The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 6/25/09 (warning: graphic language)

[BlueIris]

"Ed Dying"

Hate is an old man fucking, arduous
and half a bone, but I work at it
like Sophie Tucker, a last geriatric fling
like pushing a car up a hill with a rope.
Hate the Reagans and their facile cancers,
all straight people with lives and my brothers
who flee to the continent having buried
their allotment. This is the rage of the 8th
year, bent out of shape, crazily displaced,
yelling at the queerest people because
the scum politcos of the NIH are out
of reach, funding the end of the world.
I massacre whoever gets in my small way--check
lost in the mail, promise of shirts Friday,
876-4466 my Thrifty druggist rings busy busy
and I need refills like a one-arm bandit,
that kind of thing. As for Ed, Ed is dying
by phone, dwindling in secret, doing without
spunk and visitors. I leave word weekly
on his machine, reports of my latest tantrum,
a recent self-immolation in the Mayfair checkout.
For months there is no reply, but we are
light-years beyond good manners, Ed and I,
loathing bullshit so and the comfort of sunny
disposition. Checked in the day Rita Hayworth died:
Hi, Ed, poor Gilda, huh? My only friend who knows
how blonde the lady from Shanghaia was and why
it matters so. Publicity errs on the bright side
always, burning for us to have a good time.
Ed who has met them all--Cary, Hitch, Her Serene
Highness--is the last living link between us
poor queens and To Catch a Thief, speaking of Eden
lost. Now we are all on the last train out,
fleeing, fleeing, diamonds up our ass, the past
curling like smoke as Marlene drags her last
Gitane. Even as Ed is dying, in Washington
everyone eats his boogers and Mormons file
plauge under Pest Control, Reagan's colon
clear as a bagpipe, his sausage tumors
replicated in lifelike vinyl for souvenirs.
Then suddenly over New Year's: This is Ed.
Thank you for all your messages. I love
your rage. So I hate mostly for Ed's sake now,
and the old man fucking with his dick in a brace
has mounted a bimbo who can't feel it, does it
for fifty, next year will do it for thirty-five
and eat his shorts for an encore. There are easier
ways than all this slamming about, I admit,
but the time comes--say after the third pneumonia,
and they send you home to recuperate with
the wrong dose, 200 fucking milligrams less
than what will make you live again, and ten
days later you're back in stir, starting it all
over, over and over--the time will come
when you prove you are still alive just feeling
anything at all. So sometimes we are wronged
as Lana Turner in the fifties, jilted and stomped,
like a torrent of smoke thrown by a moonlit train
bound for the chaos of Shanghai. And if we wail
and spew bile we say we are not collaborators,
for Ed would not be dying please without
the complicity of niceness, so many smiling
colon exams. Yes it's hard to keep it up,
me and this numb member of mine, rutting
while Rome burns, but to hate everything
half-true--including me, especially me--
a nasty temper works like Spanish fly.
Be hard and cry foul, I order my bad thing,
for we are in enemy hands, buying time like
fallen women in countries torn by the death
grip of keeping things polite. Hate for the same
reason a man might sit and weep: missing Ed.

~Paul Monette

[BlueIris]

1. Kick.