767 Humor poems

(In Plaster, with a Bronze Wash) A person is very self-conscious about his head. It makes one nervous just to know it is cast In enduring materials, and that when the real one is dead The cast one, if nobody drops it or melts it down, will last. We pay more attention to the front end, where the face is, Than to the interesting and involute interior: The Fissure of Rolando and such queer places Are parks for the passions and fears and mild hysteria. The things that go on there! Erotic movies are shown To anyone not accompanied by an adult. The marquee out front maintains a superior tone: Documentaries on Sharks and The Japanese Tea Cult. The fronts of some heads are extravagantly pretty. These are the females. Men sometimes blow their tops About them, launch triremes, sack a whole city. The female head is mounted on rococo props. Judgment is in the head somewhere; it keeps sums Of pleasure and pain and gives belated warning; This is the first place everybody comes With bills, complaints, writs, summons, in the morning. This particular head, to my certain knowledge Has been taught to read and write, make love and money, Operate cars and airplanes, teach in a college, And tell involved jokes, some few extremely funny. It was further taught to know and to eschew Error and sin, which it does erratically. This is the place the soul calls home just now. One dislikes it of course: it is the seat of Me.

Let me thy Properties explain, A rotten Cabin, dropping Rain; Chimnies with Scorn rejecting Smoak; Stools, Tables, Chairs, and Bed-steds broke: Here Elements have lost their Vses, Air ripens not, nor Earth produces: In vain we make poor Sheelah toil, Fire will not roast, nor Water boil. Thro' all the Vallies, Hills, and Plains, The Goddess Want in Triumph reigns; And her chief Officers of State, Sloth,Dirt, and Theft around her wait.

If sunlight fell like snowflakes, gleaming yellow and so bright, we could build a sunman, we could have a sunball fight, we could watch the sunflakes drifting in the sky. We could go sleighing in the middle of July through sundrifts and sunbanks, we could ride a sunmobile, and we could touch sunflakes— I wonder how they'd feel.

don’t talk to stranglers when yr wasted do talk to swingers don’t talk to swindlers if you can tell them apart from the strangers who are just strangers no stranger than you alone and afraid to be alone cuz they might want to touch your throat

you have lipstick on your collar I say to my father the priest that’s just the Blood of   Christ my son he replies by and by (the milky thigh of   Mary in my mind) William Blake’s eyes aligning in the snow a statue outside London simply called “The Heretic” where birds sit and shit and live out their days in unconscious praise of that third space between language and the mute object as sunlight pours through the stained glass at the Lincoln Park Zoo where I saw the lions pacing and you told me to always remember that the cage is for the protection of   the captor

The front seats filled last. Laggards, buffoons, and kiss-ups falling in beside local politicos, the about to be honored, and the hard of hearing. No help from the middle, blenders and criminals. And the back rows: restless, intelligent, unable to commit. My place was always left-center, a little to the rear. The shy sat with me, fearful of discovery. Behind me the dead man’s illegitimate children and the bride’s and groom’s former lovers. There, when lights were lowered, hands plunged under skirts or deftly unzipped flies, and, lights up again, rose and pattered in applause. Ahead, the bored practiced impeccable signatures. But was it a movie or a singing? I remember the whole crowd uplifted, but not the event or the word that brought us together as one— One, I say now, when I had felt myself many, speaking and listening: that was the contradiction.

Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote. Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses. Homer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey. Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him. Melville was asleep at the wheel for much of Moby-Dick. Fitzgerald slept through Tender Is the Night, which is perhaps not so surprising, but the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of The Magic Mountain is quite extraordinary—that he wrote it, even more so. Kafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays. No one knows too much about George Eliot’s writing habits—my guess is she would sleep a few minutes, wake up and write something, then pop back to sleep again. Lew Wallace’s forty winks came, incredibly, during the chariot race in Ben-Hur. Emily Dickinson slept on her cold, narrow bed in Amherst. When she awoke there would be a new poem inscribed by Jack Frost on the windowpane; outside, glass foliage chimed. Good old Walt snored as he wrote and, like so many of us, insisted he didn’t. Maugham snored on the Riviera. Agatha Christie slept daintily, as a woman sleeps, which is why her novels are like tea sandwiches—artistic, for the most part. I sleep when I cannot avoid it; my writing and sleeping are constantly improving. I have other things to say, but shall not detain you much. Never go out in a boat with an author—they cannot tell when they are over water. Birds make poor role models. A philosopher should be shown the door, but don’t, under any circumstances, try it. Slaves make good servants. Brushing the teeth may not always improve the appearance. Store clean rags in old pillow cases. Feed a dog only when he barks. Flush tea leaves down the toilet, coffee grounds down the sink. Beware of anonymous letters—you may have written them, in a wordless implosion of sleep.

