(One more parenthetical aside, infuriating as it may be: Much thought has been given, by me and by other scholars, as to why women are able to read the entire book, achieve enlightenment, and suffer no negative consequences. [Excepting, of course, our Miss Kickmule, who, let's face it, did have an unusually high testosterone level for a woman. She used to wrestle grizzly bears for relaxation and never cried when she saw The English Patient.] Is it because women have a greater capacity for truth and enlightenment than do mere men? Many scholars believe this is the answer - although these are primarily female scholars. Is it because men, while possessing a capacity for truth and enlightenment the equal of that possessed by women, simply have a devastating allergic reaction to the chemicals used in the ink or paper in this particular volume, which produces such distressing symptoms as head explosions, emulsification, metamorphosis into butter, and self-swallowing? Other scholars are convinced that this is the explanation - and although these are primarily males and may be biased, I have always read the book while wearing both latex gloves and quilted oven mittens.)
In any event, the verses that follow are the complete text of The Book of Counted Sorrows, except that we have withheld two poems in an attempt to spare male readers from the likelihood of madness and messy violent death. No need for any of you men to thank me for that. It is the least I can do.
Finally, a word about the verses themselves. Actually, here are more than a word; here are forty-three words about the verses themselves. But I felt it would sound peculiar to say "here are forty-three words about the verses themselves," though now, through the mechanism of this clarification, I've gone ahead and said it anyway, so I might just as well have said it in the first place. Well, live and learn. So here are those forty-three words: Some of these poems are nothing but doggerel; some are doggerel with a touch of wisdom; others are of a more ambitious nature, and the level of success varies from piece to piece; and a few are perhaps emotionally and intellectually engaging.
You know, however, what my opinion is worth: My opinion and two dollars will buy you a latte at Starbucks.
The thought of that latte was so appetizing, so fully realized with my free and supple imagination, that even though I did not, in fact, consume the beverage, I am now required to floss and proceed to the carriage master's cottage.
Be not afraid for me. The robotic monkeys have been repaired.
And Now the Text of the Cursed Book...
THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS
An Inevitable Doom Press Publication
All rights vigorously reserved and viciously defended.
© 1928 by " "
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means
without permission in writing, in blood, from the publisher. Any
violation of this copyright will result in the violator being tracked
down by packs of spectacularly well-trained and utterly savage pigs
that will find you as easily as they would locate truffles if that
happened to be what they were trained to find.
These pigs will bite you on the ankles, kneecaps, and genitals until
you have been subdued, whereupon you will be conveyed to the proper
authorities to be executed, convicted, and put on trial, in that order.
PUBLISHER'S DISCLAIMER:
Inevitable Doom Press hereby warns all readers of the possibility of
insanity or violent death resulting from the reading of these verses.
You may also suffer headaches, halitosis, hoof-and-mouth disease,
dizziness, failure to achieve dizziness when dizziness is desired,
bleeding from hair follicles, the unexplained cancellation of
subscriptions that are dear to you, hives, rashes, boils, inflamed
earlobes, the sudden growth of a second head, bad weather, colossal
flatulence, the compulsion to insist that your name is Igor when you
know perfectly well this isn't true, the unwanted romantic attention
of cats, blisters, and the growth of eye hair.
Table of Contents
One Door Away From Heaven
Neither Do They Fade Away
In the Fields of Life
The Weight
The Train Leaves the Station
A Delicious Walk
Habit Makes Destiny
Pedal to the Metal
Remembering When We Didn't Expect to Live Forever
A Roundness
Remembered Dreams
Academic and Novelist as Abbott and Costello
The Chain
Short Story
The Modern Age
Wee Wisdom
This Old Honkytonk of Fools
Cold Fire
Whom You Might Trust
1992
Men on White Horses
Crossing Nevada
Melodrama
Busy Humanity
Kiss
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Winter Moon
The Mask
Reality
The Answer Comes After the Funeral
Drummer
Potboiler
Saving Graces
Politics
Ten Years Old, Reading in Bed
Fallen Yet Not Lacking in Virtue
February, 1969
We Are All So Modern Here
All Those Snappy Epigrams on the Theme of Night
Anthem
A Thought While Reading Rex Stout
Cry Doom
Dragon Tears
Cold Questions
Mary Shelley, No One Listens
A Job May Not Be Enough
The Root of All Mystery
Haiku
Where God Goes on Vacation
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening with Exploding Heads: A
Tribute in Verse to Robert Frost
About This Book (from the scanners)
Dedication
To the doomed. To the forgotten. To the misunderstood. To the misbegotten.
