Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Stevie is my heroine. Stevie loves a song. Stevie loves sad people who get life wrong. Stevie wants to blame God if there is one to blame. Stevie thinks there's no one left who goes by the name. Stevie wonders what to do with sin and with redemption too. She can't keep returning panties, pretending they are new. for Stevie Smith

Seen on a billboard just outside Manhattan I ride the train into the city’s Monday Madness, the live show during my short lunch break from the office. The hour is special. Loving it feels like an eighth deadly sin. O, towers topless in the sun. My city, my come-hither gentleman’s cabaret. The city is a strip of cabaret. (O, how I love my Two-for-One Tuesday!) Girls strolling arm-in-arm throughout the city are sizzling lesbian acts. My hotdog lunch eaten, I hear Miss Vermont, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and the special Miss Oregon request the special In Flag and Lamb. Bargirl Jane, brown beret on carrot hair, and uglier than sin, wears mascara and Wonderbra on Wednesday Wet ‘N’ Wild when I take my liquid lunch. Everything looks so fine in Champagne City. Everyone looks so foreign in the city. Cleo, Karisma and Love speak special tongues as I wander past their talk, and lunch on crystal buns. A diverse cabaret. The Chinatown shops on Exotic Thursday are friction booths where you can buy y...

for my mother As the train crawled up the green girth of the hill, you watched a sepia dream turn Technicolor. The peak was ecstasy when we imagined ourselves birds till Sunday-dressed crowds plucked us from our perch, to wind a driveway to an aviary where real birds moped outside a hotel moulting in the sun. Nearby, Hindus chanted over coals in an aluminium trough small enough for barbecue. A garish-gold mosque raised a mute loudspeaker to the sky. On the next concrete contour, ringed by scraggy bougainvillea in clay pots, a Chinese coffeeshop squatted and spat the fag ends of old men’s laughter. Outside the shop was set up like a studio. You wanted a photo: you holding a tendril drooping from a wooden trellis, you posing demurely like some film star in the fifties. Why I did not ask afterwards, whether you closed your eyes for a moment’s commemoration or a blinding flash of recognition that this visit was reward for years of longing (granddad’s stories, black family albums, wavy-edge...

Some readers posted thought-provoking comments on my poem, "Beautiful Suspect." I am posting here my thoughts on their comments. My reply may make more sense if you read their comments first. Thank you, Anonymous, Greg, monkey and Larry for your thoughtful responses to the poem and to each other. I only wish the "poem," not even a draft but a jotting down of ideas and phrases, deserve such deliberations. The discussion is important, of course, because of the issues raised by the "poem." I frame these interrelated issues thus: (1) What is the relationship between the speaker and the author of a poem? What is at stake when we conflate the two, as we so easily and commonly do? (2) Should an author treat subject matter of a dubious morality, in a manner that that is not condemnatory nor ironic? This assumes that the author, in his real person, thinks of the subject as immoral in the first place. My thinking on the first question: The basic relationship betwee...

Pedro Almodovar's "Volver" has a melodramatic plot, melodramatic characters and melodramatic atmospherics. Yet, it does not end up as melodramatic in effect, at least not in the negative sense. Its depiction of the bond between mothers and daughters is genuinely poignant. This unexpected result can also be found in John Irving's novels. I am thinking of "The World According to Garp" and "A Prayer for Owen Meany" here. What makes the film and the novels more than the sum of its elements seems to me to be their spirit of invention. Bad melodramatic is garish in its use of stock of situations, characters and images. I find the wit and imagination in the film and novels technicolored instead.

The poem pretends that on the linebreak hang * Guess rhymes function as time's unction. * Desire and doubt, desire and doubt. One comes in, one goes out.

The beginning of a poem: The first lesson about picking up a trick is to remember everyone is a terrorist. They carry strapped to their body herpes or that STD with a pretty flower name, or HIV, or else depression or diabetes. They are not mules; they know what they carry, but still yearn to breed death. Terrorists, in short. I should add here, "like you and me," but that is not how I think of them, not like you, love, and certainly not like me. What I say applies only to big cities, of course. In a small town, everyone knows everyone, and so when you marry Cousin Dick, you know what you are getting. The risks are incalculable when you go tricking.