Painting with Words

A Whole Bunch of Stuff

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 02:42:44 GMT

Here are the first four drawings from a series of six:

And now, some poems...

Love Hurts

How can I write a love letter to you
when that love was lost a long time ago?
I wear that love, which you once declared a true love,
around my neck like a putrid, rotting carcass.

Tears were never cried for that love.
In fact, 'tears' and 'cried' are not strong enough words.
Howling tempests of grief never swamped and battered
my body for that love.
The loss of that love never burned me,
never consumed me in a great conflagration,
never reduced me to a pile of cinders.

This is a love poem of mourning.

How can I say what you once meant to me
without regurgitating every painful literary cliche
of the last five hundred years?
I will not compare you to a flower
or the sun, moon, or stars.

But goddamn, you were beautiful!
And you trusted me to carry you under my wing
like the wounded gosling that you were.
I think that's what I loved about you the most;
that even though you'd been abused, raped, mistreated,
beaten, neglected, abandoned and betrayed,
you still had the ability to trust.
And you trusted me.

I remember entire afternoons
spent lying with you in a warm, fleshy pile,
like a litter of pups,
our only language that of skin on skin.

I never grieved over the loss of that.
Never grieved over the nourishment
that our touching gave me;
the pure mother's milk of it,
the safety and utter relief
after years of living disconnected,
like a man under glass, my body starving
for fingers and arms and legs and lips.

Shall I grieve now? How do I do that?
By writing a poem?
How do you let something go
when so much time has passed
that it's turned into a scab, a crusted booger?
Do I rip off the scab and let fresh blood flow?

And I never mourned the loss of our passion.
How being together was like a cure for cancer.
How you were the first thing I thought about
when I woke up in the morning,
and the only reason I got out of bed some days.
And how spending a day with you
was better than winning the lottery,
better than anything I could possibly think of.
The way our hands and eyes hungered for each other
like junkies needing a fix.

How do I mourn the loss of that passion,
now that twenty years have passed,
and the anesthesia is starting to wear off?

How do I grieve for the intertwining
that was severed,
the raw flesh left behind
when our hearts were brutally disengaged,
like siamese twins ripped apart
by horses running in opposite directions?

What about the time you told me
that you couldn't live without me;
not like some cheesy lyric from a country-western song,
but with the truth of your bones and blood.
And I realized that we had both jumped into
the deep end of the pool together.
How do I say goodbye to that moment?
Am I still walking around with scar tissue
and bits of dried-up, dangling heart-cords,
like forgotten umbilica?

How do you begin to repair
a delicate piece of machinery
that's been neglected
for half a lifetime?

You once wrote a poem about me
entitled "An Evening With My Beautiful Lover."
What do I do with that?
Do I burn it? Do I tear it up?
Do I put it in a drawer and try to forget about it?

Those words were never given a proper burial.
Ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.
Our love is dead,
and it's corpse has finally surfaced,
like a soldier missing in action.
And it's time for me to dress in black,
and weep.

David Aronson
March 2007

Monkey-Boy
for my son Josh

Do you remember when I sang you the first forest songs,
and showed you how to arrange the bones?
You climbed up and over everything that was climbable:
sofa-mountains, table-caves, coatrack-trees
and waterfall-chairs.

My little monkey-boy, mercurial, bouncy,
ready for your stripes.
Never a blank slate, you were born
with your personality fully tanked
and priced to move.

And you must have had the justice dial
turned up extra high when you were crafted.
Do you remember how you were outraged
when Bart Simpson got bullied on TV?
No one had to teach you that it was wrong.

My wild little monkey-boy,
where did you learn to speak so eruditely?
Did a traveling consortium
of missionary english teachers
find you in the jungle and take pity on you,
thinking you Tarzan's primitive boy,
and leave you with a scholar's vocabulary?

Your controls must have been set
to bypass stranger anxiety as well.
Do you remember when you dove head first
into a room full of unknown people
as if they were a huge vat of candy?
I think you forgot I was even there
as you charmed grownup and toddler alike
with your swaying flute and fearless turban.

My darling monkey-boy,
your Gepetto must have placed
the philosopher's stone behind your eyes.
Like a reincarnated Neitszche,
you wanted to know the nature of good and evil
as soon as you were pushed out of the nest.
You swung from vine to vine looking for God
while the other little monkeys
were looking for grubs.

Sweet little monkey-boy,
you're an imp and a mazik,
and you fall into mischief through sheer curiosity,
but you've also got a piece
of Florence Nightingale's heart,
because you can't stand to see anybody suffer.

You played patty-cake with death
almost as soon as your life had begun.
Did you discuss esoteric mysteries
with the cherubim and seraphim
while your body lay motionless in that hospital bed?
Is that where your old-man-of-the-forest wisdom comes from?

My brave little monkey-boy,
I'll always be there to applaud you
as you conquer the world,
and to pick you up
when you fall out of your tree.
And no matter what,
I'll always be on your side.

David Aronson
April 2007
High Colonic of Love

You remember the past
through shit-colored glasses;
a watery brown-out,
a slaughter-yard wallow
that stains your eyes.

No chocolate bunnies,
no baby chicks or peppermint candy.
The rainbows got sucked into a black hole,
gold coins, leprechauns and all.

Lucky for you that I kept a record,
scribbling notes and plucking
the jewels from the turds
before they disappeared forever
down the drain.

Here's an item:
A declaration, a promise made,
a gift to be hung around your neck
or strapped to your forehead
like a prayer box
--but all you remember
is the breaking of the promise.

You really should keep this gift
in your mojo bag--
it will bring you more good luck
than a rabbit's foot
blessed by the Pope himself.

The giver was a woman,
and not just any woman,
but a woman who slid down your throat
like sweet cream
and warmed your belly
like hot buttered toast.

Remember when she spoke to you,
earnest and naked in your bed,
and revealed to you the hidden wonders
of the dark continent of you,
and announced her position
as first lady of the united states of you,
and her eyes and her voice
led you through that tangled forest
to the place where all your lost radiance
sat waiting for you to find?

And what about that other woman?
The one who touched you
like a butterfly landing on
your summer-warmed, grass-stained
vagabond face.

She took all your innards
that were spilled out on the ground
and stuffed them back into you
and stitched you up
like a much-loved childhood doll,
and thawed you with her easy-bake-oven smile.

You've wiped your ass with her gift
and tossed it on the dung heap
as carelessly as all the rest.

I think it's time to schedule you
for a high colonic of love;
to purge yourself of the slamming doors,
the harpy screeches, the castrating hysteria,

and make room for the good flora and fauna:
the smiles that pardon all your secret sins,
the rolling on the floor like giggling pups,
the salty sweetness of ardor-swollen lips,

the warmth of flesh that curves
into yours at night
and acknowledges your spark
when it's at it's most tenuous,
protecting it the way cupped hands
keep a burning match from the wind.

David Aronson
January 2008

Poems from the Eye of the Hurricane

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 21:35:54 GMT

I've been going through an intense healing crisis since December. Here are some poems that have come out of it:

Ruach (The Holy Breath of Spirit)

Okay--I give up. I surrender.
Powerful currents are capsizing me.
I dip my toe in the water
and the riptide pulls me under.
I'm not going to struggle--I'll become a merman.
Tidal waves wash over the blinking lights of Disneyland
and I'm surfing the crest.
The spell is broken--
my Mickey Mouse ears are blown into the gutter.
These puny windshield wipers
can't hold back the downpour any longer.

What is expected of me?
Nothing that requires any more effort
than allowing a seed to become a flowering tree.
Remember the spark? The original plan?
The holy letter scratched into your forehead
long before you were born?

You are a catalyst, an enzyme,
the sand in the oyster,
the bee that pollinates the flower,
the man who sweeps up the ashes of the Phoenix
and from them builds a new nest.
You're the fire that turns the water into the steam
that drives the engine that takes you to another country,
and you can no longer indulge in the illusion of insignificance.
You can no longer ignore the fact
that your existence makes an impact.
You speak, you touch, you love,
and the entire web starts to quiver.
It's time to acknowledge your sticky-sweet immersion
in the cluster-fuck of humanity.

Here's your top hat and your wand;
people are waiting for the lightning bolt
that knocks the lids off their towers.
They squawk and squeal,
but their hearts secretly hunger
for the moist dark alchemy of the cocoon,
and it's merely frippery that they relinquish.
Donald Duck is drowning
along with his indignation
and his victimization--let him go.
The ocean of you has tributaries
that encircle the globe.

