kagablog

Hey man,

I’ve been meaning to write and tell you how much I enjoyed The Ballad of Sugar Moon and Coffin Deadly. Rocking through the main section, I was amused by Coffin’s intellectual machismo, and enjoyed laughing at him (as I laugh at myself), since he’s so aware of his own absurdities, and the absurdities of the world that spawned him. But when I got to Sugar Moon’s confession — wow! It hit really hard; some really beautiful poetry there.

Yours,
Jonathan

Winged City Chapbooks
an imprint of New Sins Press
www.newsinspress.com

Prosthetic Gods

Copyright © 2008 Jonathan Penton
Poems Copyright © 2000-2007 Jonathan Penton

All Rights Reserved

Cover art by Sri Nash Parker

ISBN 13: 978-0-9796956-9-8

Winged City Chapbooks
an imprint of New Sins Press
Rane Arroyo
3925 Watson Avenue
Toledo, OH 43612
www.newsinspress.com

To these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him. One may say, therefore, that these gods were cultural ideals. Today he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal…Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

It’s all very well for Allen to say
that he knew the best plural minds of his generation
but chances are you didn’t

chances are you knew punks frauds egos clingons
cheap fucks who rent their stolen suits
chances are
you only knew one mind
worth saving

chances are it was the first you buried
chances are good it was not the last

there is no tape for the way minds break
there’s a million things that can go wrong
and not one of them is anything
a doctor
could notice

we seek the solution to madness knowing
sanity has no answers

So you have a little world
And you think your world has meaning
But I take your world
For spite, for sport
So what will you do now?

And you have a little god
And you pray your god has power
But I kill your god
For sport, for spite
So what will you do now?

You’re respected at your job
You work in four felt walls
But you can’t have a job when I’m around since your hearing won’t turn down

So you go back to school
To excel as you always do
Campus politics just make you laugh
They’ll never reach in you

Still you feel a little small
Fuck your student in the hall
But I taunt you and you hear me still so you fuck her like a queer

But you carve a little niche
You’ve got room to invite friends
And you cast your thoughts in radii like you perceive a web
Or a crystal when it’s dead

And you lash at the strength of the helpless
Trapped in the techniques of the weak
And I can’t really stop this little game of vengeance
Until you can lie still on top of me

So you have a moment
Of true worship
And find what you’d been seeking after forgetting how to look

The moment passes, but you knew they always do
You just weren’t certain they’d ever return
You’re stronger now, you can wait for the next one—

So you return to your life
conceived, designed, and built in misery
you bring it this ecstasy
and find it has less purpose than before
that waiting seems easy, and seeking seems senseless

Yet know this
as she smashes your heart with her fists:

There are no former poets.
There are only poets,
failed poets,
and dead poets,

and only those in the final group can be numbered.

my lips brush the image of a weak man
i kiss his words
you lie like the innards of a strong man
when your mouth folds into something we can’t use
our backs arched on different curves
you kiss like the message of a good man
that neither of us will ever touch
i reach for the body of a memory
that no one thinks of much

Every night, I think of your betrayal
And the bitterness floods my bag
to form a heavy shelter
That protects me from my enemies
That warms me in dead desire

And every morning, I tear my shelter down
I think only of the warmth of your body
So that I might freeze in the desert sun
I carve your name into the flesh of murderers
To share with them the freshness of my wounds

And in that moment
just before your spray
given the options
was it really so much easier to
turn away and face the wall
find comfort in some instant too long gone
and duck the question
of what you and I might represent

decline to comment
on the differences between our then and now
and choose to spend this time away
keep anything I might offer at bay
spend moments staring into space
looking for someplace you won’t find
letting me watch as you
seek solitude
the moment
that you
come

Venus walks among us, invisible and stalking.
Men are not her object.
Venus picks women. She chooses them carefully.
They never get away.

Venus picks women. She does not wait ‘til they have grown.
She murders their parents.
Parents do not befit a god.
She puts them on the street.
She puts them into alleys.
She puts them in the hands of the state.
She puts them someplace they’ll run from,
and she destroys whatever they try to run to.

Venus rapes women. She ravages their faces
destroys their hands
mutilates their feet
and when she’s ruined every inch of them save their orifices
she sends a mortal to finish the job

Venus destroys women
usually, Venus kills women

sometimes, Venus takes women
sometimes, Venus fills their tiny bodies
and walks among us for everyone to see

This is the last poem I write about you.
Swear to g-d.
Swear to G-d, this time.

This is the last time I pour whiskey into my coffee cup
scribbling notes through a poet’s reading
because this is the last time I’m in a coffee shop
when it’s past time I should be drinking

This is the last time I will hesitate before using the C-word when not speaking directly to a representative of my local police department who is acting in his or her official capacity

This is the last time that I pretend that I’m ignoring you
But it is not the last time I pretend that you’re ignoring me

Back-alley moralists
Your hearts long severed from your literary niche
Enlightenment-hobbyists
Who scratch each other’s back long past the removal of all skin

No, I mean it. No more pages of free-verse jabbering about what a bunch of losers you are. It’s incredibly transparent and self-serving. It only degrades me. It’s when you read it that you degrade

This one reads just like the last one
and I’ve got a million more

But there’s no need to spit out
what’s in someone else’s mouth
and there’s no poetry community
into which poetry can fit

So there’s no need for friends or enemies
or comfort in being read
no lovers among your listeners

There’s no slice of the market you can eat:
The market will always eat you

She asked me how to improve her poetry

I told her to destroy her lovers, neglect her family, and sit alone and lonely until she can’t remember the smell of love, until she can’t remember the thrill of beauty, until all she has left is an empty and fossilized truth that can only destroy her in her quest to stifle the Quixotian quests of strangers

