So here’s a new poem about several things. The centaur Chiron, and John Lennon, and if you like Bojack Horseman, it’s about that too. Originally when I posted it Sunday night, I didn’t say much else besides that. But I’ve since reflected on a few things that seem worth adding here, Monday night.
First, I’m not sure how people feel about writing in a variety of voices and styles. This piece is definitely a departure from, say, POEM AT THE GOING RATE, which was itself a huge departure from INTERROGATION DAYS. When I was younger, I often distrusted people whose poems changed like this, and I guess I thought it said something about their lack of character — in short, what Hopkins said about Keats, “the chameleon poet,” whom he distrusted for this very reason. But the thing is: I wrote in the same mode for almost fifteen fucking years and it ruined my poetry. Only when I broke free of the ego inside that self-conformity did I actually do anything worth sharing. Maybe that won’t be true for everybody, but it was for me.
And writing without ego is not really possible, but writing to break free from your ego’s insistence on its own image is something you can do. It’s surrealism and all its derivatives. It’s a very tricky thing to write because it really can produce a psychedelic kind of mentality, and all the things that come with that: the world constellates into an immense and awe-inspiring dream that is infinite and overwhelming, and you exhaust yourself trying to keep up with it, and then at some point you crash and feel like you’ve just been kidding yourself. But unlike psychedelic escapism, poetry allows you to come around again and see that, no, you really did get a hold of something, and it’ is in fact workable in the real world.
At least I would like to think this poem is moving and intelligible to a waking mind. Maybe not. Regardless, it’s a stage on my way into a new project, and there a couple dozen more in this mode already. Maybe I’ll share them here eventually.
One other thing: the title is a quote from Lennon’s “I Found Out”: “I heard something ‘bout my ma and my pa / But they didn’t love me / So they made me a star.”
Anyhow, thanks for reading!
SO THEY MADE ME A STAR
SO THEY MADE ME A STAR
The wounded healer begins a parable. It tells of fractured stars and nurseries and a popularity that makes one ancient. It fills with tabloids & grief & pharmacies while capital raids the gods of the unloved. One day you wake up in a photograph like a centaur for real or a luck freak. It’s a story about John Lennon’s life. It’s a bandage giving birth to a song. * So you’re a star, a genius of horsepower. Your mother is a nymph, a linden tree. You move like motes in the day’s archive where there is no love but comprehension. Does commerce and concealment teach this? Yes, but one grows into a spectacle, learning idolatry and alcohol and rental stores. As above us, the stars hang like tiny coffins asking telescopes to eat their childhood. * They’ll tear out your liver for eternity. The magical thing is you can take it. This myth lives in the wounds’ mask as worn by the children in your fan club. Even assassins are in love with melody, with nuclear families through Lennon’s eyes. The 20th century crucified its fantasies with satellites and contracts. And nightmare is the sky as it signs an autograph.