The sound of a body becoming a lit match

Katie Farris, Rachel Madievsky, Neil Jordan, Sinead O’Connor & a poem

I went to the dentist two weeks ago feeling very good about my oral hygiene. Cocky even. I have two insurance plans. I get my teeth cleaned four times a year. After years of neglect, if I were any more fastidious about what goes on in my mouth you’d have to call it a fetish.

At the end of the exam they found something. A pocket. A shadow. A fissure. A possible fracture. The X-rays were inconclusive. They needed to go in.

“What does that mean” I asked. I ask the dumbest questions at the dentist.

“Oral surgery,” they said.

“Ok,” I said.

The thing they don’t tell you about middle age is that at any given moment a handful of your friends will be going through some terrible shit. Chronic illness, terminal disease, addiction, depression, the big C.

Teeth and gum problems don’t really compare—as long as you take care of them and I was taking care of them. So I told myself: no complaining.

The day of the procedure I was calm. I went to the drug store and picked up my antibiotics and pain meds—600mg tablets of ibuprofen. I ate some solid food and read some poetry. I was ready.

The assistant explained they were going to slice open my gums. He used the language of an exorcism: purge, cleanse, holy fire. The doctor stuck needles into the roof of my mouth, shot me full of numbing agents, left me to rest for a while. I drifted off and when I woke a large dog clamped its jaws onto my face and shook me around the room. After half an hour, the doctor said, “Ok, we’re going to start the gum graft now.”

Bring it, I thought. Let’s do some Hellraiser shit.  

The light shining through my eyelids made strange shapes and patterns and when I projected my mind toward them the shapes and patterns got even stranger and were accompanied by random images: rockets, fleshy orbs, a friendly cat.

The doctor stitched me up and I thought of the hospital corpsman who sewed up my head after I got in a fight with a shipmate in the scullery in Singapore. That feeling of someone tugging on a thread that’s connected to your head isn’t something you forget. There’s an intimacy there. I wondered what he was up to, if he had a nice life. The corpsman, not the guy I got in a fight with. Fuck that guy.

When it was over the doctor said, “Lasers, chain mail, no dancing” while the assistant wiped the blood off my beard, which I thought was nice of him to do.  

I can’t really eat or exercise but I did, however, dance with Nuvia at a friend’s wedding celebration on Saturday, which is one of my favorite things to do on this horrible planet.

TL;DR: I’m on a poetry diet so let’s review some books.

In the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris

This isn't a poetry collection, it's a memoir, a survivor song, a screaming fuck you to cancer that will make you think about time a little differently. The time you have left, the time you've wasted complaining about your petty woes, time that just keeps getting screwier and screwier.

What if the past
is a crouching tiger
and memory is the act
of putting your head
in its mouth?

This little banger inspired me to write a poem about finding a piece of cheesecake in the men's room at JFK but that's not important. What's important is "To the God of Radiation," which asks "How much more can one body take?"

Seriously, how much? Do you know? Have you tested it lately? It's getting late and the scythe swiper is coming.

When I was on book tour last spring, I asked for this book in every bookstore I set foot in.

"We don't seem to have it in stock, but I can order it for you?" they said.

"Yes, please," I said, and then I left town.

Emergency Brake by Ruth Madievsky

I started reading this collection while preparing to interview Ruth for the LA Times and was mightily impressed. Emergency Brake is full of great lines and the voice of some of these poems isn’t all that dissimilar from the voice of her novel All-Night Pharmacy.

I never claimed to be an oxygen mask
or the kind of person who understands
the difference between a tongue
and a tackle box, but I know
that there is ceremony
in the sound of a body
becoming a lit match.

I love how there are three poems with the same title—“Shadowboxing.” Why not? Why should a name be absolute?

These poems get inside you and it might be because there is so much penetration going on in these poems, bodies inhabiting spaces, objects thrusting into bodies.

