Frederick Seidel

I live a life of appetite and, yes, that's right, I live a life of privilege in New York, Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning. Say that again? I have a rule— I never give to beggars in the street who hold their hands out. I woke up this morning in my air-conditioning. At the end of my legs were my feet. Foot and foot stretched out outside the duvet looking for me! Get up. Giddyup. Get going. My feet were there on the far side of my legs. Get up. Giddyup. Get going. I don't really think I am going to. Obama is doing just fine. I don't think I'm going to. Get up. Giddyup. Get going. I can see out the window it isn't raining. So much for the endless forecasts, always wrong. The poor are poorer than they ever were. The rich are richer than the poor. Is it true about the poor? It's always possible to be amusing. I saw a rat down in the subway. So what if you saw a rat. I admire the poor profusely. I want their autograph. They make me shy. I keep my distance. I'm getting to the bottom of the island. Lower Broadway comes to a boil and City Hall is boiling. I'm half asleep but I'm awake. At the other end of me are my feet In shoes of considerable sophistication Walking down Broadway in the heat. I'm half asleep in the heat. I'm, so to speak, wearing a hat. I'm no Saint Francis. I'm in one of my trances. When I look in a mirror, There's an old man in a trance. There's a Gobi Desert, And that's poetry, or rather rhetoric. You see what happens if you don't make sense? It only makes sense to not. You feel the flicker of a hummingbird It takes a second to find. You hear a whirr. It's here. It's there. It hovers, begging, hand out.

So the sun is shining blindingly but I can sort of see. It’s like looking at Mandela’s moral beauty. The dying leaves are sizzling on the trees In a shirtsleeves summer breeze. But daylight saving is over. And gaveling the courtroom to order with a four-leaf clover Is over. And it’s altogether November. And the Pellegrino bubbles rise to the surface and dismember.

My girlfriend is a miracle. She’s so young but she’s so beautiful. So is her new bikini trim, A waxed-to-neatness center strip of quim. Now there’s a word you haven’t heard for a while. It makes me smile. It makes me think of James Joyce. You hear his Oirish voice. It’s spring on Broadway, and in the center strip mall The trees are all Excited to be beginning. My girlfriend’s amazing waxing keeps grinning. It’s enough to distract From the other drastic act Of display today—Osama bin Laden is dead! One shot to the chest and one to the head, SEAL Team 6 far away from my bed Above Broadway—in Abbottabad, Pakistan, instead. Bullets beyond compare Flew over there, Flew through the air To above and below the beard of hair, A type of ordnance that exploded Inside the guy and instantly downloaded The brains out the nose. Our Vietnam Is now radical Islam. I tip my hat and heart to the lovely tiny lampshade Above her parade.

I like the part I play. They’ve cast me as Pompeii The day before the day. It’s my brilliant performance as a luxury man because I act that way. They say: Just wait, you’ll see, you’ll pay, Pompeii. You’re a miracle in a whirlpool In your blind date’s vagina At your age. Nothin could be fina. You eat off her bone china. Don’t be a ghoul. Don’t be a fool, You fool. In the lifelong month of May, Racing joyously on his moto poeta to the grave, He’s his own fabulous slave. He rides his superbike faster and faster to save His master from the coming lava from China, every day, But especially today, because it’s on its way. Fred Astaire is about to explode In his buff-colored kidskin gloves, revolving around The gold knob of his walking stick, with the sound Of Vesuvia playing, And the slopes of Vesuvia saying Her effluvia are in nearly overflowing mode. Freud had predicted Fred. In The Future of an Illusion he said: “Movies are, in other words, the future of God.” Nothing expresses ordinary wishes more dysplastically than current American politics do. Breast augmentation as a deterrent To too much government is odd. Korean women in a shop on Madison give a pedicure to Pompeii. Fred only knows that he’s not getting old. Pompeii doesn’t know it’s the day before the day. The governor of New York is legally blind, a metaphor for his state of mind. He ought to resign, but he hasn’t resigned. Good riddance, goodbye. The bell has tolled.

Snow is what it does. It falls and it stays and it goes. It melts and it is here somewhere. We all will get there.