She turned away in disgust. Now she has a computer in her family room and writes rhymed verse about her favorite holidays which she sells for $20 a pop to the local community paper

Another crisis I’ve averted

Another stranger saved

tonight it is you i channel
your mouth in a group of strangers
your hand on another woman’s body

—————————————————————————

we compete with one another
seeking the deepest level of hopelessness

we always wanted to be great at something

—————————————————————————

i can feel you now
staring at that blank screen
i want you so badly
that i get your writer’s block

There’s a bearded man stretched naked across the foyer floor
and you realize you’ve reached a place you’ve only read about
in weird fiction and the biographies of the mad

You move smoothly, easily
among these discharged minds
their walls of blood and puke

Coke on every mirror

Pills in every couch

It’s not a party here until somebody’s dead
Platypus women and weasel men
dressed not fashionably, nor like rejects
dressed like they can’t quite clothe themselves at all
match their sense with their socks

Separate from society, they have no need to rebel

Too close to the source of empathy
they’ve lost the ability to sense
any mind but their own
collective
unconsciousness

A lesser extrovert would be terrified
but you feel more you than ever:
this is a fantasy you never understood you had
you hold your liquor
and your water
long after your host is past passing

Here, style and grace
the only virtues you’ve known
are the only measure of a man

Should they ever write of us
the lies they tell will be worse for their benevolence
Should they speak of us in hushed tones
their worship will be false as their fucking

All writers repeat:
They convince themselves the unique are unhappy
They see a life of misery and think it a miserable life
They take a suicide and judge it tragedy
They immortalize suffering:
Our immortal joy won’t interest them at all

Let us die together, beloved
Let us do it now, before they determine what to write
Let our immortality be something only lovers share

the rain drenches me at the bus stop
the salsa jar cuts open my hand
Our day care closes in minutes

as the old men march for peace
while the young men march for justice
and the union blames them both
for the price of hot school lunches

you want compassion in my time of labor
you want love from a broken back
i fantasize of sex in the shoah
i wonder what you think We have

Her corpses pile like friendships, newspapers,
a stack of obituaries falling over as you try to use the toilet.
Her own rage hidden, she takes up yours for sport

She says, “where there is life, there is hope.”
She trembles with hatred when I point out she lies.
She does not believe I have earned certainty.

when i cut myself this way
it’s to know how he bled
this scar is for her

for each wicked lover
for each evil friend
i find the way to wound myself until i look like them

You see how much i want to forgive you
You see how many i’m willing to hurt

One woman in particular
loves to hear your woundless words
You grease the thighs between her eyes
and watch her skin twitch slightly
under your superior selfish logic
You let her wrap herself
into the shapes you want her to need
and as her moments come to a head
you see a subtle sign—
before unnoticed—
flashing in the corner

Do not tease the animals.

Do not tease the animals.

Although they are not capable of making threats

This is not a request.

Thus did Cerridwyn and Jesus fight like Eliot and Pound
While Ché sang to Evita on what matters on the ground
And all their manifestos mean nothing to me now—
Your gods are the biggest joke since the Bible

A failure, celebrated, can never push through
The samsara of gender to seek something true
So if we are all destined to love and to lose
Let me suffer without any comforts
And the lies that you tell to make your lies worth living
Can rot with the flesh of our culture

Take instinct and reason and all our deceit
Take Brando in Paris and take my wife, please
But when you take that money and you fucking leave
Let us both understand what we’ve come to

We’ve defiled our flag as fire never could
We’ve built a stone fortress with tools of bad wood
Our symbols replace that for which they have stood
They shield us from truth and self-torture
But you were never a woman and I was never a man
Our bodies are not what divides us

like a vampire sinning in the freshly carved wounds of his victims
the poet jonathan penton smashes your reading heart with his
bleeding fists of verse and in that moment before we murder
our parents or allow them to murder us for the umpteenth
time in that moment when the machismo of our intellect
fails us and we compete with one another seeking the
deepest level of hopelessness like the scent of her
new lover’s ass on your ex’s fingers, yes, in that
moment of reading the poet jonathan penton
fantasizing of sex in the shoah discovering
why he cuts himself this way - it’s in order
to look like you - our bodies are not what
divides us but still the poet dreams of
connection and becomes, quoting
Freud, a kind of prosthetic God.

when the poet jonathan penton
sings at his best we can hear
leonard cohen at his worst
it’s piano man billy joel
if this chapbook ever
gets filmed it would
have to be by mat-
thew barney not
bergman

respectfully
ak

your poetry is pure
passionate
physical

every stitch in your paper screams sincere
your ink a mix of sweat, tears, vomit, and blood

trouble is, you’ve been using my blood

once, I was an adult again
I fooled myself into thinking
that people could just be friends

I tried to be a reader, again
but found my books all mute
so I tried to be a writer
on the grounds that blank pages were better
than vacant words

once, I became a child again
and adopted a pet
complaining to her still face was easier

now, I am a patient again
at least the doctor’s deafness is funny

I didn’t come here for a piece of ass
Show me what you’ve got
That you’ve never sold

I don’t mind if I can’t touch it
I just want to know if you’ve got something to give
you’d kill for
rather than see me steal

my lips brush the image of a weak man
i kiss his words
you lie like the innards of a strong man
when your mouth folds into something we can’t use
our backs arched on different curves
you kiss like the message of a good man
that neither of us will ever touch
i reach for the body of a memory
that no one thinks of much