Suburban Shamanics (ugh)

NOTES FROM DOWN UNDER:
THE DIARING OF
A SUBURBAN SHAMAN

There’s nothing worse than sitting here
at 5 a.m. pop-slathered with a
near-rotten handle -- shaman! --
but then to be compelled by
hyper-modernity to qualify
that tope with a suburban
skin of aging white middle
class manflesh, as dull and
appetizing as toast going flabby
with transfatty marginings.
No birdfeathers sewn into
the loose boxers I wear
at this already too-worn hour,
no great flukes flapping
under this chair, no pachyderm
drumming huge bones under
this chair, though when I
open my mouth and chant
these lines they’re all there,
as primed and hungry as
the beasts and bestials
which flaunted ‘em fifty
thousand years ago
in the Lascaux of my blood,
still hot and pent for the kill.
The suburban half of my
moniker walls my song
inside the property lines
of my 30-year-mortgaged
house and keeps much
from getting out: Maybe the
closest neighbors get
an unexpected late-night
ride on a dream grampus
when I sing here, but I
doubt it. At most they
may wake troubled with
the dull ache of hunger
and rummage the fridge
for some meat or cheese
or feel the hard itch of
horniness in their orbs
& jerk off in the shower
hanging pendulous boobs
on the eagle who sings
jewelled oghams at
the bottom of the sea.
No one in the academies
of verse or myth take
any of this seriously --
not art, not tart enough
with true polar chaunt
to hold a candle to that wind.
Even my familiars sniff
at the clumsy saw of
my lines, coming from the
lungs of one who learned
to sing upside down in
barest compliance to
the rules. The rest
of the formal instruction
I got second- or third-hand,
out of books, recovering
from the booze, surmising
dreams and sea-things
with inapt metaphors
and rhymes in massy reams.
Lots of sour sighs
in the boneyard tonight,
the old ones are wistful
for the good old terror
when a votive would be
hauled screaming down
to the boiling-ground,
stewed there in agony
clean of mortal meat
and bleached by bone moons
for eternities; what time,
what craft was then applied
by those old hands in
reassembling aright the man;
how delicate the fitting
of the extra bone; and
how many ages would pass
before the new man would
be sent back to the surface
with the taste of that bone
in his mouth, an appetite
for the sick man’s marrow
to augur and harrow in
the work of the day
healing on the wings of song.
All that’s gotten lost
in the sludge of futurity,
flooded by the ten thousand
whines of things each clipping
the only pair of wings
a soul’s double life affords.
Well That’s the Truth,
as Edith on “Laugh-In”
would proclaim from her
oversized rocking chair
with a razzing of the lips.
I’ve an audience of two
today: cat Violet deep
asleep on the couch across
from me, and the caul
of deep night pressed up
to the opened window
to my right, close as
a ghoul on his last late
foray before light in
the east dispells him
for good, translating
depths into soft blue,
annealing dark undersides
for good. I can’t change
the woeful stature of my name
much less disobey the
salt master who bruited
it into me, the one who
drowned me down a glass
and held me three nights
in the whale and then
spat me back on this shore
I vigil here every day
on the cusp of two
distancing worlds. What is
it when a vocation is
drilled so implausibly into
lost purposes, so passionately
that you’d think these bald
suburban days were really
scales of an old fish
flapping more furiously
then ever up the
sea of soul and mind?
Maybe you’d sing as
I do, redolently ancient
and free of father or
censor or id or editor,
just a naked savage
riding barebacked on
a sea-worm from
song’s first waking bubble
to its last curve
and smash on its
last shining shore.
My mojo’s a medicine
for your indifferent ear,
ejaculate and wild,
discordant and free,
the sound of deep things
breeching black waters
in a gush of exultant
stink ferried from deep
grounds far away. There
is a stillness here
as a great bulk hangs
fully exposed in the
late-night air, exposed
to gleam silvery
the bones of the moon:
And then this final
gorgeous smash
falling down back into
the swale of waking gloom
here as my song
begins to die away
out of range. It’s
safe now to wake,
my friend, stir and
scratch and yawn,
fart and hobble
to the shower
where the fish still
has you in the
wake of his power.
As you soap yourself
good in the pour of
warm water, the
orbs of my song
are aching and
itching in your body,
to eat to fuck
to yowl to surfeit
the profanities
of God, exultant
as wave-foam scattered
from my dying sweet boom
down suburbia’s dead shore.