The Pulp
Sonnets and Other Poems.
by Evan Fleischer
Michiko Kakutani is Right Behind You.
Don’t look now, but Kakutani is behind you.
Yes. She’s writing. Uh-oh. Did she see us?
Quick. Bring your head down. If anyone asks,
just say that we’ve forgotten our glasses. Yikes.
You haven’t written a book, have you? Good God.
Something she might have the chance to review?
You haven’t written anything? Then why on earth
is she behind you if she isn’t there to review you?
Has she been reviewing backs? Sweet Moses Bar,
she’s probably reviewing your back against others.
I’m sorry if people will refuse to stand behind you
from now on. If I had seen her coming sooner,
I would have said something, anything, maybe nothing.
Probably nothing. I would have said nothing at all.
Pun Poem.
I’m a Marxist of the Groucho persuasion,
if only because I’m more honest with women.
Adam Smith’s wife caught him cheating,
and he blamed it on the Invisible Hand.
A Sonnet for Simon.
Hold on a second.
Did I just say a sonnet?
I meant a haiku.
Write a Poem.
What to do with those who can’t read a poem?
Write a poem? (Well, we’ll save that joke for later —)
Do we offer them bread? A threnody of platitudes?
Watching people talk about Elizabeth Bishop,
I can’t help but think of Christopher Guest movies —
‘In the Waiting Room’ shouldn’t be this hard, nor
mysterious — “She’s talking about pairs of hands —
why pairs of hands?” And why not hands of pears
or bears or rickety rocking chairs? A, A, A.
Why is this so hard?
“The tear at the end of ‘Man-Moth’ is what
the artist has to offer,” which, so, goodness!
What a boon to bear the inner-swoon!
Now I know what to do if I can’t make rent —
Do you take tears in check form, sir or miss?
I hear what an artist has to offer is only this —
Book readings can be revived under the knife —
Cut through the onion, and what do we have?
A miniature Gunter Grass! Oh, what the hell.
Why am I answering this? What’s the point
in yelling at someone who’s not there? What
do we do with those who can’t read a poem?
Write them a poem? Yeah. That’s a great idea.
What Do I Do With You?
I’m not suggesting that you can’t draw a map, per se —
The days may not be fair, Berlin-qua-Cohen sings,
may be grab-bag blindbursts of hand movements,
occassional fade-in’s from white, and you’ve moved
either twenty or one hundred feet, and who knew?
I’m not suggesting you can’t draw a map, but we need
to come to some sort of order — that slow boil of fools
growing wise ain’t found in the coffee pot, the tea,
mettle, or fettle jot, neither kneenicked towards moon-in
haze-cloud light, or floorwashed ‘til the ground down
through to foreign feet is a clearviewed sight. But we need
something: the urbane Zeppelin with a three-story wine glass
hanging from the balloon, that breath of hopping ahead
a decade for friendship … shall I lift the lithographs to life?
The Pulp Sonnets.
I.
‘Sonneteering for sale,’ hushes the gale,
dockyard workers treating the crates with care,
its contents strictly for the healthy and the hale,
knowing that if released into the air,
it would bend the ring around the cozy
sound four-hundred years into this year’s round,
boxing gloves gloving the blood, rosy
in the raw or tumultuous paw, sound
bouncing off sound seeking a ship to board,
drawing a navy onto the sea as sudden
and proud as if it were drawn from a sword,
mixing the water, the sky, the mud and
these, the boxes are left alone on the docks,
waiting for a ski-mask to come and pick the locks.
II.
What would the Russians want with a sonnet?
I don’t know, sir. It doesn’t blow anything up.
This is geopolitics run by an old lady in a bonnet.
Yes, sir. Shall I ring the kitchen for sup?
No, Simon. You’ve done enough for tonight.
Go home to your wife and your limousine.
Give a kiss to each: but: your wife, might
I suggest an article I published in this magazine?
I hope you don’t mind I used our real names:
I’m trying get thrown out of office,
and making my hope for dalliances plain
assures me of nothing but moral profits.
