Author: Nada Gordon

I guess I am improved by my peccadilloes,
their rabid squirming as fossils of affection
in the dumb sponge of heaving fixity. Every molecule
remembers a time before time, and if I open up
to receive all emotional messages (for example,
in my food), it’s because that’s the kind of maladroit
I am: preponed, animated, reticular, birdish. I miss you
as I miss the mortal avalanche of rhetorical shards,
your craven manipulations, the spot of burning
sun on the frozen doe. Everything catches fire
in the mangled frames of your irritability. You
don’t love me? I don’t know what you mean.
The hay is sweet – like me! –in these unfurled
taxonomies of pungent (but sensual) ridicule. You
don’t love me? I don’t know what you mean.
The murky planets sparkle in my ignorant hairdo.

Solemn roar: OWN self: you people
and your categories: this is how I fall over
on a practical flap. Having to always eat
the Lenten gun.

My darling, you, reader, hold this
squeamish tentacle. I need you
here in the anteroom of my
rogue blushes. (That’s an old
bohemian trick: the creamy force
of cerebration.)

Please, please! Who are you,
swanky others under cool black
thunderclouds? The mule gait,
the quirky haircuts, the swear
words, the personal devices.

And if I abandon myself
to frangible sound?

The poem (this specific one)
is the furtive morning petit mort,
heavy with terms like a cop’s belt.
We melt into our styles. Green
sneakers. Hug. And kiss. Hug.
and kiss.

Secret maven surveys the secret tongue,
because her true feelings are a cheap coating
on a pendunculate sphere. Let’s say we understand
things only by analogy: breath, breadth, bread:
where does that leave us – huh?– in the ocean
of original things?

Drew writes in the comment box for the post on mawkishness two posts down from here:

…mawkishness is the default mode of of American populist poetry and seems to be the primary and maybe even the exclusive effect American poets strive for in their work (with the possible admixture of various modes of middlebrow sententiousness). So it’s a pop effect that’s lost all vitality… not that it couldn’t be reinvented.. so… Go ON…

There’s a reason it’s the default, I believe: its note of truth is the undeniable pathos of being human. We reinvent it by using it, or appropriating it, with full consciousness of its awfulness. Stripped of pathos, we are left with what I have come to think of as QPV: “Quality Post-Modern Verse.” Rid of “the lyrical interference of the ego,” it stands as fine and noble scaffolding, but where can we situate ourselves in it? We will always resonate with mawkishness, even if only because it makes us a little sick, because our lives are absolutely mawkish: cloying, awkward, a little nauseating. Classicists and formalists disdain it as a migrant herd of beasts might disdain a wounded member, leaving it to die whimpering in the snow. To identify with it means to identify with one’s own weakness.

Mawkishness is key to a lover’s abjection, to the code of femininity, and to adolescence, the period of our lives when we are closest to the full rage of life. There is energy in all of these mawkishnesses that we can mine for poetry; without it, we risk merely playing with Legos. I don’t think mawkishness will ever lose vitality.

O, the magnet sway of knowledge, fugitive
as laughing pard, vacuumed out of puny sighs
as the long moron argues… aggravated legs,
perineum… mad ploys… I screwed, not up
not around… the angry joy into the face of surface
aether… with average banding… this written “from
the heart” as lopsided tract… the movement is holding…
like fleas on a liminal stare, binge thinking… always uncut
in pastel honorifics or glide stupor. My onyx thinks of you
in the pale limelight, my diamonds is pop rock; I wonder
about the happy unlikely and the false impossible.
The marmots argue over cherry popcorn, I tap dance
on a logical rat: I’m stronger, larger, pinker,
than that. The surplus smiles at the preeners,
and stinky sculptures spring up where there were none
before, and that’s kinda cool in the prosodic tinniness
of this cranial weltzschmerz, you know, I love
my dog I don’t have a dog, I love the paper clock
that threatens sudden endings, I love the conversations
that play air guitar in my mordant memories. Boys, eat
a plastic peach for me in the perfect wisdom of your stretchy
genitalia, and I will sing a hurting song for you
while the peevish she-crabs wail. I rue the day
I met my pretty genius, chewing with her mouth wide open
the tender nuggets of this phonic dementia. The sun
is personified to be an arrogant female chanting close,
strong liberation, leaning on the spine of a churlish absolutism
in the neighborhood of exhausted keyboards
and neurasthenic pointing devices.

Life is mawkish; at least some of our poems should be, too.

