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.

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