Starch

Hello again. I do not expect this to be anything spectacular, but I haven't written poetry in near a year and thought it would be good if I began again.

Starch

Crackled paper tied tight over two small planets
When will I see again?
A vision of milk and shadow soaks my gaze,
Fills my heart.
When will I see again?

Three years I slaved away,
Deft hands refining jet armor,
Crafting plates of heavy steel.
Plate by plate they fall from me,
Rusted.
When will I see again?

He found the small chink in my chainmail,
Saw it close to my heart.
Blinders on a well-rationed brain
Could not help my sight.
When will I see again?

One gasp, one tear and all is done.
How sharp, how callous was his spear,
Leaving old soldier to her end,
Bleeding into the wheat.
When will I see again?

I open my eyes.
White cataracts glisten,
Dry and fall.
Sandpaper lids open and close.
I can see.

Starch, what have you done to me?
I was warm but now I'm white and stiff.
Starch, what have you done to me?
I who once loved
Am pale and cold marble.

A New Year and The Ugly Woman

Every intention have I to continue this blog. I have found several factors have been getting in the way, but with the new year, why not be more productive? I would like to thank all those who have made comments on what I have thus far written. It is very kind of you and best to you all!

Today I find myself musing on The Ugly Woman. What, you may ask, is the Ugly Woman? Indeed, many of them exist, people would believe. They are often librarians and spinsters, hiding away in houses full of sixteen cats and knitting needles. In truth, however, the Ugly Woman is the majority of women. For indeed not every poor damsel can be blessed with the radiant and splendid beauty of someone like Angelina Jolie. Heavens knows we don't all have bloated lips, bloated breasts and rail-thin frames.

But let us take the Ugly Woman to the cinema and to literature.

I am often thinking of the sad, infeebled (and sometimes Byronic) male in film and literature. For instance, take a Woody Allen film. You have a generally undesirable-looking man, with a puny stature, unfashionable glasses, and very thin hair. He's awkward if intelligent, and maladroit. In short, he has little to recommend him. However, he generally tends to achieve a great success and of course, to woo some (attractive) woman or other. This paradigm can also be seen with Charles Chaplin's Tramp, Jane Eyre's unpleasant Mr. Rochester, and all the romantic loners who self-loathe and are yet admired. These are Ugly Men, but where are the Ugly Women?

It is rare that we see an unattractive woman in a serious, positive situation. I think of Bridget Jones, who is overweight and dreadfully maladroit. However, the same mystique does not surround her as Woody Allen--you ask yourself why? in her case, where you would not ask such a thing in the case of an Allen character. Why is Mark Darcy attracted to her when she has all of these unseemly flaws? Why should she end up with a handsome, intelligent man?

Well, the Ugly Woman cannot be taken seeriously. She cannot find a leading role in any narrative other than that which mocks her. She is the maiden aunt, the village witch, the best friend. She may be intelligent and witty, but all of these things are strange. Instead, she is expected to lose some weight and maybe get a facelift.

I will be satisfied when I see a romance novel with a two-hundred pound intellectual riddled with pimples and not-so-perfect teeth. Will he love her then?

FdS

Une Reverie

Last night I dreamed.

The darkness of the building overwhelmed me. That was key to the dream--that dreary, all-encompassing darkness. Somehow it made everything acceptable. Made what happened acceptable.

I do not remember when I entered the Bistro de Jouissance. How I came to be at such a place I do not know. Never a place of wholesome bread and finer wine, the name was a poor one to mask the brazen nature of this house of ill repute. Jouissance. This may have been an American brothel, but the French words could not hide the house's intention: to get off as many men as would provide the purse.

Scantly clad bodies hovered in the shadows. I watched as the women stood in loose lines like brood mares awaiting examination for purchase. And fine connoisseurs such gentlemen were. I never would see their faces but I always saw their intentions. Take Janice into the room over there, do. She knows well how to drop to her knees and suck. And off they went, as happy as any romantic pair with picnic basket and table cloth. Such things are easily feigned.

I watched the corseted young lady lower her eyes before a prospective patron. I knew well what would occur in that setting. She would have to tell him her limits beforehand. He might be offered the crop. If he paid, she would always please though his restrictions be tighter than her corset.

But lo and behold, a vision resplendent on a throne above the rest. A Norse goddess, golden locks flowing over a face which had seen but little of the day for years. She sat on her dais as I imagined the first Elizabeth may have done. Her face, expressionless, proud, eyes of that dreadful blue few dare to meet.

