The
Rat's Nest
крысиная
нора
поэзия
poetry
by Mickey Cesar (Микки
Сизар)
e-mail:
mickeycesar@gmail.com
[updated
Monday, May 20th, 2013]
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INTRODUCTORY
NOTE FOR SATURDAY, MAY 4TH 2013
There
is just a vast emptiness.
I am a foreigner, alone with my
language, and I, dismayed,
find these images inexpressible.
So,
as usual, find enclosed a few new unedited poems, with the usual
caveat:
some gems, some trash.
Enjoy or don't.
tantalus
On
a short leash
snapshots all look backwards
a significant angle,
slope
or compelling curve. Repeated patterns
and recognition
assail the photographer
always aware a composition has been
staged
before. Her lips part, her back arched
she escapes
moments
before ever possessed.
Stop cataloging, my friend.
What is
baleful always remains; what
delight
erased.
epiphany
number two
Day
whatever in exile, you
reflect on those suppressed and
illicit
moments the hours absorbed. With the evening’s
fifth
shot of cognac, you celebrate
the petite woman who pressed her
left breast against your elbow
on the metro, the snatch of your
native language
eavesdropped passing through the park, the
occasional
transparent dress brilliantizing near-summer
nakedness
on the street. Shot six is just to forget
loneliness.
Shot seven is for tomorrow, and the wretched hope
that
its same mistakes will bring about a different result.
Day
whatever in exile closes with fevered sleep
and the no-longer
surprising epiphany that half a world away
at home, poets lie
awake in sweaty beds
angry, alone.
the
last place to hear a cheesy american pop song
Behold
towels, sand, cigarettes
a book, a beer, a tea. I have set
our
picnic. The sun on the river
is wordless, here slightly
interrupted
before the Black Sea. The cats have overrun
the
café, Laika shouts at play. The day
warms, then cools, then
reverts. Nothing
I might want to say translates, and
silence is
not an option. The smoke
of the river cruise hangs low above the
boat.
The crackers stay uneaten. The scent of
shashlik
teases.
Summer lay before us like an endless
sandbar
untrammeled, undisturbed. May fifth –
the sun
slips, and I wonder on how many beaches
this vignette is repeated,
how many
old men alone.
outlines
and habitations
Oh
sad and beautiful city
I still have candies for you.
Your bony
daughters
rotting. Here I see
another year waiting for a
girl.
Seven-fifteen, the fountains
weaken to a slow,
unsatisfying gush.
Twenty minutes to the metro, forty-seven
checks
of a cell phone. The policeman
must believe I have business
here
even when
I don’t believe it myself. Kiev
is
almost a pleasant exile
a good place to die unremarked
as good
as any other
called home.
squeeze
and release
Snake
eyes, craps. Busted
the
seventeenth time since Lisa
touched
you, and taught you
the
word “adorable.”
Time
is running out. Old and grey
and
poor and lonely. This world
is
insufferable: certain secrets
you
can never admit, list, the
consistently
compelling image of
a
1911, trigger cold in your hand, the
squeeze
and release like a wicked
kind
of pornography. Also
the
desire to live to be one-hundred twenty
to
fuck teenagers, to publicly
tell
God to piss off. To just be broken, to
die
brilliant. Some day
you
may, but in truth, experience teaches
you
never will. We each
just
suck it up and continue
ragged
and desperately unhappy.
If
I were all the man that she is cat – if if there were men like
this, the world could begin.
APRIL
POEMS
epiphany
number one
Heavy
machinery, dogs
the
sound of an unattended wedding
fools
and funerals, April.
Mr.
Black sits on benches, considers
his
fortune, ninety-two Hrivna mostly
in
ones and twos. On the stairs, bags of
potatoes
and parsley and spinach and
radishes
and lettuce; unmitigated disaster.
Even
the sparrows realize
he
is wrong for everyone.
failing
industries
Dreams
of tearing flesh. Rip back
the
skin a little bit, let
the
rain in. Mornings you awake
moist
and shivering in the sun.
