What kind of a closet fetishist
would shit in the sink while he thought
his wife was in a halfway house, tranked-up,
then let fly when he realized she was at home,
sneaking up on him, on little cat feet, a rosy dawn,
an Aurora, grounds for divorce, he neglected me,
I was a victim, I am a martyr to his twisted, sick
desires, his hobbyist magazines, with women's hose,
and high-heeled shoes, and garter belts, and caoutchouc
dildoes, sticking out of people's asses, like bullwhips,
lollipops, he said he was just taking his own temperature,
rectally, but I caught him, I saw it, there are no giant rodents
underneath our sink, in the bowels of the earth, trembling,
tellurian vibrations, little deuce coupes, surfer rules, for dress,
as rigid as punctilio at The Court of Louis Seize.
Had that last week. Try Maury Povich.

There's an urban legend about a guy
who was shitting in the sink,
and a possum, in the drain,
came up and ate his cabbage slaw,
avec horseradish. A variation is
a pistol, with a laser sight,
shot a dumdum bullet up this person's
fundament, came out his head,
the exit wound much larger than
the entrance, and very messy.
Compare the "bit" in Naked Lunch
about the skin tag that wrapped itself
around the axle of the Duc de Ventre's
Hispano-Suiza, sometimes known as
"The Talking Asshole." Contrast with
Jack Saunders' Snapping Pussy of Doom,
Vagina Dentata, or Big Red.
Also with The Spinning Fatalist.
For extra points, discuss whether he
is a racist, a sexist, or a myxoscopic
zoophiliac (fucks chickens in the armpit).

It's like a theme and variations,
a short story, an exercise,
in a textbook on how to write
the popular, the commercial,
a leitmotif, from which the poems,
the essays, the self-interviews radiate
outward, effloresce, populate a niche
that was not being exploited, until
conditions changed: the post-masterpiece,
or post-inaccrochable (PI) novel. Something new,
under the sun. Daily typewriting. Or, enema vérité.
Stark-nakedism. The paranoia-critical method.
"I'm my own police," as Harvey Keitel said,
in City of Industry. I disintermediated.

There's a place for what I'm doing
in the culture. More of a place
than ever, now that fewer and fewer
people know how to do it.
Where will they learn? From MTV?
From chat groups on the Internet?
In clubs, where they check each other's
physique? At the dog psychiatrist? Is he
a behaviorist or a Marxist? A Freudian?
Cultural evolutionism? French structuralism?
What species of dog? Does the white Eurocentric
patriarchal hegemony discriminate against a Pekinese,
compared to a Dachshund, say?

Julia Adams is treading water in that white Spandex bathing suit,
and beneath her, in the inky depths of Black Lagoon, is the creature,
purple, twitching, hideous, a Manichaean, a forces of darkness
versus forces of light, her parted legs, her dangling triangle,
a spiritual wickedness in high places versus the lone writer,
writing alone, think of Frankenstein, being chased by the mob
to the top of the hill, and then think of the homosexual in
Suddenly, Last Summer, the street urchins, the fellaheen, Gore Vidal
says Tennessee always did go a little over the top, no, cannibalism,
the wages of sin is death, writing a perfectly straight business letter
and starts talking about alligator dicks, slides to the right,
as Granny Brown says about the eye on her stove for carving turkeys,
Halloween's here, can Thanksgiving be far behind?

Jason Epstein writes about Auden coming in
to the old Villard mansion in carpet slippers,
to deliver a manuscript, his Juliet balcony,
his parking space, Archdiocese of New York,
publish the Cardinal's poems to maintain
good relations, publishing was a cottage industry,
then, before RCA bought Random House, Bob Hope
cracking jokes about General Sarnoff, on NBC,
synergism, Disney and the telephone company,
any bonds, today? Plenty of cartoons and ads,
amusement parks, total lifestyle branding,
not so many poets, not so many books of poetry.
I'll see your logo and raise you a discontinued,
a surplused, a redundant, a downsized, we have
Wall Street Panic Snopes, Michael Jackson band-costume,
Jane Fonda exercise. Where is Elvis, the patron saint
of schlock? Titty pictures on black velvet.
Bull market in blockbuster, bestselling properties.
Vivaldi in the Barnes & Noble, $3 coffee. Screw-top
wine in plastic champagne flutes. Personal assistants.
Bukowski puking blood that smells like beer shit.
Small comfort afforded by the profession.
At least there's someone here, or was.
He will be missed. Sherlock Jr.
Buster Keaton measuring
a ticker tape. A foot
of gangsta rap, six inches
of hip hop.

How does a gay lesbian bisexual
transgendered person feel when she
puts on the clothes of the opposite sex,
her significant other safely in the detox screening center,
or a halfway house, tranked-up, and takes a hot steaming crap
in the sink, defiantly, the clicking noise, the laser beam,
and then, Eureka, I have found it, she hears a footstep
on the stair, the vaguely olfactory impression,
smell-memory, suddenly making sense: the nagging thread,
the subliminibal tension-builder, the fake debate,
the contrived suspense, the old deus ex machina
cranking away like an erector set, I saw it coming, sir,
I have read so many of these things I can write one
in my sleep, phone it in, Kierkegaard defined despair
as having read one too many Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries,
Walker Percy said. That's the difference. To make a career
of writing genre fiction is slow poison. Death by a thousand
tiny knife-cuts. Suicide. Better to write poems no one wants.
Get the word right on the page. Fresh, new. Inédit. Raw, intuitive.
Self-taught. A vernacular writer will make do. Will get by
on grits and grunts, like the Conchs in the keys during the Depression.
Oysters Brown (Oysters Rockefeller with star anise instead of Pernod,
or Penrod, as Wayne calls it) and a nice trash-fish étouffé.
Just before you take it up you add a stick of butter.
A recipe's for food, not books.