In that slow, rolling haze peculiar to a dream, I approached her majesty. Kneeling like a courtier. Her smile was slow and small, as though it were something she but deigned to give me.

"I cannot pay," I whispered. She laughed low in her throat, bestowing upon me another small smile.

"No need," replied she.

Naked and humiliated, I waited for my livelihood.

A Return to the Black

Dirt. It covered everything. Covered her bed, covered her chair, covered her dresser. Was it dirt or dust? Sometimes she could not tell, it was so fine. Yet it had indeed aspects of dirt--the itty bit of moisture, the way it clung beneath her fingernails.

She was living in a barren garden. Was she perhaps the plant? The fragile orchid growing in the damp conditions? If so, she was certainly wilting here. No sun at all, for days and days on end. Dark, weathered curtains shielded her from that vicious warmth-bringer.

"Matti," one of them whispered sweetly into her ear. "Matti, when do you think you'll see the sun again?" She moaned incoherently in response.

"Matti." This one was a more masculine voice, cultured and melodious. "Matti, you know every old house has a ghost to haunt it, no?" She nodded, rocking back and forth on her dirty bed. "Matti...you are that ghost." This was only greeted with more moans.

"You are a ghost, Matti," the voice insisted. "A ghost, a shadow. You are no longer a human being with a physical, lively essence. If they see you at all, they will be frightened." His voice turned into an unpleasant hiss as it neared her ear. Her eyes popped open of their own accord, fright flooded into irises the color of the little blue pills she once took.

"Yes," another joined in eagerly, sprightly, almost. "They're all afraid of you. That's why he left you--he couldn't take the daily horror of you." She squirmed in her bed, closing her eyes shut at the thought of it.

"Face it," yet another insinuated. "Face it. You are a freak." There was a slow certainty in the words, an horrifically comforting feel to them. The other voices chuckled and cackled in agreement. She was certain she heard the clinking of glasses together, as though it were a toast. A toast to madness.

Dirt, dirt, dirt. Even the packaging of the leftover bags of chips and snack cakes she had eaten before she had run out of food entirely were beginning to disentegrate, coagulate into dirt. The dirt tangled in her now greasy hair. The dirt stained her two-week old pyjamas, stained her bare feet, stained her hands.

Matti curled up into a ball on that dirty bed, her arms tightening around her bent legs. She leaned down her head and began biting at her knee, hard. The talking continued, the casual conversations on the horror that was Matti. Her grip on her knee slackened. Blood filled her mouth. Filled her lifeless mouth.

A Brief Vignette

Everyone writes memoirs, it seems, nowadays. Even the owners of brothels. Everyone thinks they have some story to share. My ten year old nephew is already writing about how awesome it is to be him. Assigned by Ms. Mathews. He only barely scraped a B.

Wouldn't it be amusing if I could go on from there and say, "Well, everyone, you thought your memoirs were great--look at mine! Ms. Mathews and I, oh man! Ours was a love which surpassed all sticks of chalk and dry eraseboards! (And it was kinky, too.)"?

No, the only reason I even know about Ms. Mathews is because my sister complains about or praises her every time I'm visiting.

"Oh, Robert! Look at what Ms. Mathews gave Bobby! Did you see? He got a gold star for his homework. I tell ya, that woman is a genius. Bobby is getting smarter and smarter."

Or, if you prefer.

"Robert! I don't know what the hell she thinks she's doing to these kids, but she's not going to give Bobby a silent lunch just because he was talking to his friend for one second! I don't know why that school board hires people like that. They were probably all on those illegal drugs they get as incentive."

You see, if I attempt to immerse you in my life, I will only diverge into that of another. It will never be a story about me.

You know, they say that Lord Byron had a club foot. He was supposed to have said, "Well, even I must have an imperfection, and this is it, alas!" Surely he thought himself an adonis, and a veritable Don Juan when it came to the ladies. The club foot didn't matter, though everyone would have noticed it.

Again, what does this have to do with me?

I remember walking with my toe inward when I was told this story in high school. I was a rational young man at the time, but I was so afraid of my poetry, of these poems I had within me and which I could never share, that I thought that maybe if I pretended to have a club foot like Byron, I'd have the guts to show it to somebody--anybody. It wouldn't have made sense without talking about Lord Byron.

"Robert, you have the most lovely poetry." A girl from college. We were kind of almost sleeping together.

"Well, I've never seen such drivel." A professor from the same college. Until then, I had seen him as a genius.

