Second Annual Poetic Cross-Dressing Contest

In a rousing return to the popular Poetic Cross-Dressing competition of last year, scalawag and general bon vivant, Whimsy, conducted a second contest in which each submitted poem had to be derived from one famous poem in the voice of another poet who was not the author of the piece being parodied.  Ms. Kelli Agodon, Ms. Terese Coe, and Ms. Claudia Grinnell served as judges.

The contest results were

Runner-ups included  “Workshop” by Jack Edwards and "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Paul Dickey.

Third Prize was "This Is How It’s Done" by Alison Armstrong-Webber.

Second Prize was "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" by Frank Matagrano.

The First Prize winner was (drum roll please ...)

"Musee des Beaux Arts" by Ciaran Berry .

The complete set of poems are again reproduced below for your amusement and edification.  The poems are listed in order of their original entry.

Joanne Kelley

From the Holy Sonnets by Frank O'Hara

X.

Death, don't be so stuck up. Some
people say you're a big deal and scary,
but you're not. You think I'm afraid
of you? I've got news for you, I'm not.
And you won't kill me. We rest, sleep, even
act dead, and important guys kick the bucket.
They get old, sick. You're really into this
cycle-of-life thing, aren't you, with big
shots and losers. You hang out with creeps,
wackos, sickies, who make like they're dead
with dope and circuses that keep them dead-like.
So why are you so full of yourself? Huh?
We'll all cross over, meet the Big Maker, then
we'll be alive forever, and you'll be history, nada.

Tom Finnegan

Bushes, By Joyce Kilmer

I think I saw a bramble bush
While sitting once upon my tush.

A bush whose shape was now at best
Not quite unlike my love's right breast.

A bush that sat in sun all day,
And had a tan like mellowed hay.

A bush that may in winter swear
That summer robins didn't care

Upon whose branches they have sat
And shat and shat and shat and shat.

Poems like this require a push
To write about a Goddamned bush.

Robert Schechter

Ode to a Nightingale by Rod McKuen

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

The pain in my heart is like I'm drunk.
How pretty the sound of the bird!
I wonder if he's happy? Oh, I envy him!
I don't even know what these flowers are.
Now I can really use another drink.
I bet you the bird doesn't know about death.
I wish I could fly away with the bird.
But I can't. I'm too sad. I'm just myself.

Ernest Slyman

Poet Dresses His Verses, by Randolph Healy


Randolph Healy's verse most shocking
all about in stretch lace body stocking.
Words so cute & cuddly,
verse quite bright and bubbly ---
while other verse play ugly
his wears long sleeved lace
go about society defrocking
members of the human race,
wearing words so shocking,
straps crisscross the back
in a manner alluring.
His verse not the potato sack
and most assuring.
Sexy open cupped red satin verse enduring
trimmed with black ruffled lace straps
and adjustable garters demurring.

Jennifer Reeser

The Love Song Of Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath

Let us go then, you and I,
when the evening is oppressed against the sky
like a Pollack tyrannized by the Luftwaffe;
let us go, in black, unsatisfying shoes,
not freakish blues
nor bean greens like those of Atlantic waters
where Neptune bites the red hearts of his daughters:
shoes that follow like a dreadful resurrection
or oozing infection,
chafing our feet with their fat, vampiric leather.
Oh you, oh you, it will not do
to question what we see, nor who.

I will have to rub you out, you know,
speaking of Michelangelo.

The heavens peddling wares between the windows,
the heavens that undress onto the windows,
hawked their phantom daylight through the ghettoes,
glowed with ghastly cobblestone crescendos,
let smash upon my hands the motes that fall from dust,
fast past the casements, dribbled down my face,
and, seeing how it was a hellish autumn night,
dropped once against the door, and sneered at grace.

And indeed there will be time
for the heavens prostituting down the lanes,
the big striptease against the windowpanes.
There will be time, there will be time
to visit Auschwitz, and to catch the final trains.
There will be time, Herr Lover, time to hate,
and time for all your fascist reprimands
that rise to amputate me at the gate.

