THE ESSENCE OF TYRANNY

  There: look at the me I want you to. Tall, thin, 20something. It is all so simple. I am at my peak, I think. I am sure. It is what I tell you. I am born on Candlemas/Groundhog’s Day/February 2 nd, 1965, to a single mother alone in a home for unwed mothers (how quaint!). Forget that. This is just what I have been told.

  Think of me 3 or 4 years later: I am out on a summer evening- Summer Of Love redux. 1968, or ‘9. A brownstone stoop on Stephen Street where teenaged hippy girls’ nipples protrude through tie-dyed all-natural fibers. Mommy is showing me off to the teenaged neighbor girls. Breasts. I never sucked on 1 when a child. This is interpolation from a later date. Then, I am listening to Three Dog Night’s hit song Joy To The World-

‘JEREMIAH WAS A BULLFROG/

WAS A GOOD FRIEND OF MINE!’

  I am happy. I am held. I am cute. All the girls say that they want to be my mommy. Mommy, who waited over 20 years for me, still recalls her lost child- Robert, a stillbirth- born a few months after me, but well before I found her. I am her child. No other. Daddy is across the street, on our side, talking with the orange-haired Mrs. Terrence. Orange! Her daughter is 1 of the girls gushing over me. She is brown-haired & cute- 16 or 17, wearing a beaded headband, brown suede jacket with dangling suede fringes. Nice tits, tight ass. This is me, years later. Then, I am held. Held tightly. My hair is beautiful- strawberry blond. Other mothers think I am a girl. I am so beautiful. A decade later I will swoon over tv star Valerie Bertinelli. Now, I paste Valerie Bertinelli’s face upon Mrs. Terrence’s daughter. In truth, this is common human practice. It is part of the way to deal with gaps. You paste the memories of looks or temperaments of those you know & remember upon those you do not, but who seem to evoke the known others. It eases. Many a lover or sex partner now bears another’s visage. Some I do not paste. One Day At A Time. Valerie. Mrs. Terrence’s daughter. Love.

  Mrs. Terrence & my dad a few years later. She tells him of All In The Family. TV show. My dad in heaven. Nixon-bashing. 1968. My dad in a low. Nixon wins. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dead.

  My mom & I on a bus to the Macy’s store in Brooklyn. Young. Curious. I am pink with flesh. I ask my mommy very loudly, ‘Mommy, why do these people have brown skin?’ Mommy grits teeth. Yesterday someone was killed. Riots. Mommy: ‘That’s just the way it is, Daniel. They are black on the outside, but the same as me or you on the inside.’ Mom is a Liberal- capital L- & Classically so. ‘But, Mommy, these people are brown- not black. Why are they black people if their skin is brown? They’re not blacks but browns!’ A brown man across the bus can barely contain a chuckle. Mommy is confused. To the brown laughing man: ‘Hey, Mister, why are you called black if your skin is brown?’ A large brown woman with a purse rolls eyes warmed over a grin. ‘Lawdy.’ To the purse lady: ‘Hey, Lady, why- ’. My mouth is full!Tootsie Roll. I like it. It is brown. It is called brown. Macy’s. Let’s go.

  Later. 1980s. Lonely. Sometimes I shiver uncontrollably at night. Even in summer. SKINHUNGER. I have read the term somewhere. Those not held enough as babies suffer from it. Moodiness. Withdrawal. Introversion. That is me. That is the creation. I am not. Skinhunger. Me & not me. It is more than just knowing what something is. It is trying it on, walking around in it.

  1 st Grade. 1971. This is it. The year it all changed. Summer. Everything. 1 st. Change. Eyeglasses. Myopia. Nearsighted. The world is not a fog. I can see. The world is not what I knew. Everything. Changes. True sight.

  1968. Hippy girls. There is another. Mrs. Terrence’s Valerie Bertinelli daughter’s friend. Orange hair. Red hair. Orange. Why do they call orange red? Why do they call brown black? She is beautiful. Her freckled face is a countenance that sticks. Mommy knows her name. I know her face. She is nice to me. 15 years later I see a tv commercial for Mountain Dew soda. Neo-hippy picnickers are jumping into a lake. Red-haired girl. Orange! I am in love. Fantasy is nice. She is nice to me.

