....Collected Poems...of Wayne Noone
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_______________________________________________________ Nietzsche In Turin Nietzsche wore a brown suit. I see him in a brown suit of heavy wool and wonder did he act like other men in everydayness? Did he stand for instance leaning against a wall, say a brick wall, in Turin, toward the end of his life or the beginning of his ruin, holding himself in his hand and pissing between his worn brown shoes? Did he fumble with his buttons as he finished (I don't think they used zippers then), and as I came upon him in his brown suit would he look at me in a somewhat wistful way, perhaps embarrassed, and give a little wave, acknowledging the commonality of our despair? triumph of nihilism sal was complaining bout his busride to work how some retarded girl was sitting behind him talking on and on about her life how she dressed whether she brushed her teeth and sal turned around said who cares and this on his 57th birthday she just laughed and kept on talking I said that's nothing compared to what I go through here at 7:15 just trying to maintain have a cup of coffee but ol' john rolls in around 7:30 all crippled up moving around like someone shoved a pipe up his ass how ya doin' wayne where'd ya eat last night wanna look at the paper and so on till amy gets in non stop talking from the time she walks through the door like a godamn bluejay outside your window at 7 am on a weekend when all you want to do is sleep in John Sitting at his desk like he does, staring at his monitor desperate for conversation reminds me somehow of a big old snapping turtle sitting among the roots and snags and soft greens of the river bottom all still like, just a little air bubble slipping out now and then, waiting for a fish or bullfrog to skim by so he can clamp down with his big spiked jaws. Yawn I'll tell you if you listen about trackless lives vaporous and unclean lived out in cubicles in buildings cheaply built and ugly, already shattered, bombed out and empty while all the while occupied, filled with the flotsam of two millennia or at least the last twenty years which after all is the only time that matters and the emptiness all we have left, here, I'll talk about emptiness, about the empty sounds of spoons on plastic, of women desperately and incessantly scraping the bottoms of their yogurt cups and the blunted tapping of their keyboards forever and aimless, about the vapid chatter of the day, of concerns over dogs and children and refrigerators, news of the day latest child abduction, child abuse, sex scandal, sports team, I'll tell you of John, my cubemate, fried, so crippled a physician couldn't begin to heal him, staring for hours at a blank monitor, laughing to himself, he's a hoot, and there's a million more where he came from, who as I write this calls Darlene, whom he despises, to find out if she enjoyed her dinner at Emil's last night, and other calls, calls by a million Johns to a million Darlenes all pointless, all already gone. I'll tell you how, right now, at seven fifty-five a m if you walk down the carpeted aisle on this floor, in this building, or in every other building you will see pale faces staring, staring, their monitors lighting up their faces with expressions like those of children staring into a fire. But there is no fire, everything is cool, neutral, and we are no longer fire, we are cold, have lost our talent for pain, and even disease and death are gone, neutralized, having lost their glamour. And this no blessing. Let me tell you that if you're reading this you're a godamn fool because its too late, too late for you, too late for your children, too late for your sports team, the time for weeping was twenty or thirty years ago when Christ was alive and walked this sad earth when the wood was green and humans could still lick the salt from each others' faces, when there was still reason to scream when our screaming could be heard and warriors to listen, but now there is no apparatus for listening, just dead noise and the scraping and the calls and the information and all of it so jumbled and confused that in all seriousness I want to cry out to you help me let me be free of this somebody tell me this cannot be so this outrage just cannot be so but it is too late for that and a leveling has come over all. Inchoate Corruption in my vision tonight. After a dim yellow day cold slanted sunlight empty conversations, young women's faces ruddy with blood. Unlike decay, with its weary promise: sandblown pyramids, civilizations, corruption is current, wet. See the clean sheet of plastic on the bureau. Watch it bubble and erupt, blacken summon a sudden dark tumescence. Panicked I clutch myself, spasm. Something is looking in the window. At The