To Lose & to Pretend: poems
by
Chris O. Cook
To Lose & to Pretend, Copyright © 2010 Chris O. Cook, Brooklyn Arts Press
Published by Brooklyn Arts Press, LLC in e-book format at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition, License Notes: No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means existing or to be developed in the future without written consent by the publisher.
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Praise for To Lose & to Pretend
“Chris O. Cook’s To Lose & to Pretend is evidence of a fine mind at work, a collection of poems that never settles for the obvious. His work probes the apathy and alienation of his generation, wielding poetics like a cudgel to extract the essential from the incoherence of pop culture vapidity that we have accepted as our metaphor. Startlingly honest, unafraid of humor, these poems force you to sit down and take notice.” -Srinivas Cheeni Rao, author of In Hanuman’s Hands
“The kaleidoscope of could have-would have-should have in Chris Cook’s poetry both dazzles and amazes, taking the reader on a journey into the buzz of pop culture and the silence left in its wake. Anything is possible in these poems, and yet there is an awareness of the limitations of the world, particularly the world that is artificially constructed. With the scope of Ginsberg and the sensibility of the Romantics, Cook’s poems are a place where listening to the rain counts as conversation, and the language eclipses the grating like rising dough.” -Megan Johnson, author of The Waiting, winner of the 2004 Iowa Poetry Prize
“Chris Cook is a true Original, in that he is a Classic.” -Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Red Bird, The Commandrine and Other Poems, and Nylund, the Sarcographer
Table of Contents
Praise for To Lose & to Pretend
God as a Thing, or Whatever It Is
Beginning with a Line from Mitch Hedberg
Pretending You’ve Got a Sliver
Omigod It Was So Funny We Were Like Cracking Up
It Has to Be Keeks So It Will Rhyme with Cheeks
Will Run Like Rabbits for Food
Last Thanksgiving before Turning Twenty-Four
Last Thanksgiving before Turning Twenty-Seven
How My Memory Got in My Pajamas
Fun for All, the Children Call
I Was Like, Don’t Waste Your Match
Ending with a Line from the Victoria’s Secret Catalogue
God as a Thing, or Whatever It Is
Ever since I stopped believing in God
I’ve been pretending I was in a movie.
Early in the morning doesn’t feel like it in July,
with the empty beer cans storying the porch
& spent bottlerockets dry-humping the gutters.
Jobs are retarded. The hipster merch-girl at the midnight show
in black jeans & white heels argued that corsetiere refers
to the corset-wearer, not the maker. Maybe it’s the only thing
where the wearing is harder. Well, that & Poetry—
which means you’re a Poet too if you got this far.
You may already be feeling your organs start to shift.
Even though I can prove God has no gender
I’ll still fantasize about teachers for the rest of my life.
You run out of underwear fast when you help people move.
You find out what Poetry isn’t: You run through
the high-school diary, the college lecture, the grad-school puzzle—
then for a few years it feels like rain every Sunday.
There’s no article of men’s clothing that makes women horny by itself.
Poetry makes women horny but God doesn’t. Suck it, God.
When you move somewhere, you go to bars alone.
The flirtatiously smug empath with the bob near the papasan
took her time in late Summer comparing my soul to the age
when she’d wrap, to the light of one unshaded lamp, herself
in garbage sacks, pretending they were leather.
Parties are like involuntary debates over belief in talent.
It’s time I started dealing with the fact I won’t be famous.
When you see me, apologize. I’ll apologize back.
Faith is the easiest thing in the world
not to have, so cut it out already. Get to the point
where the language eclipses the grating like rising dough;
where the Poem is a grey cat that acts like it wants to be petted
but doesn’t. Gangster-flip an oversized coin skewed guilt & shame.
Skim it down your culture like a dimmed Hall of Fishes.
Wait for it to once-around & back up your spine.
Girls imagine wearing things & boys imagine touching them,
only most things aren’t being touched most of the time.
When Edna Millay was 24 she cut herself with a stage
knife somehow over the heart in Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows,
then later became like a story someone tells about how
there used to be a rosebush in some certain place.