  Grandma Chin is nice to me. She is nice to all the kids. Especially Phillip- her daughter’s son. We fight. We make up. Phillip is nice & smart. But not as smart as me. Not as tough. After playing with Phillip I go out. Some day soon I will meet Ziggy. We will stop men in cars & ‘sell kisses’ for the hookers on Wyckoff Avenue. Stephen is my pal. Ziggy will be more. Phillip has slanty eyes. Ziggy won’t. Ziggy will be tough. Phillip fights like a girl. The girls are invited to Grandma Chin’s kitchen. She is cooking up berry teas & cookies. She will tell stories & show off wondrous things. Phillip yawns. There I am. There’s Tommy Stasiak. There’s the Stangs- Ronny, Willy & Mildred. There’s Alana Orduch. Big. Blond. Tina. Scared little girl who lives next door to me & Grandma Chin. Christine. My sister. Linda Attoir. Lacy Attoir. Always in that order. The boys watch tv. When Grandma Chin is done she will talk to all of us. Now, it is the girls. Now, it is the boys. Here is a memory:

            “The essence of tyranny is the denial
             of complexity.”- Jacob Burkhardt,
                            Swiss historian

THE DEATH OFTHE VIRGIN

by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

AS GRANDMA CHIN ON THE DAMNED JAPS

What is put forth by the Master, in the theater,
of death? The plaits of the curtain pull back
and reveal what is prostrate, as a prostitute
dragged in from the streets, and thrown heaped
upon a too-short bed, body rigid with coming,
lips washed with weather. No weeping can recover
the magma of her rimless eyes, nor her form,
from the refusing day. It is like the young
summers, ensconced and homey, in the kitchen
of Grandma Chin, the old woman who lived two doors down,
and spoke of the accursed Japanese, a bitter piece
of her fruit bowl the same as her gaze. She held
her head down from the light of reality. She was
an Apostle of the remembrance. Was it Nanking
in spring that interred her joy from that place?
Was it the grief of a father coming home with one
less? Was it the absence of a pet that ran
from the tumult? As she spoke, with a double-edged saber,
between her gums, a never-escaping thought
of the viciousness equal to that of invaders
with children-tipped bayonet ends, made its way
to the hollow that some thirty-five years of passage
had not curtailed. Nor could it copy itself
in the gilt-trimmed mirror, ornately gathering rust,
on the wall. She hung her reflection within
it as if it removed her truer self from this
life. Another part of her self kept moving
with a purpose known only to the reflected
self. What is one hundred and eighty degrees to you
who kneel at the Virgin’s end? A memory of fire?
What beachhead works its way to a vanishing
point to the seeker who loses true sight
of the shore? The surface of tomorrow
is what calls the Apostles near. With fear
they are too captive to a human thing.
But is it human, or not? Some say she was
not so, nor her child a man. To Grandma Chin
it is the foolishness of brilliant snow
off reflecting light that is mistaken
for the light. Every last bit of religion
seems a hand whose speech is not of sound-
she gave hers to the ghost forty years before.
Perhaps it is the acute genius of an unmade song
that withers from her flute that is what the soul makes
its own. In the spring (that childhood where mountains walked)
she would bake, incessantly, her scents filling the air,
as the children would come, from even the far end
of the street, all ready to eat her exotic treats
they had never reckoned, and could not pronounce.
And this is what the painting’s sadness bears.
This is the rage beheld by the few who grew
with it. The look in the eye was not of the dead,
her skin not sallow with lifeless carelessness.
She would gather us inward and lade our ears
with tales of the Far East, and all that was
there. How imperfect I remember what she did not
recall. No stories filtered from the lips of the dying.
No kamikaze crazies stilled skimmed from her gaze.
Grandma Chin surely was now. The decades kill
us all, save the moment. They do not retain
like a canvas can. They pose and suppose,
depose and defend. They recycle and remit.
They hover nothing but immanent authority
that resists. As Grandma Chin attests. You could see
it in her bearing. You could sense its emission
through her carriage, as her hand spidered
toward you, in point or exclamation. It loomed over
you. Then it retreated. Then it bid itself
to your cheeks, and on and again, an endless disease,
a callus of love or longing, unshaven, unbidden,
real as only the Virgin seems to appear. To Grandma Chin
we were spawned in the light of her kitchen. First
there was me, the bigmouth whose ass she would whack,
then her grandson- Phillip Chin- my sometimes pal.
There were the Stangs, all three, Aryan kin
she kept wary of- Mildred, Willy, and my best friend
Ronny. And Tommy Stasiak, and the cute little Attoir girls-
Linda and Lacy- were often formed there. And, sometimes,
my sister- Christine- although she was too young
to recall. Tina, the girl-next-door, was made there, too.
And Alana Orduch. We were all transfixed
by the old lady and her ways, the tales she would wend
with fictions and fact- the imperative course, of course!
As we gathered around her breathing form
we marveled the baubles that blew by as words,
forgotten by all, now, subsumed in their say.
Grandma Chin was it all- she and her shawl-
too big for so little a woman. Who made
her that way? Where does beauty lie, if at all?
And what resisted the stubborn stay of the tales
as they grew from the weeds of her lungs? And the Orient
is an eternal place- brimming with vengeance-filled rivers,
duplicitous warlords, mountains that made emotion first,
and dragons that spoke- or she would insist
that what followed her words was the truth
made from bits of the other she would not
mention- for is a yes ever truly a yes?
Then the picture invades- time is here
again. What is read is what is read
right. What dissolves is that read
then. One thinks of poor Mary Magdalene,
bent over and ignoring the brass of the bowl,
its flish-flash of joy no mind need propel,
which will wash her lover’s mother,
by her hand, or another’s, in the sweet zero
of her waning, from a duty that has traveled
forward. Could it be Grandma Chin
was similarly bent, in a hole in the ground,
or right out in view? Did the Japanese seem
a ghostlier portal than her own origins?
Where did this animus stem? We had known
of the Nazis and Japan in school, and heard
