Homer Simpson In Hell

Criminey! Must
I lose the BVDs too?
Bare ass naked
before the jury
of the dead
& judged for
all eternity
by my piddly
middling prick
of a prong.

No heroic
labors in
this gauntlet
of loss: dark
claws ripped
away my job at
the power plant
(a cost cutting
move, they said),
my stupid family
stiffing me
for life in
South Park,
my credit cards
all maxing out.

All I worked
so poorly for
now peeled
away in
bloody sheets,
heart as naked
as my ass.

So now you say
I'm ready to enter
hell at last,
just like all the others,
a soul without
one sou of a chance,
all my sins unconfessed,
nothing brave or cocksure
to grapple against
dark claws, nothing
to shield from this
eternal cold.

Now you say
I'm ready to begin.

***

Last night I harrowed three rooms of a dream, first in a hellish workplace of old (my 18 year sentence in a corporate nightmare) where my co-workers, grizzled inmates, got sick with the death flu my wife caught earlier this summer. I look down on a bathroom (through some grate) where a prisoner, taking a crap, suddenly starts explosively vomiting, his whole inner works suddenly in rebellion, expelling fetid noxiousness from north and south.

In my escape from that place I go back to school, selected to participate in a master's class in songwriting. I am selected not for any primary talent in writing good songs but because I look the part, have young man's handsome looks [I don't, anymore], just what is needed to woo a thousand hearts from the stage. The class is supposed to start at 2 in the afternoon in a room at the far end of an educational complex (the far eastern wing), but my scouring of that area doesn't locate the room (in the classroom I think is the spot, an overfilled chemistry class is underway -- scowls pointed at me when I peer into the room).

So me and this other guy buddy up to quest together in finding the class. Time is of the essence -- it's late and later past the 2 p.m. hour -- and we're lugging heavy guitars in black cases (he an acoustic, me an electric). We race to the far western room, passing through what seems to be a flea market of stalls, there to the Office where we get the specific room number (which we seem to forget as soon as we start to race back in the other direction.)

Complicating things further is this huge menacing she-bear who is prowling the halls. We have to get past her to get to the class. Narrowly escaping her fury in one hall, we board an elevator to try getting to the class from upper (or lower) halls. But the elevator stops at the next floor (not the one we punched in), door opens, and the bear fills the passage out, all fury, fang and claw. Just then I hear a woman's voice say my name and I'm awake at 2:30 a.m., our bedroom wholly quiet, filled with blue moonlight, a silence which suddenly shifts into the scampering of our cat around the room (her daily gambit to wake me up & get her morning treats).

***

Thus the harrowing of Hell soaks down and to extremes, enduring the agony of both history and my two-faced gaze toward shores inside and out. I fuck up every way I go, my work is pure errancy, a fool's errand, naming what I cannot know, blaming the world for my words. The hero blunders on, changeless, uneducable, taking on every gnomon his fear paints, fucking every phosphor squirming in his blue and bluer balls. The narrative is not, as Rilke dreamed, one of being defeated by successively greater angels, but rather pinning to a fall less and lesser one; maybe that's the same thing, but the hero's paradigm has us besting this mess, when really the mess is luring us down to root ignobles, the original sin, the organ inferiority which we never could abide -- my teeny pecker no match for the mother's wild wide sea, the words welling in my throat no equivalent for the dithyrambs of the diurnal sea. Oh but I try, but I try, though I lie, though I die. Nothing will remain of this in twenty years, my ziggurat of ghostly vowels will tumble like a sand castle and be reclaimed, utterly, by the sea, leaving only the one shore day which outlives all its lovers, singers, posters, sicklemen.

But ah! she said, calling me from the last wave of my sleep -- now you are ready to begin.


SAND CASTLE

Sigh down the long runnels of foam
which line the heart-road of this shore,
now soft in the gauzy drift
of a late summer afternoon,
the sun far to the west, it's fierce
maul now fleece, pale on the backs
of two boys building the same sand castle
you built against the tide so long ago.
Each measured handful
of packed sand is angled
so close to the water's edge
it's understood that sand castles
are an invitation to what
washes it all away.
The arrival of each wave
in its final exhausted spread
is exhilarating, filling the moat past brim
and tearing down with singing foam
what you too would release
if you knew what, or how:
You watched those walls tremble and fall
to the sea's mute caress
and when you walked away
you forgot what was so earnest
about it all almost before the sea
erased it anyway. Now it's too late
on one beach to save your life
though there's still time on this other.