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Occasional Verse 6: Your Six Year-old Daughter Asks How the Penis Gets Into the Vagina

What do you say? Do you tell her?
I told her. And now your wife
wants to know why.
So does your therapist.
Maybe it’s because you remember
the day you figured it out
in fifth grade,
a full three years before
it was revealed 
in junior high health class
by a football coach 
that said puberty 
poo-ber-dee.

You were riding your bike
home after school,
puzzling it out.
You knew that somehow
the penis had to 
get into the vagina
for babies to get made.
But it just didn’t seem possible 
that the penis, 
a squishy little piece of flesh,
could be pushed against a vagina, 
and do anything but crumple.
If only it could be made firmer,
if only it had another state.

Wait a minute, 
I stopped the bike for this.
I remembered that the penis 
almost has the desired properties
when you wake up in the morning.
What your mom sometimes calls a flagpole.
Yes, that might just work,
a flagpole penis.
Oh my God, a flagpole penis! 

If you don’t take into account my age
at that moment, 
you might be unimpressed,
but remember this was pre-poo-ber-dee.
An erection was in no way connected
to desire in my mind.
I was like a man who’d never seen water,
trying to figure out how a fish swims.
I was an anatomical engineer 
that deduced the solution from first principles.
It was my on-the-road-to-Damascus moment.
Okay, not everybody gets to be Paul.
But when the great engineer in the sky 
has called your name, 
you go out and you preach the word.
And that is why I told my daughter.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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The 17/18 Poems 35: A World of Made

a world of made is not a world of born

how many rain-soaked lives must I live

this makes me pain great cause, and again, and again

in this opportunity of space, I am an asshole

an asshole deep

from the day that sex made me

from wanting the page to roar back

from the future I’ll never see

god, please grant me, not serenity

not this cleat or that clod

or the beauty of the leaden peonies

god, grant not love and good conscience

but a deeper, blacker stripe.

Check out other work in the 17/18 Poems series here.

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Strange Faces Other Minds 13: Bear’s Night Letter

Dear Blank. That’s how I think of you.
Nameless as your eyes would disclose you
if I got that close.
You may have noticed me, though,
in my window above the street
where I pretend to be switching channels.
I suspect your mother suspects
I have been watching you,
and maybe she is correct to guard
her clothesline, the seven flavors
of your nighties, your pantyhose having a fling
with the breeze. If you think I am humorless
you are wrong. I see the comedy
of those popsicle-colored convertibles
you and your friends jazz around in.
I see your father’s pride
when he waters the flowers and you
practice handstands or pump your arms
and work over the grunts 
of a high-school cheer.
I’m not going to slide out of shadow
with a voice full of peanuts, Hey, Girlie,
a crank who stuffs pigeons 
into a sack. Oh, no. Secure in my creephood,
it’s enough to watch, knowing that one day
perfect teeth enter the pizza
that breaks the cartwheel’s back.

This Brendan Galvin poem is filled with such beautiful masculine creepery.

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series.

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Occasional Verse 5: Trying to Find Your Underwear After Sex

Do I address the underwear 
or do I address you, 
now naked pair,
whose underwear disappeared
into that oblivion of bed clothes,
as if to say there is no way
to put that apple back on the tree?
Maybe there is someone approaching,
a child that needs sparing,
or a lover betrayed?
But that, of course,
only makes the underwear hide harder.

Could you close your eyes
you might be able to see yourselves
just five minutes before,
in a tangle of elbows and feet, 
pushing your underclothes 
back in time, almost to the first day.
And now the price of that pleasure 
is an eternity of search.
Nothing free in indulgence
is quite free of consequence.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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Racists of America Club Note #15, attempt at an intro

(Another piece of dialogue. I’m not clear on the context.)
-You should come to a meeting.
-I’m not sure I’d know what to say.
-Just come, listen. You don’t have to speak if you don’t want to, but you probably will. I hardly ever know what I’m going to say, but once I hear other people share, something always comes up. Most of us live lives rich with shame about race.

