Wow, you know, why not? Lay it
out there. This one begins with a riff on “Old King Cole”: “He called for his
his butts & he called for his bowl / & he called for his fiddlers three
/ in vain.” It’s hard not to read “butts” and “bowl” as snide references to sex
and booze, all of course, in vain for the old guy who isn’t really that old but
worn out from drinking, and now trying to stop drinking so he can stay less
worn out than he would otherwise be if he kept drinking. In the end, looking on
his life, “Henry has much to do.” This is positive. Sure, we all do, and he
did. So, he tells himself, relax, continue. “The world is a solemn place, with
room for tennis. / Everybody’s mouth / is somewhere else, I know, somebody’s
anus.” Ugh. “Tennis” is there, trust me, because it’s a close rhyme for “anus,”
an excremental image if there ever was one. And, really, it is sort of true—we all
have masters, who humiliate us, sometimes, often. “I speak a mystery, only to
you. / Here’s all my blood in pawn.”
One last humiliation then, besides
sucking down the unsatisfying porthole leavings the Man deigns to grace you
with so inelegantly, you return the favor not with shit but with blood, a far
more valuable product. There’s a take on capitalist socio-economics not too
shrouded in euphemism right there. Eat shit, give blood, and as that Japanese
prison-camp commander tells Alec Guinness and the other captured British slaves
in The Bridge on the River Kwai, “Be
happy in your work!”
It does demand a relentlessly
twisted, dark take on the world to see it only in these crappy terms, but it’s
possible, and it even holds up to a certain amount of scrutiny—except, like a
poem, there are competing interpretations to life, too. I’m not regarding the
world from that place today.
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