Anthony Seidman

The Usual Ambuscade

Some can’t digest

their breakfast, can’t shave

without nicking their chin

because of the ants who burrow,

mandible-drag

salami rinds,

severed beetle,

seeds,

a grape,

crumbs,

raisins,

hotdog bits,

antennae tickling

antennae of thousands,

hundreds of thousands,

if not millions of black, red,

wingéd ants, industrious,

loquacious the way  

alphabets, words

fornicate

when the poetry book’s

shut, yet tense like

thunder on the click.

            **

Some wear leashes, some

kneel on all fours,

belching milk,

wine from tin bowls,

or they dance

until the Fire Marshall

and Cops drench the

conflagration;

they hookup later

in stucco dens of Arleta,

South Central, Boyle Heights,

their rooms peppered

with crotch, sweat,

nostrils eating ribbons

of baking soda, Bolivian aspirin.

            **

There’s one who kept splintering,

pieces of his self littered

back-alleys, temples and

truck-stops; shreds

of his self like molted

exoskeletons of tarantulas;

sixteen. he lost his innocence which

scurried off with long-tail;

twenty, he lost hair; thirty,

his teeth, eyes and hearing;

ridges in his fingertips uncoiled,

slithered away like

electrified lianas; he lost

his friends, and his diploma,

keys, shoes during a daze

brought on by dehydration;

he lost all sense of selfhood,

scooping out liver, kidneys and

resident stones;

this morning he woke up,

sniffed how he’d

gloomed into absolute perdition,

except for his lungs

and a leaping-yet-one-legged-tongue,

and so he sat up, 

and began to croak.

            **

One stared at serving of water,

studied the liquid prisoner

pent up in walls of glass,

and how the goblet shaped

the odorless, colorless water,

and though he noticed

the transparency encasing him,

he couldn’t grasp

the cosmic membrane

glazing everything,--

the dull weight of an apple,

paint brush stiff with blue, breasts

heaving beneath the blouse of a woman

who has just run, or words themselves,--

and which appeared to him

on the other side of this glass;

and he wept,

for he was not

born as the worm,

the pelican or lion

shredding the gazelle,

he was nothing but

semen stunned by its own light,

flimsy cosmos of clocks, shoes,

number glistening on identification card,

dresser emptied of belts,

glasses, photographs and socks

into the suction gust,

and staring at the blank page

he could only muster

two words: Black Crystal.

            **

Some regard the fish, lizard, crow,

and recognize they  

are a species in the light and

the dark, their arms may flap,

taking flight eons from now,

or gills may blossom on their necks;

some are seventeen,

hardly serious and

always in love, or lusting

for the islands;

some are exiled, some eat shit,

some write in blood, and that

is no exaggeration;

some close up, like storefront

shuttered on Main Street;

some form the horizon

in the desert, a haze, all silence.

Some give up, burn paper.

Some speak in tongues.

            **

Celeste buries me among the oleanders,

beer cans, by the rusted

Pontiac Firebird on cinderblocks.

Celeste scoops me a grave from

the belly of a cumulous cloud.  Celeste

inters me head down so that

I blossom like an onion.

Celeste finds me on the tile floor

of the bathroom, and as I’m too heavy

to drag outside, she chops me,

feeds me in chunks

to her dogs Shelley, Leigh and Trelawney;

Celeste bites me, bullies me,

locks me in the trunk of a Cadillac,

she kicks into some carboniferous pond;

she gets me high on moonmash and

stardust, and scoops out my looney-tune brains,

screws me until I gag, resuscitates me,

shoves me off bridge in search of parachute.

            **

Blender in brain clicks

on, tongue splutters, ears abuzz,  

electric filaments glow white;

alphabet opens sesame, 

twenty six bat-wings

flicker across the page;

alphabet spreads,--

camel’s hump in the letter G,

patios where twin noons

slumber inside the letter B,

the corymbulous X,

or the open eye of O;

poet sweats and  

fire-gust sears him, full

of burr, singed bugs, sage-brush,

tar-flattened tarantulas,

until the page finds him

on desert highway, heat

ringing in his ears, landscape white

as salt, haze on horizon,

and the poem itself

by roadside:

a Joshua tree

with ripped sleeves,

uncombed tuft of hair.