of the atom bomb and such. But Grandma Chin never
let on what it was that formed her. Her family-
was it rich? Was it destroyed, save for her? So
many things lingered in this old New York house;
as if a commonness lacking direction. Somehow,
her room full of sabers was its own in the end.
The mirrored walls reflected nothing save another
mirror. The silks and satins grew yellow, I think.
Did she fall from her youth, like old Eve into sin?
A particular intrusion sees itself in the way
she remembers, or remembered. Grandma Chin
is more than a certain voice or speech.
She is that thing, like the Master’s,
that gathers in, in its reach. Past
the words she is curving- the motion,
in and of itself, is the curve. So uttered
she is utterly that unrevealed. She is
what her pinwheel collection, out back,
gathers in the evening of spinning. Here,
in her garden, they whistle and toot in passing
winds. They go faster than the slip of mortality
from the gleam of St. Matthew’s pate. The shine
exposes nothing but a neutered chaos of a scene-
a moment trimmed down to an interior exteriored,
fully, frontally, nothing not revealed nor unknown.
And this is Grandma Chin in her voice
speaking. She is her evidence of then.
She is not abstracted as any shine nor sway.
Times slide easefully by. She is wife
on the ship with America eyed. She is
a factory worker for three dollars a day. She is
a mother of presence. For here she is, to us,
the solicitude of self and song, and her stories
ram their way gently into being the balance
of dust that winds the lift of air to ear.
See her shadow stretch, unbroken and unknowing,
the lands it will chart within the gathered. See
what I almost heard (in her hatred?) as young eyes looked
out, into her, even as in the Master’s they turn
down and in, as if they disdain or distrust,
the truth of their moment. It is all
a lie. Some say the deceiving necessity of love
is that necessity. There never was a Jesus.
We all know this truth. We fear
growing used to death. So the scene contains
all that we want to know- the painting
and the poem. Alana Orduch varies no less
than an Apostle in oil. She is no less
a dream than the source of a dream. She is
an emblem, a totem of herself. She is,
perhaps, Grandma Chin pretending to be a mute
Korean orphan so the Japanese would let her pass
and leave her mother behind. To memory
it just is. To Alana Orduch it could be
the reason she hunched into a ball, fearing
the spaces between the old lady’s words.
She is, no less, and is what she perceives
she is, and nothing more. And that is why
this gape persists to this day, inflicts through
the power that seems as a black surface
forever swallowing light, acknowledging
just in its absence of light. Is your distance,
too, an ideal thing? Or is it consumed
as the mythical moment of the dream
that the Master presents to you? O,
I remember, now, a singular time
when Grandma Chin’s tales of derring
gave in to a woe. It was when Stephen was
ill. She had to give us reason to be
there. Sadness always draws more than happiness.
Her tale, that day, was of a lonely duck
left to its own in a lake that was dying
by a factory. The tale broke a hush
that should have gone by. In its tell
one could tell it was real, some how
or way. The way a motion deceives,
for a moment, someone into thinking
it alive, as if motion were the only character
of thought. As if thought, itself, were
the only component of life. That surpasses
even Grandma Chin’s tale. And the painting
weaves itself back, again, a honeycomb
of young blue air that welters the eye,
remains beneath it all, or over, or about
it. Like a rain that is smelt and heard
but never felt. As a tear
it challenges, as a rain it builds,
where earth tips over into her eyes,
dissolving as an argument before
a truth. A metaphor will come
into itself, and surround itself. Like a doll
with a doll within a doll in a doll in itself,
concentric as a sphere, or a damned good hunch,
like the men who can see the good horror
of death before them, and assume some growth
as light denied. In the streets, outside the house
of Grandma Chin, I channeled my future, then
my past, as it stretched and tunneled to now.
The deep breath of a future word grabbed me-
what relation am I to then? Or to the Master,
or to Grandma Chin? Is one human at birth,
or is it mere myth we relate? I seem of meaning
and of humor. Or do I just acclimate
to it? Do I accommodate a set of outcomes,
possible and prescribed, that come
from her lips? That possessed the engines
of future days, mysterious yet turgid,
under the skins of that then? What is
is what is, what is imagined in time
by time. Love is just the touch
of two adjacent streams that flow
into, then bisect, a sense of seeming
more than the anonymities of the inhuman
wave, which flows down, only one way-
no one speaks to the hills. Some do
more than ignore the silence of breath.
The flesh on too-human lips engage
the conversations of the age
which comes. Once, I was awake-
sometime between Grandma Chin’s kitchen
time, and the time I started this
poem. A drama ensued. What it was
is no matter. It had A. It had B.
It had the sojourn between. Doing time
on planet Earth is often this simple.
It had an audience (you- here, now!)
unknowing. It had a precept
and perspective (see how I construct?).
It had a certain gothos of sound
and even a scent. Yet it was just the same. It
was the flutter of one old Japanese
eye. It was the tangle of death
from the Virgin’s dangling left wrist.
Was this merely imagined? What if it was?
Is the fall into fiction so tragic a state?
Grandma Chin was too smart for a mortal
happiness. Does it sever, as a bar,
one from a higher state? Do events really
occur, or are they just a thought, or the thought
thought? I will demonstrate:
What if Grandma Chin were here, in front
of us all, and filling us with tales
of Old China? What if she were not?
What if all that was was my description
of her describing, multiplying through
my subtleties and intonations, cresting
as a minaret atop an old Spanish mosque?
Or is this all beside the point?
Does the essence of the old woman
matter in the being, or the seeing?
It is said we all iridesce in the curve
of living, that we construct the cosmos
around us. Our faces a separate story
sprung from a higher view. That they are
an endeavor given freely to the world
we mimic and decode, decide and digress from,
all the while engaging the play of the game,
the time of just water, and what is
put forth by the Master, what is Grandma Chin.