We drank our faces off until the sun arrived, Night after night, and most of us survived To waft outside to sunrise on Second Avenue, And felt a kind of Wordsworth wonderment—the morning new, The sidewalk fresh as morning dew—and us new, too. How wonderful to be so magnified. Every Scotch and soda had been usefully applied. You were who you weren't till now. We'd been white Harvard piglets sucking on the whisky sow And now we'd write a book, without having to know how. If you didn't get a hangover, that was one kind of bad And was a sign of something, but if you had Tranquilizers to protect yourself before you went to work, Say as a doctor interning at nearby New York Hospital, don't be a jerk, Take them, take loads of them, and share them, and don't smirk. We smoked Kools, unfiltered Camels, and papier maïs Gitanes, The fat ones Belmondo smoked in Breathless—and so did Don, Elaine's original red-haired cokehead maître d’ Who had a beautiful wife, dangerously. But stay away from the beautiful wife or else catastrophe. Many distinguished dead were there At one of the front tables, fragrant talk everywhere. Plimpton, Mailer, Styron, Bobby Short—fellows, have another drink. You had to keep drinking or you'd sink. Smoking fifty cigarettes a day made your squid-ink fingers stink. Unlucky people born with the alcoholic gene Were likely to become alcoholics. Life is mean That way, because others who drank as much or more didn't Succumb, but just kept on drinking—and didn't Do cocaine, and didn't get fucked up, and just didn't! The dead are gone— Their thousand and one nights vanished into dawn. Were they nothing but tubs of guts, suitably gowned, waiting around Till dawn turned into day?Last round! Construction of the new Second Avenue subway enters the ground. Aldrich once protested to Elaine that his bill for the night was too high. She showed him his tab was for seventeen Scotches and he started to cry. (Or was it eighteen?) We were the scene. Now the floor has been swept clean. Everyone's gone. Elaine and Elaine's have vanished into the dawn. Elaine the woman, who weighed hundreds of pounds, is floating around— Her ghost calls out:Last round! Wailing, construction of the new Second Avenue subway pounds the ground.

A dinosaur egg opens in a lab And out steps my paternal grandfather, Sam, Already taller than a man, And on his way to becoming a stomping mile-high predator, so I ran. I never knew my mother’s father, who may have been a suicide. He was buried in a pauper’s grave my mother tried To find, without success. Jews grab The thing they love unless it’s ham, And hold it tightly to them lest it die— Or like my mother try To find the ham they couldn’t hold. A hot ham does get cold. Grampa, monster of malevolence, I’m told was actually a rare old-fashioned gentleman of courtly benevolence. At night the thing to do was drive to Pevely Dairy And park and watch the fountain shooting up and changing colors. The child sat in the back, finishing his ice-cream soda, Sucking the straw in the empty glass as a noisy coda. Sometimes on Sunday they drove to the Green Parrot. There was the sideways-staring parrot to stare at. The chickens running around were delicious fried, but nothing was sanitary. B.O. was the scourge of the age—and polio—and bathroom odors. If you didn’t wash your hands, It contributed—as did your glands! His father always had gas for their cars from his royal rationing cards. The little boy went to see the king at one of the king’s coal yards. The two of them took a trip and toured the dad’s wartime coal mine. It was fun. It was fine. The smell of rain about to fall, A sudden coolness in the air, Sweetness wider than the Mississippi at its muddy brownest. I didn’t steal his crayon, Mrs. Marshall, honest! It’s captain midnight ...brought to you by ovaltine ! I travel backwards in a time machine And step inside a boy who’s three feet tall. How dare he have such curly hair! A boy and his dog go rafting down the Mississippi River. They have a message to deliver To the gold-toothed king. Sire, we have a message that we bring. Little boy, approach the throne. Ow! I hit my funny bone. The British consul was paid extra because it was a hardship post. The weather was Antarctica/equatorial extreme. Surely summer was in error. Winter was terror. White snowflakes the size of dinosaur eggs Versus humidity that walked across your face on housefly legs. I loved both the most. Radio made women dream Of freedom from oppression and the daily nonsense. Hairy tarantulas in boatloads of bananas made the lazy heat immense In the heart. Blizzards didn’t stop my father’s big blue coal trucks so why bother. Why bother, father? Billie Holiday was inside. I thought I had gone to heaven and died.

