day two - October 3^rd

“Could I have your attention please?”

Michael always had to say this at the beginning of a class. For the most part, students were quite loud and rowdy given half a chance, and he had to raise his voice as firmly and as politely as possible in order to gain any control in the classroom. He often wondered if a more manly physical presence would have made a difference, but it seemed like a lot of trouble to go to just for the sake of custodial order, and often thought of himself as a glorified janitor, a babysitter, a well paid part time prison matron. But those were the more extreme definitional modes he relied upon when he began to lament his role as teacher. It did have its good points. 

He considered buying a whistle to shut them up, but that would only add to his reputation as a rather eccentric professor of literature, composition, and creative writing. After repeating it three times they finally fell silent as he fell into a long’ish rhapsodic mode.

Thank you, so much, gentle readers, for your eagerly awaited attention. Now, today’s exercise, the limerick, like any poetic form, is open to moderate alteration, so long as the intricate immune system, so to speak, comprising the general structure and outward thrust of the poem, is not compromised. If you wish to slightly alter the rhyme scheme in your second attempt to write a limerick, please feel free to do so. The use of slant rhyme is also acceptable in this exercise. It can only add to your basic understanding of the many tools available to you as young writers of poetry. But be cautious at first. Structure can be very useful as a way toward complete agility and freedom when you tackle longer poetic forms as part of your completed manuscript project. Some people consider limericks to be a minor poetic form, a kind of slight, whimsical doggerel that conservative poetic minds tend to feel lapses into vulgarity, thereby making the form of no real use to the serous poetic imagination. Their imaginative properties, from my humble opinion, are seriously lacking. I, on the contrary, feel that the noble limerick has the ability to both amuse and enlighten if it is carefully handled by a skilled practitioner. So please, gentle readers, as you approach and refine your first attempt at the limerick, consider the narrative first and foremost, and do not allow yourself to lapse into simple vulgarity. Vulgarity can be delightful and profound, but let’s see if we can come up with some other thematic options for the time being. And then later, perhaps, depending on the outcome, we might decide to entertain more ribald narratives for our poems.

*

After Michael left his second poetry class of the week - on the use of limericks as alternative comic structural strategy - he was starting to feel a little better about the news. He still hadn’t told anyone, so it was just ‘their’ little secret, his and that god damn over eager doctor with the bedside manner of a dead skunk. Why couldn’t she have just listened carefully and done as he had requested. He knew as soon as he got the message what the news would be, otherwise there would have been no urgent telephone call at all. He could have just checked himself mid-week. But no, she had to save him from the suicidal thoughts he had no intention of having.

After class, on his way home, instead of lightheaded boozy depression, with a side of fries and a Caesar salad at the campus pub, he chose a walk among the urban wilds of a city he was beginning to love for its landscape alone. In between burgeoning housing developments clinging to the side of low lying mountainous regions there were still plenty of rough, elaborate walking paths along steep dusty edges of barren, desert like environs. With his earphones planted firmly, and his hiking boots clutching the earth, he braved the blinding sunshine and the treacherous hillside, listening to Robin Gibb sing ‘I Started A Joke’ over and over and over again.

It had been one of Michael’s favorite songs, ever since the first time he heard it in 1968, when he was twelve years old. It represented to him, even then, such a perfect union of poetry and music. The haunting quality of the melody, combined with that rich high pitched pseudo-boyish voice, and lyrics that hinted at something both hilarious and heartbreaking. It was a commingling of styles he was drawn to immediately.

When he found a copy of the BeeGees greatest hits in vinyl at the Kamloops Value Village he snatched it up, along with a small plastic record player, and then, after listening to the whole album twice, he went online and downloaded his favorite track onto his ipod.

If that doctor had only seen him, singing away to himself as he wandered along those treacherous paths, with a slight lilt to his gait, she would have thought he was about to go over the edge, prompting her to call the police regarding a potential suicide among tumbleweeds and thistles. What a well intentioned joke she was. So serious and concerned. She didn’t even have her facts straight, and gave him ten years of relatively good health, with medication, and then it would be all downhill from there, with death being the most likely career option around sixty-four, if he was lucky, and careful.