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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The 17/18 Poems 35: I Miss The Future

I miss the future maybe more than the past

what was to be and now will not

tragically gliding forward and away from us

there were happier men in that future

there was justice in that future

and most of all there was great poetry

can we bring it back forward

or is it gone forever

men will never have the character and intellect

that was to be so

being of the future

this loss cannot technically be 

a fall from grace

but being so close to realization

it feels we really did lose something

and now that wisdom, gentleness, and peace

is never to be had, or almost had, again

Check out other work in the 17/18 Poems series here.

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Strange Faces Other Minds 12: Parade

Something weird to admire this week on TV:
the handsome face of the white supremacist on trial.
How he looks right back at the lawyers, day after day
–never objecting, never making an apology.

I look at his calm, untroubled face
and think, That motherfucker is going to die white and right,
dissappointing everyone like me
who thinks that punishment should be a kind of education.

Right in the middle of Parade by Tony Hoagland, I ran into this.
I felt so called out on my shit, like Hoagland came to my house, punched me in the balls and left.

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series.

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Occasional Verse 4: When Your Favorite Band Mainstreams

It’s tremendously gratifying. 
You were right.
This band is great.
But the very same moment they legitimize your taste,
they no longer serve as its marker.

You are a bit like a revolutionary
that suddenly finds himself in power.
It’s a little embarrassing.
What do you do now?
Who is left to convert?
There is no argument to make,
amazingly everyone agrees.

The only answer
is to find another backwater band
with which to bother your unlistening friends.
The guerilla needs to go back to the jungle.
If you don’t, you’ll find yourself 
saying silly things like
I liked them before this or that important concert,
waiting for your early adoption 
                                    to count for something.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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Racists of America Club Note #14

Yes, this is a common issue for a lot of writers, especially people newer to fiction, though we all face it. I see it with my students sometimes: they want to write the “Message Story” that feels like it has a thesis statement. They lead with it, but then remember they’re supposed to tell a story so they try to paste some one-dimensional characters and plot onto their sexy idea after the fact. -WF

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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Occasional Verse 3: Reading Nietzsche Before Watching It’s a Wonderful Life

These spirits do not mix.
All it took was a 30 minute dose of Nietzsche
on the herd mentality, mobbing, 
and the perversion of the ubermench’s spirit, 
to make George Bailey’s wonderful life a Greek tragedy.

Prior to this encounter, I had seen the movie
over 15 times, usually during holidays,
and it always touched me.
But this was the first time I saw 
George’s family, friends, and townspeople
ply that combination
of guilt, shame, and sex 
(not to mention some angel dust pyrotechnics)
to level George Bailey, man of talent.
And on this viewing, surprise of surprises,
Mr. Potter turns out to be the only man
trying to save poor George,
even if it is
only out of self interest.

And all those gut-wrenching moments 
coming so close to escaping:
the board meeting,
the bank run,
the train station with Harry,
the call from Sam Wainwright,
(if that idiot can make it anyone can).
If only Ernie the cabbie
would chloroform Georgie-boy,
so he could get out of his own way 
for a half an hour. 

The real dagger in the soul is the end
when he’s wet, disheveled 
with tinsel matted on his head, 
looking out as an imbecile on all proceedings,
as he is made
to feel grateful for it all.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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Racists of America Club Note #13

I lost a coat as a kid when we were staying in a hotel in the southwest. I’d been playing with another kid staying there on the hotel’s sportcourt. The boy was Mexican. When the coat went missing my dad asked me where I thought it was. I told him the Mexican boy probably stole it. My dad called me on that assumption immediately and that same day he found my coat in the hotel’s lost and found. My dad bringing it to me mentioned it was probably the boy that turned it in.

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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Racists of America Club Note #12

(an attempt at dialogue, I’m viewing this as the founder being interviewed by a reporter)
-How do you try to “escape” racism?
-Mostly by talking. We each share a little something. It could be something going on at the moment. It could be something from the past that a person is working through. The important part is that it’s not judged. Each person says what’s in their heart. They learn to trust the group. One guy has a black guy at work he’s having problems with. One girl has a story from when she was ten years old that she is still ashamed of.  

