Myth of Arrival

Hmm … I see I might be repeating myself.

Eight hours of jam pack thrills, by which I mean,
work. Work against residents' destructive
urges. Against obscene drama, obscene
conditions. The State waits, servile, passive,
never addressing Administrators
who cut costs by having nurse aides work "short;"
who fire at will any malcontents. Slurs
aside; for each mishap, lack of support,
each time we err the State takes notes and our
nursing aide certificate lasts as long
as no mishap occurs. Another hour
I can go home. One slow response, one wrong
move — all this is gone. There is no welcome
to thrive, to keep on in such a system.

Only five days left of National Whomp Up Poetry Book contest! How are your poetry series going? Do you find it easy to write a poem a day for a month?

Some posts I write need a little background information. Not everything I do as a nurse aide is clear. There are terms, phrases, ideas I use because I do them every day, but they might not clear to an outsider. Then there are things that happen that need no background information. One of my residents is dying of cancer. It is a terribly painful way to go. One day I suppose I will go to work and "Max's" bed will be empty; unless he dies on my shift. Either way it will be hard on all of us. We have no real tools in place at work to deal with mourning. We just keep pushing on. You work with a resident for a year, perhaps two or more, day after day, month after month. You become their world in some ways and they yours and then one day they are not there. Like getting washed overboard in a storm at sea. The body is gone; no physical evidence they were there at all, except in my memory. That is a poor tombstone, since I have so many large holes in my brain I am worried I will forget faces and names as I age myself. It also weighs on me uneasily; such responsibility and why I was given it I do not know?

But here I am. And here "Max" is and I have no doubt that when I return to work this afternoon there will be more vomit to clean up. More soft words to speak to calm his panic-attacks (who can blame him?) and more bending of my back and lifting of his body and hurting of my muscles to keep him comfortable. It is a price to be paid in this job. And what a price.

After each meal, his pills caused nausea,
vomiting everything back up, nothing
was held down. A nurse aide from Jakarta,
Indonesia, nodded her head, sighing
as we wiped away the froth, spew, vomit.
Looking into the bucket she asked: "Max,
what did you eat for lunch? Spinach? Diet
Coke?" Soon the cancer will spread, the attacks
worsen. Soon we will put him on morphine.
"That'll be the whole shebang," Max shrugged. Resigned.
"She? Bang?" My Jakarta friend asked. "You mean
what, Max?" "Everything." Yes, Max had declined
fast. It's what we don't talk about We hang
about, blind to all this, the whole shebang.

I was going to write a normal blurb about how Sam, Bob, Rue and I are going to perform this Sunday to promote our book, 4 Against the Wall … but I just found out Ruelaine fell earlier this week and fractured her femur/ femora in her leg. Poor Ruelaine!

So this is going to be a Benefit Show for Ruelaine's Femora!! Please come out and join us. Our flier reads:

On Sunday, Feb. 26th, at 2 PM, Schuler Books & Music at the Eastwood Town Center will feature a poetry reading and booksigning by the authors of "4 Against the Wall" — Zack Chartkoff, Sam Mills, Robert Rentschler and Ruelaine Stokes. The books features the photography of Roxanne Frith, a photography teacher at Lansing Community College and a staff member of Schuler's.

The four poets — and their work — in many ways represent the vitality and fresh vision of the Lansing poetry scene. Together their work spans several decades in this city that is simultaneously factory town, university town, state capitol — and, over the years, both a hothouse and a sanctuary for poetry.

Included in the book is a lively set of interviews documenting the state of poetry in the Lansing area over the past three decades, in addition to collections of poetry from each of the four artists. The book will be available at Schuler's.

These sonnets are little things, true, but they are the evidence I leave behind of how I am. What is happening in my world. Perhaps that is evidence enough that I have had a busy day? Perhaps I take my sonnets too freely, for granted no less? Perhaps.

The worse time is a day-off, hesitant
what to do with so many hours. No
body calls on the telephone, shouldn't
I have someone who will send me pillow
books or lewd notes? I sing along, alone
with the stereo on endless repeat.
Once I took the mutton bone, the blade-bone,
and made the First Singing Magic to beat
back the despair. Once. Now I feel saddled
to do something special on these lone days.
Soon this day will be done, nothing ribald
happened, again. To sail away? Stargaze?
To live with grace? Cat, why have I despaired?
Where is this fire? Blade bone? O, cat, I'm scared.

In this poem, which is step away from the more direct Nurse Aide Sonnets I have been working on, I picked a slang term for our tradition, "old skool," something about as common from the Hip-Hop lexicon as you can get. I wanted an almost cliched phrase, something anyone who has not rendered themselves deaf and dumb to popular culture could at least make a wild guess at. And that's the whole point of New Formalism, I believe. To breath life into Form, since all poetry is required to take a form in one manner or other.

The poets of the Sixties who thought they had thrown Form out the window with so many other of their nihilistic exercises¹ might not agree but really, shouldn't we be welcoming all forms of poetry into our worlds, not barring some from the gate? As The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetic states on page 835:

However … having rejected old forms [Modernists] had no choice but to invent new ones in order to go on at all: there is no escape from form and the reaction to form can only be expressed in another set of forms; for not to have form is not to have any means by which to express the reaction one wants to articulate. No Form, No Speech.

Free verse is … so more or less artificial than the traditional metered verse; the choice of any form is a priori the same: the choice of form. And, in time, with the old attitudes and old moralities manifestly gone … poets discovered they could return to traditional forms once again, forms which a generation of poets who came of age in the Sixties never knew.

The day that some major recording label puts out a CD of Hip-Hop sonnets will be a sad day for most poets who work only in written form. Disco sonnets? Gangsta' sonnets? Pimp-wannbe sonnets? Imagine, a whole nation of kids grooving to Funk sonnets. It almost makes one want to roll out of bed in the morning to see which way the popular culture weather vane is turning today.

"Old Skool" means nothing to so many who
reads this and yet you have witnessed the roots
doctor, old master of some sort, who blew
across the page, calming the trees, the brutes,
the stars into order. You witnessed what
tradition is, the reason you are here,
both as singer and healer. This sonnet
is proof that there is so much we still jeer
and gibe at, simply because it sounds strange.
"Old Skool" means nothing to many and yet
how poor is our music, how dim our range
to cut out so much? The terrible debt
we owe others making our notes richer,
wilder, making us beastly and queerer.

1. I recall one of the members of Jefferson Airship saying he had "tried bathing, man, but it was too bourgeoisie" for him. I think that sums up the nostalgia of Sixties nicely, don't you? And back when I was a wee Zachary and thought playing loud music was a form of political protest I would crank up my crappy Sex Pistols' Never Trust a Hippy LP, thinking I was doing something profound. [back]