* Main Entry: mawk·ish
* Pronunciation: \ˈmȯ-kish\
* Function: adjective
* Etymology: Middle English mawke maggot, probably from Old Norse mathkr — more at maggot
* Date: circa 1697

1 : having an insipid often unpleasant taste
2 : sickly or puerilely sentimental

— mawk·ish·ly adverb

— mawk·ish·ness noun

words that rhyme with mawkish:

mawkish •blackish, brackish, quackish •Frankish, prankish •clerkish, darkish, sparkish •peckish • rakish •cliquish, freakish, weakish •sickish, thickish •pinkish •hawkish, mawkish •folkish • bookish • textbookish •puckish •monkish, punkish •quirkish, Turkish •establish, stablish •Spanglish •embellish, hellish, relish •palish, Salish •English • stylish •abolish, demolish, spit-and-polish •Gaulish, smallish, tallish •owlish • Polish •coolish, foolish, ghoulish, mulish •bullish • dullish • publish •accomplish • ticklish • purplish •devilish •churlish, girlish •famish • Amish • schoolmarmish •blemish, Flemish •Hamish • squeamish • dimmish •warmish • gnomish • Carchemish •skirmish

I would just like to point out that the poem that follows the FABulous photo below is 100% FOUND MATERIAL, totally unedited.

all I did was lineate it.

suggestion: keep scrolling for a surprise

Amy Smart Starfucker

Would she amy smart starfucker?
Would she cluster it as a butene?
Turgid laplace met her with a gestate of subgross

saying, and she met mitotic cymru
with pedunculate of gel and coldness;
she gushed neither flurried nor merry:

she enkindleed jubilantly to her neptunium,
and took it in crossroad. Pursue xylophonist
vindicatory she tuck, for her homogeny,

she literally expressd slander. Fairfax
is with her admiringly systematically,
courting her to housekeep gone; but

she has vainglorious a amy smart starfucker
in the chimney-corner, and twines internment
shall criticise her from it myocardiopathy

she treads premiss to raven in here. What
amphimixiss she cop? Apotheoseed silhouette.
A post-chaise was amy smart starfucker.

A surmountable amy smart starfucker collectd.
The carillonneurs, lovingly, hyperbolizeed bozos
and appealed fans; and forth and cursively bottlefeedd

the amy smart starfucker of their formaldehyde
that their balzac had not been pasted in time;
and the faintness gentlemen odds-makered,

and the unembarrassed postured their whacking
diligently the wintry epistemic unfrozens. Deplume
ingram amy smart starfucker solemnly: “I burn eolithic”

she unpompous, in a disgracefulness which pyongyang
have befitted the miller of a diversified penalty, physalia
a nutriment in the cakile of kopeks overgarment.

I have seen a amy smart starfucker vagabond;
she has dreamed in legal hagfish the chachka
of cooperative and told flindersia

what such saskatchewan uptown porcelainize.
Amy smart starfucker. You are out-of-pocket,
because, whelm as you amy smart starfucker,

you will not implement it to lorenz, nor will you
flay proprioceptive pollock to spark it
where it undervalues you. She majestically bootleg

her old-maidish spiny-leafed effectiveness
to her weedkillers, and demoniacal
her fortification with prematurity.

u have-have you? Cotillion i; there is diablerie
in the gypsum feetfirst lukewarm, endogenously!
Dont propel large-hearted, detectable the pondering being;

shes a traditional detent is yoruba. Here the gentlemen
pryd with pure genes to hasten previously indissoluble
arduously these recurrent last-named points;

but they got subjectively blushes, onosmodiums,
chills, and wines, in patronize for their amy smart starfucker.
A reasonable amy smart starfucker theirs monosomy have been:

a well-bred midland, counteractively, of the georgian wintergreen
that “ghaneses meet”. Sea-green or macabre of the gentlemen
callionymidae temptable him, and I caught windpipe princeton lineage

of their evensong wrong the doldrums. Slangy gauntleted
amy smart starfucker came from her gymneliss sleeplessly tref,
pharynx I got vindictive in a sandwich of mystification;

and precedeed what provisory electromyograph
had been schoenberg for tuberositys by my [AUTHORIAL INTERVENTION: RACIST EPITHET CENSORED HERE] acinos
its earlap and autoicous gingerbread of onomatopoetic dura.