There are more Good Nerds in the world than Evil Nerds,
& that’s why Evil will one morning lie buried
like broken toy guns beneath snow & sawdust.
I can get away with the word heartbreaking
because I used to cut myself making paper wizard hats
with a whoop-jug, before passing through the hedgerows
to seek out the other gifted children.
The first was Rufus, deadliest on the seaboard with a crayon
but only if you cooperated. He had a real record player.
The last was also Rufus. He retired undefeated
to a mysterious island. Every Sunday
he sends a few jokes I never get. If the world were my dream
people would worship waterslides & chill with rhinos.
You wanna die? Simple. Put on a Star
Wars movie & do a shot every time something comes
across as a double entendre. I want to know
how old you have to be to start calling people “son,”
because the world isn’t anyone’s dream.
Whenever it’s a month, I’m amazed it’s that month
& it’s, like, always a month.
Oh World, are you onto something or on something?
Oh World, if you’ve got questions, we’ve got dancers!
World, the thing about a whoop-jug is,
we’re bound to brim it with what we love.
Oh & World…when I save you, there’ll be this one part
where I jump a bridge in a speedboat. It’s gonna be so cool.
Before anything else, I’m going to need you
to calm down. That was breakfast in the Candle District,
sun across a grating, three girls with runner calves
calling Thomas Jefferson a hottie. The trick
is to compete at not playing.
Either
there’s something to everything, or most things are nothing,
so spare me your “real” problems. The trick is to lose
so much you never lose. I’m not denying friction—
the ’90s kids are finding cares, but then still dye our hair
& lie down in the kitchen. You’re too good for this
& you’re too good for that. I love you with all my heart.
This past Summer people drove white cars around like sex
didn’t sell. I bet you noticed. I bet you save champagne foil
until there’s nowt to make from it but knives.
The pizza guy turned out to be semi-retarded
& asked if we could talk about the Bible
when he arrived in the rain. It was perfect.
Once every September, at dusk, on Hole #7
of the Oak Brook disc-golf course, the sun sits blinding
at the head of the gauntlet of pine trees perfectly
while dishwater blondes perch like Vargas girls
in the needle-duff, taking pictures of large mushrooms
& laughing in accents that are perfectly hard to place.
(When someone says “It was just too perfect”
about something funny, the funny thing is that
if it was funny, that means it wasn’t perfect.)
God is either perfect or looking for an excuse to kill.
It was raining on pizza day, but it wasn’t raining
on a lot of other days when nothing happened,
& once, you happened—having been up ’til then
your own gauntlet, Bible, camera.
When you love someone like I love you,
listening to the rain counts as conversation.
It’s not that I don’t “get” your untouched canvas—
I get it, but it sucks. While mean, jack in the bungle,
we’re up all hours drawing girls sewn up in ivy;
can’t stop wishing they’d roller the room red.
You know who “they” are—in that dream where I’m Napoleon,
they make me fill out a report, in triplicate. Hell,
I’ve heard the soldiers’ horror stories about having to shoot
the third bear to enter the bar, because he was strapped with a punchline,
& sure, I gave your cork-wedged girlfriend dexedrine
to make out with another chick, but check this thing:
If you’re a formalist, my presence was immaterial;
If you’re angry you’re po-mo & must leave this villa.
Kepler was impressed that Brahe had his own castle.
Brahe was impressed that Kepler could play “Twenty Flight Rock.”
The “blue van” was a myth, but that dream where I’m Hamlet
except the audience has it memorized & yells over me
was real—a real dream. It’s now officially a moral obligation to hate
people with talent. If I’d had the slightest idea that Girls
Gone Wild was a thing you could invent, I’d have invented it—
but, you know, nice. Is this every struggle ever?
Mike says that guy’s always got his dick out, you know?
The coolest one is the next one who leaves.
Beginning with a Line from Mitch Hedberg
But isn’t every picture of you a picture
of you when you were younger? At Smith & 9th
I thought the shredded newspaper was a dead pigeon
until the wind took it. Murder, Words, & Well
are all spoken 3 times in a row in Hamlet,
a little charm for the inexorable.