I will have to rub you out, you know,
speaking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time,
to wonder, “Is there death in my red hair?”
Time to climb and set fire to the stair,
to devour genteel gentlemen like air.
[They will say, “How unlike our lips hers are!”]
my fingernails displayed like files, my eyes as black as tar,
my sweater stripped by beetles, but connected with a silver bar.
[They will say, “See how unlike our eyes hers are!”]
In my hair,
Herr Lover, is there death?
In a moment there is time
for the dying and supplying of my quintessential breath.

I should have been a Jewess or a Jew,
crawling across my Auschwitz floor to you.

Shall I lift my gravecloth skirts, my grin, peel away my shroud?
I shall take your hand in mine, and wander lonely as a cloud.
I have heard that some grow older. But we will not be allowed.

If I grow old…if I grow old,
I will cover my gray head with Nazi gold.

I do not think that gray will sing to me.

Frank Matagrano

excerpt from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by Jeffery Bahr


The shadow of a thing without memory: Pinocchio
Dead in New Mexico, where I am now, achieving truth
Through successive approximation. Your design,
Gippetto, was made to implicate us: just look at what
Happened to your boy, the articulating tree, the lie
Detector –- we, a part of his stretch, live as we have
Done in an orderly way. You ask me to make time
For you. There is only so much room in the vase.
You’re ready with a story of apocalypse: a seat
In the studio where you watched the universe
Unfold, your lips to a carved ear, reciting a whisper
Heard around the room you swore was the truth.

Ernest Slyman

Charles Bukowski rewrites Shakespeare's Sonnet 25

Hot damn, kiss my arse and lucky stars
grab you by the eightballs and boast
on Saturday nights in topless bars,
jukebox's full of lust, human race is lost.
Nobody know me, cause they ain't well-read;
my poems are five-dollar whores that cry;
the LA Times already got me dead and buried,
yeah someday I'll get drunk and die.
Heaven's a toilet; love is the devil's spite,
fame is a pisser, I'm psychotic & spoiled,
a goddam bawdy poet, I shoot crap, fistfight,
I can screw all night, my pants are soiled.
I'm famous, I'm smelly, though loved,
from Keats the skunk I'm once removed.

Betty Buckman

To the Maidens, Who won't Return, by Philip Levine

The girls are as glad for the work
as the driver of the florist truck is,
watching their tannned young arms and upturned derrieres while he swats flies from his sandwich
No McDonald's in this Godforsaken place,
as neither are there girls like this, sweet and dewey like the buds he'll transport later packed on ice, in dried up copses of Highland, Indiana and South Chicago.
The man enjoyed their buoyant spirits for awhile.
Their effervescence raised more than his spirits.
Catching nudges and squeals of laughter pointed
in his direction, he admitted having lost his sharp chin, squint-eyed sidelong glance two or
maybe a couple more raging marriages ago.
The nudge at his khaki groin was a useless reminder. He nodded out against the steering wheel ignoring skinny nubile butts, remembering his father, whose picture still smiles in front of a horse-drawn milk wagon.

"Clip Clop. Clip Clop. Fresh sweet cream today?"

Those people at the funeral, retired from more than Borden Dairy, wore pastel short sleeved shirts because just as he always stated,

"Once youth is over nobody looks at you."

Christopher T. George

A Fire Island Love Song, by Frank O'Hara

My Jack Hunter Dunn, my Jack Hunter Dunn,
Furnish'd and burnish'd by Fire Island sun,
What perspirous singles we played by the sea,
We in the tournament - you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a gazelle, the grace of a boy,
With a thwack of your racket, gaily you won,
I just wilt from your butchness, Jack Hunter Dunn.

My Jack Hunter Dunn, my Jack Hunter Dunn,
How gay I am, how fay I am, I prayed that you'd win,
Your warm-handled racket is back in its press,
But my blond-headed godhead, I love it no less!

Your gladiator's helmet shines as we walk,
My ass sways to your words, I swoon as we talk,
And cool the verandah that welcomes us in
To the CBS News and Ed Murrow and gin.

