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One good work of verse deserves another.
Though thudding rhymes alone do not mother
Wisdom, grace or insight, at least to stab
At them tempers a critic’s gift of gab,
Putting him, her, it or them on equal
Footing with the poet. Far from a sequel,
This review of Guriel’s novel, Forgotten
Work, aims at but an ancillary slot in
the limelight.
                                         Set in 2063
In part in Montreal, a fraught city
Whose demolished Mount Royal, by a fluke
Was inverted into Crater with a nuke
Misaimed by Don Junior, Acting President,
Parody plausible for such event.
Guriel, well-versed in the Canuck
Hive-mind, knew we couldn’t easily duck
The spector of crisscrossing Soviet
Or Russkie and NORAD missles. A tête-
À-tête between strident adversaries.
Leaves no safe and sure sanctuaries.

James Gordon, eccentric founder and lead
Of a cult rock group, espoused this creed:
Renown is enemy of the sublime.
He elected to descend not to climb
Slopes of Parnassian fame, to confound
Poetry with raucous musical sound.
Mountain Tea was the loaded handle
Of his band, whose erasure is the scandal
Upon which the plot turns. Its members lifted
Their name from the oeuvre of a gifted
Poet also from Montreal, Van Toorn,
Peter. As his name suggests, he was born
In The Netherlands, moved here. Like Rimbaud
After Illuminations, this bro
Knew when to stop. Having reached a summit
With Mountain Tea, rather than plummet
Down some abyss of mediocre despond,
He sought the complexity of life beyond
Mere poetry.
                               “Beyond music instead”
Or so the eponymous band had said,
Though their crazy music could not be pawned
Like Van Toorn’s book on mighty Amazon
For over four hundred bucks (there’s a cheap
Reprint at a price nowhere near so steep
By Vehicule Press in fair Montreal).
No. In fact, aficionados in thrall —
A proliferating cast of hundreds
Armed with a glut of hi-tech wonders —
Couldn’t find a vinyl, tape or file.
Their last hope was to track down the exile
Gordon, who made his home in the Dantesque gulf,
Which reeked of rot, decay, refuse and sulph-
Ur, odiferous strains perfect for punk,
Though a smelly place in which to spelunk.

Not to rehearse its plot by chapter and verse,
The tale’s set in a future Metaverse,
Though never is uttered that copywrit
Word. Guriel can thus display his wit
Inventing names for things old and new
Involving Zuck and his nefarious crew
And the letter zed. Blogs have become zlogs.
The web itself is the Zuck. Catalogues
Of devices and programs are marked zed:
Folks read Zwitter, take Zzzquil before bed,
Snapshots are brought alive by touch to post
On Zuckgram, Zucktube, any cyber-host.
Zuber’s at ones beck and call, rather winks
Since double clicks have become double blinks.
Teleporting is the norm, sometimes botched
As in The Fly. Everything is watched
By helicoptering surveillance eyes,
With ubiquitous hovering drones as spies,
The real is virtual, as on Oculus,
Except the device is superfluous.
Cyborgs don’t “wear” fleshtech, they merge
With it, unless they die by power surge.

I have mentioned Dante and Van Toorn
As influences Guriel has torn
From literature. There are many more.
First mentioned: Nabokov. Even before
Van Toorn’s MT, Gordon fronted Pale Fire
As the group’s moniker, poetry a lyre
Accompanying for a change sound
Rather than the other way around.
Among other literary ghosts haunting
The novel are Pynchon’s two daunting
Own cult tomes V. and Gravity’s Rainbow,
Difficult models from which to borrow.
The former’s alluded to in smartbook form,
Media in which content will transform
Per what’s on your mind; the latter, fallout
From a shared theme, the nuke, which takes out
The mountain of Montreal (Spoiler
Alert: in the brief Epilogue the same broiler
Treatment will befall Edmonton — it’s in
Alberta, for you Yanks who cannot pin
It on the map.) The plot is an echo
From the Chilean Roberto Bolaño,
Whose Los detectives salvajes depicts,
Putting aside its literary tricks,
A cult around a mythic poetess
(Better “poet” — let’s admit a foetus’s
Genitals should not impinge on belles-lettres).
His heroine was but a raison d’être,
As perhaps was Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea.
She never wrote at all, though to be
Honest, no one wrote anything: it’s all
Made up. Otherwise life would be banal.
And this motley cavalcade of authors
But scratches the surface. Ignorant scoffers,
Those who think that poetry cannot rhyme,
Will not acknowledge or seek out prime
Bookish real estate, the architecture
Of allegory, the subtle texture
Of allusion, articulate skills taught in
The past. Some works are best not forgotten.

A reader immune to science fiction
Not to mention rock, my addiction
To Forgotten Work came as surprise. I had
Bought it in dumbprint, already not so bad,
Then on Kindle — Zindle in ’63?
Just for browsing, Kindle samples are free.
And with Wi-fi it’s close as we can get
To what future digital natives will fret
Over, the true plasticity of a smartbook.
Yet the BeZos price for the dumbbook
makes me think its print run’s at tail’s end.
So pick up copies to dash to a friend.
In any case, you got my message, heed it!
Buy it in any format, then read it!.

