This guy, big as he was, rolled out on the ground and spun on his hands like some kind of Shao Lin master, jacking Y with hard kicks right to the throat and face. Y couldn’t get his hands up to cover himself; the kicks kept knocking his hands away. In about a slow count of ten fingers, Y was as done as dead. The big guy stood up and took his money from Drell, counted out half of it and dropped the bills one by one on Y’s head. His boys kept everybody clear while he did it. Once he was done he rolled off like it was still morning and he had his whole day ahead of him. Y they took to the emergency room of Western Central. His nose was snapped almost completely off to the right, so when he looked straight at you, it was still stuck there in profile. It’s strange how fast things change when you start to lose a little. That summer, down to that actual day, people around the street stopped calling him Youngblood. There was no respect at all to it, how they would mumble over their shoulders when he showed back up, as healed as he could get, considering. Nastynose, “Nasty from around the way”, they’d say. As if they’d proven themselves where he hadn’t. And that new guy, the one who did all the kicking? Can you believe it when they began to call him Youngblood, as if he had exactly the same reputation and name?

Svilva

Svilva had been one of Mobutu Sese Seko’s callgirls in the 70’s, Lina told me, still owned some property in Kinshasa. When she was twenty she’d received an offer from the consulate in Stockholm, nothing more than a small envelope received in the mail with the Zairean ambassador’s card and a handwritten request for an interview. She’d met the ambassador, a tall, lanky, slowly charismatic man at an International Club’s dinner at the Cultural Center downtown. He stepped over to where she and her friends were standing and handed them each a glass of white wine off the tray the waiter held out for him. She couldn’t remember what they’d spoken about but he had a fatherly kindness to him; there was a vague recollection that he had asked to speak again, in a more formal arrangement, about employment opportunities with Zairean government. Two or three of her friends had also received a letter from him, but not all of them. When she sat in his office, the ambassador explained that the president had an appreciation for women “of the North”, and blondes in particular. She was shocked by his directness, but only for a moment: men were men, and governments, neat arrangements of their power and self-interest. What florists did with flowers, politicians did with policy. Often somewhere amidst it all were a few dozen women. What were her plans after graduation, he asked. She admitted she hadn’t decided yet. She could speak French, but would she move to France? Translation work paid very little in Stockholm, as it did anywhere. It’s not what you think, the ambassador assured her. He would pay you for the pleasure of your company. At social events you would circulate the room and greet the guests. Something to make investors and foreign delegates feel more at home. She said yes, why not? In a month she and another friend who had accepted the ambassador’s offer stepped off a plane in Kinshasa. Forty years later she sits in the kitchen of her well-decorated apartment in Grenoble, Lina sitting across the table packing a bowl, Remy working to color then cut her hair. She’s paid not only Remy but Lina and I as well to visit once a month. First met when she stepped into the salon and praised Remy’s magic ability to make her “blonde and busty” again—after which she made a flat offer of payment if he made a house visit every now and then and “brought along a few friends”. The first time we sat in that kitchen full of windows, she mentioned meeting Jean Bedel-Bokassa. Who, Lina asked. “Oh, that evil man who kept his girlfriend and a few of his enemies in a freezer. Served some of them as meat to the French ambassador! I’m feeling tight today, darling, would you mind lifting the lid off my tea jar and packing us a bowl?” Lina handed Svilva the pipe and the older lady, still full about the hips, smooth shiny legs, only her breasts, because of their heft, slightly betraying her age. Women mostly age in the face, she told them, blowing smoke from her nostrils, like an elegant bull. Later Lina told me, after I had left, she had mentioned the orgies in the royal palace. The old man, Sese Seko, was impotent, she said, but moved throughout the room like a lizard, slow and watchful. He’d filled the windowless room with couches and love seats and had a group of young men and women, some he’d hired, others he’d coerced, she’d later heard, to mill about naked drinking and getting high. They could have as much of anything they wanted, she said. It was, at first, like a dinner party, except everyone was stripped down to their shadows. A piano piece by Ravel played low in the background, through speakers arranged in the uppermost corners of the room. Eventually someone began kissing someone else and soon after, we were all rolling on the floor. The old man would pace the room, hands behind his back, supervising us, watching us without comment like god. Occasionally he would direct our movements with a vague gesture of his hand, pointing at one person to go to another person, pairing us up, or adding someone else to a couple who was already going. This could go on for hours. Speed and cocaine were available on silver trays, as perfect as it sounds. Actual silver trays. Often we could stay in that room for whole nights, on until the next day, until hunger or fatigue stopped us. It wasn’t unusual for the old man to leave to attend a meeting only to come back a few hours later, or for one of us to fall asleep among the rest, waking later to join in on the group rhythm. I wouldn’t be surprised, she said, if I was the only one of them still alive. Lina told me later that Remy handed her a mirror to look at her bangs; she’d seen my new haircut earlier that afternoon and liked it so much she decided, mid-haircut, to change plans and go with straight bangs, like me. You should have seen her, Nikki, she looked so much like you. Neither Remy or I had noticed the resemblance until she held up that mirror and said, “Ah, in another life, if I was so lucky, I could have been Nikki.” Then the strangest comment: “If only she had a taste for foreign men, like me.” I swear, I’ve never seen her laugh so hard or long at something. Eventually she had to cover her mouth!