The stink of your tennis shoes, splash of the shower,
My thoughts of Jacky's body fair make me cower,
As I struggle with knot of my wrangler's string tie,
For we jitterbug at the gay bar, my Jack Dunn and I.

On the floor of his bedroom lie jockstrap and shorts,
And the cream-colored walls are be-trophied with sports,
And passionate, man-scarleted settles the sun,
On my blond gladiator, my Jack Hunter Dunn.

The Mustang is waiting, the light's in the hall,
The pictures of Key West are bright on the wall,
My sweet, your bitch stands awaiting you here
And I simply can't wait till you put me in gear.

By state roads pot-holed, by curbside lays,
You drove to the gay bar in the late summer haze,
Into nine-o'clock East Hampton, heavy with gay belles
And its musky, aftershaved, male-scented smells.

My Jack Hunter Dunn, My Jack Hunter Dunn,
I can hear from the Mustang the dance has begun,
Oh! Long Island twilight! importunate band!
Oh! magnificent rock hard tennis-guy's hand!

Around us are Chevys and Nashes and Lincolns afar,
Above us the intimate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the muscle of my dreams,
That bulge in his jeans just makes me cream.

And the scent of his jockstrap, and the words never said,
And the delicious, capricious smooching ahead.
We necked in the Mustang till twenty to one
And now I'm the bitch girl of Jack Hunter Dunn.

Ernest Slyman

Shakespeare as e.e. cummings (all which isn't singing is mere talking)


Thou who isn't singing is mere talking
and shall I talk of myself as myself
(and thyself love as deeply thyself
as thy doubt wades the blue pond of why)

I gush to know the toss and sob,
thy reasons fickle as the moon;
and sinfully sober dizzy me with dumbness
I merely sing the silent song

for deafness becomes dumb mankind,
and doubt is noisy as the churchbell,
for fickle the endless ends of day,
turn like dry leaves in high wind,
as surely old mad houses are insane,
hide thy imponderable sorrows
which play the evening sky
like baby sparrows
before spring rain.

Watson

Billy Collins' Forgetfulness, by Mary Jo Bang

She reckoned the glow unknowable. Ham slung
in a hammock: memory is this half-moon.
Swooning, she excised the fourth level of Hell – Dante would do
and Louise needed kindling. So kind the boy
who had fired the party grill, bright buttons
on a blue smock. And
little salmon sandwiches, a fountain,
Melpomene in marble, a thoughtful dog.

The subsequent scenery, unbeckoned remembrance.
Hardly a tragedy, Ham winged in between swings.
It happens, certainty making a place for sentiment.
A cold mirror separated them, she in the near dark,
her hands held out.

Wendy Kim

Stas writes "A Blessing"

Two empty cans worth of Bud on the floor of my Golf;
that and a half eaten burger ground into
the rubber mat from the White Castle ten pack
we couldn't finish on the way to Rochester.
Enzo needs to pee and keeps adjusting himself;
I can barely see anything. Everything's lit
in a weird way. It's just us and two fenced-in horses, moving towards me as though I had anything to offer. I pull over and wave away
skeeters that dip low and back around my face.
Enzo walks off, unzipping. I light a cigarette,
walk over to the smaller one. She reminds me
of Sarah Hetzlinger, the bangs maybe. She looks at me with one eye, as though she knows that I've been praying for Sarah the way you pray for rain.
This mood now, it's like something you have to keep quiet.
My fingers comb through her mane, trail down
her cheek; she pushes her nose into my palm.
I remember Sarah's gum, how the smell hangs
on my shirt when she walks by my locker in the morning. Enzo's already in the car, griping about the concert and the fact that we don't
have any booze, but I've already started
stroking her ear, and now I've got to pull
my shirt down so's
I can cover myself.

