American Poetry Review, January/February 2023
Ode to English, Amok and Running
Anglo Saxon, you rampaging Viking hunk with blue eyes,
muchos gracias for your 500 words we use every day—boy
and girl, cow and pancake, all the curse words, and skunk,
monk, lunk, funk, because English, you had some funky
beginnings—while the rest of the world was using alphabets
you had runes, and your first sentence wasn’t written
until 450 AD on a coin—This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman,
which means what? The coin, a dog, or a sharp-
tongued woman? Who knows, English, but you grew fast,
put on weight, opened for business, and set up your
Bully pulpit of mercantile lingo—derivatives, assets, revenues,
liens, debt consolidation, cash flow, collateral,
break-even point, only no one does, just big daddy Mr. Moneybags,
Scrooge McDuck, the Bezos-a-rama, ka-ching, that forgets
the little languages that fed into the mighty Mississippi, like
Celtic, a banshee screaming in the bog, the clabbered milk,
hooligan smashing the night to smithereens, after hours
in the pub drinking whiskey, the water of life, a party galore.
Damn your warmongering rants, the sieg heil salute to jackboots,
all the AK-47 dirigible shit storms in countries too forlorn
to have an exit visa to another place, the drone empires of potentates,
dictators, oligarchs, Visigoths, demon kings, hopped-up
engineers of the out-of-control-200 mph-train of the coming
Eco-apocalypse, which is already here, etching out its onslaught
of fire—Rattlesnake, Scorpion, Slink, El Dorado,
Fox, Mojave, Zaca, Caldor—and the deluges—Ida, Eta, Bertha,
Michael, Cristobal, Fred, Delta—the hurricane and virus,
ramping through our blood streams, like Zeus throwing a tantrum
on Mount Olympus, Poseidon and Ares his wingmen.
French, you, invaded in 1066, tried to obliterate the native speakers,
but Anglo-Saxon showed you when you married
its beautiful blondes and forgot the Paris that had already forgotten you
though you live on in our legal gobbledygook and in the words
we use to pick apart the world in our brains—philosophy, ontology,
oncology, hermeneutics, physics, phenomenology. Jesus!
Get this, English, you are like the winner of the pie-eating contest
at the county fair, you don’t care how you look as you
gobble up the apple, pumpkin, blueberry, blackberry, cherry pies,
because you’re a mess and proud of it, strutting your
dumb-ass diatribes all over cybersphere, making cracked-brained
connections, in love with the marginal, insane
Hullabaloo of a world gone amok, from a Malay word, amuk,
meaning frenzied attack, as when mobs go out on
the streets and kill as many people as they can, so school shootings
and supermarket rampages have a history as do words like
Icebox, which just happens to be a more fabulous than
refrigerator, and my mother never made the switch,
so I still use it when I’m talking to my husband about dinner,
a linguistic toast to my mother, who used to say,
That’s the oldest story in the book, and I’d ask, What book?
What story? And she would roll her eyes and let me
Jabber on, stringing words together like a double lei of lingo
zinging with Hawaiian pidgin, which is a ratatouille
of English, Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, and a couple of other
languages, so when a TV announcer says, The governor
covered his okole on that one, you know he’s saying, He covered
his ass, and my favorite Hawaiian word is kuleana,
which means responsibility, so when someone tries to bully
you into doing something you don’t want to do, you
can say, Hey, man, that’s not my kuleana, which sounds
so James Dean with a little aloha thrown in. Oh, English,
Kleptomaniac lingo thief, bring your pajamas to the slumber
party of all the words you have pillaged or stolen,
all the linguistic loot (Hindi), and as you light your cigar, you are
lighting the Spanish cigaro, which they stole from
Mayan sicar, and what about cookie (Dutch), wanderlust,
(German), lemon (Arabic), ketchup (Chinese),
penguin (Welsh), karaoke (Japanese), but while you’re at it
why not steal the Swedish mangata, the trail moonlight
makes on water, or Schadenfreude, oops that’s almost English
now, or will be in twenty years, and don’t get me started on
Latin, Lord of All the Stuck-up language we use to mean
nothing, and I know you went through the mill of French
