What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
I
In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyantes distress me,
Commuters depress me–
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.
II
She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions–
Bad as Albert and Lil—what a pair!
III
The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep—
A typist is laid,
A record is played—
Wei la la. After this it gets deep.
IV
A Phoenician named Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business—the lot,
Which is no surprise,
Since he’d met his demise
And been left in the ocean to rot.
V
No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you’ll make sense of the notes.
Dust if you must, but wouldn’t it be better
To paint a picture, or write a letter,
Bake a cake, or plant a seed;
Ponder the difference between want and need?
Dust if you must, but there’s not much time,
With rivers to swim, and mountains to climb;
Music to hear, and books to read;
Friends to cherish, and life to lead.
Dust if you must, but the world’s out there
With the sun in your eyes, and the wind in your hair;
A flutter of snow, a shower of rain,
This day will not come around again.
Dust if you must, but bear in mind,
Old age will come and it’s not kind.
And when you go (and go you must)
You, yourself, will make more dust.
1.
A conversation begins
with a lie. and each
speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart
as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
A poem can begin
with a lie. And be torn up.
A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own
false energy, Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.
Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies.
2.
The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment
the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone
The syllables uttering
the old script over and over
The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie
twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word
3.
The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette
the blurring of terms
silence not absence
of words or music or even
raw sounds
Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint of a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
4.
How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me
though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract
without wounding myself or you
there is enough pain here
This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?
5.
The silence strips bare:
In Dreyer’s Passion of Joan
Falconetti’s face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera
If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank space or as words
stretched like skin over meaningsof a night through which two people
have talked till dawn.
6.
The scream
of an illegitimate voice
It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself
How do I exist?
This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer
I had answers but you could not use them
The is useless to you and perhaps to others
7.
It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything-
chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums
If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing
a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew
If it could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn
till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare
8.
No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words
moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child’s fingers
or the newborn infant’s mouth
violent with hunger
No one can give me, I have long ago
taken this method
whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue
If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciation to the eye
the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn
like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a single ear of grain
for the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing
are these words, these whispers, conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.
They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.
I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control
A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths.
A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
To do something very common, in my own way.
My mouth hovers across your breasts
in the short grey winter afternoon
in this bed we are delicate
and touch so hot with joy we amaze ourselves
tough and delicate we play rings
around each other our daytime candle burns
with its peculiar light and if the snow
begins to fall outside filling the branches
and if the night falls without announcement
there are the pleasures of winter
sudden, wild and delicate your fingers
exact my tongue exact at the same moment
stopping to laugh at a joke
my love hot on your scent on the cusp of winter
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.
The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.
The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.
Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”
No offense.
The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word interesting, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.
Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.
The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.
The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.
Not you!
The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.
He wasn’t threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.
The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.
How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.
The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee’s house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.
The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.
OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.
Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.
The rape joke is he called wrestling “a soap opera for men.” Men love drama too, he assured you.
The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass’s My Century, which he never even tried to read.
It gets funnier.
The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.
The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said “he didn’t have those urges when he looked at her anymore,” not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!
The rape joke is that he was your father’s high-school student — your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.
The rape joke is that he knew you when you were 12 years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.
The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.
The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.
The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.
Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.
You know the body of time is elastic, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.
The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.
The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.
It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.
The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.
The rape joke is that after a while you weren’t crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.
The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.
The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.
The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.
The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati Ohio.
Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.
Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends — haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.
The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.
The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.
The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.
Admit it.
The real final line of “Rape Joke” is this. “You don’t ever have to write about it. But if you do, you can write about it any way you want.”
— Patricia Lockwood (@TriciaLockwood) July 25, 2013
He has a turtle and she has a shell.
She’s the principal and he’s the janitor.
She’s a widowed social worker looking for a father figure and he’s an elderly vagrant.
She’s a woman and he’s … a woman.
He’s unprincipled and she’s … principled.
Everyone in his life has drowned and he hates dogs and she’s a collegiate swimming coach with a thousand dogs.
He’s a collapsing star in the heart of the galaxy and she’s an ex-con with 5,000 spacebucks and nothing to lose.
He’s clever and she’s stupid.
He’s good-looking and she’s ugly.
She’s sort of interested in him, but he’s not sure how interested he is in her, though he is, a little bit.
He is always being ironic and she is disdainful of irony.
He’s a prosperous historian living in the present day, and she’s a historian struggling to make ends meet … from the future.
She’s a Nereid and he’s a Dryad.
She’s a sassy black oncologist and he’s a racist with prostate cancer.
She’s a plucky explorer of catacombs with a lust for adventure and smoldering good-looks, but he’s the quiet type, content to stay at home, reading about the exploration of catacombs only in books.
He’s moneyed and she’s a bitch.
He’s squeamish around blood but she is courteous around blood.
He’s a Muslim terrorist and she’s a normal Muslim.
He blew up the World Trade Center and she blew up when she heard he blew up the World Trade Center.
She’s a singer/songwriter but he’s just a songwriter/gay.
They’re both gay.
He’s a foot fetishist and she’s an amputee.
She’s a world-renowned gourmet cook and he’s a world-renowned fast-food restaurant mogul.
He’s a highly sought-after model caught up in the spree of drugs and sex that is the Berlin fashion scene, and she died in a car wreck six years ago in Zurich.
It’s midnight on the mesa, a dry breeze rustles across the colorless sand, and high atop a wind-chiseled monolith, they are two black cobras, drenched in silver moonlight, coiling in a furious act of forbidden cobra love.
She likes things one way and he likes them the other.
He’s hungry and doesn’t care where they eat, and she keeps saying she doesn’t care either, but every restaurant he offers up, she shoots down.
She likes monogamy but he likes sleeping around.