Ciaran Berry

Musee des Beaux Arts, by Philip Larkin

About suffering, they were never wrong,
The old bastards; how well they understood
Its northern disposition; how it takes place
In housing estates, mostly in Hull, where someone is watching
The cricket or eating fish and chips, or just buggering off down the pub
To get a couple in before closing;
How, when the pinstriped suits are smoking cigars and waiting
For the 9:30 to London, there will always
Be kids, who didn't really want it to happen, having it away
With each other in a field somewhere nearby:
They never forgot
that even this spiteful tedium must run its course
Somewhere, like the hare at the dog track, or a donkey with
A waggly tale on the beach at Blackpool

In Lowry's Procession,for example, how everyone looks away
From the painting; the man with the umbrella
Might have noticed the artist there twiddling his horsehair brushes
But doesn't think it matters, the snow's about
To start and he'd best be off home for his tea;
And the woman with the shawl and ankle-length blue skirt
Needs to get to the shops before they close;
They're too caught up in life, they can't be bothered.

Amy Unsworth

"The Garden" Bake Shop, by Rita Dove


Nothing nastier than a rich person
especially that one near the railing
reeking of Evening of Paris, with her particular sway,
her flowered skirt. You’re so fine and mighty.
Oh Pray! she cries. Her blond mane arcs over her shoulder
as she crosses the street, gingerly, like a poodle.


She steps away from the factory girls after their shift,
the men in their tired blue shirts. Avoids
the children, always dirty, always hungry,
playing kickball at the mouth of the alley.
I’ve finished my paper cup of coffee,
smoked my cigarette down to the very end.


Next she’ll be coming in the front of the shop
wanting sweets dusted with sugar,
and I’ll be the one that folds the whiteness
of the box into square, take the bills
green as parsley, over the counter top.
As she leaves with her change and
doughnuts, she can’t be bothered for even
a single, beautiful word.

Jennifer Reeser

The Red Wheelbarrow, Dorothy Parker

Just how and why
the rain on that thing thickens,
no one seems to know
but those damn chickens.

Jack Edwards

Workshop, by Ogden Nash

How wise I am to have prompted the concierge to instruct the doorman to ask the valet to go and fetch my Lincoln;
I’m about to say how bad your poem’s stinkin’.

I’ll begin by admitting we got off to a grand start, as the title is first rate;
it caught my eye like a fish hook
and held me like Mike Tyson holds onto a blind date.

While writing good poetry is a lot like playing the Lotto,
every good poet from the Venerable Bede on down to Byron and Keats
knows that a blizzard can’t make a sensible obbligato
and no one in the history of the world ever roamed decaffeinated streets.

Some poets think of inspiration as a godsend and some a curse
but most agree it’s never very wise to force it.
No sooner than you’re settled down and committed to that special little verse,
you’ll want to cry "sayonara" and divorce it.

But in closing I'll concede that the message of your poem was clear
and from this day I never shall forget it:
"Many a poet stuffs her lipstick, wallet, car keys, diaphragm and kitchen sink into a sow’s ear",
--or maybe it’s just me,
maybe that’s just the way I read it.

Paul Dickey

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, by John Berryman

386.

Aw, Mr. Bones, come on!
Why leave me near –
so tired & so late, & miles to go before I sleep?
You do yourself better, stopping here
Like everybody & sure,
Henry failed, did not any promises keep.

Henry’s head in trouble do feel queer.
It’s just the woods he say,
and the farmhouse near --
for the girls are lovely dark and deep --
once upon a time & ‘tis all a mistake
for he had once his house in his village.

Pussy-cat, watch woods fill up with snow
all easy wind and downy flake.

Albany Meath

The Road Not Taken, by Lewis Carroll

Two roads I have met or have they meet me?
A question of fleeting priority, 'neath this wood turned an uncommon yellow.
Do I choose one or the other, think man, which one should it be?
Me but a single and both twins so fair, reason it out, you're a bright fellow.

This game is a toss-up, most decidedly, Ah-Ha what a brilliant young man.
I'll simply flip me a coin up from down here in me pocket,
Can't dither all day over roads with no plan.
If heads it is falling I veer to the left, if tails it will certainly lock it.

Wow/wow/wow what thing was it that swooped up above?
My eyes how they strain in this air's yellow light.
Beak it flashed, had feathers I'd swear it and wings white much like a dove.
Why it ate my gamble whole in a snap, what a quick trick flown from sight!