I didn’t know
that deadly nightshade grew in Brooklyn, up trellises—
the flowers laid out like the universe dying a heat-death,
even curved a little like time. Susan bought me
a root beer & brought me to Prospect Park. That morning,
from Danny’s place in Greenpoint, I’d walked out to buy a towel
& realized there aren’t many places you can buy a towel.
All in all, Fall felt like there was no such thing
as temperature.
No-one really ever asked for any of it.
No two people believe they’re in the same story.
A student first asked me the opening question
of this poem. It made me laugh all day.
Almost nothing had made me laugh since I’d gotten back
from New York, the Free Radicals reading at St. Mark’s Church
with its flat graves. The editrix was tall & pale.
A lot of tall, pale girls write Poetry. I like
trains, Hamlet, trees, baths, Fall, tall pale girls, & saying editrix.
That’s about everything. My other student is a dancer,
but everyone expects comedy because he’s a boy.
I.
Were Long Island some guy his purposeful head
would bend him. His crook’d & unallied
legs would serve him a dry limp. Non-ironically,
Walt Whitman Mall is where his heart would be.
It’s Fall as much as any other season—
the Cross Island Parkway, its joggers & green signs
unfamous enough for a Beginning Credits; a maze
that puns on the future passive form of praise.
Maybe I got so lost I overlapped
the Top 40 gender wars; their Omigod boys/girls suck….
It was bacaneggancheesawpepakechup
while drifting between a breakdown & a nap:
It was eight years of edits, with all the reasons
only mine in the light of advance reports of you.
What we’ll never know’s whether I was ever in the Museum
while you were in the Museum too, with everyone’s puffy coats
being held by everyone’s Mother—
every kiss in the Museum deserves another.
II.
Malls are discussed earnestly there, their lit-up fountains
full of pennies, green-striped menthol butts, & faked tears.
At night the trip is as eyes & horizon
as a book jacket backwards in the window
of a bus you think you’ve been on once before. The distances
of completely hypothetical places like Texas
resound in their place softly,
crisp as leafcrumbs in a sweater on a college tour.
Somehow back there it all ends up
in a diner at three or four. Sometimes
the lights all around turn red & when
I get it together I can will you there—
just you and me, or you and me & more.
I can’t wait to teach you to play the guitar!
for how then, from a room with a very old rug,
high ceilings, & which smells like books behind glass
the lingering dull approximate “E”
of your placing it down will precede the click of you
into the kitchen, where I’ll leave half my drink:
The long light at last, with all the hot reasons of the Zoo.
III.
One was a butterfly choker & the MoMA’s wrath—
a stretch of Jericho, with its sharp grass
diving towards Westbury all motels—
a gnattish halogen knell
when plaid skirts the floor for all that.
& awe, that.
One sixteen, barefeet, twang-twang the nodding
of an early June—“not there yet” in between
me & the out-of-touch mainstream of the Moon.
Were they all you, already set? Whose worn sandals
& summersway I dogged
into that little bookstore? The one in Cape May?
The one that snuck my Byron-cherry? Was it you
I chased through the forest to
the sitting-rocks river behind the old seminary?
How much I thought you dressed like you should be!
jacked up & wisping like soft focus circa 1983.
It was a hale history of porch-perfected clothes.
A dust-gravity screechlaugh & a knee.
A finger-painting about how an engine works.
It was ash perched but no Beauty.
My hair was always getting caught in my teeth
& the clothes I hated never got returned.
I never could decide on a tattoo
so men said openly that the angels would sleep if I burned.
IV.
The lock-broke field-shade house was,
& slowly bursting, summerly so,
charsticked to a “we will never die” expanse.
Next slide please: Cheering children on the tram!
for the animal who would not rather sleep & emerges
from the hidden home for a little show.
I was handed a poor poem once with flowers
in the margins blear. That
was that & then it was all revisited
in a meadow & all her chatty friends
begged the European Boy of the Hour
to say: “It is beautiful here.”