(JOHN F. KENNEDY’S INFORMAL APPOINTMENT OF DEAN MARTIN TO HIS CABINET) What the fuck did they want, these men who needed the company of others to make a life, as he needed a woman to make babies? —Dino, nick tosches I always plays to de common folk. — dean martin 1 It was casting time for The Young Lions. Brando wouldn’t hesitate given this chance to dye his hair white and do a German accent. And while no one would hire Monty Clift after his facially disfiguring car-wreck, Brando convinced the studio that the other, slightly older, kid from Omaha was the right man. No one could play a more sensitive-tough than Monty, like the artist-bugler-boxer Prewitt mistaken for the enemy, gunned down by his own men in the Pearl Harbor dawn; or the way, as the seraphic cowboy Matt Dunson, he got a rise out of his demented empire builder father, John Wayne, by kicking over a tin cup, sloshing the coffee into the dust to show his disgust. Clift knew that Lions director Edward Dmytryk was searching for someone to play a key supporting role—as Frank Sinatra had in From Here To Eternity—yet he was stunned to hear it was “Jerry Lewis’s partner in shlock.” Clift softened, nauseated when he saw Martin’s competition pander to the crowd on Broadway. Lucky for Monty that he let it go: the two men not only became friends; it was Dean who put the man with the wired-jaw to bed when he had the chloral hydrate and alcohol wobblies. Ignorant of Brando’s intervention on his behalf, Monty told Dean that Marlon’s fifty takes per scene were getting on his nerves more and more and he vowed to walk off the set if he tried ONE MORE TIME to have his German soldier die with arms spread wide to “echo the crucifixion.” Clift, wasted with self-recrimination at forty-five. Martin, an actor for whom one run through a scene almost always sufficed. Dean got a chuckle out of Monty with his response. “It should be awful good with so many takes.” Then the future flashed before him. “I guess there are directors who want us to do the same scene over and over again too.” “Sure, lots. Some of the best.” “I guess I got spoiled. Jerry and I got to where we pretty much called the shots.” And then—without any foreknowledge that he’d be doing his only two other serious roles in the next two years and be subject to directorial rule on the sets of Some Came Running and Rio Bravo— he vowed in the future to set up his golf net before shooting started on a picture. Dean appeared to float, perfection never an aspiration: that he was already as well known for his insouciance and drunk persona as for his singing and acting doesn’t mean he was so well-defended that he didn’t feel any pressure about working with such aces as Brando and Clift. He didn’t have to stretch to play a would-be draft dodger, Michael Whiteacre: “a likeable coward like myself,” a screenwriter in Shaw’s novel, a singer in the movie. The army doctor feeds Dean his first line in Lions as if his future were visible in the instant: art and life exquisitely commingled. Doctor: “For a man your age and in your profession you’re in excellent health. How do you manage it?” Martin doesn’t hesitate: “Clean liquor.” But sauntering through this role didn’t mean everything was swell: he felt so out-of-place on location in France he gave up the offer of a choice part in The Guns of Navarone because it meant going back to Europe. In his middle years, he ambled through the role of “Matt Helm” in another toneless Bondian takeoff, and when Columbia wanted to shoot Murderers’ Row on location in Cannes, Dino set the studio straight: “fuck no, just build some fake Riviera sets.” 2 A diffident crooner, he needed a stooge. License to fuck around on stage. After his split with Jerry, Dino’s drunk persona grew into a ghostly partner, and by the time he had his own TV show the public was so saturated with his presence, many conflated the persona and the person. When he landed the drunk’s key role in Rio Bravo, he turned to Brando for help, “what should I do?” Brando told him what to think about. The more inscrutable the subject the more this spectre stands out in relief. Part of Martin’s appeal was that no one knew him. It wasn’t a mask; his detachment was who he was. He showed up, his spirit remained elsewhere. His wives and children found him unknowable. It wasn’t personal. When the Martins entertained, the guests carried on while Dino disappeared into his room to watch westerns on TV, alone. It wasn’t personal. When the producer of “The Colgate Comedy Hour” suggested they have lunch to get to know one another, Dino set him straight: “No one gets to know me.” Martin was a man no one came close to knowing. What does it mean, to know someone? 3 Why ask such questions at all after Socrates beguiled us out of answers and set us on the inexhaustible path...dialectics? Don’t you think I haven’t wondered if I haven’t strayed from my true path as I find myself tracking the trajectory of such non-exemplary lives? You’re thinking it’s a trick, and will not answer, but before you judge my dissolute subject— who like the money but thought all the attention was a joke because “a singer is nothing”— as a derelict choice, consider how philosophy, while striving to become more concrete continues to recoil before the problem of other minds. And it is said that Monsieur Sartre turned paler than his martini, when Raymond Aron challenged the Husserlians, at the Bec de Gaz in Montparnasse, to make philosophy out of a cocktail glass. 4 There’s something about everyone no one can know. There was no question of Dino taking orders and being bossed around was out of bounds: penalty shot incurred for the perpetrator, who was, this time, the imperious Billy Wilder whose streak of hits was breaking fast. Dino as always was doing his job, which was to literally play himself in Kiss Me, Stupid

Plum black & the blush white of an apple shoulder, melon & cream, in tones to list the flesh; in light, washed colors off at last & textures sheer with damp I slowly pull from you with your quick help. Weekend's ample procrastinations to forget the least of what we want to do. April, half a blast of cold, half new light, green & simple. Now dusk. Now fear. We pencil what we owe on this short form, our numbers good enough. The goose-neck glare undoes how we spent the day. Each bite each bee-sting kiss each bitten O all aftertaste. Later, at the drop-off, postmark queue, we joke: "Now we can die!"

I sell one bristle brushes. People seeking two bristle brushes I send to the guy on Amsterdam, who’s in a rush. I may have one customer a year for my one bristle brushes, a one-eyed lover of tanagers, she may have one dollar to spend in the moment light’s neither day’s or night’s, but one’s where infinity begins. Whoever she is, she’s always painting barbules, I’m always thinking, no one will notice that they notice this, that her tanagers move, that everything’s alive. We talk care and feeding of the one bristle brush. Care exists. I thrive.