Song of a Reformed Headhunter

R. Nemo Hill's Active Ingredients is presenting a series of poetry readings every Monday in October. I'm reading with Jane Ormerod, Paco and Thomas Fucaloro on the first Monday. It'd be lovely to see friends there, if you are in New York. Date: 2 Oct 2006 (Mon) Time: 8 p.m. Tix: $10.00 Place: The Stone, 2nd St. & Ave C www.thestonenyc.com

It’s like moving through a jungle, alone in an Indian file of soldiers, ears buzzing with insect static, the radio held at the back squelched. The jungle is so dark you only see the half-inch blue cyalume straw rubber-banded to the helmet in front. You're a blue straw to the man behind. Then the air flinches into lightning and trees tilt into view. The soldiers, like bayonets shedding green scabbards, flash steel, then are sheathed again. The lieutenant shouts, Antenna down! You obey but your radio crackles into life, a voice growling, Gold now, gold! Final fire before the assault. This happened many years ago and you've always wondered what it means or what it describes. You are at a loss to explain it though you know you are the radio, and the lieutenant, and the men in front and behind, in Indian file, following a bobbing blue straw.

I pound and pound this what-do-you-call-it, Elliptical, EFX546, pumping the body all that chemical shit, shooting my morning its new daily fix, instead of pondering over an old sonnet, a room of straw for spinning into gold, a debt requiring its pound of meat, a mini made from an injection mould. It’s true I haven’t moved although I’ve run 3 miles, and, like in writing, I’m as far from what the mind wants and the mirror sees, and though it’s true I pound like everyone on manufactured wheels, my chariot-car signals I’ve lost four hundred calories.

After viewing the Susan Sontag photographic exhibit at the Met, the images that stay with me are Walker Evans'. Here's one by that American social realist photographer, from the Snite Museum of Art collection: ALABAMA TENANT FARMER (FLOYD BURROUGHS), 1936, printed 1950's silver gelatin print

Still on Forster, here's an old poem about his relationship with Mohammmad, an Egyptian, when Forster was working for the Red Cross during World War I. This relationship might have been Forster's first sexual experience. The epigraph, found in Robert Aldrich's Colonialism and Homosexuality , quotes a secret diary, which Forster presumably never showed to Mohammad. [Poem removed for submission to journal]

I've revised "Parting Gifts," last section of the sequence, in order to round up the themes better. The original and the first six parts of the sequence are here . I will add the epigraph later. 7. Actual Landing Here’s one more for your album. Let me give you Queens, the one borough you couldn’t see. A boulevard of body shops and billboards, it’s an old graveyard abandoned by the Irish and Italians it weans from suckling at familiar pubs and tombstone tits. Others have moved in, with their gods and groceries, and make (lawyers as mediums) with authorities their various accommodations, their different debts. In the day they maneuver, working their consoles, their bodies up the stairs and round the city’s screen; at night, the same computer game. Only the scene has changed—-the maze, pitch or battlefield is the soul’s, in which the aim, as in the day, is to arrive. Their children, born American, will be their signs of actual landing in the city, citizens of Flushing, 56th ...

It is a shock to read Ozick's essay, "Morgan and Maurice: A Fairy Tale," written soon after the posthumous publication of Forster's Maurice . The shock lies less in Ozick's convincing argument that the novel is an artistic failure than in her evaluation of Forster's humanism, a humanism publicly demonstrated in his anticolonial writings and court appearances to defend artistic freedom of expression. Ozick's appraisal, or more accurately, a re-appraisal, resulted from the startling revelation of Forster's homosexuality. The question was, what does that homosexuality means for Forster's humanism? Ozick writes, The shock of the publication of Maurice , then, is not what it appears to be at first sight: Forster as Forerunner of Gay Lib. Quite the opposite. He used his own position as an exemplum, to show what the universe does not intend. If that implies a kind of rational martyrdom, that is what he meant; and this is what shocks. We had not thought of...