 

********************************

My main poetry site is https://alteritas.net/pastis

Reposted due to extenuating circumstances, another colonoscopy is in order.

***

Many years ago I wrote some light verse about the Second Vasectomy I had to suffer, the first one having failed out of what I feared was obdurate will on the part of my genes to procreate, to which I am constitutionally opposed. The two stumps of my severed vasa had found a way to reconnect despite cautery, aligning so perfectly that the 2-3 mm channel through which sperm is conducted into the penis and ejaculated remained functional. I thought of these stumps as a pair of cobras dancing opposite each another to the warble of a flute, finally embracing in a kiss. A kiss of life.

Planned Parenthood had to go back to the drawing board, me back to the operating table. Only local anesthetic was applied on both occasions, so I got to observe, admittedly with a blurry, distant eye. 

This time I’ll settle for prose instead of poetry to describe — not in gory detail rest assured — another medical procedure, a colonoscopy. Though there is a poem involved, at the end.

For the record, colonoscopy is a common procedure for someone of my age. The results were negative, which means they were good. Nothing ominous here.

Yet there are few things as excruciating as the obligatory 24 hour fast and purge before a colonoscopy. Purification of the gut is accomplished with the help of a truly awful substance, CoLyte, of which four liters, roughly a gallon, must be poured down ones gullet within a few hours to prep the large intestine, voiding it of all opaque matter, in particular the very fiber we are urged to eat daily. Once the inner bowel tissues are pink and shiny, they can be observed with the help of a colonoscope, the overall state of these tissues be determined with a self-contained mini-video. Any suspicious polyps or other growths can be snipped off and saved for the lab.  As for the procedure itself, it was a real gas, if you’ll allow me the expression.

 

The way it works is that the patient, or at least his, in my case, colon is inflated, this to facilitate the insertion of the device. Afterwards, it takes an hour or two to deflate. Surprising how inodorous the farts are, comparatively speaking. A bit like a fine white wine, like water splashed on hot slabs of sedimentary rock. Very little rot there.

Just before starting the operation, the nursing personnel administered a sedative and an anesthetic. The latter had a familiar ring to it, Fentanyl, whose brand name is the apt coinage Sublimaze.*

Yes, Fentanyl  is one opioid involved in white blue-collar drug addiction, similar in some ways to Oxycontin but stronger, in fact 75 times more powerful than morphine, while Oxycontin is but 1.5 times. Analogues or variants of Fentanyl can be as much as 10,000 times stronger than morphine, which is why they are often deadly when casually mixed into street drugs such as cocaine like Comet or rat poison have been in the past. It follows that Fentanyl is dispensed medicinally in micrograms, what we used to call mikes back in the day of Timothy Leary. In my case I got the standard 50 mcg dose via IV. It worked. Michael Jackson got much more.

As I reflected back on the experience later in the day, it became clear that the second ingredient in my pre-op pharmaceutical cocktail was more intriguing than the narcotic. Midazolam  is a sedative often combined with FentaNYL to ease anxiety about an incipient and then ongoing procedure. It is known for its capacity to create anterograde amnesia, the “loss of the ability to create new memories, leading to a partial or complete inability to recall the recent past, even though long-term memories from before the event which caused the amnesia remain intact”.

I’m-gonna-stick-this-thing-up-your-rectum-but-you-won’t-remember-it kind of thing. For this reason Midazolam plays a part in the pharmacopeia devoted to EoLC, end of life care. As Woody Allen said about dying, he doesn’t want to be there when it happens. Midazolam might help, since with it you won’t remember, even in an afterlife, that you were. And, mercifully, I was present only physically during my encounter with the snake-like colonoscope.

Retrograde memory is another kettle of fish but there are also many drugs which can destroy or impede long-term memory much faster than the humdrum decay and degeneration of the brain. We all manage our memories as best we can, availing ourselves of the techniques and disciplines which work best for each of us and turning when need be to the panoply of mood and pain-abating drugs available, too many to list but including the simpler non-pharmaceutical ones I like best, coffee, wine, cannabis, in that order and optionally, depending on how I feel, on what I define as my needs.

One non-chemical way to manage our own memories is through the exercise of poetry.  Which brings me to my point.

A couple of years ago I began a poem citing the advantages of dementia, currently a kind of euphemism for senility, becoming senile. This process of getting old and losing memory function is usually looked upon with shame.

Not by me. I want to go down proclaiming the benefits of forgetfulness, the glory of senility which even the Stoic Seneca never addressed properly. Here is a start in that direction.

*

Loss of memory short-term — a boon in disguise!
Attention then falls on what dwells in the eyes.

Recollection, remembrance and their coeval regret
make up together the other great threat.

Wisdom if it comes means cutting the cord.
Breaking with memories brings as well the reward

of recognition hard won at long last
things of youth are things of the past.

*

*(JOB ALERT FOR UNEMPLOYED POETS: Pharmaceutical companies might pay well for creative concoction of brand names. Look into it.)