Alright--I acquiesce--
there is freedom in surrender.
I've had my face to the wall for way too long,
like a punished child sitting in the corner, forgotten,
and left to split the seams of his clothing as he grows.
I won't be a bird on his death bed
despairing for never having flown.
I'll be the goldfish that leaps
from his imaginary bowl,
the vine that grows through cracking stone.

What is asked of me requires no sacrifice;
I desire it the way a salmon yearns to swim upstream.
The only thing I need to renounce
is the inevitable accumulation of crust and debris,
the fallout from living in the material world.

The tide rolls in,
scrubbing and rinsing with it's foamy suds,
and the afterbirth falls from my eyes
which water and blink
as they let in the morning light,
momentarily blinding me,
the same as on the day that I was born.

David Aronson
December 2006

Jubilee

An ancient stone hospital was winding down.
The wards were full of the dead.
Soon the last breath would expire
with a barely audible sigh,
like a candle flame softly extinguished
by a breeze through the curtains.

The only survivors were myself
and a strangely androgynous nurse.
She was surely a woman,
but her face looked like my son and my father
when I glanced at her sideways.

We strolled from bed to bed,
surveying the deceased.
Some of the patients
had been there for centuries.

We saw an old man with an archaic nightcap
from the time of the plagues,
children with limbs missing and mangled
in factory explosions,
elegant young men with wasting, coughing diseases,
sad, pale, addicted women, overdosed and drowned.

We saw creatures that had been sick and dying
for so long, they had lost part of their humanity,
and lay motionless in truncated lumps
under neglected bed sheets.

We saw patients with their hearts eaten away
and their throats plugged up.
We saw emaciated bodies with hair and nails
grown into wild tangled brambles
to rival Sleeping Beauty's castle.

Soon the nurse and I would also die.
What to do?

"I have a potion," she said.
"It brings the dead back to life
just as Jesus raised Lazarus
from the tomb."

Being a Jew, I was skeptical.

But as we pressed liquid to lips,
eyelids began to flutter.
Wasted centenarians leapt from their beds.
People without legs turned cartwheels.

We raced from sickroom to sickroom,
giddy with our godlike task,
the hospital filling with human voices
after years of silence.
Crutches were smashed against walls.
Iron lungs were abandoned.

The potion ran dry,
and with more corpses to revive,
the nurse whisked me to the kitchen,
handed me a mortar and pestle
and a jar full of something
and said, "Here--grind!"

We whipped up a frothy, buttery batch
of death-be-gone
and resumed our rounds,
flinging gobs of it into shriveled, blackened mouths,
like paperboys tossing the morning edition
onto the porch.

The newly resurrected danced and sang
in croaking voices and garbled dialects.
They laughed and shrieked and sobbed
and stared at their functioning bodies
in wonder and amazement.

We came to a room with two humanoid creatures
strapped to a bed.
They were like hunch-backed men
with the heads of alligators.
According to their charts,
they had committed crimes--
eaten people, like the Big Bad Wolf.

"What about these two?" I asked,
hesitant to reward such evil.

"Give them back their lives,"
replied the nurse in a firm, clear voice.
"All are to be redeemed!"

David Aronson
March 2007

Letter to myself at age 11

I know it hurts.
I'm sorry it's taken me so long to arrive.
First my armor didn't fit properly,
and the dwarf had to bend it and bang it
and re-solder it I don't know how many times.
And then my first horse died,
and my second horse got pregnant--
I didn't even know it was a girl--
and my third horse was stubborn and willful
and was always galloping off
on it's own personal adventures.

And then, I could barely hear your crying
in that closet you got lost in,
buried under pillows
with the door locked behind you.
But something kept startling me awake,
like a mother who hears her child's faint cry
even though she's a thousand miles away.

And I went looking for you
and found you in the photo album.
Your face was supposed to be smiling
for the benefit of the school and the PTA,
but your eyes and your mouth
were wavering on the verge of tears.
And so I held you to me
and felt your sadness.

Long afternoons that drained you
with their crushing heaviness;
sunny afternoons spent indoors
fearful that if you went outside
you'd be hunted down
like a Jew fleeing Nazi Germany.

The Gestapo teachers that shaved your beard
and tattooed your arm.
The American ambassador that turned his head
and washed his hands like Pilate.

The experiments they performed on you,
like a rat in a cage
with no escape from trauma and stress,
no bars to push to bring relief,
waiting to see how long it would take
to break your spirit.

I saw the light in your eyes
that flickered and burnt out,
and I felt the lump of petrified meat in your chest
that you hauled out of bed every morning
like an iron ball chained to your leg.

And I know it hurts.
And I'm sorry it's taken me so long to find you.
But I'm here now.
So rest your head and hush.
Hush and go to sleep.
I love you, little boy.

