The
Rat's Nest
poetry
by Mickey Cesar
e-mail: mikkirat@sunflower.com
[updated
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010]
INTRODUCTORY
NOTE FOR WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1ST, 2010
Freedom
is a joy beyond words.
Here are recent poems,
unedited, with the
usual caveat:
find enclosed some gems, some trash.
So it goes. Enjoy or
don't.
AUGUST
POETRY
august
lightning.
Lydia
was
struck by lightning
at an early age, at a picnic.
Her
aunts and cousins witnessed
the sudden slowness of her hair and
limbs
scorched, yet untouched. The bolt
tickled her and
struck six feet under,
leaving her
unscarred.
They never
saw the charge
she developed, but they felt it
at inopportune
moments
in the fillings in their teeth,
in the heat that her
shame
released.
She has since
been a brush-fire
lapping
the edge of asphalt in a stiff breeze,
and she
prays
for rain.
produce
and Arcor strawberries
The
sickly sheen of grapefruit skin:
the fat man who found me
at
fifteen, wandering the late streets
with a head full of God and
coffee –
took me camping.
Everything sticks to
me.
seventeen
places you might be
Walking
home from work, on the phone
in your silent kitchen, eating
Chinese
on the road to Denver, almost dead
at your supervisor’s
desk, mascaraed, ready to quit
bent over the gearshift, sucking
cock eastbound 23rd Street
angry almost anywhere
glued to a
booth by the dance floor, around the corner from the ATM
scribbling
on napkins and planning revenge at a dirty table in the food
court
holding your breath on a humid evening while cicadas die,
while you sweat
on the beach, vacation, anxious
whispering
naked in a stranger’s bed
sleepy at work, three
p.m.
twelve-step meeting, basement, First Presbyterian Church
laid
over in L.A., waiting for a plane
silent at your grandmother’s
funeral
reading magazines at the clinic
nauseous in a
house
that
looks best on fire.
amputation
Sweet
syrup will not assist
in this surgery. It simply
has to
be done, the left hand
gone green. Instead, sterilize the
wrist
with whiskey, dip the blade into the tumbler
too.
Nevermind the trembling
which shivers along the serration
as it
touches the tendon between
ulna and fifth metacarpal.
As it
rests on your skin, cold and considering
this moment’s
inevitabilities, recall
all the other, smaller extremities
you
have lost to rot: the tips,
the limbs, the unneeded organs.
It
is easy once you’ve begun
cutting bloody to the bone,
easy
snap of cartilage, easy
living with a painful stump.
soon
Can
you
can you please
help me
help me fill this
with
anything. Scream if you will.
Smile, kiss me, fuck me
yell
or break my teeth.
The edges are so empty.
big
daddy said it best
“How
are you?”
How
are you?
How
am I?
What exactly is
that
supposed to mean? Is
that
how I have been since the last time,
or what? or
something more like
how have I been since you ran out
screaming,
how I have been since
I smashed your TV, or how I have
been in
the last five minutes?
This is some shit. And after all
this,
after all the deceptions and accusations
and the
soul-ripping shit that is –
oh, God
it’s just so goddamn boring and pedestrian,
infidelity is, and anyone who says
they never lived it
is a liar or a fool –
after all that crap,
you just sit
down and ask
the most intimate question of
all.
symposia
At
dinner with professors,
we pretend to have read
each other in
detail.
The lasagna is monstrous, the waitress
shapely and
efficient.
The department covers the tip.
direct
to video
After
unvarnished threats, we present to you
scenes of upcoming
releases.
We have seen fit to include
terror, explosions, and
High Definition bodies
both wet-oiled and quartered. You
must
digest each moment carefully. If you leave the
room,
hit Pause. Nothing else is required.
Grab a snack
if you can. The deception
resumes: just press Play.

“The
pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the
future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” ~ Franz
Kafka
JULY
POETRY
the
backs of cabinets
And
what if we did? Would
the sky split open like an overripe
fruit,
showering us with sour juice? Would
our trembling
breath burst forth so
explosively that we need fear an
almost
universal response?