The fact of the matter is, their perceptions become my reality. My poetry isn't mine. Instead, it's the good poetry of the women who want to sleep with me, and the crap poetry of the arrogant professors who can't see past their egos. It certainly isn't what I say it is. It's incidental.

The thing to know about Robert is that he is merely a coincidental figure. I'm some guy who just happened to be there at the beheading of Charles I. I'm some guy who happened to be in the plane when they first dropped the atomic bomb. I'm some guy who happened to be standing in the general vicinity when they were taking a picture of Hilary Clinton. I'm just here, and a witness to the struggles and triumphs of others.

I'm an afterthought. No use writing a memoir about an afterthought.

The "B" Word

This is it. It's coming your way, my fellow women. I'm convinced nearly every woman has been called one at least once in her lifetime. Yes, my friends, it's one of the gros mots, bitch.

Why do we abhor it? Why do we think little of its meaning and the true vulgarity? Naturally, I can imagine at least one person saying, "What the hell? It's just another choice word I like to use. No different from bastard, shit, etc. What makes this any worse?"

Indeed, what makes such a word as bitch worse than some of our other pretty expletives? Let us take a look to its etymological roots.

I am sure it doesn't take a philologist to know that the word harbors its beginnings in canine breeding terminology. In order to obtain the good traits for the work that humans want the dog to do (i.e., hunting, rat catching) it is of course necessary to make sure that there are good breeding dogs, male and female. The female, a dog whose purpose is expressly to breed, is (and was) called a bitch.

Let's think on this for a minute. A bitch is a female dog meant for breeding purposes. (I will grant that not all female dogs were bred, but the reproductive was seen as their major purpose as a whole.) This of course leads the average observer to recollect the estrus of a female dog, of a bitch. Dogs in heat are not fun. They howl and become easily agitated. They are looking for one thing: the mating, the intercourse. It is an overwhelming urge, a drive, a force so intimately connected to the female dog's psyche.

And of course, if you've ever seen dogs mate, you can see how the bitch reacts. She is still, passive, as the male eagerly humps her. I am no expert on dog psychology, but this passivity, the way the dog turns her head, it is as though she is looking for something else to do, but by her nature forced to submit.

A bitch, in human terms, is interestingly enough a woman who will not submit, a woman who is angry, moody, or otherwise disagreeable. A woman who is irate when it comes to sexual matters. I do believe that in very contemporary terminology, it is how one refers to someone under one's power, sexually or otherwise (e.g., Sally is my bitch).

Are women bitches? The short answer is no. In biological terms connected with dogs, women are not merely reproductive creatures. A woman's life does not merely consist of birthing children on a yearly basis. As Simone de Beauvoir has said, women have their own plans and ideas: they are not wombs. Breeding bitches are just that.

Furthermore, to imply that a woman who may have spells of anger of irritation is likened to a vicious dog is less than apt. Most people have changes of mood and become angry. Also, certain ways of approaching things in the professional world call for being aggressive. Being aggressive is not only a male trait. Aggressiveness and assertiveness are seen across the board.

I end this discussion noting that in calling a woman a bitch, even in jest, you categorize her and package her into the straight jacket of sexism. Such restraints only increase resistance and a will to escape.

FdS

A Beginning

This is it. This is the beginning. I am nearly shy as an inexperienced performer thrust naked onto the stage--against her wishes. It is not against my wishes that I begin. Such things are necessary.

What, then, am I here to do? Well, it is easier to explain what I am not here to do.

I am not here to promote myself in any sense of the manner. Perhaps I am not keeping with the times, but I could never quite play the harlot--in every sense of the word. I am not here to defame people just for the sake of looking wise. Satire is necessary, yes, and to be desired--but I find there is a difference between satire and impotent spite. Criticism is a far, far better way to go.

I am not here to provide news or delight about the media/entertainment industry. I can foresee different sorts of those media coming into future entries, but it will certainly not be found in abundance. If you are looking for Paris Hilton, you will not find her here.

I am not here to be a political commentator. There are too many of them and their voices are loud and grating. If I wanted to do such things, I would find a way to get myself on CNN or its ilk. As with the entertainment, this does not mean that politics will not at times be discussed, but I am not particularly an advocate for either party, so arguments in their favor would not be so painful to me as to the hot-blooded political commentator.

I hope to spread a bit of critique and a little philosophy when I can get it. It is my humble hope that one person might read this blog and think, if only for a second.

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