David Aronson
March 2007

New essay and illustration

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 04:55:39 GMT

Ars Gloria

Dr. Hoffman's Folly

     Bill stood on the kitchen table, his arms raised in a grand, sweeping gesture, shouting "I am Jesus Bill! I am Jesus Bill! Hallelujah!" in the bombastic oratorical tones of a holy-rolling tv evangelist. He leaped about on the flimsy table like a demented, drug-addled Peter Pan, and I was afraid it would collapse under his weight, but I was unable to do anything except stare at him with a big dumb grin on my face, because the acid was kicking in big-time and turning the clockwork gears of my thought processes into a water-slide filled with raspberry jello.
     There were four of us scrambling our brains that evening with what was supposed to be lsd, but could have contained just about anything that was poured into the kitchen sink where it was most likely concocted; drain-o, rat poison, douche vinegar, who knew?
     Our blinkered band of blind pied pipers consisted of my friend Dave, his friend Bill, my first wife Terri and myself. We were all young, none of us over the age of twenty, and we were gathered in the small apartment where Terri and I had lived since our untimely teenage marriage, precipitated by the unplanned birth of our daughter Diana the year before.
     Diana had been put to bed an hour earlier and we had sprawled on the living room carpet waiting for the drug to take effect. And as we sat hovering in that twilight zone between everyday consciousness and righteously fucked up, I glanced through Bill's journal which he carried with him everywhere he went, a key prop in his emerging literary persona. I read through some of his latest poems, expecting Bill's usual mix of zen philosophy, dada nihilism, and absurdist theatre, and was shocked and taken aback by the extremely violent anti-christian sentiments I found expressed in them. There was stuff about Jesus sucking diseased cocks, having the cross shoved up his ass, and lots of nasty scatological references.
     Dave, Bill and I were all Jewish by birth, but gravitated towards eastern theologies; zen buddhism, hinduism, taoism. We practiced yoga, and had disdain for pretty much all western organized religions, and certainly no love for christianity, but this was really over the top! There was some serious rage in that notebook, and wherever it was coming from, christianity was the target. It was a side of Bill I hadn't seen before. He had always played the part of the mystic, serene and wise beyond his years, or else the clown, the witty court jester who amused everyone with his surrealist wordplay and eccentricity. Now I was seeing one of Bill's darker characters, one filled with volcanic repressed anger, and it scared me; not so much for myself, but for Terri, who, although seriously strayed from the flock, had been raised a catholic, and I was nervous about how she would react if she should read the products of Bill's poison pen.
     I knew that Terri was volatile and prone to extreme bouts of irrational over-reaction, but what neither of us knew at the time, and wouldn't know until years after our divorce, was that Terri was suffering from a serious dissociative disorder; the result of a highly abusive and traumatic childhood in an extremely dysfunctional family filled with alcoholism, addiction, incest, physical abuse and mental illness.
     I think it would be safe to say that taking acid was not a good idea for any of us, but what the hell did we know.
     So now Bill was dancing on the table, gesticulating wildly and shouting "I am Jesus Bill! Praise Jesus Bill!" at the top of his lungs, and Terri stared at him with a googly-eyed expression of uncomprehending confusion; she looked like she didn't know whether to laugh, cry, take offense, or wind her watch.
     My stomach knotted; this was not going to be a pleasant trip. Truthfully, though, I didn't really know what kind of a trip I had wanted it to be. I don't think any of us really knew what we were after. Enlightenment? Revelation? Kicks? Transcendence? Escape? Wonder? We had failed to heed Dr. Timothy Leary's advice to honestly examine one's true expectations and motivations before taking lsd.
     Terri laughed hysterically at Bill's antics; the kind of bone-chilling laugh that one rarely hears outside of the locked ward of an asylum, the kind of laugh that makes your hair stand up on the back of your neck, and your scrotum, should you possess one, shrivel up like a raisin. Dave and I looked at each other wide-eyed. The first note of bad trip paranoia had been sounded. Once again, Tim Leary's words came to us too late: set and setting, set and setting--we were fucked.
     Terri continued to laugh like Woody Woodpecker's evil twin. We thought she was going to have a fit. Even the normally implacable Bill was alarmed now and had climbed down off the table.
     "What's wrong with her?" he said.
     "I don't know," I said nervously, "maybe she shouldn't have taken any acid."
     We stood in a circle around Terri and arranged our faces in ways that we hoped would seem kind and soothing.
     "It's okay, Terri," I said, "everything's going to be alright."
     "Yes, everything's groovy," said Bill, "think about butterflies and bunny rabbits and shiny daffodils..."
     "You've done acid before, haven't you?" Dave asked Terri. Terri looked at me.
     "Not really," she said, "when we did that sugar cube--that was my first time."
     "Oh shit!" I said.
     Terri was referring to an afternoon, shortly after we had first met, when I had shown up at her house with some sugar cube acid while her parents were out, and we tripped and had sex in her bedroom while side two of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band played over and over on the turntable--we must have heard it thirty times--and Terri was menstruating and her blood got all over the sheets, and she was flipping out and getting hysterical and I kept telling her "No... it's beautiful... it comes out of your body... it's natural..." like some drugged-out flower child at a Manson family orgy.
     So Terri hadn't had as much experience with acid as I thought she had. Not that we ever got good acid anyway. The days of Owsley and orange sunshine were long gone. All of our late 70s suburban acid was heavily cut with speed and god knows what other kinds of garbage, and our trips were usually psychologically akin to the act of peeling off one's own skin with a pair of tweezers. I honestly don't know why we continued to take the shit.
     "I think I'm freaking out," said Terri, her voice quavering.
     "You're not freaking out," I said, trying to be the voice of reason while my brains were sliding out of my ear like runny eggs. "We only took one hit. It's not that much. You're going to be okay." I tried to sound confident and upbeat but Terri wasn't buying it.
     "I... I need to be alone," said Terri.
     "Are you sure that's a good idea?" I said.
     "Yes... no... I mean... I don't know... maybe..."
     And she removed herself to the bedroom, shutting the door behind her. Dave, Bill and I looked at each other uncomfortably. A pall settled over us, replacing the earlier hilarity of Jesus Bill.
     "What do you think she's going to do?" said Bill, "She's not going to hurt herself, is she?"
     "I don't know," I said, as I watched the carpet and the walls breathing in and out. "I think you freaked her out with that Jesus Bill stuff. She is catholic, you know."
     Bill just stared at me blankly.
     "And whatever you do, don't let her look at your god damned notebook."
     Just then, Terri came rushing out of the bedroom in a panic.
     "I... I'm going to get in the car and drive... I have to get away..." she said in a shaky voice.
     "That's not a good idea," I said slowly, trying to maintain my composure.
     "No... not a good idea," my friends echoed, with barely concealed alarm. We got up and once again surrounded Terri, fencing her in with our bodies. With soothing baby-talk and paternal cooing we gradually herded her away from the door, moving slowly so as not to frighten her.
     All of us were tripping pretty heavily at this point, and it was getting hard to keep track of what was happening when. Right now, yesterday afternoon, and five minutes ago were getting jumbled up and re-arranged like chips on a scrabble board in a scrabble match played by monkeys. All kinds of Lucy-in-the-Sky visual effects were pre-empting my usual neural-retinal schedule: colored silly-string motion trails, shifting kaleidoscopic patterns plastered over every surface, chairs and tables shooting up to the ceiling on rubbery legs like in an episode of Little Nemo in Slumberland. And in the middle of this phosphene brain-gasm, a part of me was trying to figure out how to keep Terri from snapping her tab and slipping her wig, and that part of me was a little man in a little boat in a toilet bowl getting sucked down into a fluorescent day-glo whirlpool.
     So Terri and I decided to take a bath together thinking it would chill us out, but when we shut the door to the bathroom, the walls began to close in on us. The water running in the tub sounded like a deafening waterfall with eerie voices murmuring underneath the roar, and the flowers on the wallpaper seemed to be staring at us with accusing eyes as we got undressed. I felt as if I was slipping down a dark tunnel. I was paranoid; the toilet hated me. Whatever nasty things the acid was doing to Terri's head were now infecting me as well.
     "Don't look in the mirror!" I said in a panicky voice, expecting to see a vision of our flesh melting off our heads, leaving Mexican Day of the Dead sugar skulls blinking back at us. We got in the tub and sat facing each other, and as I watched her, Terri's skin took on a greenish glow, and her eyebrows curled up into a sinister pointiness, and her teeth became fangs, and the freckles around her nose turned into rough, bumpy scales. She had transformed into a dangerous, frightening lizard-woman, and I could tell by her look of trepidation that my face was doing bizarre and unpleasant things for her benefit as well.
     "Is my face scaring you?" I asked. Terri nodded.
     The trip was taking us from a colorful Peter Max black light poster into a medieval Heironymous Bosch demonic nightmare.
     "Okay--let's get out of the tub then," I said, my voice small and tremulous. "Don't look at me and don't look in the mirror."
     We quickly got dressed and rejoined our friends in the living room. They were watching tv, but the screen was broadcasting nothing but static, since all the stations had signed off for the night.
     "We're watching the snow," said Bill.
     "It's really cool," said Dave.
     "Look--it's thousands of people waving flags..."
     "Oh yeah," I said, "I see it too... people waving flags..."
     "Look--now it's millions of Chinese people with conical hats..."
     The novelty of the tv game did much to take the edge off of our fear and paranoia, and soon we had forgotten all about the bad trip bathtub. The four of us sat huddled around the tv for what seemed like hours, ooh-ing and ah-ing over the imaginary scenes and hallucinatory characters that our lsd-feuled sense organs were projecting onto the tv's visual white noise. The distraction seemed to calm Terri down, which in turn calmed me down, and everyone was able to relax. Eventually, the drug began to wear off, and the tv static lost it's animated funhouse appeal and reverted back to plain old boring static.
     "Come into the other room with me," Terri whispered in my ear. We excused ourselves and shuffled off into the bedroom. Terri shut the door and flopped herself down on the bed.
     "I'm horny. Come here and fuck me!" she demanded.
     "Now? What about Dave and Bill?" I asked, somewhat anxiously.
     "What about them?" Terri said, as she stripped off her clothes.
     "Well, they... they'll hear us..."
     "So what?"
     I was rather uncomfortable with this idea. I knew that both Bill and Dave hadn't gotten laid in quite a while, and I also knew that it would be pretty unpleasant for me to have to listen to my friend having sex in the next room when I was feeling horny and frustrated.
     "Come on," Terri demanded, "put that thing in me!"
     I did the deed as quickly as possible, all the while worrying about Dave and Bill overhearing Terri's squeals and moans of pleasure. It was very hard for me to enjoy myself and I felt rather like a concubine in a male harem, or a stud animal corralled into a breeding arrangement.
     When the servicing was over, I quickly returned to the living room to check on Dave and Bill. The vibe I got from them felt kind of strange and I could tell that the quickie had been clearly broadcast through the apartment's thin walls. Dave had an ambiguously crooked smile on his face, half amused and half embarrassed, and Bill was standing on his head in a yoga posture. Our two-year-old daughter Diana had awakened and wandered into the living room and was staring saucer-eyed at Dave and Bill as if they were gooey green martians with antennas and six eyes and drippy slobbering fangs. I picked her up and tucked her back into her crib, and by the time I got her back to sleep, Terri was snoring in the bedroom and Dave and Bill were feeling sober enough to drive, so we said our goodbyes.
     I sat on the couch and reviewed the night's adventures. It was clear to me that Terri and I should definitely not do any more acid together. Lsd is not a recreational drug. It is a powerful substance that needs to be approached with caution and reverence. It can be a gateway to expanded levels of consciousness, or a pandora's box loosing all the screeching demons from the dungeons of the subconscious. Luckily, we got through the evening without anyone burning their hands on the stove or jumping out of a window. We were on the ground floor anyway, so a jump would not have been fatal. And besides, those once-familiar tales of acid trips gone awry are most likely urban legends. But the experience underscored the wisdom of the unfairly maligned Dr. Leary who warned people not to take lsd unless it was in a highly controlled environment with an experienced guide. And one should definitely not feed acid to people indiscriminately without knowing anything about their state of mental health.
     It's no surprise to me that the 1960s magical mystery tour through the summer of love ended up on the side of the road with a blowout and smoke pouring out of the hood, and a lot of misguided, psychedelicized basket weavers sitting on the grass, gibbering and babbling and twiddling their thumbs and toes.