Uncountable
tremblings, sheets
indignities.
What began in the kitchen
spilled
over into the sink, drained
and
left you bloodless and disinterested.
Some
find solace in the easy phantasm
but
you are a veteran, lately
wandering
the warehouse district
debris,
ripping your hands
on
the edge of a chain-link fence.
Bolshevik
Bowling
The
afternoon, an insistent telephone
ringing
in the wind. This winter you passed
the
gravestones, the funeral wreaths, the dip
in
the road for the last time, and as
the
gusts die you find a vague satisfaction
in
your worn-out shoes, so poor
you’re
back to feeding eggs to the cat.
Today,
even the memory of happiness
seems
more to embitter than assuage.
So
this is what it comes to: an unending accumulation
of
images better than this.
Ptitsas
ring out among the newly-blossomed Kashtans
the
schoolgirls are dark and thin, and phones
ring
incessantly in the distance.
and
the frying pan needs to be replaced
You
are getting sleepy.
At
night, you trade bodies with butterflies
and
gasp at the improbable breeze-borne lusts
which
batter you. You must
take
a spike and crucify them.
On
the threshold of Easter, you stand in mud
and
slush of receding winter, sure that
years
recently have all been autumn and worse.
In
your purse, old tissues, metro
tokens,
lip balm, a torn
five-Hrivna
note, chewing gum, two-for-one
coupons
for coffee shops. Your bones ache
and
you wonder if you ever will own
a
mattress and a morning. The faces
at
the grocer’s are in a slow rotation
and
the most striking thing
about
you is weariness, and the last batch
of
Cypriot tomatoes gone rotten.
“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
MARCH
POEMS
on
eternities and endings
You
have seen farm fields
vast
oceans of wheat, seen
a
plague of locusts and
sandstorm.
God offers no subtle
signs
of His reserved antipathy.
This
morning, sitting in the snow and ice
you
saw a long-faced woman on the steps
with
arthritic hands suffering a cigarette
and
her eyes caught you twice, reminded
you
of something you cannot explain in
any
language, but made you ask
God
to stop. Yet the day went on
a
thousand faces on trains indecipherable
advertizing
frightened women asthmatic old
men
swinging briefcases Kazakhs went on
to
be crushed between Teatralna and Kreshchatyk
slaughtered
tenses, and came home
to
ask the cat
how
long it lasts.
notes
on escape: nothing is easy, or romantic
Outsiders,
we have our own exiles, and
the terrors of walls and
fences.
The human touch
electrifies, convulsively. Shock. Wash
your
hands of it all, the beggars, the crows, the
dispirited continual
winter. We want
nothing more than an island
a ditch to dive
into
an unmarked grave.
next
stop Belarus, believe:
Five
March, Березень,
пятый, these
clouds, butterflies,
this old anger and
this rotten coffee pot. Mold and clouds.
The
insufferable beauty of potholes, we walk Yulitsa Kikvidze
and note
buildings blotched with satellite dishes
(mushroom sprouts from
Soviet brick) concrete
proof that we exist. Yesterday, I say
I
will not be a prime squared again
for seventy-two years: happy
birthday, маленькая
кошка! Snowlit
clouds, ice and
broken asphalt, springtime in Kiev is all
disappointed dogs, life
after love.
“The
pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the
future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” ~ Franz
Kafka
FEBRUARY
POEMS
sudden
declaration, confession
I
have sat beside a number of snow-numbed
train stations. I am the
smoking man, invisible
in my ivy hat and grey wool coat.
I
have been thinking of you
for decades occasionally
sipping
coffee from a paper cut.
The cats have more sense than to
loiter
where the dog with the compound fracture
begs scraps
among the cigarette butts and slush.
It would break your heart a
thousand times
in quick succession, create a fluttering
like a
cold pulseless breeze. The old women
on the wet stone steps sell
onions, parsley
potatoes, pickles, spices and wooden matches.
The
veteran of the old war sleeps hard on his
shoulder, and I
think of you again
damn it.
no
country for old cats
In
an otherwise quiet snowlit night
the chelloveck ahead has
shuffle-skitch shoes.