The violence we keep in dark
cupboards
makes spoons and forks shiver in their beds,
makes
the dishes edgy, yet the strangest dreams
repeated have a way of
coming
manifest by daylight, or being drawn up
from the tiles
by the moon outside.
off
Water Street
You
come to this by cobblestones
with your shoes unlaced, your
back
braiding like the telephone lines,
the laundry which
twists in the wind
above your head. At the landing, your key
slams home
and you go in, for a moment
relieved of the crippled
criminals and vile children on the street,
covered by the dull
mist of early sunset
Morecambe Bay. You ache in your
extremities
but unload the groceries, your cabinets
nodding
their thin assent; when you
consider a cigarette (Royals, Kings,
five pounds ten at Sainsbury’s)
you risk coming unhinged.
This
empty flat which echoes, hissed
steam-heat streaked
windows
is not what you planned, but you
light your cigarette
from the stove, and know
the ghosts you brought with you
are
what make this strange place home.
expecting
a different result
On
the first day, God created skyscrapers
and highways to lead to
the suburbs.
He created air-conditioning, and the suffering
of
dogs locked in basements, dogs which waited
days for steps on the
stairs. On Day Two,
amusements, unstaffed carnivals, swaying
tents,
empty cages and trailers. On the third day
He created
insects to sting and shrink-wrapping.
Day Four was mostly spent
in marketing, the
creation of need and disappointment, the
perfection of anti-lock brake systems and
automatic
transmissions. On the Fifth Day He made
mankind, Republicans,
obesity, ranch dressing, babies
stretch fabrics, strip malls,
strippers and whiskey, drums
and pigeons to eat abandoned French
fries in parking lots
and shit them out again. On the Sixth Day
He created florescent lights, cubicles, and flimsy sandals
to
swish the tiles of retirement home halls.
On the Seventh Day He
cast out Lucifer, parceled the earth, granted
zoned, defended,
bordered, subdivided, exiled and
fenced the rest.
it’s
time, mister
I
have come to burn your house down.
It is nothing too personal;
remember
to think of it as a rite of passage, the way
your eyes
water, the sound of timbers
cracking a mad symphony, the
gorgeous
precipitation of the drapes your mother made
sifting
down the evening makes you
human. I come
with petroleum,
propane, styrofoam, assorted
flints and striking instruments
attached to
my belt, huffing asthmatic. My shoes
are new
and well-polished. God is a camera,
my friend, a vast
unpublished collection of
uncollected photographs; soon, I will
find your page
and paste you delicately into it,
your edges
cured.
day
one at the new hotel
It
seems we each seek
some final destination, but travel
willfully
forgetting that none such exists.
It is as if we continually
arrive
and rediscover the books we had thought we packed
were
not in the bag, and the air here
thicker than we imagined.
We are
manuscripts brimmed with words
we delicately spelled and
defined to the nth degree
of accuracy but never uttered aloud for
fear
our unreliable tongues would mangle them.
There are
always other skins we would rather be in.
practice
and ritual
Frank
recalls those cylinders, those
undisgorged gods of the
tundra
silent and uncorroded beneath the Sand Hills of
Nebraska.
About the bird-blind, the litter of a sudden
and
relaxing violence – shells, bottles
other canisters –
lay testimony to strange movements
at the border, helicopters,
unforeseen
developments in the cities which bring
alien spices
to market. There is a patience,
a method to the hunt.
He
makes fresco of the mud, sure his skin
is resilient, and will not
betray him.
His shotgun glistens.
Like our forefathers
he
remains alert
for intruders,
comforted
well-blued
safe
and silent.
on
liberty and law
The
blank lightning of the cellphone tower
in Hospers, Iowa,
convulses midnight clouds,
the misted highway. Just before the
half-moon
hung itself, a jackrabbit danced the tarantella
between yellow lines, not yet
sacrificed to the gods of
asphalt.
You are still asleep in the passenger seat.