He knew this was all quite possible, but was also well aware of the fact that people were living happily and in relatively good health with HIV now, for many years. It was a very different world than when the pandemic first began, and it was a world he fully intended to enjoy for as long as he possibly could.

What he had wanted from that doctor at the campus clinic was neither shrill nor sugar coated. It was a delicate mix of truth and possibility, tinged with light wit and jovial discursive foreplay that he craved. All she had to offer was dour, faintly factual data that seemed sadly out of date and totally lacking in hope and possibility in the face of an intrusive virus. And she seemed to have no sense of humour whatsoever. Whenever he saw her in the corridors at the university in the days that followed that fated meeting at the clinic, she looked at Michael with a faint sheepish smile overwhelmed by the worst kind of compassion - laced with sadness and regret.

He regretted nothing and often found himself saying, to himself, in the early days, following the diagnosis, that he had never thought of himself as someone who had experienced a good sex life. Thrilling was a more fitting adjective. Bad sex was something he had been fortunate enough to avoid over a long and satisfying career as a thoroughly sexual creature. Having practiced safe sex for years, he had become quite good at it, but apparently not good enough. And yet, like any sport, there was always risk involved. He felt that he had won the game but lost the tournament.

And although he was faintly aware that there was a sense of regret surrounding him, trying to make its way into his emotional make-up, his strong sense of commitment to the memory of an utterly thrilling sexual past would keep him going. He could easily survive on the abundant memories of such sharp, poetic, sexually astounding acts.

He liked to refer to many of his sexual exploits as a kind of meta-theatrical form. Circle Jerque de Soleil was a term he often tossed around whenever he remembered some of the more acrobatic group sex he had experienced. There had been those two French Canadian fellows at the baths who somehow twisted his arms and legs comfortably into various positions, allowing them to enter him in the most delightful, seamless, and unsuspecting ways. So much so that he had no idea who was inside and who was outside at any given moment. And as they blew into each condom to make sure it was airtight and usable before slipping it over their respective members, it was like seeing light translucent balloons at some gaily devised sexual circus where the clowns were beautiful and shimmering with sweat, red noses, and muscles fluttering like ribbons of bright sinewy satin.

Yes, indeed, it had all been terribly, terribly thrilling, and stopping for a potentially indefinite breather at the age of forty-nine did not seem like too much of a challenge. Despite the slight sense of misgiving, he knew he was ready for this. Hadn’t he been primed for a disaster of this kind for most of his life? Was it too much of a cliché for him, a primarily gay man, to have contracted HIV relatively late in his career as a very promiscuous person? His motto had always been to single handedly put the promise back into promiscuity. But he did experience the odd bout of self-doubt, and there were times of self-reflection when he wondered whether he was part of an elaborate practical joke being played on himself. Ultimately he knew that it was all far more universal than that.

*

And here he was, in the midst of stunningly beautiful terrain, listening to a rather odd looking Englishman sing in a strained, heady falsetto. Yes, it had been two days of very predictable clichés, and he was making the most of what could have been a very sad and frightening time.

I started a joke, which started the whole world crying

But I didn’t see, that the joke was on me, oh no

I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing

Oh if I’d only seen, that the joke was on me

I looked at the skies, running my hands over my eyes

And I fell out of bed, hurting my head, from things that I’d said

Till I finally died, which started the whole world living

Oh if I’d only seen, that the joke was on me

                     HAND SPLINT 

                 FOR LIMP WRIST

                        day one - October 2^nd  

the boy on the flute is a fright

his face is a horrible sight

when he walks his knees knock

it creates such a shock

his braces light up in the night

            Michael’s doctor’s appointment was scheduled for one fifteen and his poetry workshop started at two. The bus ride from Vancouver had taken an extra hour due to bad weather on the Coquihalla. But he still had time for a bagel and some herbal tea before his appointment at the campus clinic. There were six remaining manuscripts to go over, and an exercise on limericks and villanelles to prepare. He could have graded the last half dozen manuscripts on the bus, but listened to a mixed CD of all girl singers instead. Falling asleep halfway between Hope and Merritt, he woke up just in time to see the sign advertising the country music capital of B.C. On his ipod Allison Krauss was just finishing up My New Favorite and Norah Jones followed her with Come Away With Me. It was 2006 and, much to his surprise, he had made it into the new millennium with his love for female vocalists fully intact.

