Making a Poem

1 man's poem by mark k

One Man’s Poem

By morning all is shot to hell

                        -Ashbery

Two hours of lousy sleep and an inauspicious beginning,

I apologize in advance for the coffee.

But even in deepest sleep,

the muscle memory of my meat heart,

my meat brain,

the flashlight fans out

an empty room.

And how do I even know the room exists?

If I fret over being ejected from it

by monster, landlord or thief maybe

I’m already out of it, or was never

in it to begin with, or don’t

even know what “it” is. Possession

and loss is a coin toss into

a gaping hole.

And angst isn’t fear, not really.

It’s fatigue that won’t rest on a treadmill of dread.

And one day I’ll be done

testing the formula

for the model that’s been rattling along

the superhighway for years,

decades, if truth be told.

And it must be told.

Unless I am to have no name.

But that’s tomorrow’s business, not mine.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait

Last Wednesday I read a remarkable poem by Brendan MacOdrum of Oran’s Well. If You Read This is a long poem, part memoir part social commentary part cultural history. The past, Brendan writes, “is now nothing but retro” and contemporary consciousness is not much more than a “balloon of white noise.” He questions why for years music satisfied him and then “singing reached a frozen silent /shore where I couldn’t turn another/loss into another 3-chord bad angel.” He mentions Julian Jaynes, where I first learned about Thamyris, a poet mentioned in the Iliad who boasted that he could control the Muses. Enraged, they crippled him, took away his ability to play the harp, and caused him to lose his way as an artist. Brendan writes:

There are blues that no one sings

because there aren’t chords sour enough for them,

because there’s cold that cracks even a soul on ice,

because the singer lost his guitar and then his voice

and walks the blasted city streets of the

heart’s January like death in a dead tongue….

If You Read This begins: “Sleep did not come easy last night” and that night I had terrible dreams. I did not become lucid, take control of the dreams, nor wake up. I was too tired and only had a few hours before the cursed alarm bell. So I slept and suffered through this tired reminder of how I got my biggest scars. That monster has been chasing me around the block since I was a kid. He’s not scary. Far from it. I know every hair on his insipid body. He’s a cartoon I can draw with my eyes closed. In the morning I thought, this is how death will capture me - just weary of it all, like I’m done.

In the morning, all morning at work I was in a funk, could not get out. I used to fall into pits of depression that would sometimes last for weeks. I’d feel powerless to climb out of the pit on my own, would have to wait it out. A moment would come when the light would change and the world would take on a different appearance. The pit of depression, I learned, was my own self-centeredness. Yet chastising myself on that account only set a rat to scurrying in my brain. If I was lucky I’d see the humor in this and lo, a handhold out! I’ve learned to put up with a lot from myself over the years and the moods aren’t so dark or long lasting anymore. So this recent morning I’m talking about - last Thursday morning - was disappointing. I’m better than this! All morning long I played with the lines of the poem, One Man’s Poem. During my lunch break I wrote the words down.

“By morning all is shot to hell” is the last line of John Ashbery’s poem also entitled One Man's Poem. Ashbery is an artistic beacon for me. He is one of those, like Francesco Clemente and Pat Metheny, who shine a brilliant light in the world. They represent a type of integrity that I aspire to: a steadfast commitment to artistic ideals, not as a religion but for the sake of beauty itself. That’s a kind of faith that I can believe in, and it’s something that the world is ever in desperate need of. Just some music. Just some light. Just some beauty, for God’s sake. Readers of Ashbery will be surprised at that line; I could not avoid beginning with that surprise.

In the opening pages of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Julian Jaynes posits that consciousness is not at all the thing that people tend to think it is. Specifically, it comprises a “much smaller part of our mental life” than we think it does. I’m not sure consciousness is exactly what Jaynes says it is either, but the book asks fascinating questions and in this passage he equates our use of consciousness to shining a flashlight in a dark room searching for anything that does not have light shining on it. Since everything we can see has light shining on it we conclude that the flashlight - consciousness - encompasses everything. This happens when we think about consciousness, about what it is. But what is consciousness when we don’t think about it? I can’t climb out of my own pit on my own volition. I have to forget about the pit and then, suddenly, I’ll find that I’m out of it. The moment just prior to that is One Man’s Poem. It’s not beautiful, and I’m truly sorry for that. But I think there’s a small truth in it, and there will be better days and better poems.