I’ll keep my eye on the situation.
For now, this train hasn’t left the station.
III.
If there’s danger, my surfboard hides a shark.
I wouldn’t want the creatures to sneak
up on me while I’m spying in the dark
of Hawaii’s tide and her mountain’s peaks,
the shore’s green rising and falling to make
me think I’m a drunk bird stumbling through all
directions of the air, seeking a path to slake
my General’s thirst for the facts: no stall,
all action, no delay. What’s the gadget
today? A Luddite for a spy? Oh, boy.
The growing to-do pile for a Piaget!
If only the Baron would flout his toys,
his nukes and servants of the undead,
I could go from shark to sea to land instead.
IV.
A ghost discovers that a ghost is ghost-
writing the former ghost’s autobiography.
His editor at the Washington Post
wants to know why this haberdashery.
“I give you six weeks leave, full pay, and you
decide this is gratitude’s true parade?
Where’s the book? The young cub learning to spew?
What have you to say? Que charade charade?
This is a problem, and this should be fixed.
My paper’s reputation is at stake.
If they learn a ghost is one of my tricks,
I’ll end up penniless in the park, a wraith.
Oh, I didn’t mean that. That came out wrong.
Forgive me. I’ve work to do. Move along.”
V.
Listen, honey. Listen, toots. Listen, love.
Tell the policeman what you saw this morning.
I was down out at the docks shooting a Dove
commercial, see? Just me and the forming
trenchcoats by the fence, Larry (the director),
the lighting guys, and the clock hadn’t struck
four when there was an explosion in sector
five, and our prop roosters began to cluck
like mad, and the cops rushed through our shoot
to arrest everyone in sight and see
if everyone was all right, the galoots,
all the while ignoring the boat at sea,
floating away one paddle at a time,
the larger act hiding the tinier crime.
VI.
General Yevushimber looked up at
the monitors, replaying the tape as
morning broke like an exhausted clam that
could snore through a circus’ razzmatazz,
the morning paper a moldy pancake
spreading itself thin across kept lawns,
all this making the General awake
to the past that popped into this the fawning
notes of an old Otis Redding song Pop
used to play on Sunday before they’d go
car-surfing on the Potomac shores, cops
letting us go when they saw the State Department’s logo.
So Walt, Pop, and I would begin the day.
No reason why we can’t see that in some way.
VII.
I choke the guard on shore with my knife, sand
muffling the screams and yelps; then: the silence.
The mansion’s crystal chandeliers shine bland,
the General’s orders suggesting violence.
I scuttle up the hill and, there, the window.
Nose above the sill. Victorian drawing
room, filled with seated tuxes (Zagat’s? “So-so.”)
pacing, pipe-wielding, and to maybe thaw in
or out the silence, I open it a bit,
and out come the words: “One of us in this
room is a cop.” “What?” “Ain’t that the pits.”
“Thirty years of theft should have led to bliss.”
“Have you robbed for that long, Chuck? Are you sure?
Shall we to our historian demure?”
VIII.
But before they do, a lady enters:
she is frocked with fox, two of them alive,
glaring, hoping the other will splinter
into the pot like self-defeating chives.
She says, “What are you doing in my house?”
“We’re robbing the place, M’am, but we just need
to settle something first.” “Egg. Now scram, louse.”
“Not so fast, boys. There’s still the guy whose creed
runs counter-clockwise to ours. We were just
going to consult our historian,
the one full of fake whiskey, quotes, and dust.
The present shall go moritarian
while the git tells us all about the past —
before the lady calls the cops. Speak fast.”
IX.
“Our outfit has been together a while,”
dragging a tome from his jacket lining,
“every since ‘Wall Street and the Crocodile,’”
all the bankers eaten not withstanding,
when Roger P. Portico and Simon
“The Simon” Simon met in the Upper
East Side, sat for tea, and discussed crime on
the highest levels before the cuppa
this and cuppa that were emptied out, night
speeding along like a Chinese Dragon
more on fire than usual, like a blight
running in reverse, the Welcome Wagon
powered by the internal monologues,
colors looking for frowning grays to flog.”