My purse it is empty of shilling or pound not even a sixpence to jumble.
Tickity-tock let me pull out my watch, oh goodness but it has struck three!
Ow/ow/ow these less traveled feet do roar and the tum-tum begun to rumble.
On my way back where it was which I came, to nibble my four o'clock tea.

Kelli Agodon

Lana Turner has collapsed, by Li-Young Lee

Someone was wandering night
like a candle. We crossed it
once, a memory of heaven
with the moon’s rain and snow.

My father said, Oh restless child,
it is hailing, but hail was what we kept
under our pillows, in the boots of our dead
brother, I knew it was snow
that covered us.

We passed under the great night,
tracing the headline:
Lana Turner Has Collasped!

There is no family in Hollywood,
no heart in California.
The parties take place with the dead.
In my mother’s kitchen with my cheek
on her lap, I never collapsed:
oh Lana Turner, look to the sky,
find your way home.

Joanne Kelley

I Taste A Liquor Never Brewed, by Kim Addonizio


God it's sexual, this liquor never brewed
In aged oak or pearl, it foams--
I take the first deep gulp from the long
Amber neck that never saw the Rhine--

It wouldn't taste as good
As this does going down. The very air
In this dump makes me drunk; the sweat
Dripping from the forehead of the guy

Nursing his gin at the bar--
Through these endless summer days,
I am lushly loving myself
In these inns of Molson's brew.

Until the horniest angel or saint
Tries to fill my leaky balloon of a heart
With something, this little tippler
Will be ordering another round!

Betty Buckman

Danny Deever, by Omar Khayyam

Lo - the cock crows Twice - and still Once More.
We hold Only a Lease upon Today.
The Sages ponder, Oh, what For? What For?
And Danny Deever nears Death's lonely Shore.

What fate Decides which Life is Torn away?
Yon brothers Sign the Book that now They Close.
Lamenting tunes these very Kinsmen Play
While Bearing Danny's fetid Corpse Away.

In Summer, then, why Wrap in Stifling clothes?
What Chill, foreboding Vapors Ride this Night?
Some pallid Gloom chokes Out the Dewy Rose.
Dread silence Smites the vermin Soul who Knows.

Drink of the Grape! Dance on with Spirits Light
And pound Rhythm on Danny Deever's Grave.
Festivity and Fruit trades Wrong for Right
When brotherhood's Embrace shall Wield the Stave!

Alison Armstrong-Webber

This Is How It’s Done (Philip Levine), by Claudia Grinnell

I’ve grown out of these times, as you might
call it - Out of dumb touch and its candor
palming each red heel, out of the need
for lips pressed
to their polished shafts; the full flower.
Toss them- There.
And there.

I’m thinking grey hills, industrious barns,
emptied - Lying in my thorax,
they feed and grow. This rain?
A bus ride. My heels strike the wet street, leaving.
We’ve all seen the hardening of stumps,
pounding, the repose of the hung
belly, the rise up—

Sins? They feed, they come, bow down; they-
lying, as always. What was hidden
still is. Despite sweet glue, flowers,
the bones’ need always,
is to be sharpened.

My children sleep, you must imagine,
dreaming in a red shoe,
breath rasping at the heel’s suede curve.
Imagine my children inherit
this feed. I don’t

wear white

well.

Bill Moss

Suzanne (Leonard Cohen), by Robert Frost.

It’s Suzanne’s river place, I know.
She’ll sleep with me as small boats go,
And feed me fruit and Chinese tea.
She’s crazy; I don’t love her, though.

I try to tell her, make her see,
But each time she enraptures me;
I’d blindly become riverine,
Her intimacy’s trust to free.

And Jesus, who’d a sailor been,
From wooden tower watched the scene
Till sure by only drowning men
His figure and his face were seen.

