[Lyric] Squandermania or Falling Asleep over Delmore Schwartz (Don Share)

The moral superiority of distress
was limited, in my family, by Kinderfeindlichkeit.
As alternative commodities, we were lacking
        in economic utility, hence
         The Rotten Child Theorem,
the fostering not of children, but debt and guilt,
in exchange for which we admit our own deficiencies.
         I had two friends named Aaron.
         Both stuttered; neither was happy.
Their brother, Moses, was oddly favored by God.
The rod raised, no child in their pod was spoiled,
         and still, post-partum,
         the Red Sea parted with a great Oy!

One of the Aarons had a dog, a cat, a goldfish,
and imaginary friend, all unnamed. The other wished
         he was a woman named Elaine.
         Both played in the rain, alone,
shunned ~ stoned ~ by other boys and their brothers. Sad.
         How sharp it is, like a serpent’s tooth,
         Their mother misquoted, to have
A thankless child! The Aarons dutifully read
Lear and Hamlet, hated their fathers and women,
         and kicked me hard.
         I was no paste-eater, but it stuck
with me that the ciphers we each learned, by rote,
made me a cipher. Underfoot,
         my mom called me,
         a cousin, I thought, to Hiawatha.
Presidents were father figures in those days;
we were taught that they were good, especially
         the ones from Ohio.
         You don’t want to hear about this,
It’s worse than playing Monopoly. Or solitaire.
I digress. Where was Father? Working.
         I picture him now, jerking
         off his belt to mete out pain in penta-
metric slashes, punishment, in meaty welts I felt
         for ages. Only men who landed
         on the moon were proficient enough
for him, and nobody goes there anymore.
         Plenty of zero-G at home.
         Homo economicus, I call him now;
his job was to make everything small.
A small fish in a shrinking pond, he put the fun
in funereal, while Mom, rebarbative herself,
         shushed me irrepressibly
         and cued the frictive assault: a spanking!
Pardon the shriek-marks! What everyone
seems to know is how to fatten with rue,
         to live in controlled breakdown.

Yet to paraphrase The Who: Who Are You?
I’ve come a long way from tohu wabohu
~ no? To be lectured? Am I in need of further
         Admonition and correction?
         As opposed to instruction?
Then you, and you, and anyone who was here before
my zygote mitoseed into personality and gumption,
         What once was called, admiringly,
         grit, before the word meant a mote
in the eye, to be plucked, I shall defy, I say, I defy,
in italics, each reprimand, all getting-in of licks,
         and associated hissy-fits.
         Try as you may, I am inured
to such reified… Reified what?
No word follows “reified.”
         “Oh yeah? Sez who? You
         and what army?”
I was beaten again, the story
of my life, so again, I wake into, what else, my life?
         But I digress, in this mess. I,
unlike Lorca, am no good with the Ay!
am better with my eye, close-reading the stuff
of verse, perversely highlighting what's lost in translation.
         So don't cavil me with your
         critical cavalry: I write on, anyway,
by-and-by, and big boys don't cry. True,
my mood isn't food for thought, exactly:
         thought, when it comes,
         often comes to naught
and at the drop of a yarmulke or hat.
Imagine that! What luck to be in a sulk.

Jonas Salk, was he a Jew, too? Did he go to
         Hebrew school to dream, like a fool,
         of his vaccine in sugar-cube:
not so bracing sweet nor worthy of a stir
like, you should pardon the great American expression,
         Sure! How coy I'm not with this fifties-
         through-sixties boomer gruel:
Don't be cruel, I kid you not, twelve full ounces,
that's a lot in the sweet by-and-by, farther along,
         If loving you is wrong,
         I don't wanna be right, Dad.
SCRABBLE. MONOPOLY. Impervious,
implacable, impossible to appease, no pleasing
         some people, sheesh! Puhleeze!
Domestic bliss is, after all, hit or miss, like
dubiosity, ignorance, or even a disease
to be expunged by vaccination, not vacillation: action.
         Impatience married to a kitchen sponge.
         The middle son held, at length, his tongue.
What salvation? How did I spell relief? From filthy looks
I fled to my books ~ no paradise lost, there ~ books
and silent seething passages of time, thought, and labor.
         My ardor was for phantasm: grisly history
         and tawny novel of Civil Wars, World's
Great Classics, anything voluptuous, anything to quiet
fuss, any story but the one about us, e.g.,
         the one about my Jewish bootlegger grandfather
         sent to a Federal prison with bread and water,
my infant, speechless dad visiting him by train, in the South,
the bitterness in his mouth till his own death, never to unravel
         the Hydra's sticky arms of harsh speech
         and hideous hum in his anger-maze, and tedium.
Pent like a serpent, unrepentant, like unraveling Borealis in starlight.

No, you can't henpeck yourself.
You can't feel ice thin. Even so,
         when you say, "I feel like killing myself,"
         that syllogism leads
not to a philosophy of form, but to endless
analysis of act, vicious cycles of your own
rights and necessity. Oh, how cause-and-effect
         leaves one in the lurch! Essentially,
anger is unbecoming. Its conclusion appears
as an infinitely distant point I can approach
         only asymptotically, which is avowedly
         not to overlook the pure sound of emotion.
Just so, a cry becomes a word, the word becomes
a sentence, objectively, a signum prefixum.

Fix him? Did you just call me a Frankenstein?
Boo-fricking-hoo! At least I didn't have the gall
         to become a major poet,
         all tears and liquid pro quo. Or liquor
myself up with experience of the Thou, asking
what this "Thou" is saying to "us," and so on,
         or the "necessary separation of ourselves
         from ourselves ... " Because forgetting
is so close to remembering ~ mneme, anamnesis ~
I'm sorry to be so tactless, but tact is tacit.
         I know it sounds like I'm taking the high
         road of eruditio, but I assure ya
I espouse the probable, not the true, the verisimilar.
Let's break the ice and lose these anticipations
and predilections: all art begins with the particular,

has lots of heart, and ends in sadness, fuckit ~
if punctuation is biographical (God help our squandermania),
then I'm stuck like Delmore's glass-eyed duck in the bucket.