To the doomed and forgotten misbegotten who have been frequently
misunderstood. To the melancholy, the lonely, the lost, the weary, the
hopelessly anguished, the bitterly distraught, the terminally cranky, the
ferociously depressed, and the seethingly disinterested.
Also to Uncle Mort and Aunt Clara: Thanks for the homemade muffins.
One Door Away From Heaven
One door away from Heaven,
We live each day and hour.
One door away from Heaven,
But it lies beyond our power
To open the door to Heaven,
And enter when we choose.
One door away from Heaven,
And the key is ours to lose.
One door away from Heaven,
But, oh, the entry dues.
One door away from Heaven,
And yet we sing the blues.
One door away from Heaven,
We live each day and night.
One door away from Heaven
Is such a perilous height,
A long fall from the doorstep,
If we can't tell wrong from right.
Neither Do They Fade Away
Elvis is dead but spotted in Biloxi,
In Nashville, Corpus Christi. He's got moxie
To be dead vet movie-going at the Roxie,
Still sticking to this world as if epoxied.
Glimpsed in a pink Caddy there in Biloxi,
Our ageless King, still smilin' and still foxy.
They say Walt Disney was frozen to live again,
To once more walk his magic land of mice and men.
Al Einstein's brain is rumored floating in a jar.
Until he's got a new body, he won't go far.
This is America, where failure is decried.
This is America, and death must be denied.
In The Fields Of Life
In the fields of life, a harvest
Sometimes comes far out of season,
When we thought the earth was old
And could see no earthly reason
To rise for work at break of dawn,
And put our muscles to the test.
With winter here and autumn gone,
It just seems best to rest, to rest.
But under winter fields so cold,
Wait the dormant seeds of seasons
Unborn, and so the heart does hold
Hope that heals all bitter lesions.
In the fields of life, a harvest.
The Weight
We have a weight to carry
And a distance we must go.
We have a weight to carry,
A destination we can't know.
We have a weight to carry
And can put it down nowhere.
We are the weight we carry
From there to here to there.
The Train Leaves The Station
All of us are travelers lost,
Our tickets arranged at a cost
Unknown but beyond our means.
This odd itinerary of scenes
- Enigmatic, strange, unreal -
Leaves us unsure how to feel.
No postmortem journey is rife
With more mystery than life.
A Delicious Walk
The tired dog lies licking its feet.
Absorbed, quiet, and so discrete.
You would be wrong in assuming
It is engaged in mere grooming.
You can tell by the canine smiles,
It's tasting the mem'ry of miles.
Habit Makes Destiny
On the road that I have taken,
One day, walking, I awaken,
Amazed to see where I have come,
Where I'm going, where I'm from.
This is not the path I thought.
This is not the place I sought.
This is not the dream I bought,
Just a fever of fate I've caught.
I'll change highways in a while,
At the crossroads, one more mile.
My path is lit by my own fire.
I'm going only where I desire.
On the road that I have taken,
One day, walking, I awaken.
One day, walking, I awaken,
On the road that I have taken.
Pedal To The Metal
Hope is the destination that a seek.
Love is the road that leads to hope.
Courage is the motor that drives us.
We travel out of darkness into faith.
Even on this map of infinite complexity,
Only one highway is worth following,
One route worth the time behind the wheel,
One arrival rewarding to the traveler.