Declared he, “Sailors, all be," then,
"Until by ocean freed,” but when
Unsaved, himself was broken, drowned,
Our trust was lost, not seen again,

Till Suzanne takes my hand, and round
she leads me through the river ground;
Her thrift store rags and feathers wave
At treasures, miracles she’s found,

In flowery field and rubbish cave:
Loved children of the morn to save,
Sweet seaweed heroes, shells and such,
As sun pours down in wave on wave.

Suzanne, my mirror and my crutch,
We’ll travel blind; we’ll trust too much
Our perfect bodies’ minds to touch,
Our perfect bodies’ minds to touch.

Paul Dickey

Stoppin' By Woods on a Snowy Evening (Frost), by Bob Dylan

How many homes in the village must a man have
Before he’s a man you would know?
Yes, 'n' how many times must the horse's bells shake
Before they’d forever slow?
Yes, 'n' how many woods must a man walk through
before he sleeps in the snow?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

How many times must a horse look up
Before he can see what is queer?
Yes, 'n' how many eyes must one man have
Before he can see a lake near?
Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
‘tis the darkest evening of the year?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

How many years can a forest exist
Before it's lovely, dark and deep?
Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist
Before promises are allowed to keep?
Yes, 'n' how many miles must a man have to go,
pretending he just doesn’t sleep?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Watson

The Love Song of Frank Matagrano

I say a nice, warm bus, you and me,
the Newark soccer team knocking back
Long Island Ice Tea. It’s said it's my propensity
for running reds, my knack

for finding Lincoln in the license plate
of every big-finned car I’ve adored
since I was nine -- and now the first-rate
black ice at Fifth and Madison the bus roared

through. Don’t get me started about this guy with a cape
and headphones driving us or the three hags in the wayback
stopping their cribbage game to pull out measuring tape,
fit me for a flower patch before we hit Hackensack,

estimating weight, pinching the peach
from my Aquaman lunchbox. A little rest
from all this jumping is what I need, a prison haircut, each
sideburn going it alone. The best

medicine might be Coney Island. I’ve heard
the Asian girls take ricebowls of sand
and walk into the sea. Word.
I’ll follow, I’ve had it with land.

Paul Dickey

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening (Frost), by W. C. Williams

so much depends
upon

the brass bells
plated

glazed with downy
flake

beside the frayed
harness.

Christopher T. George

The Waste Land, by Orson Welles


I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

Hollywood is the cruelest place, breeding
anorexia in the brightest starlets, mixing
money and desire, stirring
dull talent with sharp aspirations.
Citizen Kane kept me sober, covering
Hearst’s yellow journalism in black and white.
(Critics wondered if the film portrayed Hearst’s ego
or mine.) My Ambersons were not merely magnificent,
they were sublime! To the merry sound of a zither,
on Vienna’s giant ferris wheel, I said,
"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias,
they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed,
but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci
and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—
they had 500 years of democracy and peace,
and what did they produce?
The cuckoo clock."
I was on top back then as Harry Lime,
the world at my feet.

I loved funfairs, the crazy house
in The Lady From Shanghai,
the bisected bodies, the torsoes
torn in pieces, the hall of mirrors. I loved magic,
I sawed a woman in half in a circus tent
on Cahuenga Boulevard. People said
I was like a jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing.
As Othello, I almost throttled Desdemona for real.
When I left Hollywood in a hurry,
I forgot my fake noses
--I had them airmailed.
How I hated my small upturned nose.

"Wotzit anent Orson Welles?
Behind the cloak of his genius,
the hypnotic charm of his smile,
he nurtures a hidden madness,
which fanned by the flames of desire,
drives him to live his greatest sin."

You gave me the sled years ago;
I called it "Rosebud."
When I came back late from the studio,
you were drunk from high balls; you’d been seeing someone else
--I smelled his aftershave in the bedroom;
knowing your infidelity, I was neither forgiving nor human,
you looked into the heart of evil,
my fists, the silence.
I said, "All women are dumb,
some dumber than others."

O Lady from Shanghai, you who were once my wife--
I sawed you in half in the circus tent on Cahuenga Boulevard
until Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Studios, put a stop to it
--those studio execs always tried to put a stop to my best pranks,
so I used volunteers, Johnny Carson, Marlene Dietrich.
Marlene and I recreated the trick in Follow the Boys.
I called my evil side, "Crazy Welles. . . Imperial Welles."