Brueghel of the Floating World

What'll be the Brueghel of the 

   Floating World

now that they found him in his

car, held in his last breath by a heart attack? 

       Television, maybe. 

Television, Land of Maybe. Fitting,

I guess, since television was his

wife those last two years, after

Annette, his constant flesh and blood,

disappeared through that anguished peephole

cancer opened in her cervix. It 

never let her go. Pinched the 

  tail end 

of her spinal cord, and tugged, sharply, by

milli-moments, until painkillers 

looked out at him like two separate Annettes

through her eyes. When she died, 

the hospital told him: credit card debt. 

His friend in Columbus said: move in. 

He moved in. It was only a 

slow gesture. He was already out, and he knew it. 

His admiration for others had its 

   counterweight in 

            self-loathing, so 

to hold better, he switched it. Hating 

by word well before hope of touch

his loathing them brought him 

even with himself. Vodka said: 

   television. Tele-

vision said: job. Job: no one

will tell you why not. So he didn't. 

One by one, the names crawled up the wall

but failed to find a summit. 

Instead, him. Camped upside-down

for days until his buddy kicked him 

as far as the shelter would take him. Homeless,

he felt how close home was less.

So he took the construction part-time for rent. 

Congestive water around 

his only rhythm, diabeaten, he let 

smoke roll to the very bottom 

of his undiagnosed emphysema. Four arms

and no legs. Eleven legs, no arms, 

but mysteriously many fingers to spare.

He counted the years on them. The 

resolute, the comfortable, the carpeted, the 

ragged. Believe it then not, it all

added up to be even. Turning the ignition

with a key, through the windshield

and wind and parking lot, dawn a faint

slit along the distance. High and low

bleeding light and blushing color. 

What was it, looking then--Annette, was it

her, when time hid its secret from her

so she could be young again, fresh, a bale

   of fresh hair

falling to her cheeks, him pushing back in

his E-Z chair to enrich the vision of that one channel? 

For a couple of weeks afterwards a few

mentioned it, more as a warning to 

themselves. Theirs now: a story. If 

the myth of wholeness and release

and communion with the reason for bodies

were here, to speak for him, what would it say? 

We gave you this one for a while. 

What happened

gave him. He took and made of it

someone for a time. Now that's not

an issue,

time. When you mention him, you 

could mean anyone. Yourselves, 

and everyone who would

give much of you back, looking by lights

beyond a day or mirror, for themselves. 

Marie One

As mayor of Starkopolis 

and councilman of Bleaktown, 

I do hereby dedicate the key

to the city to one Marie. 

To one Marie whose last name is Coma. 

In her stead for two years to have lived in cognitive dream. 

Why the poems draw what they chose from me

from their whim of passing through me

and so often come out the other side

as nothing anyone would want to live through, 

I don't know. 

But not knowing 

how and what they do is largely a condition of the thing. 

Gratitude at being spared, to be weighted

requires you be bound by tiny hooks

to the rolling over of disaster and cruel will

that spared you, but is always prepared to take you. 

I'm glad it didn't have reason to

yet, so I had a chance to meet you. Not once

have I heard you mention any sparing. 

What's there, what Starktown and Bleakopolis

grew out of, their skylines jagged

as stylishly knocked out teeth, doesn't

   give itself away or receive

according to the flinch of some moral analysis. 

Nothing should be made good or necessary, you say,

if it's already so much nature making the rounds. 

From me to you, to you to anything

that contains or compares or surrounds. 

Land of Plenty

There are South Koreans driving in bongo trucks through underground tunnels

through the dark on svelte wraith-like roads towards Pyongyang. 