I think of all the bathtubs we’ve entered
the way flags enter planets.

I found myself in Zankou Chicken on Sunset reading these poems while waiting on some food to eat with a friend who is going through some shit and felt like I’d transcended the blood-brain barrier and slipped inside one of Ruth’s poems. Her poems aren’t heavy with proper nouns but the vibe felt right. This poem called “Halloween” did a number on me:

…I will one day have to answer
for the things I said
when I was feeling like unclaimed baggage,
for making loneliness into a kind of fetish,
letting it tie me up, and telling it to beat me, to do it now
and do it hard, to empty me out
like a stomach, like a pocket swollen with coins, to fuck me
the way a shovel fucks the earth so I can stop
thinking about IV chemo and mausoleums,
so I can pretend not to hear my brain
trying to eat its way out.  

I also read Maggie Milner’s Couplets but it wasn’t for me and now I’m reading the copy of Sean Bonney’s Blade Pitch Control Unit I picked up in Mexico City last summer. Bonney is one of those poets every punk should read. Start with Letters Against the Firmament, which I will return to later this week.

With a mouth full of stiches I can’t exercise so I’ve been going on long walks around the neighborhood. I just started The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright, and I love the voice, and last week I finished a novel by another Irish writer.

The Well of Saint Nobody by Neil Jordan

This one’s a bit of a creeper. The story seems much smaller at the outset and then deepens and expands, as all great stories do, into a kind of modern fable.

The Well of Saint Nobody is set in a West Cork village and concerns a piano teacher who realizes a new arrival in town is a former lover—a professional concert pianist—who doesn’t recognize her. From this middle age meet-cute springs a magical tale about secrets we keep from ourselves, the stories we share with the world, and an ancient well that might hold the secret to everything.

Jordan has a knack for dialogue and I love it when his characters get to talking with each other. I listened to the audio book read by the Irish actor Stephen Rea, and if that Jordan-Rea combination seems familiar it should. They both worked together 30 years ago on The Crying Game, which Jordan wrote and directed and Rea starred in, and have collaborated many times since, and here they are still working together, which fills me with a kind of hope I'm powerless to name.

Rememberings by Sinead O’Connor

This is the book that get me started on Irish audio books. It also inadvertently kicked off a slew of toxic mother-daughter stories, including Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died and Mariah Stovall’s I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both, about which I’ll have a lot more to say later on, but Rememberings takes the cake in the disastrous mother/daughter relationship department.

The first, last, and perhaps only thing you need to know is that O’Connor reads the book herself and she’s a wonderful reader. Whatever shortcomings the book might have are more than compensated for by her performance, which is kind of the story of her life.

O’Connor’s music isn’t punk but she sure as fuck was. She was a terror as a teenager and grew up in a home shattered by mental illness. I think you can put her in the same category as Harley Flanagan and John Joseph—punks who had a childhood straight out of Charles Dickens.

The first half of the book is transcendently literary; the second half of the book is not. In the second half she goes through her records, album by album. In the first half there’s a haunted piano.

After listening to Rememberings I felt sad and angry that she’s no longer with us, and for all the hardship she endured for sticking it to the patriarchy thirty years ahead of schedule.

Inside the bathroom of the Jet Blue terminal at JFK

sits a golden slice
of carrot cake.
A wedge
of white frosting
in a stiff plastic box.
It reclines
on the shelf
above the urinals
where men discard
water bottles and telephones,
boarding passes and packets
of peanuts, little offerings
for late-night wanderers
when all the restaurants are closed.
You consider who you
would kill and with what
for a plastic-wrapped
tuna salad sandwich made
of mayonnaise and hope.
Several CEOs (samurai sword)
half of congress (poison gas)
the corporate husks
in the billing department deep
in the bowels
of your insurance provider (waterboard with bleach).
All you have to do is
put your penis away
wash your hands
of this bloodshed
and the cake
comes home
with you.

XO