Lantern Tavern an' he was talkin' about this guy Nietzsche how he said that truth was so hard you'd crack a tooth on it then kinda shifts gears says he remembered seein' And God Created Woman at a little moviehouse in Brooklyn when it first came out in '57 how she's pretty old now an' all she thinks about is her dogs but when she showed up on the screen all the guys got real quiet it was so quiet you could hear the crackle of the tobacco in your cigarette as you sucked it in feel the sweat rollin' down your arms so you had to shift around in your seat just to make it go away Mongoloid An unfortunate name no longer medically acceptable, considered an ethnic slur to certain Asian groups, it nonetheless captures the singular desolation of those twice blest with chromosome 21, such that when David boards the bus greeted with raucous gaiety, addressed in a voice reserved for children though he is at least 40 years of age, and questioned about his habits, his girlfriend, the intimates of his person, all questions designed to provide amusement for a bored and eager audience, even as he responds and acts the fool he is somehow far away, watching, watching as one without investiture in this place, finding his pedigree in some far off, cleaner world. Slide When I hit my mid thirties I came to a decision that I had reached some pinnacle of life, entering middle age and all that and felt obliged to act accordingly, recording in my mind the additional gray, the increasing aches and felt it further incumbent to dispense time earned advise to my cumulative lessers. Some ten years later I find it has nothing to do with realization or with any conscious awareness at all. It is like being poised on a crest. Dad took us fishing at Cannonsburg Lake. This was a long time ago, and I don't remember much except catching a few sunfish but I do recall this big concrete spillway and me and Jackie had worked our way halfway down the side where it was dry but the water ran thinly down the middle where it was slick with glossy moss. Dad and Uncle Jack were walking along the top and Dad slipped on the moss and came spiraling down the spillway on his back fingers futilely clawing for purchase like a revolving upturned turtle. Jackie and I no more than six or seven years old watching him hurl toward the drop-off pointed our fingers and laughed. July 1, 1863 There is no recollection, even knowing it wasn't so long ago. This is not the business of historians. Whitworth Rifle passes overhead. Sound of twelve pound Napoleons. Solid shot. Whitman said the real war wouldn't make the books. Because this is old blood, can only see the stains on the wood, brown stains like weeping. Screech of a Whitworth Rifle. Boom of twelve pounders. And the war came. Thud of lead striking flesh. Technology of the minnie ball. Economy of death. Two ridges or three. Grasshoppers, they continue to chew the wheat. Cicadas hum. Wheat browns in the July sun. Right now, back then there was a brief lull. Ten a.m. Sound of a clock on Schmucker's mantle. Everything is old now, like the blood. Mixed with water, dried to a stain. Like a hair found in the pages of an old book, or a picture of your grandmother, who knew someone who. Things have been written, but these passages are lifted from the earth. Last Night In The Heat Last night in the heat I dreamed there were teenagers dancing outside my window, the girls bare bellied and laughing, boys setting off firecrackers, and me in my undershorts, squatting behind the curtains with my pistol in my hand. Then later as dreams do there was this fellow standing beside my bed who was seven feet tall, clad in black drapery with a slouch hat on his head and whose face was worms. When I woke up it was Monday morning and you and I both know there really is no restitution, no sir. But when I was a kid I saw once on the ground a length of intestine that some dog or cat or other mid-sized mammal had somehow managed to pass. It lay glistening in the grass, and perhaps it's good that you and I should know that sentient beings are capable of such feats in the hope that we too may yet become free through expulsion of diseased or corrupted parts of ourselves, voidance of cancerous bowel, expectoration of lung, vomiting forth sections of jaundiced liver, and doing likewise with all the senseless blunders of our lives. Isn't that what the prophets tell us happens in heaven, how God, taking us in His hands like fruit gone brown, twists away our flesh and imperfections revealing a crusted shell and even that splits asunder finding the white seed within, which if you've tasted it, (you should taste it) is very bitter yet oh so very smooth. On To Page 7 .............. Return To Other Poets This site sponsered by 
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