I have clock clock boots.
The fog train
to Voksal at this distance
hoots like a toy. Some meters
trailing
someone’s step is a sticky squick-squick.
As I
turn left, I think of nothing
save cognac, cognac and koshka
(Marusya),
the mild entertainments of loneliness so far
removed
from my mother tongue:
through snow-covered
courtyards the dogs hours ago abandoned.
What good is it to be
fluent in one’s own language
when the mashrutka slush and
hiss
down Yulitsa Kikvidze in the distance?
At home, the cat
chews the cords to the blinds
of the kitchen window, her
wants
more important than mine.
what
international bartender’s day means
Small
berms of snowice and cigarette
butts line beneath the awning
sidewalks
of Yulitsa Pushkinska, impenetrable.
We have yet
to decide
how to slice ourselves open, how to
conspire for
casualties. Desire
lingers like four days’ melt
mid-winter.
Who really feels day to day that
nothing will
change? This faith
in schedules, taxes, credits, furtive
moments
with a familiar lover, this
lack of spasms and undramatic
intent
can suffice for half a lifetime, but you’ve
become
an unreliable narrator in your own
novel, prone to
wild
speculation and impulsive looks
at other women.
“Like
all pure creatures, cats are practical.” ~ William S. Burroughs
JANUARY
POEMS
almost
eve’s birthday
In
the caverns of winter
cosmic color splash and shape and
pattern
old echoes receding on the rails. Horizons
are
for the young: here slick stone
the rush of exhaust, the blacks
and greys and
overcoats and boots, the broken jostling
of
unoiled joints, the noise, the inescapable
sadness of set
schedules, slushmelt
seeping through crackragged concrete.
Age
is a passing train too full to board.
Wait.
an
open question
Does
anyone really greet the
seventeenth snow with certainty
that
summer will ever return?
Frozen fog dust exhaust ache
absence
white dark sunfall, the radiator
shut off again, the cat shaking
cold
hungry in the corner of the closet January
misprints and
empty bottles of cognac
acidic mornings faith. How many
prayers
are necessary, and what
they are not enough. The
sun
shudders disheartened, its heat
alarmingly
feeble.
hands
and losses
The
leaving trains taste like wine and oranges.
The
platform scuffles and dirts, wet
with
the sad melt of winter. There are
packages
and bags, oil stains on the tracks
and
crackling. The arriving comes with
a
gust that ruffles and disorders
you
and other passengers. We each endure
a
set number of stations, the repetitions
of
twenty-four years of coffee
temporary
accommodations, qualified promises
and
unsolicited offers. We both have come
to
get lost, with little success.
IF
I WERE ON FIRE
75 poems, with photography by Allison
Richardson
was released by Spartan Press on May 12th, 2011
and
is available at
Prospero's
Books 1800 West 39th, Kansas City, MO
Raven
Bookstore 6 East 7th Street, Lawrence, KS
and of course,
Amazon
if you're not lucky enough to be close to Prospero's or the
Raven.
[SAMPLES
FROM IIWOF]
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
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:
Poetry
of Matt Porubsky, author of
Voyeur Poems and Fire Mobile (The Pregnancy Sonnets)
Laura
Kitzmiller reading
at Prospero's
Hep Cat and Fab Art-boy Andrew
Jilka.
Jason
Ryberg, author of Devils,
Dice & Car Parts,
Blunt
Trama
and
other goodness.
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:
me
on Facebook
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:
Jazzhaus
feature, March 2011
Jazzhaus
February 2011
Prospero's
Poetry Filibuster (setting a world's record for longest poetry
reading!) June 2010
“the afterlife” at Prospero's
May 2010
lindsey
& the f-bomb at the Writer's Place, March 2008
natalie
3:28 Kansas City Lit Fest, June 2008
and just for fun, I'm
the “star,” but have no lines: how is this possible? The
Priest in the Porn Shop.
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)
The artwork of C.
Elisabeth Bear
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