No rest stop can offer rest assured
To equal the peace at highway's end,
When you've driven hard and well,
With purpose, in search of meaning.
Remembering When We Didn't Expect To Live Forever
We once ate great half-raw steaks
And washed them down with martinis.
Eggs and bacon for breakfast,
Sweet or sour cream over Minis.
We drove fast and free of belts.
We smoked if we wanted to.
We finished the day with a brandy
And occasionally even two.
Now we know the folly of those ways,
The dangers of those innocent days.
Salad now, and a glass of iced tea.
We shudder at the mention of Brie.
Seatbelts, airbags, sugarless gum.
Count every calorie, know the sum.
Clogged arteries are not forgiving.
Clogged or not - this isn't living.
A Roundness
Life is a gift that must be given back,
And joy should arise from its possession.
It's too damned short, and that's a fact.
Hard to accept, this earthly procession
To final darkness is a journey done,
Circle completed, work of art sublime,
A sweet melodic rhyme, a battle won.
Remembered Dreams
Your face, as no other face,
Populates remembered dreams.
Your arms, as no other place:
Landscape to remembered dreams.
Your heart, as no other heart.
Your eyes, as no other eyes,
In you each dream must start.
With you the real world dies
And my life thereafter lies
Only in remembered dreams.
Academic And Novelist As Abbott And Costello
You deconstruct. I'll reconstruct.
You analyze. I'll catalyze
New brews from old elixirs.
You mix it up. I'll fix it up.
You break it down. I'll play the clown
At one of your faculty mixers.
You challenge style. I'll smile awhile.
You find the theme. I'll soon redeem
My work from any classroom trickster.
The Chair
Tremulous skeins of destiny
Flutter so ethereally
Around me - but then I feel
Its embrace is that of steel.
Short Story
A gasp of breath,
A sudden death:
The tale begun.
A rustled page
Passes an age:
The tale is done.
The Modern Age
Living in the modern age,
Death for virtue is the wage.
So it seems in darker hours.
Evil wins, kindness cowers.
Ruled by violence and vice.
We all stand upon thin ice.
Are we brave or are we mice,
Here upon such thin, thin ice?
Dare we linger, dare we sate?
Dare we laugh or celebrate?
Knowing we may strain the ice?
Preserve the ice at any price?
Wee Wisdom
When tempest-tossed,
Embrace chaos.
This Old Honkytonk Of Fools
Rush headlong and hard at life
Or just sit at home and wait.
All things right and all the wrong
Will come straight to you: It's fate.
Hear the music, dance if you can.
Dress in rags or wear your jewels.
Drink your choice, nurse your fear
In this old honkytonk of fools.
Cold Fire
Vibrations in a wire.
Ice crystals
In a beating heart.
Cold fire.
A mind's frigidity:
Frozen steel,
Dark rage, morbidity.
Cold fire.
Defense against
A cruel life,
Death and strife:
Cold fire.
Whom You Might Trust
Nowhere can a secret keep
Always secret, dark and deep,
Half so well as in the past,
Buried deep to last, to last.
Keep it in your own dark heart.
Otherwise the rumors start.
After many years have buried
Secrets over which you worried,
No confidant can then betray
All the words you didn't say.
Only you can then exhume
Secrets safe within the tomb
Of memory, of memory,
Within the tomb of memory.
1992
Winter that year was strange and gray.
The damp wind smelled of Apocalypse,
And morning skies had a peculiar way
Of slipping cat-quick into midnight.
Men On White Horses
Those
who would banish the sin of greed
Embrace the sin of envy as their creed.
Those who seek to banish envy as well
Only draw elaborate new maps of Hell.
Those with passion to change the world
Look on themselves as saints, as pearls,
And by the launching of noble endeavor,
Flee dreaded introspection forever.
Crossing Nevada
Las Vegas far behind
The highway flat
And straight
The Mojave dark
Where this small town
At 2 a.m.
Holds hot eternity at bay
With service-station lights
And a humming Coke machine
Though neither can lay to rest
The uneasy suspicion