David Aronson
November 2006

Autobiographical essays

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 23:09:12 GMT

I've been writing short anecdotal autobiographical essays lately. Here's one with a supernatural theme:

The Haunted Shed

     When I was a little kid, I loved ghost stories. Whenever I found myself in a library, ghost stories were the first things I looked for, and I read as many as I could get my hands on.
     As an adult, I don't really understand what the appeal was, because nine times out of ten, those tales of headless women and sleepers having the blankets pulled off of them by invisible hands in the middle of the night, would scare the living-bejeesus-shit-stuffing out of me. And then, I would obsess over the stories, re-assembling the most terrifying details in my imagination over and over again for days on end.
     One would logically assume that this is not the kind of experience that a child would willingly subject themselves to, or repeatedly seek out, yet that's exactly what I did.

     The psychologist in me would like to think that these frightening stories and images were symbols representing traumatic, fear-inducing, real-life events that were floating around in the murky grotto of my subconscious, and that the compulsive reading of ghost stories was an unconscious attempt to stimulate the repressed fears in order to process them. It was a primitive form of cathartic therapy.
     Yeah--that works.

     One book in particular occupied a large portion of my childhood awareness. It was entitled Fifty Great Ghost Stories and I purchased it at the elementary school bookmobile. It was very thick and every one of it's detailed and highly descriptive stories took place in the late 19th century.
     The Victorian era was a world I was already familiar with from reading the Sherlock Holmes adventures by Arthur Conan Doyle, and it was very easy for me to get lost in the book's gothic landscape of crushed velvet and heavy drapery, shadowy corridors in dark mansions lit by candelabras, domestic servants and horse-drawn carriages, and young squires returning home from tours of the continent.
     It must have been the end of the school year when I bought the book, fifth grade I believe, because I spent a large portion of that summer immersed in the gloomy, macabre world that it evoked. I sat in my room with the curtains drawn, reading and wallowing in stagnant pools of both romantically-tinged melancholy and garden-variety depression, alternating with overwhelming and uncontrollable feelings of being really creeped out.

     It seems I was a goth kid before there even was something called goth; before the Cure purchased their first tubes of black lipstick and nail polish.
     It was a psychologically unhealthy situation to be sure. A lot of my depression grew out of a difficult and largely unsuccessful transition to a new school and new neighborhood where I felt like a complete outsider, and staying inside reading morbid ghost stories in isolation was not doing anything to improve my emotional state.
     Halfway through the summer something shifted, and I was able to pull myself out of the house and into the sunshine. I sought out what few friends I had in the neighborhood and spent my time in communal play, like a healthy, well-adjusted child is supposed to, but my preoccupation with ghost stories still lingered.

     There was an empty field near my house that my friends and I spent a lot of time in. It was actually rather small, but to our child's perspective, it seemed enormous. The field was flanked by trees which blocked the surrounding suburban tract housing from view, and we could imagine that we were exploring in some forgotten wilderness far from civilization.
     At the edge of this field stood a large shed. The shed had a small window and a door that resembled the front door of a house, which made it easy to imagine that someone, some hermit-like being, might actually live there, or had once lived there, since the shed seemed as if it hadn't been used in years.
     In a very short time, we had constructed an entire mythology around the shed and it's imagined former inhabitant. We tried to satisfy our fevered curiosity by peeking in the window, expecting to see ancient but still intact tables and chairs and a bed, but the view was completely obscured by dust and dirt and cobwebs.
     There was something eerie and unsettling about the big, house-like shed, and my friends and I were both fascinated and scared of it at the same time, and the summer passed with the shed's mystery persistently skulking about the periphery of our young minds.

     Then, on a cloudy day late in the summer, when signs of autumn were just beginning to harsh our Tom Sawyer barefoot buzz with the threat of a brand new school year, something happened which amped the shed mythos up to War of the Worlds panic proportions.
     My friends and I were farting around in the field, looking at the clouds and chasing butterflies and putting grasshoppers into jars, when a gnarled, rickety and very thin old man suddenly materialized behind us, seemingly out of thin air, startling us and making us jump.
     The man had an extremely wrinkled face, like a desiccated prune that had fallen into the back of a cupboard and been left to fossilize, and his beady, yellow eyes exuded an aura of malevolence.
     "What are you doing here?! You don't belong here!" he shrieked. His raspy, high-pitched voice was strangely asexual; it could have belonged to either a man or a woman, and the queerness of it sent shivers up my spine.
     "You shouldn't be here! Get out of here!" he screamed, with all the hysteria of someone defending themselves from mortal danger. He moved towards us with a shaky, spastic gait, and swung his cane at us wildly like someone batting at an attacking bee, and we stumbled all over each other like the Three Stooges to get away from him.

     Later that day, our imaginations went into overdrive. The old man had been so bizarre and evil and freaky... so inhuman... his voice so otherworldly... like a wailing banshee... And hadn't he just appeared out of nowhere? There could only be one explanation. It was the ghost of the man who had once lived in the shed. Yep... that's what it was alright.
     So hungry were we for something strange and mysterious to occur in our bland, sanitized, suburban world that we didn't even entertain the notion that it could have been a real flesh and blood person who we simply failed to notice sneaking up on us; some crotchety old coot that we'd never seen before because he usually stayed inside his house watching game shows on tv and eating soft foods that wouldn't foul up his dentures and who needed to vent his spleen over being old and weak and impotent.
     Nope. It was definitely a ghost.

     We stopped going to the field after that--we were too spooked, and for a while we re-hashed the story of our encounter with the ghost of the shed, each time embellishing it with more ghostly, supernatural details, giving ourselves an adrenaline rush to equal any preteen sugar high.
     But like any addictive activity, our tolerance level soon peaked, and the story just wasn't scary anymore. And besides, school was starting, bringing with it newer and bigger stimulations.
     But there was a part of me that didn't want to give up the ghost, so to speak, and so I started making up stories. I told my friends that I'd been walking past the field and seen the ghost of the old man, illuminated by a supernatural light, inside the shed folding clothes, or something ridiculous like that; that i'd seen him wandering around the field, digging something up with a shovel, or possibly burying something with a shovel. I can't remember all the silly stories I concocted, but I'm sure that the details came straight out of Fifty Great Ghost Stories.
     I don't think my friends ever really believed me. They were tired of the ghost game. But I got so involved in my own stories that I actually began to believe them. It was a strange kind of self-hypnosis, and for years afterwards, in my mind, I was convinced that I had actually seen a ghost in or around the shed in the field.
     It wasn't until I was a teenager that the spell wore off, and I thought back to that summer and said to myself "Oh yeah--I made all that shit up."

     It had been my longest sojourn in the land of the unliving, and although I made a few brief visits as a teenager, like the time I had strep throat and spent a week with a high fever, reading nothing but ghost stories and listening to the Doors' Strange Days, their darkest album, and putting myself into a very disturbing head-space, my eagerness to go there diminished, and by the time I was a young adult, I had no more need or desire for walking those gloomy corridors.

     My inner psychologist feels that in some strange way, I must have identified with the ghostly protagonists of those stories. After all, they were unhappy, earth-bound spirits trapped in some stressful or traumatic situation, and that's exactly how I felt in the fifth grade--trapped.

     Nowadays, when I go to the library, I usually peruse the occult section for books on astrology and my other various esoteric interests, and I often flirt with the idea of cracking open one of the many books of true ghost stories.
     All those ghostly women in white, wringing their hands and searching for their lost children; the little boys and girls peering forlornly out of the windows of the rooms where they were murdered; the brave young men defending buildings that no longer exist--they're all whispering to me "Come back, David--we miss you..."
     Perhaps I'll have a chance to visit them on the day that I die, making a brief stop in their tragic shadow-world, before my soul moves on to the next adventure.

David Aronson
October 2006

Erotic Art

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 03:24:04 GMT

These images are from a series of erotic drawings created to illustrate a friend's chapbook.
The others can not be posted on LJ, but you can see them here:http://www.alchemicalwedding.com/drawings/erotic.htm

Sometimes A Broom Is Not A Cigar

I have many things to return to you.
I've been taking care of them for a long time
without really attending to them,
like an absentee landlord,
like an invalid gardener who lets the weeds take over,
or maybe, possibly, like a widow
who discovers that the contents of her safe deposit box
have tripled in value.

These things were installed in me at an early age,
and like asbestos in the walls,
they've been poisoning me ever since.
I've discovered the probe,
the implant behind my ear,
and I'm having it surgically removed.

Now that I've written the eulogy for my first life,
and before I mail the birth announcements for my second,
I need to take inventory of your gifts,
your plagues and pestilence that have taught me so much,
so that I can return every last one of them to you.
You see, they were never mine to accept in the first place.