X.
“I suppose the point is, night on its way,
the two of them set to work: filching all
they came across: wallets, pooches, and quays,
some tossed from boats to pedestrian malls,
not quite knowing how to approach the shore,
the boat leaving Michael to drown, I’m told,
and more: overhearing where there’s a store-
house of ‘squinto’ Pintos in a foothold
out in the Meatpacking District, taking
them all and giving them to the world’s ants;
foot-level global warming finds them baking,
now, and the car crashes have got their pants
down around their ankles, knowing the need
to care for this problem — if not, to heed.
XI.
“What is British award show pablum like?
That just came to me now. Anyone know?
Simon Williams (from Upstair’s Downstairs)’s mic’
once picked up the immortal words, ‘Hello.
When the program was broadcast on the Beeb,
Yanks thought it was a documentary.’
Where was George Michael? Catherine Tate? Dweebs
like us would expect nothing less ord’nary
from a true-to-life TV show, just truth.
Maybe a dragon and a narrator,
but mostly honesty — from God’s lip’s! S’truth!
It’s true on both sides of the equator,
I bet. Now: where was I? Pig’s jumped the pen.
Let me describe the history again.”
XII.
The Baron was stabbed mid-heart attack
during this harangue of nonsense, purses
belonging to each all were poached, a lack
in lights led to stumbles, oaths, and curses,
heads knocked like unanswered doors into black,
unconscious, and when lights and kin came to:
perhaps send hounds after lost time to track,
Roger mutters, wetting his welt turned blue,
but neither is called for; neither needed:
the Lord snuck through the kitchen to surprise
the Lady. “My birthday,” she conceded
a welterweight fight of tears in the eyes.
Thief to thief to hidden cop the crowd turned.
The dog too large for a rolled-paper spurn.
XIII.
The Ghost had a talent for drinking in
that he could not physically imbibe drink,
taking the term heavyweight for a spin
to leave his fellow patrons in the sink,
so if drunks wanted to challenge a ghost,
it was their game to lose — from first to last,
the fedora-fond wraith deciding what most
required his attention and which to pass
on to those with hands in peanut dust,
thumb posturing as a Stonehenge column,
the yo-yo sway of sun from red to rust,
happy hour getting lost and solemn
in the 3 a.m. rush to crust the eyes
as cri-de-coeurs of hawks asterisk the sky.
XIV.
So the drinking came to bear at the bar
the ghost liked to frequent: his man’s
tie, here, filled with faces of the Tsars,
who introduced himself by the name Stan,
whose job was to sell excuses to those who
wanted to opt out of the jury pool
where he heard a case “for you, Mr. Boo,
why, even just the details make me drool.
Ever since Claudius’ flesh turned green,
Keats’ nightingale got a bullet through
its skull: we’ve pulled the curtain back to dream
and raised a wall-to-wall caterwaul, pew
pulpits hiding some cold mendacity.
(P.S. This sonnet isn’t the last of me.)
XV.
“To keep it short, my rant comes to this: some
self-interested spirits still think they
can skip morality’s dance card, the drum
and timbre of the times, and so their way
gives way to their way, and that’s fine. But my
real point: spirits use this as a cover,
a small band trying to do more than I
imagine, I imagine. Oh, brother.
If Wim Wenders hopped on a merry-go-
bender and spun out nothing but bastards
for the hour — you get the idea, Snow.
They want to outlast the past. Disaster.
They’re trying to deflower from beyond
a garden who thought the clouds long gone.”
XVI.
Poking through the books tickled out new treats:
that the ghosts gave Van Buren hair twenty feet
tall, that any aspiring athlete
had to remove their limbs — from head to cleats,
or, at least, that’s what the rule book had said,
a copy passed among all the writers,
leading some to scratch the hair off their heads.
This was not what they had wrote. The spider
seeking who had taken its web — and where.
Cities competed for distance despite pledged
dollars taking them straight to the cellar,
all bets off, all speculation unhedged.