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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Occasional Verse 2: Driving the Wrong Way Down a One Way Street

You entered the do not enter
and there is no way out but through.
You will learn that the usually effective
embarrassed/apologetic wave has its limits.
Even the church-going mother
in the hatchback
taking her children to school 
can be seen muttering
a few non-biblical epithets
under her breath.
Her stare is enough to wish for the end times.
You have screwed this up for everyone
and will have to keep screwing
because backing up is worse than continuing.
You can only manage your level of wrong here.
Driving the wrong way down a one way street is like
putting a roasted potato in your mouth
at a dinner party that is way too hot
but you can’t spit it out.
So take the honking,
take the shrugs,
take the fingers.
This is an exercise in humility.
It is spiritually cleansing.
Remember Elliot’s words
Nothing dies harder than
the desire to think well of self
and know that today,
if just for a little while,
you killed it.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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Racists of America Club Note #11 (a cry for help)

I have a question about the Racists of America Club. I’ve been working on it like I said. I seem to have gotten into it by opening it as an interview. Right now it doesn’t have the bite of a real story though. It is more akin to one of the Socratic dialogues in Plato in which the star is the idea less than the characters discussing the idea. I think one of the problems of the story for me is that I actually believe in the idea too much. It is not like a real interrogation. I’m too one-sided about it. Have you ever had this problem writing a story? Maybe I should be writing an essay instead? Help! -BW

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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Occasional Verse 1: Arguing About Whether You are Arguing

You are discussing a movie with your wife.
Talk has circled around various interpretations,
and now you find yourself debating, rather vigorously, 
whether you agree with each other. 
You maintain that with minor exceptions you do.
Your wife is quite certain that you don’t.

Don’t be surprised. 
For if there is an acorn through which 
to glimpse the forest of marriage, 
it must be the argument about whether you are arguing.

And so, here we have
in this discourse 
the inability of two to be one,
coupled with the relentless determination
that quite simply two equals one.
It’s a very real physical impossibility, 
a duality of states
as in superposition
not as one, not as two
but, for lack of a better term,
a one / not one.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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Racists of America Club Note #10

Talking to a reporter:
So this is my point, there are a lot of people out there that are a little racist, but don’t think of themselves as racist. In fact, my guess is most of the racism in America is of this sort. There are very few people that even in private conceive of themselves as racists. I would also guess given that our difficult 400 years of race relations that nobody has been untouched by that history. Struggling with race is in our cultural DNA. Calling somebody a racist is basically calling them American.

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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The 17/18 Poems 30: Willow Said to Be Weeping

willow said to be weeping
joy said to be mocking
hope said to be thin
and the cargo was not slaves

this is the verbal energy
that surrounds the contemplation
of difficult (I mean ravenous) things

a bit daring I do say,
unlovely hand,
you are the subject given over
just like the dead
and in such quantities,
such well-meaning forevers

Check out other work in the 17/18 Poems series here.

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Strange Faces Other Minds 7: Presque Isle

In every life, there’s a moment or two.
In every life, a room somewhere, by the sea or in the mountains.

On the table, a dish of apricots. Pits in a white ashtray.

Like all images, these were the conditions of a pact:
on your cheek, tremor of sunlight,
my finger pressing your lips.
The walls blue-white; paint from the low bureau flaking a little.

That room must still exist, on the fourth floor,
with a small balcony overlooking the ocean.
A square white room, the top sheet pulled back over the edge of the bed.
It hasn’t dissolved back into nothing, into reality.
Through the open window, sea air, smelling of iodine.

Early morning: a man calling a small boy back from the water.
That small boy–he would be twenty now.

Around your face, rushes of damp hair, streaked with auburn.
Muslin, flicker of silver. Heavy jar filled with white peonies.

Every time I read this it takes me to my room somewhere. I first experienced this poem on the page. I wish I could find a recording of Gluck reading it.

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series.

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Strange Faces Other Minds 6: Somebody in a Bar

Somebody in a Bar

This is a great example of how lightning can strike anywhere. I photo copied this page from a book of poems in the library. I didn’t like any of the other poems. I don’t even like this poem, but the second stanza by itself is probably the best thing I’ve read all year. It kills me every time I read it. I tried to track down who wrote it, but wasn’t able to. If anyone reads and recognizes it, please let me know.