You assumed a parental duty to feed me
with bits of your own flesh,
and I, likewise, felt obliged to lick the wounds,
like an animal trapped with it's brood on an empty ice floe.
I thought it was my business to transform your feces
and your nightmare abortions into gold,
but now, your emotional landfill
with it's hundred-year halflife
is staining everything a cancerous brown,
so I'm giving it all back.

I'm giving back the pussy cat you said I tortured
--that was a lie.
You were the one with the leash, the whip and the glove.

I'm giving back the Playboy magazines you appropriated,
hiding your flaccid anxiety behind bathroom bravado.

I'm giving back the Punch and Judy nightsticks and hammers
with which you clubbed each other half to death.

I'm giving back the duplicitous phone calls at 12:00 AM
and the blind-eyed amnesiac trips to New York.

I'm giving back your floppy three-cornered cuckold's hat
and the accompanying ribald libretto.

I'm giving back your contractual fluids
squirted through holes in solemn bedroom sheets.

I'm giving back Dr. Freud's triangle,
where boats and planes and symbolic submarines
are never heard from again.

I'm giving back your passive-aggressive nipple-biting
and your eunuch's mirror that hides genitalia,
like a fat man's belly obscuring his penis.

I'm giving back your lurking father-fear
and the castrating knife behind your back.

I'm giving back your insect mouth
that severs members during fellatio.

I'm giving back your half-acknowledged seductions
and your intellectual incest.

I'm giving back the box-row seat
at the foot of your marital love-bed,
and the playbill for the impotent king
and his wretched child bride.

I'm giving back your cheating heart
and your d-i-v-o-r-c-e.

I'm giving you back all those stories,
those blueprints I once thought were mine;
those dark burlesque narratives,
cheap smutty novels written by psychotics and cretins,
horrible made-for-tv softcore porn movies,
with all the sickening shame and embarrassment
of a catholic school sex-ed filmstrip,
rerun and rerun over and over again
on a channel that can't ever be changed.

Your enmeshment was more cruel slapstick than sadism,
the Three Stooges with a dildo in the eye,
but still enough to cripple and dislocate
a green and unshelled young child.

I'm noticing an empty space
where your dysfunctional library used to sit;
a stretch of wall once occupied
by your infernal diseased volumes
reeking like a noxious pussy-fart,
with titles like How To Ruin A Marriage,
and How To Repeat The Same Mistakes Ad Nauseum
Without Ever Learning A Goddamned Thing.

That space is clear now,
and the sunlight through the open window
reveals nothing but spotless white,
and I'm wondering
what sacred lovers,
what coiling angels of light,
will soon be blown in
on the virgin wind.

David Aronson
August 2006

Art & Poetry

Sat, 05 Aug 2006 02:13:40 GMT

One of Us from Shadows in Heaven

A Poem About God

It's time to let God out of the books.
He's been standing in those books
with his face to the wall for too long.
He's tired of jumping through your hoops,
afflicting people with boils and whatnot.
The burning bush is so--I don't know--last millennium.
I think God has paid his dues by now, don't you?

But how could a benevolent god
allow so much suffering in the world?
This God is a bad egg.
Let's lock his ass up in a book!

Where's God? He used to be in this mountain,
in this ocean, in this thundercloud,
in this sheaf of wheat.
Sorry, he's over there in the book.
And he's so much more...engaging.
We've got a top notch team of writers for him.
Our ratings are through the roof!

It's time to let God out of his contract.
The statute of limitations is up.
He's tired of smoting and smiting in your infomercials.
He doesn't want to be Big Brother anymore.
Leave the job of omniscient censorship to Santa Claus.

But where will we find God if he's not in the book?
In your asshole.
That's right. God will be in your asshole.
And in your penis and testicles,
and your vagina and your breasts,
and in your piss and spit and cum.
There's a lot of places he hasn't been to in a long time.

Oh, you let him do some cameos and guest appearances
in poems about flowers and sunshine,
but God hasn't slopped around
in a big pile of shit for ages.
Sure--a lot of people are going to be upset,
and there will be lawsuits,
but think how nice it will be
to have God smiling up at you every morning
as you brush your teeth.

Let him out, I say.
He's tired of being the heavy-handed shtarker.
And he wants to shave, already.
You'd be amazed at how much food
gets caught in that beard.

God is tired of being cooped up in church pews
and shoved into hotel drawers.
And he's tired of being unable to screen
the people who read his lines.
Some of these creepazoids would not be
getting a second call-back, let me tell you.

God, bubbulah, stay with me on this one.
It's going to be sweet.
Millions of people bowing down
and praising your name.
We'll split the take 50/50.

Maybe God is tired of being a he.
Maybe he'd like to be a she for a while,
or an it.
Mommy, God is under my bed
and he's keeping me awake.
You'd better share God
with your little brother right now!

And what a boring domain
you've given God to live in.
Fluffy white clouds and
round-the-clock harp music.
Like waiting in the dentist's chair
with a head full of novocain for all eternity.
It's no wonder people are always
breaking those commandments.
Maybe God would like to live in a tree,
or at the bottom of the ocean,
or inside a bubbling volcano.

God has done his time in your books;
he's up for parole.
He's played all your make-believe games with you
and participated in your puppet shows
like a bemused, cheerful, over-indulgent parent.
He deserves some time off for good behavior,
don't you think?

David Aronson
April 2006

New art and poem

Thu, 11 May 2006 23:09:44 GMT

"Summertime" from Shadows in Heaven.

A new poem from the "Reports From the Secret Heart" series:

The Queen Of Wands
Crossed By The Moon

Her valentine-crimson hair
danced and wriggled on her head
like snakes of flame from a fiery Medusa.
She claimed to be a rock'n'roll love-child,
and I believed her.
She moved about her suburban island
like the throbbing hum of bass strings,
bewitching passing sailors
with heavy riffing from her electric guitar.

Her husband, the Prince of Cups,
knew her as a wildfire mare that could not be saddled,
and he was highly aroused by her midnight-ride romps
with strange virile cowboys,
as he spied on her through her own crystal ball.
Or so she told me as we rocked and rolled in my bed,
slipping and sliding on a sea of backbone slip,
squeezing lemons and juice running down our legs.

The Queen of Wands was jaguar-sleek
and so hot your fingers blistered when you touched her.
And maybe it was just this sensual sizzle-pop and griddle-hiss
that exiled her to the barren surface of the moon.
Maybe her mother couldn't take the heat;
maybe mom's panties got wet
every time she picked up her little queenlet,
and, horrified by the child's brazen built-in sex-broil,
banished her to the bleak lunar wastelands where she now dwelled,
her fire damped down by cold clay and harsh, paper-dry winds.

The Queen occasionally escaped from her cratered prison
by disguising herself with the help of potions
brewed up in her cauldron,
and the subterfuge of her sailor-slaves,
long since enchanted into braying pig-dog-men.

Our bonfire boff was only to have lasted a single night,
but the Queen saw something of herself in me I suppose,
and I became her favorite,
and our simmering dalliance lit up into a sexual conflagration.

She had once sat at the right hand of Beelzebub
as a sorceress-in-training,
and men offered up their souls to her
at midnight blues-guitar crossroads.
And so I couldn't very well refuse her invitation
to join her in her marital bed.

After a sumptuous aphrodisiac feast
and a deadly nightshade cocktail,
her husband and I filled her at both ends
like a stuffed sweet pepper,
and powered by an itching copulatory spell,
we explored every possible configuration
of three bodies, two male organs, and two female orifices.
"Hey, I think I've seen this porn movie before,"
said the Prince of Cups.
"I think I'll keep you both," said the Queen of Wands,
grinning like a mouse killed by a cat
and waking up to an eternity in the land of cheese.

The Queen and I fucked in the shower
like horny otters,
bent over and hanging onto the soap rack.
Her labia was a perfect pink tropical flower
in the full flush of bloom,
carnivorous and inviting and waiting to pounce.
A nibble of breath on her neck
was all it took to melt her into a puddle
like an erotic witch from an x-rated Wizard of Oz.

We feasted for weeks on end in her lunar mansion,
the moon beaming down on us ripe and full,
like a fat milk-engorged breast.
But when the nighttime sky started taking bites
out of that dairy-moon-platter,
her mood began to turn and churn
like the washing machines at Bedlam,
and her silver mirror no longer told her
she was the fairest of them all.