The
morning finds itself eight-hundred miles
away and aching, having
escaped
toward silences. The day brings jigsaw and coffee,
small
explosions, and a girl still young enough
to flutter at the
novelty of being seen
in sunglasses and little else.
yet
another riff on WCW
Forgive
me.
I sold a pair of your unwashed underwear
to the old man
at the laundromat,
but it paid for the wash
and
a six-pack.

“Human
time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line.
That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for
repetition.”
~ from The
Unbearable Lightness of Being
by
Milan Kundera
JUNE
POETRY
gulls
and other seabirds
Sarah
told me one time
that an oasis is violent, an island
excellent
when shipwrecked. She told me
about the cat that slept on the
fantail,
slaughtering gulls eight times around the world.
She
heard this story
from the grizzled tom in person
so she
believed him, as should I
old intimate friend
lost in the
sand.
undertow
We
talked about it, and arrived
at a truce between our nerves and
bones.
Jellyfish littered the mouth of
the Indian River, held
sway over the boundaries
of salt water and fresh, lined the
bay
and beach while we searched for manatee.
On the strand we
sat
among rocks and moss, examining
sand and shells for omens,
portents
of unabridged futures rolling out with the tide
but
found the curls and rills
indecipherable. Is it not enough
that we
swim some times, that our fins and scales
fit so
nicely, and glisten together
as the sun makes the water coruscate,
or must we
constantly alter our skin to better fit
the clothes
that we left in the city?
Let us negotiate nothing:
let us slip
into the depths, and await
the tooth, the tentacle, the things
that reach
for our toes.
dead
letter office
I
recall she arrived late, smudged
mishandled and beset
by
multiple postmarks. She lay
on my coffeetable,
poorly
bundled between coupons for
home furnishings, oil
changes, lay
orphaned, her young edges creased.
I had been
long preoccupied
with debt and reparation,
sporadically
economizing and rebending staples;
she lay nearly
lost among
the colorful demands near my futon,
the beer bottles
and cigarette butts,
yet I was struck by two words
in red ink:
Open Me.
I recall reaching for the blade
but of the next
day, nearly nothing
save an extra forty sent
to turn back on
the electricity,
the rest of my check
for rent.
outbursts
We
each are like the priest’s parrot,
the ill-bred legacy of a
poor tenant
squawking “cocksucker!” and “goddamn!”
at
each inopportunity. We daily see
the anarchist in his
cubicle,
the letch at the altar
mumbling marriage vows, the
felon
patient at the counter
clutching twenties to pay
the
electric bill, and imagine
we are made of sterner stuff until
we
humbled are withdrawn from the priest’s freezer
asking:
“what
did the chicken do?”
short
missive to the brunette prancing into the coffeeshop bathroom
Jesus
Christ, that white dress
could power Las Vegas. Tone it down
or
go naked. Passersby
occasionally have cardiac conditions,
young
woman: either change
out of that little number, or remove it.
I
give you until noon.
dark-eyed
promiscuous
The
sun, strong sugar
has driven us up from damp beds.
We stretch
toward each other, leave
our empty graves to blackbirds.
Flush
with color, we touch
and spread ourselves to the wind.
We
kiss, and disintegrate
our last tastes lost
on a thousand
tongues.
the
deposition of mister brown
The
clock on the nightstand
reads two-twenty. We lay
in sweat
and blankets, overnight
incorporate alien rhythms into our
bodies.
This light leaks into our skin,
our breathing
disrupted.
There is not room enough
for each species in a
single evening.
We cannot sleep.
the
cut
Breathe.
You must
despite the clumsy surgery
breathe. Your guts
filled up
a dozen jars with
the bile and pus of every evil
you
have ever committed
or imagined. The syringe lay
beside
your severed skin, its
anesthetic leaking. The
incision
gapes between your clutching fingers,
your intestines
open. Think
nothing of the knife, but only of
the toads
which swarmed the creek
when you were a child
with cold eyes.
and
a note on the door
A
rotted sponge in a bucket.
Paint chips, a peanut lodged
between
baseboard and carpet,
cat hairs which drifted miraculous
to
cling on stuccoed ceiling.