to land on English shores, but I hate your acumen, why not say
common sense, or drunk instead of bibulous,
using words the impecunious don’t understand so you can
bamboozle them with your erudition—you are ubiquitous,
pickpocketing the hoi polloi in their shacks and bungalows
while you hobnob with the gods. Oh, English, you’re
Messed up for sure, but it’s a hot mess like that boy
on the corner with the slick hair and slim hips. Forget
what he’ll look like in ten years, all that Bud going right to his gut,
because he’s sexy now, his sneer so cool, his libido hot,
and so are you, English—I love how chaotic you are,
how you can throw a chain saw, a flaming tiki torch,
an accordion, and a monkey wrench up in the air and juggle
them while a mariachi band plays Beatles covers in the
Night of our party-hearty apocalyptic end game Armageddon,
because we’re having fun, but it’s a kind of fireworks-
going-off-in-your-hands-after-drinking-too-many-margaritas-
and-ending-up-behind-the-Taco-Bell-by-the-dumpster
fun, which seems like a beatnik paradise until the Pharisees show
up screaming for your crucifixion. Oh, English, I love your
One-note onomatopoetic honk, beep, vroom, clang, boom,
bang, zoom of motorcycle gangs gone haywire,
riding the flat roads of the American West, tattoos ablaze
in the setting sun, John Ford on amphetamines, so
Put it here, pard, let’s review what we’ve learned so far—pretty
much nothing, but we’re still surfing the lingo sea,
waiting for the big waves to roll in from the Pacific and building
a fire on the beach of our own stupidity. Here’s a pop
Quiz for all you cognoscenti—Why is English so elephant-
in-the-room ginormous? a) English cannot stop snacking,
- b) English is a slut who will have sex anyone, any time,
anywhere, especially in dive-bar restrooms, at abandoned
building sites, and under the table at church bingo games,
- c) English is a simple country girl, but all those words
like elixir, mockingbird, and greengage make her seem
Mata-Hari mysterious, d) English doesn’t give a flying fig
what you think, e) all of the above, because you love
your capitalist pigs, English, your rape-and-pillage
Robber baron scumbags, your sham millionaire hotel magnate
turned leader of the Free World, your Waffle-House index
storm damage reports, and while the redwoods burn and Miami burbles
back into the ocean, English, you are at mission control with interns
who finished high school by the skin of their teeth, and like Chernobyl
you are testing the system but can’t fathom that the cheap
Sleaze-meisters in charge have cut so many corners that we’re in Origami
Land, an amusement park so full of folds it has almost disappeared,
and I don’t know about you, but I want a double-fuzz burger on rye
or maybe a grilled lint sandwich with my 36-ounce kerosene
mocha frappe, because that’s all that’s on the menu, brothers
and sisters, and while we’re making up words let’s not forget
To toast the double-plus-good dose of free will that plays
to the masses, with their five-hundred-word-vocabulary
urban myths—Oh honey, everyone says you’re a werewolf.
The better to eat you, my love. So now I’m Little Red
Riding Hood, and all I wanted was to be Alice drifting on the river,
but look who’s rowing—it’s Simon Legree in holey
Underwear, but maybe it’s “h-o-l-y,” and that’s English for you,
change one or two letters and a pervert turns into a saint,
a priest becomes a pest, a mommy a mummy, a dummy a whammy,
a Machiavellian-game-show-trumpet mouthpiece turns
into Humpty-Dumpty, a chump, a champ, a chimp with his mouth
open waiting for the peanuts to fly in his direction,
so have a beer and watch California burn on your TV screen—
it’s The Greatest Show on Earth with a dollop
PeeWee’s Big Adventure. Whoa, what’s this I see—Visigoths and
Vandals shooting up the back yard with those AK-47’s again. No problem,
baby, because we believe in the transmigration of souls,
an ectoplasmic manifestation of who knows what? Well, here
we are, English, with front row seats on Mr. Toad’s
Wild Ride, careening down the 21st century open road, fueled
by CBD and craft beers. In case you haven’t noticed
this is not Proust’s Paris, but wait—maybe it is, because at the end,
crass, social climbing Mme. Verdurin becomes La Princesse
de Guermantes, and isn’t that the oldest story in the book?
