Trance Notebook #15
This week in the PEN Poetry Series, PEN America features a new poem by Wayne Koestenbaum.
Trance Notebook #15
[the opposite of Tupperware]
pallid and underage
Oscar Meyer
Weiner cocktail
hot dogs in their
stinky liquor—
__________
cruelty inflicted
in Oscar Meyer pigpens?
__________
two-year-old boy died of
leukemia after being
Best Man at his
parents’ wedding—
__________
I sent my mother
a subscription to the
New York Times,
large-print edition,
though I’m not sure
she can read—
__________
guy without a shirt, red
hair, pants falling down,
backpack, Woodstock–
generation nudist
__________
lay on floor for half hour,
googled “nervous breakdown
symptoms,” discovered
that I always have
the symptoms of a
nervous breakdown—
__________
fell into a reverie about
asking the interviewer
to pose nude for me or
somehow making it
clear that he could
invite himself to strip—
__________
I wonder what my
father would say about
nervous breakdowns,
the type of subject
that fuels his eloquence—
__________
don’t overuse
the word “rape” as
(manic)
metaphor for my own
writerly rapaciousness—
__________
tomorrow draw
another crucifixion
__________
sexy guy entering
café thinks I’m over-ogling
him and resembles icy-
demeanored artist
whose neck I hovered
near in pursuit of musk—
__________
eviscerating envy
of sailor
hat akimbo
on crew-cut head
__________
Li’l Abner “I’m
past my prime”—why do
I find that song so haunting?
__________
because I
don’t remember the singer’s name?
because she isn’t past
her prime?
__________
what is a prime,
anyway?
__________
and why did I already
feel past my prime when
I was seven years old?
__________
outdoor hunk
with tight green shorts
rides away
on black bike and
wasn’t aware of my
existence—
__________
we talked about
Lana’s daughter Cheryl
Crane—“our younger listeners
probably don’t know
who Lana Turner is—”
__________
learning
how to make cursive
capital T’s and Z’s
in elementary school—
I never made the
Z correctly—
we rarely
have recourse to a
capital cursive Z—
__________
haunted by Liza with a
Z and other renounced,
betrayed Z’s—
__________
one symptom of a
nervous breakdown is
social avoidance, my
specialty—
__________
my father maybe
relieved to leave Venezuela
in an era before
international long-distance calls
were affordable—
__________
teaching me how
to urinate standing up
__________
why did we call it
a pee-pee-thing?
an ordinary
suburban locution?
__________
Twinkie defense,
Listeria, handjob,
God going commando
__________
—God’s
love affair with Otto Rank,
God’s love affair with
Simone de Beauvoir—
__________
God’s revisions of Kafka’s
“Penal Colony” before
Kafka finished writing it
__________
Miss Paul was my
second-grade teacher,
Miss Paul a funny
name, like
Miss Joe or Miss
Bob or Miss Peter
__________
masturbate on the top
bunk if you’re a girl,
on the bottom
if you’re a boy—
__________
every time I ask
permission she
looks aggrieved—
says “are you
eating celery?”
__________
despite the taboo against
cannibalism
__________
it depends
what fish are used
in the gefilte fish—
__________
death’s
interpreter, I’m
a fat man leaning on
the same bannister
Kafka’s uptight
virile father
leaned on
__________
if he’s so famous
why do I need to ask
this question?
__________
the answer is Pink Floyd
__________
Thomas
Bernhard, My Prizes:
“The problem is
always to get work done
while thinking that work
will never get done
and nothing will ever
get done…”
__________
—the raminer
club—raminer the
phrase Anna Moffo
sings in Debussy’s
“La Mort des Amants”—
to reanimate
__________
profound divas
like Tupperware
or like the opposite
of Tupperware
__________
flowers like escalators
__________
“using” means
rubbing my eyes, their
chalcedony derrières
__________
Kirk Douglas’s “slippage,”
my eagerness to talk
about Kirk’s slippage
__________
one night we had roseate
nipples and blue mistletoe,
one night we were slapped
by our Baltimore painter
boyfriends at a bar
__________
like a long orgasm in
Dynagroove
__________
“Sempre libera” backwards
like Paul McCartney’s death
revealed by playing
“Revolution 9” backwards—
__________
who taught
me that trick?
__________
rescued or adopted by
a queer on Mission
Street in pursuit of
his perfect éclair,
his Patricia Neal
impersonation
__________
inégale Baroque music in
Death Valley
__________
simple indigo
riposte to mystical
cupcake-pink boxes,
Maurice’s Bakery
__________
their glazed
French twists
an untimely message
never measured
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