Where Is My Own Irving Layton?

"I always think of something Irving Layton said about the requirements for a young poet...: ‘The two qualities most important for a young poet are arrogance and inexperience.’ It’s only some very strong self-image that can keep you going in a world that really conspires to silence everyone." 
                                                                                                                                         Leonard Cohen

Where is my own Irving Layton
an exuberant supporter
of my defeats?
Where are my true mentors, those
who do not drain whatever little is left
in my wallet or my heart or my marriage to the holy books? those
who do not diagnose me with anxiety? those
who tell me I am special? those who do not
themselves escape to a psychiatric ward
and weep and weep instead of owning up
after hearing what I have to say?

Where are my teachers? Where is the cure
for cancer? For pimples? Where is
what is not in sight? Where can I be blinded
by the light at the end of the tunnel? Where the train? Where is plastic surgery
without all the 'plastic'? Where have my prayers
gone? My Arabic? My childhood voice? My singing voice? Where
is my guitar? Where are the chords I'll never learn? Ladies? Where in the world is Waldo?
where in the world am I? Where the hell am I? Am I?

Where have you been? Where are you aching? Where do I
enter? Where is the handle? Where the decelerator?
Where is the world? To be? or Where do I buy rope?
Where oil? What precise spot on the ceiling
won't bear my weight and give me near-death?
A nirvana? An immortality in the present? A new outlook? New looks? This glorious spot,
this solemn Zen-master of a spot
must be found, warmer climates of the heart
must be found, cheaper plane tickets
must be found, better questions must be found
or I must die. But tell me:
Where is my own Irving Layton
an exuberant supporter
of my defeats?

New Notebook

I am not proud
that I rip off notebook pages
unsatisfied not with the content
but the handwriting

but this is the way the world is, too,

and although I can't say that I don't regret
the lives I've given up in the wind
more a papercut than paper
thin and soaked
empty space for the most part
skin and lines not blackened adequately
in battlefields and lovebeds--

but this is the way the world is, you say,
I could've been the solitary weak page
in the manuscript of an august masterpiece
not edited off, not quoted
while those pressed against me
would be caressed into immortality
by the generations of beauty.

Sancho Panza

I do admit I fooled around
with little Kut quite a bit
when I gave him this bloated mask
and such pretty people to meet

I put in him longing for home
then hid all homes away from him
when he found one I made him ask
whether it was worth the dream

Too much passion for a dead art
with too sparse a wordbook of love
the illusion of a great task
but shoulders not fit to push and shove

"Self-mockery in rhyme is smart"
he thinks, gosh, he will speak and speak
no glory in which he will bask,
not a single ounce of unique.

I do admit I fooled around
with little Kut quite a bit
when I gave him this bloated mask
and not the courage to quit.

The Voices

The Law says I'm now a Man
The pictures say I'm but a Boy
I think of everything I can--
then a She says "You're just my toy."

The Inside says that I'm a Soul
Brain Research states otherwise
Leonard speaks there'll be a Call
My Friends say I'm food for mice

The Heart screams "I'm Immortal"
but betrays itself when it aches
Time creeps on sweet and subtle
waits for when it'll eat my face

Graveyards with silence choose to speak
and mutilate dreams taking flight
whichever truth I choose to seek
already muted by the blight

See, these voices roar and blow
within my ears day after day--
Terrified I just hope to know
one day what I'll choose to say.

The Truth About Humanity

Those that say humanity is
the great monuments and empires
built and destroyed, great loves, great struggles,
great literature, great sex, great faith:
you are wrong. Humanity is
a sequence of not-yet-dead men stuffing cotton
into dead men's assholes
-so that they won't shit their sheets and coffins-
and hoping to be able to shit in a toilet
for oh god just a little bit longer
until they lie flat dead on a stone
their assholes exposed and rotting.

Sakura

I am done now
learning to yearn
for things unattainable
the introduction of you
an all-sufficient instruction for me
in that regard;
I am done with the desire
to explore the whole of this world
or have the whole of this world
come explore me in awe
before either me or this world
is stuck in the ground in a coffin--
The sunken cities
that hide in the swollen seas
your large pupils swim in
is all I want to go to.
The sonatas,
the sonatas of fear and laughter and sweat
your long fingers can draw from me
all I want to hear, your fear,
your fear and laughter and sweat all the taste I want on my tongue.
you see: My heart
no longer a house for the imitations
of great things, no longer like
the cheap dusty Sacred Heart of a plastic Jesus
in another forsaken church
but a mantelpiece for your light feline sit,
that crossing, oh that soft crossing of your legs
that makes the whole of this world tremble,
and the bastard you grin like.

You Come Down From the Stage

You come down from the stage
already feeling like a tree
fooled into a full blossom
by a treacherous March morning

you come down from the stage
utterly alone, the personas you loved,
the personas you hated--the personas that blissfully weren't you washed away,
gone, and once again there is no excuse
for this haircut that is rather a lack of a haircut
once again there is no excuse
for this face, this pitiful waste of benzoyl peroxide
and (never quite) Clean&Clear.

you come down from the stage
to an empty bed, that was all the gazes you'll have on you
for the next god knows how many months,
now you have to live with everything
the make-up remover will not take off
the hunchback of your character
exchanged with a more difficult kind of hunchback

You come down from the stage
already feeling like a tree
that fooled itself into a full blossom
in a March morning almost like any other

ready to have its flowers
frozen and cut down by the winter
ready for nothing else,
nothing else at all.