As he opened his eyes he found himself sweaty and drooling on his own shoulder, softly muttering the lines to a limerick he had never forgotten, one he had written in high school English class when he was seventeen. The exercise had involved giving students the first line, and then they were expected to complete the poem according to the form they had just been taught, and they were not allowed any notes. They had to listen.

The point of no note taking was to insure that the structure of the limerick would be imprinted on their brains long enough to write one of their own. It was an old-fashioned teaching strategy, before laptops littered the classroom and memory sticks were a dime a dozen.

His high school limerick had something to do with an unattractive yet musical young man whose face was not a pretty sight. So he had to rhyme the word fright with another word, and then make up three more lines comprised of one original couplet and one more rhyming word in the final line that corresponded to the last word of the opening line.

He didn’t have a very scientific, structured brain, and found himself struggling with strict poetic forms due to the rigid, manufactured quality of everything from the villanelle to the anapest. But the limerick, that was his favorite, very simple, very effective, and a perfect form for the comic edge that invariably seeped into his poetic voice.

Having been a precocious wordsmith from a very early age, his talent for writing short poems, that the teacher often thought he had stolen, was quite sophisticated by the time he entered high school. He once wrote a poem about the rainbow effect of sunlight on snow for another student and the teacher refused to accept it, claiming it must have been plagiarized from a poetry book.

Pink is blue is green is white

The colors sifting through the light

They crave the shafts of absent night

Pink is blue is green is white

This wasn’t the poem he had written, just a sudden re-creation form the dregs of his imagination. But he knew there had been something about the refraction of colour and a list rainbow tones. At the time, in high school, he didn’t think it was such a great poem, and had tried to dumb it down for the student he was writing for, but as it turned out, the student was a pudgy strange looking little creature with no mental capacity whatsoever when it came to poetry, among so many other things, so it was a wasted effort and created no small amount of conflict in the schoolyard immediately after English class.

“You fuckin’ homo! I told ya to write somethin’ easy for me to understand. Like about a snowman or hockey for fuck sake.”

And then the ugly bucktoothed bully kicked him in the knee. It hurt but could not really be considered much of a physical injury.

Later in life he often wished he had kept a copy of the original snow poem he had written for that hideous, taunting halfwit, but alas, it had been lost to the great vacuum of unsung literature, sucked up into the not so literary stratosphere like so much vacuum cleaner detritus.

He especially liked vacuum cleaner metaphors for a very specific reason. They were so efficient, and when they worked properly they could solve the most mundane of daily problems, ridding one’s self of the excess that surrounded them. Had he owned a giant vacuum cleaner as a high school student he could have taken it into the schoolyard and vacuumed up all his shrieking enemies.

*

As the bus rolled into Kamloops, about an hour after waking, he was putting the finishing touches on a poem of historic and culturally astute proportions about a certain vacuum cleaner that revealed his penchant for finding the erotic within humourous semi-autobiographical modes, a style he had cultivated during his late teens and early twenties, and something he had become known for as a middle aged poet whose presence at readings was sure to arouse no small amount of laughter from an amused audience. Michael called his new poem McLuhan’s Bride, acknowledging, in the title, that some of his poetic voice, but certainly not all, came from an extended leap into a joint major in Cultural Studies and English literature, a leap that had taken up over twenty years of his life before landing him in the  groves of a struck him as a comfortable but unstable academic cul-de-sac. But he had some wonderful memories of his time as a professional student, and the new poem spoke frankly of one of those memories.