No lights--the drivers sport U.S. issue night vision goggles…when traveling 

through the countryside one must see like a North Korean. 

Food born in the south

                 climbs north on the backs of 

         ants, after the classical fashion

of twigs and fallen leaves. The Captain 

once stationed at Camp Red Cloud 

says night 

from a height of several thousand feet

reveals the technological yin-yang of the landscape. 

South lit all the way from the lower coast 

    up to the DMZ, 

North a mapless smudge in darkness.  

In Seoul the city sprays raw sewage on gardens--the whole wind stinks. 

But tradition still strong enough to be 

buried in the ground 

    trumps any compass…This is a place 

    after all, 

                                    where

kimchee used to be brewed in animal stomachs, pepper salt vinegar cabbage, 

placed in holes shoveled over for safe keeping. Marked where they hid, 

sometimes years later, the Captain swore, 

to be drawn from the ground, just like us sitting here, for a good meal. 

The World Stable

Academics mostly, sons and daughters of

         elited privilege--

the cult, Corpus Mensa, began as a tiny attractor, drawing them

into a concentrated clutter. Its dictates were obscure

but involved an adept's complete blending with her studies. 

To apply for any roosting fellowship

grant, or perch 

  of professional prestige. 

And once that had been accomplished,

once they'd gorged themselves with a range of knowledge

in an array of disciplines (three languages at least, fluency

   in one or more 

                  sub-tongue of science) --

and had been recognized

as possessing real promise, 

were to enact the cult's operandi and kill themselves. 

2/

Akin to self-immolating monks, the heads-on-a-stick 

    said, 

         performing alarm from inside a 

  million television sets--

but with a twist. These folks appear to be 

   protesting the very 

fact of their existence. By knife (a dissertation of the throat), by

gun, leap, and overdoses of every color. The president's 

staff were in discussions with the deans of several 

    universities. To determine: 

            could this be 

                 defined 

as terrorism? Literally wasting the value of 

what had been so painstakingly accumulated,

were those brains they were junking

theirs to do away with? Publicly gained 

funded and cross-pollinating resources

as they are--was it their culture

to kill? Born of debate, they could coast on arguments

until they were all gone, so the 

president called for a 

    stay in 

the freedom to self-murder. Intellectuals, intel, lectures--

they blend together, bear information in patterns.

Were they to be separated from heartbeat and 

sex life and neurochemistry easily, the lay world

would happily do so. And let what's left 

destroy itself for its own benefit. 

3/

By the end

of Death Week, autodidacts and university heads

were detained by the thousands, plugged 

  in padded rooms 

under suicide watch. Some rucked their skulls 

against cell walls

 until their expertise splattered out. Others chanted 

the cult mantra, "Our mind is waste." An exchange program

was set up: for every article they wrote, every 

review, proposal or commentary, they would be given 

food and amenities. Under supervision they were 

provided pen and paper. For every sentence written

were allowed a sip of water. For every publication

a week of uninterrupted sleep. Of course, the firmest

believers wrote denunciations of the whole

program, detailing the futility of such tactics, their

resolute adherence to self-extinction. Others, 

wooed by small comforts, softened. What good is a

cult if you're separated from the others, alone for

months in a room as white as Rome? The ones

who lost heart, though, were the first

to trace the outlines of the irony

framing the whole lot of them. 

Asking to leave, denouncing their vows, 

they were surprised by the response that met them:

no, can't let you do that, because how, really,

can we trust you? Couldn't this just be 

     another strategy 

of degradation? If we let you go, we destroy you. 

If we keep you near, we hold

the world stable.

Now if you were us, wouldn't you ask us
                to do the same?  

Omelet Man

Oblivion is your toast and butter,
dogma are the eggs, never
    sunny side up,
            always over easy.
For breakfast there is evil in the world

or, if evil is busy,
indignity without embarrassment.
A man laying on his side covered by a

zebra print blanket, his collie's leash
lashed to a huge acorn tree

which boils bright green above him.
At the edge of a Walgreen's parking lot,

within sight of a K.F.C.,

masturbating rhythmically to traffic.
Word is he's supplying the jelly.
    Black-
           berry, strawberry,
or Amishly elegant apple butter…
    any manner of heated bread

he will return to you coated.
Some folks are born
            to be
looked away from, so why not

  behave as if no one
was there? Oatmeal is where
    their skin comes from, and
where, indeed, it

shall end. Better with a dollop
   of butter, a drizzle of
               maple or agave.
In company of bowl and spoon.
An omelet is a man who can pretend.