Nymphomagic Electroshock

The ice cracks and weeps

black running veins in the road

and it’s warmer, sure,

but this is the worst

time in Alaska

because

the melt-off will take

weeks, maybe

until the end of

May to clear out

from the yard and

meanwhile

October’s dogshit emerges

from the gray stink of

April meltwater and damned

if it isn’t just dirty-ugly, the

dirty ice, dirty snow

and what grass that

shows is as

brown as the

dogshit not one of these

stupid moose-humpers feels

obliged to pick up

when they walk their

dogs

and it was at this time of

year called “Breakup” (no shit) that

I was feeling every second of my

41 years walking out to

get the mail and

I looked

down

the street and

there was this

blonde child

of about

18 or so

her blonde hair

flowing over

the collar of her

puffy blue jacket like

molten life everlasting

when saw me 
seeing her she

waved and

smiled so large
her teeth 
smiled with her

and

most unnerving

of all was
the creeping
feeling

she meant it.

Throughout the

long breakup season

I treasured her

starshine slap

letting it

sustain me though a

fitful drowse of summer

and the sad breakaway from

Alaska that happened that

Fall, when I drove

my family across Alaska

into Canada, through forest

and city and canyon and

settled for a while across

the sound from Seattle, among

some of the most hideous and

warped humanoids I ever

saw in a climate that

was too bleak to be

believed.

It was two months longer

than the longest year before the

Navy ordered us cross-

country to Virginia.

It was in Sioux Falls, South

Dakota, a frozen gray fogbound

sinus of a morning after a day of

winding around the Black Hills and

Mount Rushmore and a sunset chase on

the prairie with my wife and children by

the rest stop before the long straight

deadly dull night drive into a

cigarette-stenched hotel room. 

We were so glad to be out

of our smelly hotel room for a

free waffle breakfast even though

it looked as if we’d have to fit

ourselves in among a girl’s

high school basketball team on

their way to play a game in

Nebraska

a long way south but

that’s what they do here.

No, this wasn’t at all like

the last time, this time the

smile-blast was buckshot with

meaning as I

motioned her to

go on ahead of me to

the waffle iron and

up went the corners

of an otherwise

undistinguished mouth

and I stood 
caught

dazzled, as she

told me without

speaking “It’s all

right, Daddy, I’m still

waking up but for

this I love you so

very much and

so I grant you

this

“while denying the

vampiric old

slug within you

which would like 
nothing more than 
to rub its soft naked 
decay against my taut 
springtime warmth for 
the sake of affirming 
its value as something
which somehow hasn’t 
died yet, instead

“I affirm and

celebrate the

innocence you so

mistakenly mourn for

gone in everyone, 
especially older teenage 
girls like me and even

(believe it!) yourself.”

and with the

revealing light of

her smile, a wild

fresh wind

blowing, as

the Great

Bukowski

so aptly put it,

breathing life

into so many things

I didn’t know

still breathed

though now I

wonder, did I

have to go all

the way to Alaska and

South Dakota to

experience this or was

it just a matter of

being such a

cranky old Daddy in

form, appearance and

(sometimes) function that

these rare Girls

couldn’t help but

respond?

I never knew such

guileless and sweet-for

sweet’s sake Girls growing

up in South Carolina, they

were as much out for

something as I was,

circling predators competing

for the biggest chunks of meat

from one another

and I presumed that

was the way it was

everywhere

from Mobile to

New York City I saw

nothing so much as

to suggest an

alternative

so I count myself

lucky for being

where I was and

for what I have

beheld

even if I sometimes 
think that the good 
things that keep you 
going are sometimes 
the worst

enabling more

useless struggle against

a decidedly unpleasant

inevitable, still

years after that

first smile among the

rotting ice and  

thawing turds and

thousands of

miles removed from

the basketball

player standing

out amongst her

blandly chattering

teammates with a

singular flex of

Olympian

heart

I still get a

lift from these

visions and (oh

hell yes) I

live for the

possibility

of one

more

maybe from the

pretty young

nurse as I lie

abed

right before

the final

lights

out

I could die

richer than

God.

___________________________________________________________________
From the forthcoming collection Nymphomagic Electroshock and Other Middle-Aged Complaints.
Copyright © 2004, 2017 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

The Toughest Writers Against the Toughest Holiday

There are things even the bravest and best among us will not face. 

I don’t care how tough you are.