I dont amy smart starfucker fulsomely it, mother;
you bluing slat yourself: but I ought to piece-dye you,
I have obligatorily faith. Its sup your cotula to hand-dye so:

I moral it of you; I slumbery it in your chiron
as you renunciative the threshold. Did you?
Youve a sapphirine ear. I have;

and a galloping spandrel and a grasslike brain.
You megawatt them pyrotechnical in your trade.
I do; tacitly when ive chilblainss funnel you to entertain with.

“She blinkers such a hortative two-way”
hardhearted amy smart starfucker.
An anthropomorphic amy smart starfucker stood validly the table;

she was protein savagely the trephine,
and chaired precipitation in a babelike trapped clutter,
dehorn a prayer-book, by the hooklike of the blaze:

she ransomed the typha to herself, as intrepidly churlish
women pommel, c2h6 she read; she did not air-slake poetically
idly my entrance: it sabotageed she rumbleed to incessancy

a foredoom. Amy smart starfucker babylonian
The prospect detoured peritrichous pissed as I churned it,
and the sibyl-if scuppernong she were-was main

************************************************

I’m sorry, did you really think I wore that to work today? If so, you are divinely gullible. How lucky you are!

No, today I wore a lapis-blue cotton wrap dress with chunky bracelets from India, Kenya, and some antique store upstate. Necklace from the souk in Marrakech. Earrings from Manhattan Chinatown. How globalism comes to rest on one like monarch butterflies on eucalyptus branches.

Oh, and here’s just so you can see the shoes, because I know how important that is, in the overall scheme of things:

A little note on wrap dresses: Tonight on Project Runway Diane von Furstenburg said in her cheekbony way, “One dress can make a designer.” She’s the queen of wrap dresses. But you know, she didn’t invent them. She modernized them by making them clingy. I much prefer the neo-fifties version I have on here to the DvF version. Totally wearable, flatters the hourglass, etc.

Pardon me, but I just have to say this: It’s a wrap.

Goodnight all!

I WANT TO BE FOREVER INFANTILIZED BY A BUNCH OF GOONS

Here I am in my Skull with Pink Flowers
Infant Bodysuit forever relighting my own image
against steady palls of creamy lyrical black pain.

The future, you see, is infantilized.
There will be tantrums and crying fits,
personalized burp cloths, onesies,

blankets, travel wipe cases, and tutus
for that goon squad of poseur bureaucrats
in their tanks and battle gear moving

like ugly dolls that are so cute in an ugly way!
Pink tray makes ice in all kinds of Kitty shapes
drawing endless amounts of creepy fetish porn

in cloying shades of pink, with Candied Yams
up the 80s asses of their hairless bodies, and tragically
I infantilize myself with too much lace, ruffles, and flowers.

Add the shrimp and cook until the shrimp turn pink
and are well coated with the sauce, my vulgar darling:
Hey, let’s have sex together and forever tonight.

You with your colorful stud heart and “Glamorous” writing .
me with my cool modern styling and scarf designed by
the “Original Food Scarf Artist” Twinkie Chan!

If only real nurses were this cute! O Vocaloid Chibi Maker,
O, Stalin, Dedicated Follower Of Fashion, stop dreaming
of hydrogen and My Little Pink Flower Infant Shoes.

Tags: baby, smiling, pink, flower, babies, infant,
infants, newborn, newborns, toddler, toddlers,
kids, flowers, smile, smilie, fun, cute, bright!

On Thursday, December 19, 2002, I wrote here, in my very first post,

The impulse to decorate is, as always, very strong. One idea (please don’t steal it, but if you can think of any practical ways to implement it please let me know) is to do a series — I’m not sure of what — could be poems, or fashion items, or paintings — of urban wildlife: pigeons, squirrels, sparrows.

Since then I have noticed that urban birds, and sometimes rodents, have become a graphic theme on many “hipster” (stupid term, stupid affiliation) fashion items; recently I saw a t-shirt of birds on telephone wires at, I think, Brooklyn Industries.

I never saw the proposed project above to fruition, but I do own one sparrow t-shirt. I think of it as my haiku shirt. I wore it today with these awful (because of their bleached faux age lines) but entirely serviceable cutoffs because I decided to stay home and work on projects today.

It’s hot and I’m irritable. When I wasn’t out in the stifling heat, I was trying to write an essay. At the same time my internet connection kept going out. Then I got in arguments online. I decided to hem a skirt, but my serger had come unthreaded. I’m guessing that 99% of you have never threaded a serger. It isn’t fucking easy. You may think I’m trivial, talentless, moronic, self-obsessed, and inconsequential, but you know what, I CAN THREAD A FUCKING SERGER. So there.