A starting point in the constellation.
Orion’s Belt will drag them to the station.
XVII.
”Sure my heart’s been broken before. Screw you.”
“M’am, we were only asking if you want
a ride home. Besides, the cars are new.
Thought that might provide a welcome counter-current
to the events of the day. You mentioned
the boat and the getaway, the trenchies;
if anything else comes up, my extension
here at the station. Thanks, Frenchie.”
Door closed. Quietly behind the desk.
Flex the muscles of the mighty rolodex?
Do they still call it that? He’d have to check.
The accordion, bass, and the Tex-Mex
radio fuzzing across Petersburg square:
his patio. No real moment to spare.
XVIII.
“Am I really looking at penguins, George?”
“Keep rowing, Rowan. Row and don’t look
left or right, not at the polar bears, fjords,
or the penguin’s unearthly height. We took
the sonnets for a reason, one being
that money is always in season — look
out!” “I can’t drive the boat without seeing
what’s going on all about. Nature’s hook
could drag us offstage. This isn’t good-faith
ignorance. This is only ignorance,
and almost nothing more.” “Cash, I saith!”
“That’s it. I’m rowing ashore. Forbearance
kept me from saying it plain: we’re lost, fool,
and if we’re to survive, we’ll need some tools.”
XIX.
“But there isn’t a disco club for miles,”
George said, a smack of oar on the ol’ head,
soon frozen, left floating like a hair style
for people fond of accidents with beds,
boats, and unused portions of aircraft fields,
the rumbling coo of penguins blotting
out the sun, the blue, the white, the cold yield
hallucinations of horses trotting,
hats whipped by one hand like lassos, nostrils
flaring — or is it all a vision? Prelude
dropped from the cargo of the plane, kestrels
kippered out from a gunman’s attitude,
the scrunch and twitch of a thousand-yard stare
literally plucking birds out of the air.
XX.
Looking at the picture frame of the long-
lost love, which would be lost if she hadn’t
stole the frame, but whatever the damn song
will be tonight, thinking about Paddington
Station postcards lining the desk, pouring
out a glass for herself, wondering why
she spent a few years getting money, storing
up to vacation at a train station, sly
not the right word entering Frenchie’s thoughts,
but it was close enough: the brewing chai
wouldn’t tear her away from all thoughts fraught
with worry when she was standing by the trains,
hoping that she might find the picture frame.
XXI.
Stuart Kaminsky’s file had come up once
again, the Hollywood detective whose
most famous file had in lore been ensconced:
“Somebody had murdered a munchkin,” clues
piling up on Oz’s movie set just
so, and now it was on the copper’s desk,
the radio off, ready to go, bus
filling up with cops who look like Pete Best,
forgetting they had cars of their own, dragged
back by the Commish and sent to their cars
and copters and they turned the road to slag,
sending snow and beggar’s bullets upward,
pedestrians parallel to the pavement,
speedometers jostling against containment …
XXII.
… and as they tear around the corner, Cap’n
barks his orders over the ‘com: “Hey! Tom!
You and Pyotr go to the shipmen
down by the docks: tell them that there’s a bomb
in the shiphouse, so that they’ll clear on out
and you can eat well, and those that stick around
can help you board the boats, which will stoutly
seek out the four corners of the planet round
our boat-based prey.” “Nikolai! To L.A.
you’re to go — to that gotch-gutted piggie
Simon who works for a General Y — hey!
Watching where you’re walking! Mickey-
tumbling can’t compete with flying metal
blocks, however quickly the brake pedal …
XXIII.
… comes down. Martin? You’re to Olympic
Square in Chicager. Do your best to find
out why — after being so prolific
in asking for the Games, ‘tis now, ‘Never mind.’”
“But what does that have to do with the boat?”
“Everything is connected. Which reminds
me: after the Windy City, the gloats
will be sure to come: I want you to find
some drug busts to make up in Ottawa.”
“But: jurisdiction —” “So what? Your record
grows, no matter where you are, ja?”
“But what of international discord?”