McLuhan’s Bride

Once, at a graduate student soiree

the Professor’s wife told him

that Mcluhan’s wife

was afraid of her first vacuum cleaner

clearly shaken, he hesitated to add

that he, on the contrary, felt little techno based fear

when it came to small appliances

and all of the strained emotional ties

they liberate their lovers from

and had, in fact, experienced a prolonged affair

late sixties, with his mother’s first vacuum cleaner

an avocado green Westinghouse

amply accommodating his great pubescent shaft

in a most delightful way

stored in the basement

this mechanical bride

this compact galaxy of carnal pleasure

pre-dating certain groundbreaking

post-structuralist thought

stood proud

alongside boxes of old clothes, hunting rifles

bewildered WWII army uniforms

broken rear view mirrors

pocket westerns and his father’s empty Mickey’s stored in heating ducts

among the detritus of lives infused

with sex and booze

standing squat and satisfied

his thoroughly modern fully equipped paramour

astute and wild-eyed in ‘her’ stolid ambient purring

giving him uncomplicated joy

strengthening his love for his mother 

her taut brisk arms pulsing, strong around her fervent breasts of steel

pressing that small appliance into layers of 1950’s synthetic pile

the charged erotic ways of her domestic engineering

giving him pure uncomplicated joy

and reminding him of the ways in which she kept her house in order

providing sons and lovers with the necessary tools

to survive in a world where

as Mcluhan once said;

“each of us lives hundreds of years in a single decade”         

and

“when you are on the telephone you have no body”

inspiring one to think

when you are screwing a vacuum cleaner

you have no conscience, no need of one

save the sudden onset of a short circuit

as you engage in one final perfect act

of consummate industrial self indulgence

and the grand sweep of history

that will one day go the way of

items stored in a musty basement

works of art, mechanical reproductions

boxes of old clothing, hunting rifles

bewildered WWII army uniforms

thoroughly modern fully equipped paramours

canisters, astute and wild, eyeless

in their stolid ambient purring

having borne silent witness

to the grand, eternally pubescent

shaft of time

Michael didn’t think it would be a good idea to share his new home appliance poem with his students. Generally speaking, bringing one’s own work into a creative writing class that one was teaching was frowned upon. He did it the odd time, but due to the sexual nature of this one, he felt it might be best to show a little restraint this week. Little did he know, on the five hour bus ride form Vancouver to Kamloops, as he scribbled the final words of his poem into a notebook, that quirky written sexuality would be the least of his worries by the time he arrived in the classroom at two fifteen.

He apologized for being late and began to wittily improvise limerick exercises from his rough notes. To hell with Villanelles. They could wait until next week. Under the circumstances, the limerick was all he could withstand for now.

In the classroom, despite being visibly shaken by the news he had received at the clinic, Michael still managed a bit of pseudo-prudish humour by telling students that he would prefer that they did not use the word Nantucket in their limericks because it had become such a clichéd occurrence within this particular form.

Faintly vulgar innuendoes often managed to work their way into his teaching style. It was something he couldn’t seem to resist, and on this particular afternoon it lightened the load of his astounding diagnosis.

How was this diagnosis even possible?

It must be a mistake.

But he knew it wasn’t.

Although he had told the doctor not to call him regarding test results over the weekend, she still managed to leave a message asking him to come to see her at the Royal Inland Hospital during her weekend maternity ward shift. He had said to her, clearly and emphatically, that he would be away so there would be no point in having any information until he returned on Monday.  But wouldn’t it have been lovely to have been able to walk over to the hospital, through the sound of wailing newborns and joyous parents, only to receive grave tidings from an over eager health care worker with the timing of a rattlesnake at a baby shower.

The first thing she said to him after revealing the results was, “a lot of people are prone to suicidal thoughts when they first get the news. Perhaps you might consider counseling?”

            He had one gay nerve left, and she was all over it.

She had ruined Michael’s weekend. So he retorted, as gently as possible, without resorting to an excess manifestation of his signature sarcasm - yet managing to fill each word with a subtle, underlying rage over her forgetfulness about his wishes regarding the results.

I appreciate your concern, but no, I won’t be experiencing any suicidal feelings. I am well acquainted with the immediate emotional effects of this sort of thing and on several occasions have helped others deal with their initial response. Thank you for your time. I have to run or I’ll be late for my limerick workshop. I’m really looking forward to it, especially after you’ve managed to inject such a strained poetic rhythm into my weekend. I’ll contact you later in the week if I have any more questions or concerns.

            As he walked toward the classroom he thought of how he often liked to alter the final rhyme of a limerick in order to punctuate the brief narrative with a slightly jarring tone, bringing faint chaos, and a kind of contradictory open-ended closure to an otherwise ordered poetic microcosm.

the man with the lisp is afraid

he hides his rage in a cage

as calm as can be, he makes merrily

concealing his status

regarding HIV

*