What book? And my mother comes back from the river
of souls, and says, There’s only one book, darling, the Bible,
and it will tell you everything you need to know, and though
I don’t completely agree with her, the Bible has a lot of great stories—
Adam and Steve, Noah shagging his daughters, Jehovah’s
X-ray vision ripping the skin off stinking sinners and sending
them straight to hell. Anyway, that’s where we are, amigos,
treading water in the River Styx, six sheets to the wind, speaking
English, and trying to figure out what the hell’s going on,
but it’s hard when English is always changing, I’m talking about hijabs,
blow jobs, Steve Jobs, not to mention corn-on-the-cob,
Yule logs, eggnogs, and all the Christmas fandango, oy vey iz mir,
OMG, and FYI I’m boycotting the holidays this year
because I just want to lie back, drink Manhattans, eat little snacks
or pupus as the Hawaiians have it, and think about the various
theories in the air, the nutty ones and the esoteric, so baking
and decorating take up way too much time, and this is our
Zeitgeist, English, Madame Blavatsky to the stars, space alien
of my inner brain, my dearest mumbojumbologist,
what I love about you is you’ll say anything, and God knows you do,
which makes me want to dig out my brain with scissors,
but here we are in another year at another party in a dark room,
wrapped in each other’s arms, slow-dancing to a love song,
a deep drum, rumble-to-the-core, full carnal score, and you
whispering in my ear delirious lyrics written just for me.
Ploughshares
Ode to All My Late-Night Great Ideas
The Germans have a word for you—Schnappsidee—an idea
fueled by Margaritas or shots of tequila or bottles of red
wine or white, you know the ideas that maybe involve a road trip
to Miami or California and you wake up in a parking lot
in Mississippi or Delray Beach with a dead French fry stuck
to the side of your face or you decide to drive over
to your ex’s house at 3 am and give him what your mother
used to call “a piece of your mind,” and if you’re lucky
you won’t remember that psychedelic trip into the night
or you’ll be able to retrieve the piece of your mind
from the sidewalk where he either threw it or you fumbled,
and it almost slid into the gutter, or what about the time
you volunteered to serve Thanksgiving to the homeless
and all the women with their sliding makeup and soft
chins whispered, “We could trade places with you tomorrow,”
or was that the Buddha, trailing along on the comet tail
of all the acid trips you took when you were sixteen, especially
the night you discovered Motown, because you’re slinging hash
in the 24-hour diner of your soul, and what is it that keeps you going
through that dark night but four men singing harmony,
and so what if you end up on the side of the road in Arkansas
reading a beat-up copy of A Season in Hell or Fleurs du Mal,
you still have “It Was Just My Imagination” flowing through your
cerebral cortex along with Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin,
and that road trip across country in the 1966 Cadillac convertible
with the boyfriend who hated to travel. Was he the one
you gave a piece of your mind to? No, that was another one who had
so many rules about food that when you were behind
his new girlfriend at the local co-op and saw the belt full of tofu,
lentils, soy sauce, turmeric, fenugreek tea—all the brown
meals you ate with him passed before your eyes, and you felt such a sense
of relief that his Nazi regime was over, Berlin bombed
and you walking through the rubble, glad that you still had your arms
and legs, but back to that Cadillac convertible on the road
from California to the East Coast, hitting Taos and trying to conjure up
- H. Lawrence and thinking about the description of Gundrun’s
and Ursula’s stockings at the beginning of Women in Love, but really
we were driving to a one-month meditation retreat,
which is kind of the opposite of a car trip, sitting for an hour at a time
and then walking and sitting and walking while your mind roams
like a wild monkey on amphetamines, but after a week in Himalayan
storms, being attacked by pterodactyls swooping out
of the wild skies, you finally coast down to the plains or savannahs
with their endless vistas of nothing and its brother and sister,
which is an oasis of cool water, and you find that your mind’s zoo
has lost its savage beasts, the lions now little pussy cats
and the wild boars, piglets, and yeah, it’s kind of boring, but it’s also
like a radio with Bach playing, so you can always tune
into the Kinks if you need to, and I don’t really want to tame my mind,
but I do want to get the good out of it, leaving room for a riot
or two, though it takes so long to get over the riots—windows broken,
walls collapsed, doors splintered—that you think, Is it worth it?
and I guess I’d have to answer, yes, the bombs exploding like fireworks,
the shelves looted, and the little girls crying on the street
corner—Oh, that’s me sitting with my torn dress and skinned knees,
so please, Mr. Postman, keep all my great ideas in cosmic envelopes
and bring them to me whenever I need to be shoved out the door with no
idea where I’m going or how or where the hell I’ll end up.