He’s bored but she keeps talking.
They’re both vegetarians but are both picky eaters and it’s almost enough to drive each other crazy.
They’re both the same.
They’re exactly the same person.
They’re in love.
They’re both in love … with murder.
She’s a pacifist and he’s a warmonger … until the tables turn and she becomes the warmonger and he the pacifist … though during the turning, on vectors bound for where the other just left, as they pass each other in the middle, like passengers on opposite trains, they see each other and reach out into the void, and for a few brief seconds, before their forward inertia pulls them irrevocably apart, they simultaneously occupy a single position.
He is the ocean and she is the sea.
He knows where a rare ore is and she knows metallurgy.
He said a curse word when he was in space, and she was at mission control and overheard him and reported him to his superiors, after which he was not to be allowed back into space.
He’s trying to solve the Middle East conflict, but she keeps stirring up trouble in the Middle East.
He’s on an important fact-finding mission for the U.N. and she shits facts.
They are the only two deer in the world who can walk upright on their hind legs and speak proper English in British accents, and their favorite activity is debating the superiority of Copernican models of the solar system over the alternate models.
She is a t-shirt full of eggs and he is an egg accidentally blown out of a lake by a strong wind.
He is expanding and she is shrinking.
It is her second day at Ruby Tuesday’s and he has worked there for five years.
He lied to her and she splattered paint all over his car except she made the paint the exact same color as his car to express the complexity of her anger but he didn’t get it.
She is naturally thin and he has to work at it.
She is involuntarily drawn into the story of every house she passes in her car, and he is unable to drive a car because of his leg.
She’s a pale-skinned aesthete who edits a webzine, and he’s a suntanned meathead completely perplexed by the masthead.
She’s his best friend and he’s sick of jerking off each night into the toilet.
He has a piece of turkey stuck between his teeth and she’s got a full Thanksgiving turkey stuck between her knees.
She is uncomfortable and he is fingering her.
She finally trusts him and he finally thrusts himself into her.
He’s thrashing around in a bathtub and she’s a flash flood happening somewhere far away.
He gouged out Christy Schumacher’s face in the yearbook and she is Christy Schumacher.
She’s the first female matador in Spain and he’s the first male bull impersonator willing to take male bull impersonating all the way … to its logical … and gruesome … conclusion.
He’s a carpenter and she’s a virgin.
He has a ponytail and she has no education.
He is widespread poverty, sweeping corruption, and violence institutionalized to a degree unseen elsewhere in the western world, and she is a tiny Latin American nation.
He is the farmscape at sunset and she is the silhouette of the barn, the windmill, and the silo.
She thinks she might be falling for him, but she is cautious because of how badly her last relationship ended, and he is okay with taking things slow because he is patient and cunning.
They both have perfect coital timing.
He is dangling her off a bridge and asking her what bridge it is and she is pleading for her life and screaming the Golden Gate Bridge.
His gaze carries calcium on it like a one-way conveyor belt that deposits massive doses of calcium into whatever he looks at, and she has a calcium deficiency once thought incurable by experts in the field of calcium.
His resemblance to her ex is superficial, but her resemblance to his ex is profound.
She was only joking when she touched her behind and made a sizzling sound, but he was the one who had to drive her to the emergency room to treat the third degree burn on the end of her finger.
He is the rain and she is smoking a cigarette on the patio.
He has always been ashamed of his membership in the militia, and he has always hated everything they stood for, but he has always been in love with her, and she never even gave him the time of day … until he joined.
He is Norway but she is holding out for infinite fjords.
He calls Nashville, laughingly, Nashvegas, but she calls Nashville, icily, Nashville.
She has just excitedly asked him to the annual charity dinner, and he has accepted, albeit reluctantly, anticipating yet another tedious masquerade of bourgeoisie apotheosis.
She thinks swoon is a funnier word than mulligan, and he thinks swoon is a funny word too, but no way in hell is it funnier than mulligan.
She’s a streetwise kangaroo in the last days of the crumbling republic, smuggling food and medicine out of the city, distributing it out of her pouch to the poor, and he’s a power-hungry possum prelate, who secretly convenes a midnight session of the senate, and with pledges of infinite eucalyptus tricks an influential coalition of koalas into illegally declaring marsupial law.
She’s like get a load of this and he’s like whoa.
She’s a lonely air traffic controller and his name is Eric Trafalgar and completely he’s out of control.
She’s a disorienting aroma and he’s a bee crashing into a mirror.
He’s a man running up a hill while morphing into a snowball and she’s a snowball rolling down a hill and morphing into a running woman.
Her very existence depends upon the capability of mimetic art, and he doesn’t even know what mimesis is.
He stabs her in the heart with an icicle, but when the icicle melts she resurrects.
He’s looking out across the fan-packed arena through a pair of high-powered binoculars, and she’s on the other side, pointing at him with one of those big foam fingers.
He’s searching for the Holy Grail and she has a map to the last known location of the Holy Grail.
He’s searching for the Holy Grail and she has a cousin who supposedly knows a guy who says he knows where the Holy Grail is.
He’s searching for the Holy Grail and she has little Holy Grail shaped pupils.
He’s searching for the Holy Grail and she’s a trapped cricket too small to leap out of the bottom of the Holy Grail.
He’s searching for the Holy Grail and she’s standing in front of the Holy Grail, smiling up at him impishly, as behind her the Holy Grail imbues the fringes of her body and face with soft gold light.
He’s searching for the Holy Grail and she just swallowed the Holy Grail whole.
She’s the Holy Grail but he’s searching for Atlantis.
He’s radiation and she’s a Geiger counter registering the current level of him in the surrounding rubble.
A fortune teller long ago warned him he would die in Egypt, and she walks like an Egyptian.
He is several flames and she’s a candelabra.
Juvenilia 