Unreal City
under the brown fog of an LA dawn,
a crowd flowed down Sunset, so many,
I had not thought the movies had undone so many.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying "Cotton!
You who were with me in Kane, in The Third Man!
The Magnificent Ambersons! Have we aged so soon?
Are our careers over so soon? Are we forgotten so soon?"

II. A GAME OF CHESS

The Chair I sat in, the burnished throne in Xanadu,
the gigantic shadows cast by a silver candelabra,
the table laid in profusion of sweetmeats.
Eat my darling! Eat! This sustenance is not poisoned
though paid for by ill-gotten gains.
The rise of Kane, barbarous king
in the democratic province
chasing the lucre that all the world pursues.

"She was one of those black-haired girls,
skin as white as Carrara marble.
I had to rape her offstage.
I came on unbuttoned, dishevelled,
Having had my way with her."
But
O O O O that Eliotian Rag--
Under the Bam
Under the Boo
Under the Bamboo Tree

"So what if he dresses in drag,
as long as he do it
when I’m not around?
So intelligent, so outré, so innovative!"

"I disliked him at first sight.
He wore a toupée, so obvious,
flat and yellow, not fitting close.
There is something phoney
about a man who won’t accept baldness gracefully."

And here in Xanadu we shall play a game of chess,
waiting for the knock upon the door to boom down the long hall.
The studio execs never call, never call, never call.

III. THE FIRE SERMON

Unreal City
under the brown fog of an LA noon
Mr. Goldwyn, the Hollywood mogul,
unshaven, with a pocket full of celluloid
With a wink and cufflinks of human teeth,
asks me in demotic Yiddish
to luncheon at the studio
followed by a month at Cannes.

The Hudson sweats
oil and tar
the barges drift
with the turning tide
a Commie sails
wide
to leeward, swings on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
drifting logs
down past Ellis Island
past Lady Liberty’s Torch.
Way late! Way late!
Way late! I weigh so!

Elizabeth and Orson
parked by the roadside
a Mercury coupe
scarlet and gold
wire wheels
"Moonlight Serenade"
on the radio
I sawed a woman in half
on Cahuenga Boulevard.
Way late! way late!
Way late! I weigh so!

"Her feet were at Long Beach, and her heart
under her feet. After the event
I wept. I promised ‘a new start.’
Here in Hollywood
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
Star Faithful
Elizabeth Short
The Black Dahlia
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
Nothing."
Ooh la la

To Babylon then I came
to Xanadu to Xanadu
a sled is burning
burning burning burning
O Lord thou pluckest me away from life
Rosebud
burning

IV. DEATH BY WATER

Star Faithful, a long day’s dead,
forgot the cry of gulls, the foghorns of the ocean liners.
A current under sea
washed her pale skin in whispers. As she rose and fell
she passed the stages of her age and youth,
the nights in Long Island speakeasies, Manhattan hotels,
O you who turn the steering wheel and drive west
to Hollywood, consider Star, who was once as pert as you.

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces of the extras,
after the nights in the Florentine Gardens,
the smoke of Marlboros and Lucky Strikes
the packages that arrived in the mail
with cut-out letters.

The wind had risen again.
It came icily off the Danube
and whipped up the snow in the tiny square.
Harry Lime sat sipping ersatz coffee in the café.
He wasn’t dead but he wasn’t alive either.
In the corner, the telephone was ringing ringing ringing.

D. W. Griffiths’ Hollywood
Falling towers
Jerusalem Rome Athens
Vienna London Los Angeles
Unreal

At Maxim’s, a couple were dancing gloomily.
At Chez Victor’s, the heating had failed,
couples huddled in their overcoats.
Martins thought of the girl in Amsterdam,
the one in Dublin, the one in Hollywood,
he thought of Harry Lime,
dead Harry Lime, the racketeer
who made his money off children dying of meningitis.