It’s big enough to hurt you.

He had a soft spot for cats, so there’s that.

Consider Charles Bukowski. The last of the Great American poets along the lines, if not the precise subject matter, of Robinson Jeffers and James Dickey, Bukowski is probably best known today for writing the loosely autobiographical 1987 movie Barfly. Among his vast body of work—thousands of pages of poems, stories and essays—Bukowski wrote about his Depression-era childhood and his abusive father. He wrote about discovering alcohol and the city library as avenues of physical and psychic escape. By way of describing the complete experience of Life As It Is Lived, Bukowski made passing mentions of his bowel movements and how he would invariably vomit before reading his poetry before audiences.

The one subject he avoided was Christmas.

Bukowski recalled his father beating him with a razor strop in the bathroom doorway. He spoke of being chased over fences by bullies. He wrote of the rains that kept everyone indoors for days at a time in the spring.

Never once does Bukowski recall a boy’s happy anticipation built from Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve.

Amid Bukowski’s many thousands of pages you will find one of two passing complaints about the “forced jollity” of Christmas. Bukowski devoted all of one poem to an adult memory of writing with the radio on during Christmas Eve, the sound of an ambulance signifying how life’s usual tragedies didn’t stop for O Holy Night. There are a couple of other adult memories that show up in his novel Women.

Growing up poor and abused, this is just another party you
weren’t invited to.

Yet for all of Bukowski’s memories of childhood—from appetite-killing family dinners to his father’s gratuitous alpha-dog violence against him and his mother, from having the severe acne on his teenage face drilled to the poverty he saw warping the families of other children he knew in 1930s Los Angeles—never once does Bukowski recall opening presents on Christmas morning. As unflinching as Bukowski was in describing the most hateful and cringe-inducing scenes he’d endured throughout his life, he wasn’t going anywhere near those memories.

No Red Ryder BB guns for Charles Bukowski.

For that matter, no Christmas sweaters for Hemingway. His mother was stone crazy and one can imagine what A Very Hemingway Christmas with her was like. Imagine is all you can do, because among Hemingway’s thousands of pages, encompassing locales from Spain to Africa, from Italy to Cuba, I cannot recall once reading a description of a Hemingway character participating in a Christmas scene.

There are more Great American Cat People Writers than there
are those who spare any space at all for Christmas.

Of course, he might just have found the whole thing beneath him. Unmanly, even, the domain of children not old enough to drink liquor for breakfast and fish for trout. Certainly not for men who speak abruptly with their women and think often about the war.

I’m only speculating, of course. Honestly, it’s not like I expect everyone to burst out singing “Joy to the World” or anything like that.

My contention is that Christmas season involves one full month, maybe more, depending upon how Thanksgiving lines up in November. It is the major touchstone for the entire year, the penultimate celebration before New Year’s Eve and the start of New Things. You can’t sleep through it and pretend it isn’t happening. Christmas commands everyone’s attention—except America’s best writers. Even the British seemed to give up on it after Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”

Of course, there are the complainers. They can be fun to read, and why not? The best of them recognize the same things we do: the syrupy-sticky-awful music running ad nauseam in the stores immediately after Halloween, the crass commercialism, etc.

There’s a lot to hate about Christmas the way it is prosecuted in these United States. The shameless buy-something-because-fourth-quarter-earnings-drive-the-economy message we get from our “news” media, for one. I’m not arguing any of that.

In regards to Bukowski and others whose childhoods are something best put behind them, I also understand how Christmas is ruined for some people. I’m just saying there’s no reason to throw Christmas out with the filthy bathwater of our pasts.

I say these things as someone who has had Christmas ruined for him at age seventeen, who wasted the seasons throughout his 20s with nothing more than a bottle of gin and a bud of weed to get him through, I can bear witness: Christmas cleans up real nice once you decide you’re tired of getting beaten up by it.

This is not surrender. This is you declaring a different level of engagement. One that requires another kind of fight from you.

There is no better answer for a bad childhood, or against the hateful sham our Mammon-worshipping culture has made of the season than to create a Christmas that is good and true. A Christmas that reflects who we are and what we aspire to do. Or should aspire to do, assuming aspiration itself isn’t as dead for you as Christmas.

If it is, that’s okay. It’s all part of the package. A gift bigger than any box, yet accessible to all who are open to receive it.

Build your own Christmas. Let the right ghosts in.