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