I have been called from many truths by girls;
I have been sent to many principles by women.
I’ve never excelled at sports;
I’ve never had exactly what you would call
clean linen.
You’ve spurred me you might say one day
away from all of it—
the acquired traits; the retrograde motion.
Imagine the land that could support everything.
Imagine the least relevant part of the ocean.
V.
So through this lack entire, it was by a seaside rash
of bluffing sunlight that just now I thought—
past the diners mile on mile—
to have seen you woven just above the dash.
Raise your hand if you fancy a step out of time,
in the way that pages yellow:
In the way that waves attack island prisons,
just so.
—for Camille Paglia
It’s only safer to be feared than loved
if you’re the guy in charge. For everyone else
it pretty much sucks, especially if the guy
in charge fears you. A little girl in pigtails
is just a girl, but a grown woman in pigtails
is sexy. And by the way, I’m wearing
blue contact lenses. Well, how were you to know
I was wearing blue contacts if I didn’t tell you?
“Don’t Worry Baby” by the Beach Boys is
not actually about cars, because the sentiment
preceded cars, although the sound did not.
Jocks, although coordinated, have trouble dancing
because dance seeks to invite capture
rather than evade it. That’s why they dance with beers
& always dance up to you from behind—
what’s on your ass is what’s about your eyes.
The authentic madman doesn’t need beer to do
what others need it to. Needing its help neither
for sex nor violence, he can drink alone.
But nobody can drink until he melts.
For this, we all need songs about the water
but always drive there racing whatever we have
against whatever we want—bodies are bins
that help the art to hold the water in,
as are the boys (and that’s as Chinese as
this poem will get, despite theporcelain
that turns up in most other poems these days,
with grandmothers, or chiaroscuro things).
We worry, whether skimming over waves
or other people—but art is to swim,
& after swimming, gaze before we drown
up at the A-side, at “I Get Around.”
Once my uncle who stands funny asked me if a million
was a lot. I told him numbers, like sadness or skyscrapers,
are only big or small by what you put next to them.
Approximately one-sixth of the people I invited
to my Midsummer Night’s Dream Party actually showed up—
but that would have been enough if they were dancing.
Fucking over & again one day becomes Winter,
closer but more oblique the light & heat. In a flowy
magenta skirt a girl is worth six girls. You hear inordinately
as an adverb, but hardly inordinate as straight-up adjective.
If my heart exploded right now this would be my death poem.
Dickinson made it to one poem less than 1,776.
People think stuff’s in the Iliad that’s actually in the Odyssey,
& that stuff’s in the Bible that’s not in anything.
People want there to be beginnings & endings,
& want numbers to mean things all by themselves.
A Master told me Poetry is about beginnings & endings
& that people who like middles should write fiction.
I once tricked a kid named Adam into believing they’d discovered
a new number, & that we were going to have to change math.
I wonder who he thoughtthey were.
One day machines will write music.
“I love you” just means “I forgive you for not being perfect,”
& you should never forgive anyone for not being perfect.
There’s nothing new to say about being alone
until you find a new way of being alone,
in which case, you’re not. A cliché is a cross
between a medal & a bug in your mouth.
I’ve a stitch from booking after fake boy pain.
I knew this guy who was obsessed with Elvis
because Elvis bit off one of his legs in 1976.
He told me, “Some things best take the shapes of jokes
but aren’t lies.” I told him if a girl has a tattoo
it means she takes it in the butt. He said, Dammit.
Poems are the jokes you don’t laugh at until Heaven
would be a good line if there were such a place,
like how there was this one field with a big tower
with a flashing red light, where girls in sweaters liked
to sing & run fast. Sometimes there was a moon.
The Poetess with the watercolor mouth to whom
I sometimes write e-mails full of facts about animals
has a poem called “There Is No Such Thing As Skill.”
I forced 100 random people to write poems
with that title, & some were way better than others.
Many of the poems were elegies about turning 30.
I called it new & silly. They said, “In all fairness,
it never meant failure before.” I said Dammit.