  But this is all later. Now, I am a child. Grandma Chin speaks of World War 2. Dad was angry about it. For not getting in. Now he is angry about Vietnam. For getting in. Dad tells me that if the war is still going when I’m 18 he will send me to Canada. 18? That’s like- 1983? I will grown up & married by then. I will be like dad. Dad is angry. In 1983 he will be dead. Grandma Chin gets angry. Grandma Chin is angry about World War 2. For being it. She was a girl- 18. Like 1933: even before The War there was war.

FADE

  Later. I am now with Ziggy. The older guys won’t pay us for delivering ‘candy’ to the junkies. They say we gotta do more. Ziggy curses at them but gets slapped down. Georgey is not here. Georgey is sick. Georgey barely knows Grandma Chin. I do. Grandma Chin has all kinds of bad stuff in her closets. Phillip is gone. He has moved to San Francisco. That is a faraway place. Near Japan. New York is lonely. Alana is gone, Tina is gone. The Stangs are gone. Tommy is gone. Grandma Chin does not remember they are gone. She sits in her front window & talks to me. She wants to give me cookies. When she closes her eyes I am Phillip Chin. Ziggy doesn’t know ‘the old Gook.’ Vietnam. Ziggy says she’s 1 of them. Grandma Chin has bad stuff. She once told us how the Chinese used to slip poison into the Japanese soldiers’ wells when they were in China. Wells were for Japanese. Chinese had creeks. Grandma Chin hated Japanese. Grandma Chin killed Japanese. Grandma Chin knew Japanese. I knew Grandma Chin. 1 day I got some of her bad medicine when she gave me cookies. She was in the bathroom when I passed it out the back door to Ziggy.