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series.

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Strange Faces Other Minds 5: Birdseed

I planted birdseed
But no birds grew;
I watered the plot
While over it flew
Other birds, who
Were unaware
Of what I thought
Was growing there.

Robert Saunders was a good friend. He passed away 10 years ago and I still miss him. It is hard to know if I’d like this poem as much if I didn’t know him personally. It definitely reminds me about what I loved so much being around him. I guess it doesn’t really matter though, if you love a poem, you love a poem.

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series.

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The 17/18 Poems 29: Stubbornly Former

by this kind
he means cancer
the prospect he attaches to firmly
narrative abusing time…again
he is the tom of love now
all windows
in the mood to be forgotten
while others discuss
bribes and blandishments
instead of the love
they are too afraid to want
let the heaven we inherit approach
out of the deep business of some dream,
that heaven so stubbornly former

Check out other work in the 17/18 Poems series here.

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The Social Unit 11: The Problem of Justice

Justice is not an us versus them problem. It’s an us versus us problem. Any inversion of social/economic/political class just perpetuates injustice. I.e. the difference between labor/capital or high/low class is only an accident of history, not written in our biology. That is why “taking” power only results in “taking on” all the moral problems once despised in an oppressor. A deeper kind of a revolution is one that frees oppressors as well as the oppressed.

Check out all the work in the collection: The Social Unit

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Practicing My Writerly Gaze 1, Manscaping

It is kind of hard shaving your asshole.
It’s a bit of a blind spot really. I have many.
Blind spots, not assholes. 
Why do I do it? I do it like I do many things.
Like writing poems.
I am wondering if poems are like assholes–
hard to find, delicate, 
somewhere you shouldn’t go near with a razor.
Yet we feel compelled. I even listen with razors.

Burroughs wrote a lot about assholes. 
One of his characters taught his asshole to talk. 
It didn’t end well. I can’t help thinking,
if mine could talk, what would it say? 
It always looks angry. At least in the mirror.
Mirrors are funny though. 

In a car once with my brother, I heard
an interview in which DFW said
he believed something down to his asshole.
What he believed, I can’t remember 
even at the time it didn’t seem
as interesting as where
he felt that belief.
I’ve never felt anything that deep. 
Maybe my sphincter lacks conviction?
I’ll deal with that later. For tonight
my little rosebud will have to be content
with being groomed: bald and beautiful.

Now I realize a poet asks a lot 
when he asks the reader to contemplate his asshole.
If you are still reading, thank you for indulging me.
I want you to know 
I didn’t try to write this poem.
It doesn’t make any sense
but I feel like it picked me.
Where poems come from and why 
is a knotted mystery to me.
Tipping my seat to DFW I never fail to feel
that kind of uncertainty where the poems don’t shine.  

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The 17/18 Poems 24: Dude Raw

a break like a bend
more or less alive
many rains,
desires, and ideas

dude raw too afraid
the whole jealousy
a suitcase of a man
or a tarball ruining
someone’s beach

the freckled little milk
the mall of dead commerce
the sad clock of particular energy
it’s mixed character
tick, tock, tick

Check out other work in the 17/18 Poems series here.

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Racists of America Club Note #8

There was a woman at the meeting. She was older with a huge Elvis caricature on her t-shirt. I wouldn’t have noticed it, but the pompadour fell right across her large breasts. Every time she moved or spoke Elvis’ coif bobbed up and down.

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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The Story of Discourse 13: Danto’s Gallery of Indiscernibles

In Dantos Gallery there are many red squares. Some are framed hanging proudly on the wall. Some are being prepped for artists, Giorgione for example, to further adorn. Another is by the stairs simply waiting to have ‘exit’ stenciled on it. Being spun through room after room thick with the presence of red squares of every sort… oh look, there’s one on the shoulder of a security guard…the question one is intended to ask is this: is art camouflaged in the banal or is the banal camouflaged in art? How does one find art when it is so cleverly hidden? Or stranger, how does one find art when it is so clearly abundant?