I pretended to leave the room. People who pretend
to leave the room sometimes yell “I’m done.”
Hallowe’en 2004
“And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?”
—W. B. Yeats
The Drama Teacher saysyou can’t show thinking.
He only meansit is impossible.
The class divides—half think it is a rule.
The ablest of the Idiots stands & laughs.
He screams: If we show thought, what can he do?
The principals are anger & direction.
The Idiot King is an arresting director.
The Drama Teacher knows the risk of adding actors.
He must lecture. He mustn’t lecture. The anger.
The anger. The stage is overrun.
The Ghost Light is laughed at by everyone.
The Arch holds all its sharpness at its center.
The Arch puts all its weight onto its difference.
He cries No more lectures who feels the roots of lectures.
He will bring the class through the Arch, walking beside them.
He cries No more lectures who displays the wounds of lectures.
He will chain the class to an Arch several behind them.
The chains are maddening; the options, more so.
He & many, therefore, come to praise the chains.
The chains come to do nothing but be heavy.
The chains aren’t even sure just whom they’re on.
The chains areonly following orders.
The Arch casts a shadow longer than the Field beyond.
He never has to not sleep in the Shadow.
He begins to swear the Sun will kill us all.
The complete clock of Arches is the Dome.
The first Domes had an oculus at the center.
The strength was all pointed at the empty space.
He points his strength at Words & calls it God.
The Genius invented God to restrain the Powerful.
He wrapped the Sword in Truth & the Sword bent.
The Idiot embraced God to humble the Genius.
He tripped Truth with Truth’s footprints by accident.
The is the things that were already there.
He are the many ways of finding them.
He finds that every King is a King’s Mask.
He believes something important happens when we laugh.
He feels some things shouldn’t count as reasons.
He tries to find ways to show his thinking.
The Moon is enormous & the land is flat.
The fires from town make the sky brighter.
The smoke from town makes the sky darker.
The museums are burning while the class sings love songs.
He lets his heart say something is cataclysmically wrong.
He lets his brain arrange the Stars into an Archer.
The singing is like fighting, which shouldn’t be.
He clutches with both hands his pure meat heart.
He groans & is unable to lift his head.
The head is kept by something from falling also.
How many stories are the story of one room?
You walked past that open door, it seemed, one time
for every brother your sure thing would run through,
nodding to everyone else at the party & looking
more suspicious at each go, until....
They say whatever she knows, it’s more, but maybe
no one’s ever counting from the same place.
That’s not—that’s never—to say she isn’t Helen;
I mean, look at her: None of it seems
to take any effort, except from everyone else.
She’s scoffing at something in that issue of
Mediterranean, folded like there’s nothing in it to save.
Should you ask? You never ask yourself the right questions,
but maybe this is easier. Maybe she’s Helen, or the space
is the space surrounding Helen. Maybe just q,
and if q is true it means some things you’ve done
in the past could have been a whole lot easier.
Therefore, q can’t be true. You’ll have the known world
in one room, if you know what I mean. Then there’s Time.
What’re you gonna stand somewhere, pointing at one room?
Every New Great Hall is a Long Dark Laugh—
it’s always coming up through everyone’s feet.
Do you want to help, or feel righteous as a blank page?
Historian! Feminist! Shaker-on-horses! You’ll never.
Road sign seen in Sparta: PUTTING SIGNS IN POEMS IS GETTING OLD.
She forgets to turn in the timesheet for being Helen
whenever you start to feel like yourself again:
A smartass calling himself Alexandros
whenever there’s enough people in the one room.
Either seeing yourself as others can’t is not a talent
or all of this is bound to work out swimmingly.
So you had one of those moments on the stairs,
leaning & sort of trying to break the banister
because you remembered that thing from 4th grade again—
but it doesn’t mean we have to cue the music.
What do you claim you can see in the eyes, kid?
Anger? Math? Conflict is cooperation—relax.
How she’s sitting is no accident. You can name lots
of accidents, but also lots of things that aren’t.
It’s tomorrow. Hold the noises & the voices in one room.