The Queen wigged out,
flipped her bell, book and candle,
drank hemlock,
danced in red-hot shoes with spikes inside them,
spun her head around like a gyroscope, snap, crackle, pop,
humped her broomstick,
puked upside down crucifixes across the room.

The tides discombobulated her inner ear,
and she staggered and reeled from room to room,
frothing at the mouth, and cursing me and my family
all the way back to Abraham.
And so I was banished from the house of the moon,
where orb-addled lobsters crawl from murky pools,
raise their claws to the heavens
and spin about crying hallelujah.

I dispatched impassioned letters to her by messenger
which were returned ragged and torn,
scratched out and stained with ink.
I bided my time, hoping the Queen
would return to her summertime brilliance
with the first sickle-sliver of the waxing moon,
but her inferno of lust for me
had been totally washed away
by the men-in-white-coats fire brigade.
The moon dripped it's smelly green cheese
all over her passion and snuffed it out
like a sputtering candle.

And I received an embossed and filigreed royal missive
thanking me for my service to Her Majesty,
which I kept as a memento
of our wild, wing-melting, bronco-fuck ride
to the heart of the sun,
where, for one glorious hour,
it danced, jitterbug and pirouette,
in perfect balance and harmony
with the volatile, punch-drunk moon.

David Aronson
April 2006

Batgirl

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 22:30:26 GMT

My contribution to the Batgirl meme,
doubling as a Shadows in Heaven image

New art and poetry

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 23:54:13 GMT

Cover image for "Shadows In Heaven"

The next two poems in my series about past sexual and romantic relationships:

The Mating of Mutables

She was scared of me at first.
But I knew she was attracted too,
because she kept peeking at me
from across the table,
between the sheltering bodies of
her flannel-shirted friends,
like a rabbit sniffing the air
to see if the hounds are gone.
Clearly, I was the one with the magic wand.
And like a rabbit,
she was nervous and small
and adorably cuddly-cute.

She came to my room
and we talked about how people change
and why they don't.
We sat huddled on the floor;
she, desperately wanting me
to take her face in my fervent hands
and overwhelm her with a kiss,
and I, afraid of frightening
the skittery creature that she was.

And so began a courtship worthy of Pepe Le Pew.
Every time I reached for her,
She looked at me with round, red,
froze-in-the-spotlight eyes.
She stiffened like a corpse under my touch,
but the moistness of her mouth
invited me to join her
in a juicy, skin-bursting feast.

Eventually, the pull of her tides
overcame her timidity
and I found myself naked in bed with her,
blanketed in her delightful downy skin.
She was an anxious lover,
frenetically pistoning on top of me
like a squirrel stuck to a jackhammer.
I had to use kind words and gentle tones
like a kindergarten teacher to calm her.
And then, take her by her tiny hands,
through true and false and multiple choice
into slow-rolling, savory,
deliciously long-stroking lovemaking,
like honey dripping languorously
down the inside of a love-misted thigh.

And so, through the miracle of
mucous membrane sensitivity,
she was transformed,
from a shrinking chipmunk
to a tasmanian devil of brazen,
slobbering, wanton lustfulness.

She burst through my door
and threw me to the bed
like a stuffed bean-bag love-toy.
"I've wanted you all day!" she moaned
as she tore my pants off
like a little kid impatiently opening a present.
"It feels so good to be naked with you," she gasped,
as she rode me tantalizingly slow
like a snake-charmer cowgirl tantrika,
and performed tricks and feats
with her vaginal muscles
worthy of the number one star courtesan
in the emperor's harem.

Breathless and satisfied
and wrapped in a ball of caresses
under the covers,
we talked about all the different ways
to change who you are inside.

And then we decided to invoke
the coiled serpent energy of evolution
into the crucible of our bodies.

And so, at the appointed hour,
we lit the altar candles
and removed our clothes.
We stood inside the quartered circle
and petitioned the transforming currrent
of divine electricity
with our hands, eyes and lips.
Our bodies were blessed and anointed
with reverent erotic attention,
and soon, the queen mama snake
was roused from her slumber
and began her slow, coiling slide
up the multicolored maypole-in-the-middle.

Voices from distant stars spoke from my throat
and opened wide our eyes
like the lens of a camera letting in more light,
bringing us into focus as tiny jubilant drops
in a vast celestial ocean.
And our bodies moved together
like waves on that ocean,
the tactile intensity of every cell
turned up full blast.
And then, there was nothing but sensation;
we had become that slowly dancing wave,
orgasmically pushed and pulled
by God's eternal gravity.
Surely, this was the closest one could come
to touching the heart of existence.

The next day, I felt strange,
as if my soul wanted to fly
out the top of my head,
like the ghost of a bird
slipping through the bars of it's cage.
The trees were glowing
with a gentle translucent light,
and I could hear their green whisperings
bubbling through my inner ear.
We had opened the portals
but neglected to shut them again,
and now the seawater was madly rushing in.
We flung ourselves to the ground
and let solid mommy earth
siphon our spirits back
into their three-dimensional containers
and replace our cranial corks.

Later, we sat and we talked about
impediments to change
and how people can change for the worse.

I returned from a week spent away from her
to yet another metamorphosis.
She had become a tragic heroine
in a shakespearian drama
with a vendetta to fulfill.
And I was cast in the role of
the selfish, controlling paramour,
which was not a part I played well.
To my dismay and bewilderment,
she forced me into a halloween mask
then spoke to it like the mirror in Snow White.
I was a sinister satanic clown,
cuckolded by myself;
the victim of some evil reverse-glamour spell.
I tried to negate the charm
and dispel the illusion,
but my magic wand had become a limp piece of wood.

The wascally wabbit trickster god
was fucking with our heads,
showing us cracked funhouse reflections of each other;
she, with her hysterical woolly-brained accusations,
and I, with my castrated anxiety
and atavistic fears.
It was a volatile cup of soup indeed.
And of course,
the inevitable kitchen accident took place;
the pot boiled over
and the stove exploded,
flinging us in opposite directions.
And she scampered away
like the frightened rabbit she was,
pursued by the bugaboos
cooked up in her own brain.
And I was like the angel Lucifer,
cast down from the spiraling heights of heaven
to the dark, sulpherous bowels of the underworld.

I fell into a fetal slump
and after months of thumb-sucking and bed-wetting,
I received a letter from her,
apologizing for having drawn
that bad-guy Dick Dastardly moustache on me
so heedlessly.
She came over and we lay on my bed
talking about how people can mistake
the contents of their own heads for reality.
Her soft, scrumptious, lickable body
brushed up against mine
and I yearned for her,
but she already had her thumb out
and her skirt hiked up
to take her down an existential highway
that didn't go anywhere near my neighborhood.

The magic wand had been passed on to her
and she was not about to give it away.

David Aronson
March 2006

Girlfriend, Deconstructed

Certain things need to be cut out,
rearranged, pasted down.

Long, straight, shiny black hair
like a Chinese doll,
and big, black Bambi-doe eyes.
An upside-down-heart-shaped ass
squeezed into straining tight jeans,
crouched before an art school locker.

But what about these clippings here
that show her as nothing but
a hairy Italian dwarf
with a bad case of acne?

What the author fails to acknowledge
is his emotional ambivalence towards women.
His lovers are either idealized or denigrated
to the point where his actual
physical perception of them is affected,
airbrushing away any flaws
or magnifying them into grotesquerie.

The poem continues with another metaphor
equating his memories of the relationship
with notes for a manuscript.

Certain things, once written in longhand,
are now word-processed and edited.

The concert I don't remember
because it was spent frantically snogging;
devouring lips and tongues
and falling out of our seats.

Her dark eyes flaring red
when her mother praised my artwork over hers,
and how I neglected to defend her.

The dirty, smelly bus ride home
from the party where she rejected me,
driving me into a love-shorn isolation,
like a sacrificial scapegoat
cast out into the desert.

The images chosen for the last three stanzas
paint a picture of a passionate relationship,
and fire was certainly present between us.
We were often akin to dry tinder
smoldering under a magnifying glass,
waiting to spring into blaze,
but other less glamorous emotions
also had their brushfire sparks to ignite.

What my poetic friend is trying to say
with his flowery language
is that he desperately wanted to fuck this girl,
but she never let him,
probably because she didn't trust him,
due to the fact that he was never genuine with her.
Having had little sexual experience,
he wanted her to see him as a stud
to mask his insecurity,
but she saw right through his false bravado and posturing.

He asked her out in a very businesslike manner
rather than honestly expressing his feelings of attraction,
and then tried to pressure her into sleeping with him,
rather than seducing her like the Don Juan he wanted to be.