At three in the morning,
Martins climbed the stairs to Anna’s room.
She was in her pink dressing gown.
On the rumpled bed lay the script.
He said, "Harry was in a racket,
a bad racket, he was no good at all."
They embraced.

In the winter night, the thunder spoke over Vienna,
out of the ice clouds, the snow.
The giant ferris wheel swayed in the wind.
Then spoke the thunder:
What have you given? What have you taken?

"Rosebud."

Bill Moss

A Summer’s Day Got Nothin On You (Shakespeare), by Bob Dylan
                      

A summer’s day got nothin on you babe.
No, a fine summer day’s got nothin on You.
May wind’s blowin down along the blue, babe
Don’t put your trust in summer, whatever you do.
The sun fires on us like our dreams, babe,
And sometimes hides its face behind a cloud.
Yeah, beauty sure ain’t what it seems, babe
Just why that is, I will not say out loud.
But summer comes and summer goes, babe,
I haveta say that you’re much truer than that,
And summer fades without its clothes, babe,
But you look fine wearin nothin but a pillbox hat.
You stick around when summer’s out of range,
You’re slower than summer to cool and faster to change.

Leda and the Swan, by Wallace Stevens


She put on his power but did she put on
his knowledge with his power?

It would fit like a busted tiara,
it would not push away with vague fingers,

not like the surety of feathers,
sure in a white feathery light,

like the fire from the roof and the tower
and Agamemnon dead.

She doesn't know Agamemnon.
But did she know what she doesn't know

beneath the surety of feathers,
dropped on her like milk

to drown in the wings beating,
to drown out the heart beating

in the breast of a bird?
Did she put on the Ultimate Song

or was the music, red of a stripe
on a monkey's face, too sudden a blow?

Robert Schechter

Ode to a Nightingale (Keats), by Ogden Nash


1.

You know the way your heart can ache as if you swallowed hemlock and it was making you feel somewhat sleepy and nappy?

Well, right now it's happening to me, and all because a nightingale off in the trees is singing in a way that I almost envy for being so happy but which scares me into thinking maybe there's such a thing as being too happy.


2.

Oh how great it would be to have some excellent sparkling wine and a huge goblet that I could fill up so the beaded bubbles would sparkle right up to the brim.

I'd love to get so utterly drunk that my consciousness would fade away and I could invisibly follow you out into the forest where it's extremely dim.


3.

I could fade away, in fact, and quite forget all the horrible things that a bird like you doesn't even know about, like illness and mortality and so many problems that the very act of thinking causes sorrow,

and like the fact that love doesn't last beyond tomorrow.


4.

Away! Away! I plan to follow you, not by getting drunk but writing verse.

The night is tender! The stars are bright but their light doesn't reach me here in this garden and it's like a a perfectly dark yet somehow glowing universe.

5.

I can't see the flowers at my feet or get a look at the amazing stuff I'm smelling in the garden as I lie here in the grass beside a tree,

but there must be lots of hawthorn, pastoral eglantine, violets and musk rose, or at least that's what it smells like to me.

6.

I'm listening to you here in the dark as I proclaim that I've often thought about dying a painless death, and I've even written poems in which I've made that boast.

And now more than ever death would be sweet if I could do it while you were singing and if you'd promise to keep on singing after I turned to compost.

7.

You don't know from death, oh bird, and your voice has been heard since ancient times by everyone from emperors to Ruth among the corn.

Your song's forlorn.

8.

And now's the time for me to bid you adieu and to give up my vain desire of using poems or wine to lose myself while finding bliss in the losing.

Your song is fading and now it's pretty much gone. Am I awake or snoozing?

A man threw a core at a basket.
It hit the side and bounced off.

What did you do that for, you fool!
The man reprimanded himself sharply.
Now I will have no luck. I have failed.

But a true person is more perceptive.
He sees the failure spreading up the man’s arm
Running back earlier than the case of just this apple,
And just this moment.
Back to a time when---

But this doesn’t help our man.
He sees only the double image

Of his missed shot
And the perfect promise of the apple
Unbitten in the palm.