Who dares!

So I'm a nerd

Lady picture show

I woke this morning to a dank, rainy smell. It had rained through the night. I got up. Rain water was pooling by my front door. Outside it, a foot deep pond had grown up over night. The parking lot slopes downhill to me, fairly steeply. Leaves from the trees had clogged the grate meant to drain away water like this. Instead, a moat waited on me. There was no way I was going to chance it in the Jazzy. It'd likely explode. So I canceled classes, called maintenance, and began overseeing mopping. Which is basically eating half a raisin bagel while The Sunshine Lady mopped the water that had seeped under the door.

***

Thanksgiving was my parents' home, lots of college football and X-Box 360. Watching them. Sadly, I played neither.

***

Off shortly to a coffee house reading run on-campus by students. Should be fun.

***

An almost unimaginable synchronicity today: the week before last, I'd had some friends from the department over for a screening of Yor, the Hunter from the Future. Because I'm that kind of pal. But technical difficulties led to us watching Planet Terror. Today, Margaret stopped me in the hall with what looked like an old hardcover book. The lined diary pages were filled with her handwriting, circa 1983. She read one entry.

About seeing a movie, at the theater, called Yor, the Hunter from the Future.

K

SEDUCTION WITH MONOMYTH

No, you never asked for this
cyclopean storm of single entendre valentines,
never filled out an online form
or faux-casually mentioned
to your Nereid neighbor
the slot machine odds of your deepest
desire. No, you never
requested assistance of the half-
literate pool boy Pablo
with his arms whisking leaves from the dead
end mirror of the water
and waited for him
in the shadow of lust,
in frail frill. In a cloud,
you thought, in a cloud
and in a cloud, forever and ever,
Amen. No. Men
who are paid to think
in obscurity, whom I envy
without quite knowing it,
say clouds might feel
spongy, almost walkable, a crème
of slow descent. You
never thought of me
in my obscurity
beneath these theoretical clouds
which say rain. Which say
you can never escape
a single thing. But
here I am, with flowers, poems,
darling failures aplenty,
daring your sense
of misguided charm
to kick in, the thousand strange
verbs rustling
in my mouth
like scabby autumn. No,
I never asked
for this weather,
this brine-happy sky,
but in it I go. This nervy instant. This.

Window

Cowboy

Atop

23

Numbers.

7: the crazy number of poems accepted by the New Orleans Review for an upcoming feature. Thank you, thank you.

75,000: the approximate number of words composed by freshmen wordsmiths I'll be consigned to grading over the break. Jesus in Heaven.

20: the approximate number of minutes added to the Planet Terror dvd, rendering a fun, virtuoso recreation of cheese into still fun but nearly exhausting cheese.

3: the number of pizzas made for said viewing of Planet Terror by Drs. Davidson, Fraser, and Masters this past Friday night.

0: number of viewings of Yor, the Hunter from the Future because I couldn't find a vcr. Hence the Planet Terror screening. Gwen and especially Margaret, I'll make it up.


***

I was asked last week to read next year in the Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University. Which is super exciting. It's fun to go off, meet new people, get excited about poetry as a, well, forgive the term, community. So if you'd ever like me to show up and read and sleep in a hotel with free HBO, please ask. I'm all about it.

***

Especially the free HBO. Which is awesome.

Remember

Hi, I'm poet Paul Guest. See that sign on the fence? Don't park there.

Unless your legs don't work. Then it's cool.

After the ambulances

FAITH

Faith, that boogey-word of this boogey-age
with all its tricked out apocalypse
and all its gleeful dissembling, faith,
come now to mean slightly more than
pained concentration, but only slightly more,
faith. Maybe my fascination,
my long penance, my secular flirtations,
comes from a born taste for
fried okra and fried catfish
scooped from the riverbed’s latrine murk
and fried cobs of corn
battered before being lobbed in grease
and fried anything. Maybe
I want to believe, even in Baptist
theocracies which demand
all sin be committed in airport bathrooms
or rest stops abandoned
by the state, consigned to Dante’s shade,
maybe I want to want
to want. To never stop.
I think I have said that before.
To every woman who in her mind agreed
to wake to a tandem disappointment
beside me, to knuckle sleep
from her green-flecked eyes
and fall through her clothes
away from me, to every one of them
I spoke, somehow, of faith,
and even by the strength of her ribs
swear a fealty to her
or that moment or mess
or whatever we made of things.
It is hard to live happy
with one’s couch and dead microwave,
with one’s brick wall,
with one’s spinning class, its twill of irony,
when one learns how
the Pope is verified to have testicles,
no woman or eunuch
or genetic klutz. Latin I can’t recall
but it includes cupping
and a kind of vouchsafing
for his pendulous netherness
and all night long I could not sleep,
hating books, hating the Vatican, you can imagine
why.

Shout out

Harriet.

Hello, Cleveland

Fix

PURITAN ELEGY

The barnyard a buffet of buggery, two goats,
one mare, some sheep, even a turkey,
its laconic twitch impossible for you,
Thomas Granger, to resist, even when
it meant your death. Hung by the Puritans,
the first in America executed
by the state, you were sixteen, you were
what the Puritans never called
fucked up. Five centuries full of war, plagues,
make it easy, almost, to think
you were up to little more
than hijinks. I want to serve you
steam-riddled bowls of soup,
be mentorly in that obnoxious communal-minded way,
tell you to keep it in
your Pilgrim pants or find
amidst all the doe-eyed girls
one who stoked her own fire. But you’re dead,
hung after the animals
you’d taken were slaughtered
and thrown in a pit, burned to grim satisfaction, buried,
Leviticus 20:15 intoned.
You had to watch this
but see the readied noose
swaying. You had to enter in to history
but not heaven.

2

Weekend update