**

All that happened in the palaces of Knossos

as Priestess intoned before the bound bull;  

or stone altars where sacrificed

hearts stewed in bowls;

Medieval Paris where wolves

mauled street urchins,

and the poet-bandit

shivered under ragtag blanket;

or when the poet-banker

stretched out in unmade bed,

the Verb burst in the darkness,

a phantasmagoria cast

from a magic lantern;

or the poet-rocker who

awoke from electroshock therapy,

alphabet rattled its maracas and

plucked its bass string; forever,  

the stylus, pen, coal or splinter

was dipped in blood,

pierced the silence,

stone struck against stone, tinder

of skin, spit and hair ignited,

and lungs sucked in a blaze;

Priestess opened her crimson robe,

breasts jutting, snakes in each fist,

eyes rolled back as

lips formed the initial O

for verbs round as moon or

peeled testis of sacrificed bull,--

this has happened, and will happen again.

            **

When you can’t find

a parking spot, or your navel,

and hate & money-gripes

belch from their smokestacks,

fuck off the waiter who spat in your soup,

fuck off your boss who

according to Catullus

has teeth so white he must

have brushed them with mule piss,

and scream from the open window,

fuck off night trembling beneath the bed sheets,

bash the skull of silence and

press in his eyes with your thumbs,

fuck whichever shade your piss curdles,

for only then the roses,

the bloody roses, will not

stain our summers.

            **

I’m dissolving into myself,

oozing towards my navel, 

oil in the pan, fumes belched

from smokestacks, then melding

with yesterday’s haze & roadkill,--

fangs, eyeballs and fur-strips

deliquescing into the humus;

moist blackness salted with oothecae!

I’m decaying back into the terminal

from whence I was spat into life:

a milk-glob, a tadpole, and now

my heart, a carboniferous pool,

wasps frenzy over this surface,   

and Mother Sky,

with her stirring spoon,  

dips into my genetic seepage,

stirs me so that I exude  

a swelter of garlic and

roses, clumps of neurosis,

decades of debt, sweat and nail-clippings,

and Mother is too much sugar, fusses

over this puddle of pitch,

staining and spreading me,

then sponges this mess I am

into a goblet which she raises

over stars and half-moon,

intones a prayer, drinks

and sighs about the amputations,

the shards and globs, the drizzle.

            **   

It’s always raining,

every moment’s a downpour,

even when

the weather’s stunned

by

blue austerity:

death of a friend                     a downpour

bankruptcy                             a shower

lost keys                                 a raindrop,

(you never were landed gentry).

                       

Father’s tumor and shattered

hips, scalpels, medical plastic, tube

worming up urethra…

a thunderstorm, hail,

power outages, flash

floods, and the self dragged

into the brown flowage…

(but the city continued,

traffic and Easter eggs and

white teeth of billboards….

            **

It’s always raining,

every downpour’s exponential,

and the drops:

serrated,

ruthless,

acidic.

And your countenance

remains ovular like

the eggshell which can endure

pressure applied to its tips,

but your smile is porous as an eggshell,

and no matter what

the rain sticks inside,

rain floods your visage,

and the surface is cracking,

and the rain lodges. 

            **

To remain inside the hot earth was my wish.

A spider-shaped sun dragged me into her burrow of magma;

I didn’t know baptisms, weddings, executions,

the streamers snapping in the wind, nor cared for those who survey

dunes, river and stones with theodolites and treaties. 

I rooted deep within her entrails.

But the chamber burst, a conduit shot me up

amid rain, birdcall, shrieks and lightning-hot veins,

and I answered the sudden prick of air

with a sinewy life of teeth, nails and unforgiving snakes.    

 

            **

In this desert, summer unleashes gunshots,

divorces, suicides, and the chaparral

suicidally secretes a combustive oil;

so you might say

we grew up eating asbestos & dust;

you might

say our sun was a blazing spider

and that when thirsty

we savored the taste of her venom drunk hot. 

            **

Far down the winter wood

the gown of the last

castrato

rustles in the wind.

He shivers

having waited there

since daybreak, lips parted, ear

and head bent towards

the clack of ice-sheets dislodging

from pines and

shattering on the frozen floor.

No other accompaniment

reaches him, no

other pitch, there, in the woods

except for the ice and

the bleating

of his forced baritone.