The author here has cleverly, if opportunistically,
appropriated the critical voice,
using it first as his own,
admitting to embellishment and selective memory,
and then as a plain-talking third person alter ego,
confessionally "spilling the beans,"

Like a fish unaware of the water he swims in,
the author fails to note the subtext of guilt and narcissism
running through the poem,
and refuses to take responsibility
for solipsistically recounting the details of the relationship
as if his thoughts and feelings defined it,
as if without his musings it would cease to have been.

He continues with another metaphor.

Scores of soundbites need to be sifted through
and sorted for inclusion in the documentation.

"I don't want to have to put on a smile
every time I see you."

"I'm not going to sit here and
hold your hand all night."

"What you really need is a wife.
You should find someone
and get married."

It's interesting how the dialogue
that I remember most clearly from her
is angry, harsh and critical.
Was I really guilty of behaving
in a smothering and manipulative manner?

Okay—now we're slipping into psychoanalysis.
This is not poetry, just adolescent whining.
What Mr. Sensitive Poet doesn't see
is that she was a cold, immature, fucked-up bitch,
and that all he wanted from her was warmth and intimacy;
but he's such a masochist
that he takes any accusation from this little cunt,
no matter how ill-founded, as gospel truth.
She wouldn't even sleep with him, for fuck's sake!

Once again, the author has used the device
of speaking in multiple voices,
this time to illustrate his internal conflict
over the interpretation of his memories.
It seems as if he is now consciously aware
of his previously hidden feelings
of shame and anger towards the subject of the poem,
and the tone has changed to one of introspection.

He continues:

Certain bits of data are now seen
through a microscope or telescope,
adjusting their size and distance.

The thrill that ran up my spine
when I kissed her,
my hands encircling her tiny convex waist.

The photograph of her ex-boyfriend,
who broke her heart
and left her like her runaway father,
and who looked just like me.

The party where she abandoned me
and I sat alone and untouched,
a miserable leprous pariah
at a college make-out orgy.

You know, I think I was really traumatized by that party.
Everyone was paired off and sucking face except me,
because my girlfriend had a bug up her ass,
and I just sat there watching
and feeling like a total reject.
It's still painful to write about.

I'm sorry, but this sounds like overblown angst
from a teenager's diary.
What's really painful are the earlier traumatic experiences
of abandonment and withdrawal
that this memory stimulates,
first with his parents neglect
and then with the private elementary school
he was kicked out of.

The poem ends with the author's secondary voices
taking on the roles of patient and analyst;
a rather unoriginal and un-poetic attempt at closure
which ultimately fails,
as the ambivalence and conflict remain unresolved.

The poem as a whole is meant to point out
the arbitrary and dishonest act
of making art from autobiography,
but in the long run,
the author's choice of tonal variety
and fragmentary structure
does nothing more than reveal his insecurities
and deep-seated complexes.

Then, when the files are completely catalogued
and the collage finally takes shape,
a single picture emerges:

The two of us sitting on the art museum steps
on a cheerful spring day,
the sun kneading the knots from our shoulders
with a warm, gentle massage,
and feeling a bit dejected
because the museum was closed
when we thought it would be open.

She puts her child-smooth hand in mine
and this small feminine gesture
intoxicates me with unbridled delight.

A man walks by and says,
"Smile! It's a lovely day
and you're with a beautiful young woman."

My eyes drift up to a bird on a tree branch.
A bird whose sparkling feathers
are the most radiant, breathtaking,
sapphire-brilliant blue
I have ever seen.

David Aronson
March 2006

Even more art and poetry

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 15:42:30 GMT

"Matriarch" from Shadows in Heaven

The following is the first in a series of poems about past sexual relationships. This one is about the summer I lost my virginity.

Thou Art That

At a time when my sap still flowed upward,
and each new day was a downhill boulder
gathering mass and momentum
like a runaway train,
I stood with warm, sugary crumbs of sand between my toes
and watched the shimmering blue earth
curve brazenly away from me,
as gulls flew above my head
proclaiming me King of Wild Things with their cries.
I was seventeen in a place
where nobody knew my face or name:
where no one expected me to be a puppy
cringing under a rolled-up newspaper;
where no one saw the pitting and erosion
of a thousand hurled stones;
where no cruel suburban high school burdens
were attached to me.
And I lounged about the boardwalk
as cock-sure as any stoned-soul rocker.

It was a liminal summer,
plum-ripe for reveling,
and I was a pristine three-story house
with all the decrepit old furniture
pushed to the curb,
and sure enough, in order to redecorate,
the hoochie coochie gods soon came knocking
at my back door.
And so it came to pass that Dionysus,
lord of divine intoxication,
took frenzied possession of me.

My head crowned with laurels of seaweed,
I soon had my own gaggle of ecstatic followers
trailing behind me.
And oh how we celebrated!
And whirled like drunken, god-mad dervishes!
Our bodies cast off their last remaining
two percent of solid matter,
and we slooshed through samadhi floom rides
and spluttered and sploomed at the tops
of spouting olympian fountains.
It was an immaculately stoned orgy
of dissolving egos,
and we were bhodisattva geeks
biting the heads off the chickens of illusion.

And it also came to pass that one night
I found myself entangled in the sensual bedclothes
at the back of a come-a-knocking van
with one particular water-sister,
an experienced woman of nineteen.
We pounced on each other like kitties on catnip,
and she kissed me like an electric eel
sliding down my throat.
We staggered along the boardwalk,
stuck together with our hormonal glue,
reeling under the approving eye
of an infatuated moon,
and blessed by the stars
that chased each other lustfully
through the silky black sky.

In the blissful bake of afternoon,
the simmering ocean nibbled and licked our thighs
as we kissed underwater,
her legs wrapped around my waist.
Fingers stroked and poked
into slippery sink-holes,
slithering around each other
like two squids in heat.

And as my little brother
built rainbow bridges at the beach,
the gods attended us in our summer cottage bedroom,
and I entered her, torches ablaze,
with the sacred liquid fire of Dionysus.
And we melted and dripped into one another
like poppets in a boiling cauldron.
Her tasty, tawny-brown, animal-healthy body
was animated by Aphrodite,
undulating in the sticky seawater sheets.

The priestess had parted her silver satin curtains
and booted me, head-over-bum
across the threshold
and there was no turning back.
But the orange godhead sunshine of our union
was painted black when it was time to part.
We came tumbling down into a thorazine autumn,
like when your favorite childhood pet dies
or the circus big top burns down.
We tasted the dark side of the Dionysian cookie;
felt the sting of the wrathful buddha's birch switch
on our backsides.
A gray bummer schleprock cloud
wrapped itself around my face
as she got in the car and drove miles away
to her home on the other side of a very wide state.

And I returned to dispensing donuts and coffee
in the dead of night
to vampires in dirty shades,
anorexic chalk-faced junkies,
and people who looked as if they had just awakened
from napping in a puddle of stale urine.
My dandelion-wish days of wiggly tadpole-happiness
were gone forever.
My soul had grown another head,
like a love-struck hydra.
I had become a twin and was achingly half-empty
without my mermaid anima lover.

And so, without a word,
I walked out of the grease and flour graveyard
and got on a bus
which took me straight to her little town
of smokestacks and crumbling tin rooftops.
She met me at the station
and you could actually see the little cartoon hearts
fluttering about our heads
as we gazed mutually moon-eyed and cow-pied.
Her cool hand on my forehead
was like a benediction from the Madonna herself,
and I felt like a reunited child
after a department store abandonment.

At midnight, she tip-toed into my guest room
expecting to re-enter the temple,
but alas, the gods had forsaken us,
and we found ourselves two mere teenagers
with all the accompanying vulnerabilities
and insecurities,
fumbling about awkwardly
with elderly parents snoozing behind the wall.
The font of holy water had run dry.
But still she came dutifully every evening,
and one night fell asleep in my bed
where her father found us the next morning.
I didn't understand when he asked me
if I wanted a big breakfast.

That night, I lay alone
listening to the heartless wind throttling the trees
and whipping their branches against my window.
I imagined myself a character in a book:
a man standing at the end of a lonely railway platform
in the middle of the night,
a single, feeble streetlamp the only thing keeping him
from being devoured by darkness,
waiting in vain and despair
for a train that will never arrive
to take him home.

David Aronson
February 2006

More art and poetry

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 16:42:32 GMT

"The Deep" from the Shadows in heaven project.

Motherless Children

I first tasted her lips at the bottom of the garden.
Slippery, apple-red lips,
and a thirsty, famished kiss,
like a swallow of water after a week in the desert.
A swollen, bee-sting of a kiss,
sprinkling pollen on the flowers, birds and bunnies.
A kiss that gave my pocket watch a seizure
and pointed it's hands at the moon.

