a poem by David Linter

LIMP
for Berengere


1
A fall is a fall is a
withering descent with nothing gentle in order
It’s physics/ boy, when you go down hard
you are shattered.


2
Well, ya know, I’m jes settin’ round the old
yellow kitchen table. I’m ripe, early teens
a bowl of rosy Delicious on the tabletop
between us
We argue, about what? who remembers?
I promise you,this is not great drama.

The moms takes a bite out of her fruit,
says, “Don’t you talk to me...”
I rise against her, I protest
in the right, say, “You’re the one-”

Here’s where the pops, comes busting moves
from the TV set; balls out, mustache glistening, hamfists
at the ready, Gee,the old leading man, he really wants to
knuckle-up: Heaving,“Don’t you ever---”

To further define the crooked heroic tragedy, I looked
into my mother’s eyes, and she is in luscious reverie
For crying out loud, my mother is wet.
My mother is more happy than I
will ever in a lifetime
remember seeing her.



So what’s an undeveloped erotic bit player to do then?
Return to the prop department?
No ham-upstaging allowed in this house,

so I died weakly on cue and left the building
to no applause
and catcalls:

On your way,man!
Fix yourself, sonny-boy! Find yourself.
And stop shivering, for christsakes.


3
Fifty years on
in hot pursuit to take the fall
finally, like a sad, heatstruck dog doddering in the sun,
fifty years on

I, so unaccomplished/ridiculous

with more than my share of fair opportunities
a crazy lack of inner resources,
what a sickening waste
I am totally appalled.

Call me severed

Using codified language
I imitated waking life fairly well
Until most recently
days of unloosed brain frenzy
a colossal sense of about to be losing everything
going over each intimate failure, one piled
on top of another,
the structures of a rejected life
in hysterical collapse.


Finally, the staggering emptiness of my bed

A
What to do? What to do? Well, I sets
my sorryself down on my lost rest, I was so alone
ulcerating, masturbatory sex, disembodied bizzarie
on the phone and deathly sadness in the bone
until alas, head in hands,
my mind went wrong,
Inside, sounding for all the world like crackling tripe.

Now, you know what it is: I am listening to the bloody
sounds of my brain burning down.

Dropped
three days on the floor, gimme the phone, someone,
please
(I can touch it but I cannot get clear)
too limp to reach Berengere
ten thousand times tap-tap-tapping her Paris numbers

six cocacolas in the fridge, all I wanted other than B. I
tried to craw-craw-crawl, but, there was to be
none of that. As I lay dying I’m wanting her life to be a
radical, swinging success
is all


B
I’m hallucinating
There’s a void unveiled
beneath and I understand
that all I need do is glue
myself to the deep and have it swamp me
only I’m too busy begging
for my crappy life

receiving souls/visitations

Mom? sets down at the edge of my emptiness
‘Come to save me,eh, ma? Aww, come to tell your baby
that life is something? Son, don’t go soft, living is worth
the efforts -- there is purpose, I promise you.’
‘Romantic,’ I thought, At first.
Yet this was no simple mission of love and mercy.
This was an astral flight
made to give audience for my
mother’s recompense,
having once helped
shred a rollicking Mastiff and left released into the world
a scrambled sublime thing of a man.

The thing is: SHE OWED ME A LIFE.
AND I, SURELY NOW DAMN WELL OWE NATURE ONE DEATH.


C
I’m dreaming, and at some point I had everything figured.
A demon had broken in, had unhinged and then gutted me.
There was this arm laying above my head,
I figured it to belong to this thing
who had come to kill me. (I had to’ve gotten
off at least one good shot.) I lifted the arm of my nemesis
with my one working hand where there I noticed
my own blue Joan Miro tattoo,

“Dog Howling At The Moon.”


D
Finally, in the main, there was what Blake saw,
what St. John of the Cross saw. that place where
the world grows compressed,
united together and therefore complete
in every single moment: I believe
I got a glimpse of a small aspect of eternity.


4
      I,so cored out
so bitten-out-of
For a hellish spell; brain surgery
doctors, hospitals, morphine and morphine and time
twisted
and time perverted.
This entire trapped time
during which B looked after me.

So,what?
I died,I resurrected
only to find I as I;
I, already an unrelieved, death-hole for decades

With my dreamlover of a lifetime
an illuminated whitegirl, my blue-eyed B with her body
hovering, a sexed-up. fluttering angel. So waiting,
so wanting.
“Make love to me.”
What I’d hear in response, inside, was this insane
growling anxiety: ‘Dog, You’d better not. OR ELSE,’
and I was more committed to this historical
chronic than my abiding adoration.


I, so cored out of
so bitten-out-of.

Of course, crime and a smashing fuck, a rising
woman’s nature. Okay, maybe she wants a hard time,
maybe she holds a
rabid rape fantasy.

Where am I, when time comes to bring the reassuring
warmth meant to switch such things to love?

I, so thoroughly not there at the core
Berengere wonderful over and over, so discouraged.
So disparaged by my astounding lack.

And listen, this ain’t about
sudden blood on the brain. This is
years of groggy,
performances with me turning up
often dilapidated and much of the time,

LIMP

My magnificent angel-child
how she was flipped
she’d thought, ‘He will season me into life and real love’
She said, ”When I met
you, it was the happiest day of my life.”


My poor, letdown girl
starving, starving, always
hoping tomorrow a new harvest would surely come.


Oh,dear,
how I have failed us.


5
Humiliation dogs me.
I have to prove myself a man over and over.

So, I, finally, in order to simply get from here to there;
how do I do it? Of course, I limp.

Talk about lame
I remained alive,
exactly for what?
I lived to discover what, exactly?

THE DEATH OF LOVE, for godsakes?
Unspeakable loss, for goodness sake?

Well, there’s a sadness in every
life, and, don’t you know, it stays
with you. One makes the best of it.


6




To have written the divine
for so long and to be
dismissed,
This is dingy.




To have loved genuinely
unable to give love, properly
        things become lousy with
this,too.





The indulgence of
Disgrace







I could shuffle
I could eat
I could be clever and play
dead
I could say, yo, a good dick can only
take you so far, don't we all learn that
        the hard way, after all?

Brass ones and a fine
touch. Man! now you are talkin'
long time.

I could say.


I will swear to God
more than anything in the whole

world

I am now, and have
always been hot for death.

my own.

Oh, Jesus
fuck me, why don't
you......Christ,


Like you, don’t you know I’m just another Jew and I
guess I'll have
to live
for
ever, too.







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