POEM OF THE WEEK #15


Kevin Killian

Poet, playwright, novelist, critic, biographer, Kevin Killian -- "While he may not exactly be suited to negotiating a peace treaty," as Glen Helfand put it in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, "writer Kevin Killian is one of those people who can smoothly blend disparate insular worlds of literature, theatre, and art into an impressive whole." His 1996 collection of stories, Little Men (Hard Press), won the PEN Oakland Award for Fiction. The brilliantly varied poems of his Argento Series (Krupskaya Books, 2001) were born when "1992 Kathy Acker suggests films of Dario Argento as a prism through which to take apart the horror of living and dying in AIDS era." The new manuscript from which this week's poem is taken is called Action Kylie; we fully expect to be astonished by what our author sights through the prism of the beautiful-bottomed Aussie. After all, as the poet says, "Iconic objects take on eerie lives of their own and no one knows their business, not even the moguls at Skywalker Ranch who control everything else".

 

Count Backwards -- Five, Four, Three, Two, One




Five four three two one

	Attain the ego state of your mind

Bring down fraction control to the line of white blip

It's not evil, it's just your bodishattva

One who knows more than you about what you're doing when

It's easy when you think a lot of Camden Caulfield

        Poaching on the lief, I’d rather sit and eat beef

watching the pool of the water van mindlessly fill and empty itself like your mind on
 
                     acid,

in a water cup with little pink Dixies

a tried, true gremlin free




Do you see the guard woman and man --

they're looking at our racination through a white and yellow shot glass

she is from a trailer park in her native land




Oh pavement strip in pool of white light,

Johnny paces nervously, flings down a cigarette

that glows on rustic pavement strip

       might well be leather leaves on the old oak trees of your dream

you wanted to find Bush and the Cheney living in the Pyrenees

Count backwards, five four Lee Bontecou, a leatherface mask on a big tank camera

                    with twin gunsights for eyes




I poked the tin strips in your balls

You couldn't sit the requisite amount of time so instead I like and treated you like an

                      ermine dog

with lots of soiled crackers and a rolled up Time

Feeling abject about the car wreck,

I hung my head while William Hung was featuring on Star Trek

as I told the Iraqi men, who are so sensitive about nudity, to try

masturbate in my direction

like my country continued to barrage above the prison we called

Abu Ghraib jail




            we liked the sound of those watery phonemes

baby, come to me

I'm walking treadmill like Oscar Wilde pondering my choice to

                    surrender public nudity for a diet of shame biscuits

that crumble in your mouth

and lie in cold puddles of water on my penis and

count backwards

      five four three two one

             in America of

                  the trailer park witch who gets blamed for the outrage of the big

                   wig people




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