I’m talking about Mount Street. Jackhammers give it the staggers. They’re tearing up dear Mount Street. It’s got a torn-up face like Mick Jagger’s. I mean, this is Mount Street! Scott’s restaurant, the choicest oysters, brilliant fish; Purdey, the great shotgun maker—the street is complete Posh plush and (except for Marc Jacobs) so English. Remember the old Mount Street, The quiet that perfumed the air Like a flowering tree and smelled sweet As only money can smell, because after all this was Mayfair? One used to stay at the Connaught Till they closed it for a makeover. One was distraught To see the dark wood brightened and sleekness take over. Designer grease Will help guests slide right into the zone. Prince Charles and his design police Are tickled pink because it doesn’t threaten the throne. I exaggerate for effect— But isn’t it grand, the stink of the stank, That no sooner had the redone hotel just about got itself perfect Than the local council decided: new street, new sidewalk, relocate the taxi rank! Turn away from your life—away from the noise!— Leaving the Connaught and Carlos Place behind. Hidden away behind those redbrick buildings across the street are serious joys: Green grandeur on a small enough scale to soothe your mind, And birdsong as liquid as life was before you were born. Whenever I’m in London I stop by this delightful garden to hear The breeze in the palatial trees blow its shepherd’s horn. I sit on a bench in Mount Street Gardens and London is nowhere near.

The fellow talking to himself is me, Though I don't know it. That's to say, I see Him every morning shave and comb his hair And then lose track of him until he starts to care, Inflating sex dolls out of thin air In front of his computer, in a battered leather chair That needs to be thrown out . . . then I lose track Until he strides along the sidewalk on the attack With racist, sexist outbursts. What a treat This guy is, glaring at strangers in the street! Completely crazy but not at all insane. He's hot but there's frostbite in his brain. He's hot but freezing cold, and oh so cool. He's been called a marvelously elegant ghoul. But with a torn rotator cuff, even an elegant fawn Has to go through shoulder seizures to get his jacket on. He manages spastically. His left shoulder's gone. It means, in pain, he's drastically awake at dawn. A friend of his with pancreatic cancer, who will die, Is not in pain so far, and she will try To palliate her death, is what her life is now. The fellow's thinking to himself, Yes but how? Riding a motorcycle very fast is one way to. The moon and stars rapidly enter you While you excrete the sun. You ride across the earth Looking for a place to lay the eggs of your rebirth. The eggs crack open and out comes everyone. The chicks chirp, and it's begun, and it's fun. You keep on writing till you write yourself away, And even after—when you're nothing—you still stay. The eggs crack open and out comes everyone. The chicks chirp, the poems speak—and it's again begun! Speaking of someone else for a change, not me, There was that time in Stockholm when, so strangely, Outside a restaurant, in blinding daylight, a tiny bird Circled forever around us and then without a word Lightly, lightly landed on my head and settled there And you burst into tears. I was unaware That ten years before the same thing had happened just After your young daughter died and now it must Have been Maria come back from the dead a second time to speak And receive the recognition we all seek.

The speckled pigeon standing on the ledge Outside the window is Jack Kennedy— Standing on one leg and looking jerkily around And staring straight into the room at me. Ask not what your country can do for you— Ask what you can do for your country. Here’s how. That wouldn’t be the way I’d do it. I’m afraid you leave me no choice now. The sequence begins with the grooves Of the carving board Filling with roast beef blood. Everything keeps changing and we want it to, But don’t want anything to change. The pigeons fly back and forth And look like they’re looking for something. I went to sleep in Havana, Turned over on my back in Saigon, And woke up in Kabul, With Baghdad as both air conditioner and down comforter. The speckled pigeon standing on the ledge Outside the window looks really a bit like me, Me standing on one leg and looking jerkily around And looking right into the room at me. Unshaved men run Iran. In consequence, Nixon with his five o’clock shadow Rises from the grave to campaign. His ghost can’t stop—even in broad daylight. In certain neighborhoods, you hear a victim singing, Corazón, you’re chewing on my heart! Don’t forget to spit the seeds out! Rat-a-tat. Shot dead in the street. The pigeon outside on the ledge Came back from Iraq with PTSD. It stands there, standing on one leg in speckled camouflage, Staring in through the window at the VA therapist. Everything keeps changing and we want it to, But don’t want anything to change. Stet. Everything keeps changing and we want it to, But don’t want anything to change. Every day I don’t die is February 30th, And more sex is possible. Flocks of pigeons are whirling around and flash white In the sunlight like they know something. Here’s what. Here’s who needs to be made up. Here’s who I would do. The makeup artist is hard at work in the Oval Office. The fireplace fire is lit with the air-conditioning on full blast.