FADE

  Here the sirens are. Hear the sirens. 2 kids are choking on Cypress Avenue. This is better than money. Ziggy smiles. I smile.

  The girl with orange hair looks down upon me. I look out across the desk in the Public Relations office of the AT&T building in Minneapolis, Minnesota. May 3 rd, 2002. Across from me sit the 2 PR demons. 1, a fat cow named Gert Mauer. The other a homosexual pedophile named Edgar Watson. He has been seen carousing drunkenly with underage Asian male prostitutes in the Skyway. Strangely, I remember Phillip . I am not Phillip . I never was Phillip . 2 years earlier Edgar vented his hatred against a collections rep named Isadora O’Donnell. Here he is that day:

Edgar : Say, Dan, do you know where Isadora is?

Me : Yeah, at lunch.

Edgar : Great, thanks.

  He walks 2 cubicles over from mine & starts rifling through her purse, shopping bags & CD collection. I stand up incredulously & watch him. A guy in the cube next to mine does too. We exchange unbelieving glances. His name is Dean Johnson. 3 years earlier he helped train me. Frustrated, Edgar leaves. A few minutes later:

Isadora : What the hell happened to my desk?

Me : Edgar Watson went rifling through your things.

Isadora : Why the fuck did he do that?

Me : Don’t know. He’s an asshole?

Isadora : That’s fuckin’ it. I’m filing charges against that asshole. Will you tell them what you saw?

Me : Sure. No problem.

  She files charges. I corroborate. The union says there needs to be someone other than me to back up the charges. Dean Johnson ‘does not want to get involved’. Edgar Watson gets off. Edgar Watson in 1997 had 1 of the worst records as a collector in the office. He was promoted to auditor. He was so bad they got rid of the job. He was made an interim team manager. He was so bad they did not offer him a permanent team. Promoted to PR manager. In January of 2002 Isadora O’Donnell is fired for supposedly hanging up on 8 customers in a row. I sit in the cube next to her. I know that that is a lie. I say so. Edgar says not. His word is sufficient. Computers are easy to fix. Companies are not. The company is hemorrhaging money. Desperate they start cooking the collections books. 4 young turks who hate the union are recruited to help set up the management scam. A boss from New Jersey visits on March 20 th. I tell her I want no part of this scam & leave a meeting when my shift is over. The Minneapolis boss calls me in to her office. I tell her I know all about the scams that the 4 stooges are doing. 1 of them is listening outside the door. March 21 st. The New Jersey boss threatens my job for ‘insubordination’. 2 years earlier I win a ‘Crystal Phallus’ Local Legend award as top collector in the office. Last year I am again the top collector, but to be fair they state no 1 should be eligible to win the award 2 years in a row. This year I am an employee of ‘questionable character’. March 22 nd. The 1 st of 21 entries into my computer during hours I am not at work begins. Every time a pc is started a notation of the time the pc is turned on is recorded in a schedlog. April. The Minneapolis boss quits. No 1 knows why? She has heard that the NJ boss is setting her up to take the fall for the failure to meet projections. She gets a 6 figure job at an upstart local telephone company. Only the 4 Stooges & the bosses can enter an employee’s computer without their knowledge. May 3 rd. In the PR office. I know none of this then. There: look at the me who keeps his cool. Look at the union idiots who shrug & say I must be guilty. Just like Isadora. I am only suspended. Castration is when someone’s testicles are removed. I can learn from my mistake & be a better employee. Over 6 weeks later I learn about schedlogs & get proof of tampering. But I will soon have a new job & move on. I do not move backwards. Coincidence? Bad employee? Liar? Me? Them? It’s simple. Edgar Watson celebrates his vengeance on me by fellating a yellow teenaged boy. He is 50 years old. Isadora O’Donnell is screwed. She is unemployed in 2002. I am screwed. I will be unemployed in 2003. Dozens of other employees get screwed. Many will be unemployed. Edgar Watson screws children. He is employed. He is a model AT&T employee. Dean Johnson. Nothing.

FADE

  A little yellow girl has just killed. Grandma Chin wakes from a dream. I wake up in the arms of Mrs. Terrence’s daughter. All is a blur. She leans in. Valerie Bertinelli. Her orange-haired friend. She is beautiful. She is beautifuler. Her freckled face is a countenance that sticks. I know her face. Remember. This is just what you have been told. I know that face. Simple. There: look at the me I want you to.