And we rolled on the ground,
as naked and innocent
as the first glimmer of the rising sun.
The known world was our sandbox
and we built castles of stones, moss and mud.
Our gnarled, brown grandmothers
watched over us, their leafy fingers
cooling us with their shade,
and our father, the sky,
clothed us in woolly jumpers of blue
and teased us with beards of clouds.
like soap-suds in the bathtub.

Do you remember when your dewy head
was first peppered with love's golden crumbles?
You never doubted the morning—
the nourishment of sunlight
fed to your bones and blood.
The perfect adoration of your mother
was your birthright.
Your mother of the ten thousand things;
her hair of comets and constellations,
her cavernous belly full of diamonds and coal,
her rivers and oceans that kissed away
your scrapes and cuts.

And you were fearless with your gifts of love then.
Your heart was a bouncing birthday cake
and you showered jelly beans of affection
on all who crossed your path.
But whispered stories creeped about your ears—
promises of a better world,
and the clear stream of your joyful bounty
grew cloudy and stagnant.
Your mother's nurturing body became a bleak prison
and you wantonly pissed on her.
Thinking yourself bound for the glory train,
you smeared shit all over your lovely home
like a neurotic monkey,
only to wake up the next morning
hung over and face down in feces.

How easily we turn away from love
and become entangled in our own gibberish.
Like when those sharp, slavering fangs
sprouted from her sugar-fairy lips,
tearing my mouth from my face,
ripping out my throat,
and grinding my flesh to goulash.
And I in turn became the man who chewed up her head,
spitting out some fragments of bone and half an ear.
And there we sat, two senseless torsos
topped with raw hamburger meat,
lonesome, unspeaking, isolation tank Helen Kellers,
not knowing enough to pinch ourselves,
pull back the covers, and sit straight up in bed.

I know you think that love has left you
just a sad bit of gristle, a used wad of gum
stuck to the underside of the table.
But the sun is always hiding just 'round the horizon,
sniffing and snuffling his way
into your home town every day.
The skeletons of trees get new guts and skin
each and every spring.
The lake dries up over here
and the rain falls down over there.
And your mother is always forgiving
and awaiting your bruised and bloody-nosed return
with her celestial chicken soup.
So please don't spurn her because you've forgotten
that you were cooked up in her womb.
Please don't poison her body
with your noxious excretions.
And please don't piss in her mouth.
She's the only mother you've got.

David Aronson
February, 2006

More art and poetry

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 01:27:32 GMT

"Benefactor" from Shadows in Heaven project

Letter to Dylan

(My first wife and I had a child born with trisomy-13,
a very rare and very severe genetic birth defect.)

I don't know where my tears
have disappeared to.
They've run away
like the dish and the spoon.
Maybe the faucet was
never turned on in the first place.
Maybe it's rusted dry,
and my grief,
black, foul and sticky,
is festering like a landfill
and gumming up the works.

My first clues that you were not
the rosy bundle I expected
were the delivery room looks
of startled dismay.
"It's cosmetic—it can be fixed"
they said, hiding you from view.

When the nurse presented you
through gritted teeth,
I did not know what I was looking at.
Was it a cabbage patch kid survivor
of some horrible industrial accident?

Where your mouth should have been
I saw a series of gaping, alien holes
and obscenely mangled flesh,
as if the creator, instead of
lovingly crafting the lips and teeth
that would have proclaimed
your glory to the world,
had wantonly punched into your face
with an ice pick
in a blind, drunken rage.

When your mother said
"Where's his ear?"
the room began to spin
like an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
I think it was at that moment
that a valve was turned inside of me
and the tender flow
waiting to enfold you
was stilled to an arid drip.

I stood as coldly stoic as Mr. Spock
and as numb as novocaine
while the so-called expert
stood in his pissed-off night-slippers,
icily reciting the accusatory litany
of your defects and deformities,
to the soundtrack of your mother
wailing banshee torrents
from the depths of her desecrated womb.

That night, your grandfather
slept in my bed
with his arms around me
as if I was the newborn
in need of comforting.

The next day, kinder doctors
with warmer eyes
revealed your agonized world to us.
Your poor, tiny brain,
like a sea-sponge washed up on shore
and picked at by wild birds;
a never-ending electrical storm
in a shook-up glass paperweight.

We took you home and fed you
through a tube
like some abomination
locked in a Victorian closet,
while the sunny world went by
with eyes averted.

Your mother and I
became weak and sick,
puking up the broken
eggshells, twigs and branches
of a violated nest.
Finally, we had to put you
in the hospital,
your bodily needs attended to
along with all the other
sad-eyed aberrations.

Four months later,
your mother held you swaddling-tight
as you took your last anxious breath
in this world,
and I'm glad I was able to love you
and see you, just once,
as something more than
a cruel and vicious joke
or a hideous mistake.

So now I'm wondering
what might have been
had that spanner not been thrown
into the chromosomal works.
Would you be a poet
like your namesakes Bobby Z.
or that famous Welshman?

You were a swan without it's trumpet,
and now I think I carry
your innocent, untried voice
next to mine,
snuggled cozily in my throat
like a bear in a blanket,
asking me,
as if for a bedtime story,
to always always speak the truth.

David Aronson
December 2005

art and poetry

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:38:23 GMT

Image from Shadows in Heaven

Dead Languages

I heard a man speak hard, shrivelled words
from out the left side of his mouth.
They had been pounded flat
by the pages of heavy books,
and fell to the floor with a lifeless thump;
a droning, laundry-list poetry
punctuated with random, sterile ironies.

Then I heard a woman speak words
straight from the heart of her womb.
They tumbled out of her,
brazen and lusting for life,
like a litter of yelping, squalling animals.
Her words were nourishing
like mother's milk; rich and exhilerating
like chocolate ice cream
on the hottest day of summer.

And as I basked in the delicious
tingling, puppy-lick warmth
of her language,
the man stepped in front of me
with his sun-blotting shadow,
and implored me with the power
of his high-school-style peer-pressure
to follow the intellectual line
laid down by his lineage
of venerated sages in pasteboard caps.

I told him I preferred the voices
of those whose need to speak and be heard
was a life or death proposition,
of those who need to berate, acuse, curse, shriek,
bitterly weep, shamelessly expose, seduce
and sing hallelujah with their words
just to be seen and acknowledged.

Brothers and sisters,
I have been to the mountain top
and I have seen a vision of a time
when the forests and beaches
will be our classrooms,
and our textbooks the sand and soil.

The fruit of the tree of knowledge
will be ripe for plucking
and one sweet swallow
will connect you directly
to the heavenly database.

We'll learn the secret knowledge of all things
from the movements of the stars,
the chattering of squirrels,
the decay of a leaf,
the faces in the clouds,
the meanderings of insects,
and the density of bones and rocks.

Poems will burn like the sun through a lens;
will cut through stone like the wildest river.
Our words will be divine messengers once again,
and every poem will be a pregnant seed
containing an entirely new world.

David Aronson
January 2006

For Your Own Good

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 04:35:04 GMT

Image for a collaborative work-in-progress book project with Leslie Powell entitled Shadows in Heaven.

The Soul of the World

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 04:26:07 GMT

The Soul of the World

A crime has been committed
and no one noticed.
A dismembered body decays in a dumpster,
butchered and chopped into bits
like a side of beef.
One of mother earth's miracles
discarded and forgotten
like yesterday's refuse.
And like a ghost waking up
to the passage of time,
I realize that the body in the dumpster
is my own.

The whole world is an abandoned child,
huddled by the side of the road,
shell-shocked and freezing.
The sweet milk has curdled and
still we cling to the torn and filthy blanket.
All you lost and grieving orphans
with your steamroller-squashed hearts;
All you cracked and broken Kens and Barbies
walking around with severed limbs
and held together with chewing gum
and paper clips;
All you walking-dead men and women,
sweetly avoiding one another,
holding your Vogue and GQ masks
in front of your faces like Greek actors,
and reciting edited lines you never wrote;
I want to gather you up and hold you
until you feel safe again,
sing you a lullabye,
and keep you wrapped and warm
until you know that you are loved.

Then maybe I'll believe it myself.
Maybe I'll be able to pick the bloody chunks
from the garbage
and stitch them back together
like Isis and Osiris.
And then I'll dance like
crazy, psychedelic, Jackson Pollock spin-art.
I'll taste the 900 flavors of love
on the fertile breeze.
Twilight will reveal me as a child
and I'll breathe in the soul of the world.

David Aronson
January 2006