Trash-can liners, a nail in the
paneling
at eye-level. Remnants of toothpaste on
the
underside of the faucet, a plastic tray
in the freezer. A
can of Vienna Sausage
in the hallway closet, but no
utensils,
no
dishes, no
electricity, but in the uncirculated air
of
the bedroom, a hunger
which lingers
unfilled.
cells
Dust-covered,
loosely-bound sentences
trail through pages, barred by thin blue
lines.
There are razors here, knives and endless
repetition,
fine evidence expecting
a different ending. Here, a
drink
then a toilet. Here, a rusted spring from a
mattress
undone, then guard towers, heavy-handed
security.
We leave these things on
second-hand shelves, walk out
into
unfamiliar worlds
with the combs and wallets
we arrived with.
VANISHING
POINT
54
poems, with artwork by Alexis Cullerton available at:
Prospero's
Books 1800 West 39th, Kansas City, MO
Raven
Bookstore 6 East 7th Street, Lawrence, KS
KU Bookstore 1301
Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS
and, of course, through
Amazon.com

“Like
all pure creatures, cats are practical.” ~ William S. Burroughs
PISS
OFF NO PROPHETS: EXCERPT FROM II KINGS 2:23-25
23
And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the
way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked
him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.
24 And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the
name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood,
and tare forty and two children of them. 25 And he went from thence
to Mount Carmel, and from thence he returned to Samaria.
OTHERS
LOST:
Bronze
Conduits poetry by Julianne Buchsbaum, author of Slowly,
Slowly, Horses
and
A
Little Night Comes
Mitzvah
poems and random niftiness from Robert J. Baumann
My
Favorite Barista Michaela on Lawrence.com and blogspot
OTHER
MICKEY SCHTUFF:
feature
in Present
Magazine July 2007
interview with four other soldier/poets
from WarNewsRadio
May 2007
interview with Bill Radke of Minnesota Public Radio
Weekend
America June 2007
write-up on the book release from the
Lawrence
Journal-World January 2005
interview with Laura Spencer of
KCUR-FM
Kansas City January 2005
OLD
AUDIO POEMS:
spearmint
tea, tracks, and trestles
aurora
borealis
living
rain
the
psalms of wasps
VIDEOS:
lindsey
& the f-bomb
natalie
3:28
PAINTINGS:

OTHER
FAVES:
Prospero's
Books used books, local poetry & events, and UnHoly Day
Press
Flutter
Poetry Journal
Glenda Rolle
artwork
Rough
Traces by Jason Wesco (review)
Church
of the Subgenius
and, of course, the amazing and talented
Josie
Wrath

The
amazing Alexander Nevsky
(April 15th, 1999 – September 4th,
2009)

“The
incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles... is to live in
company with a memory that serves no purpose.”
~ Albert
Camus
increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus
(Here
are recent poems, unedited, with the usual caveat:
find enclosed
some gems, some trash. So it goes.
Enjoy or don't.)
google
search schtuff: my bands the Exploding Rodents 1985 bass/vocals
(Lawrence, KS), The Technicians 1986-1987 (Omaha), The Press
1987-1989 (Omaha), the Drain Babies (Lawrence) 2003, 93.7 FM KRCK DJ
1988-1989, US Navy Data Systems Technician CSTSC Mare Island class
89022 USS Scott (DDG-995) 1991-1995 Kansas University McCollum Hall
1983 English Lit/Creative Writing 2000-2006 US Army 317TH
Quartermaster Battalion SSG Argumedo Camp Buehring, Kuwait OIF III
Lost friends & lovers: Shelley Flook (Derby, KS 1981) Dave
Littrell Omaha Guitarist (Becky) Rebecca Anne Higgins Creighton
Education North Dakota 1986, Kelly B. Koop (just to see if he’s
paying attention) Tamara Lynn Scott actress, Kara Diver, Bellevue
West class of 83, Wichita guitarist Kurtt Lovett (1981) and
especially Kerri LaDawne Cesar, Jones, OK, perpetual muse.