Ken Meisel

December 4, 2017

“Art Installation” by Ken MeiselPosted by

Ken Meisel

ART INSTALLATION

after Ryan Doyle’s Dragon Gon Krin, “Save the Arts”

The artist had constructed from Midwest metal
a dragon, fire flaming from its gaping mouth,

and a group of evening radicals, tramping around,
had hauled the beast in a truck, unpacked it

and hoisted it up together in one piece,
in front of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

This was in the first dissonant, hard press
of autumn, where the midnight moon—

glowing like a halo above the cut of rooflines
and the feudal turrets of the neighborhood—

seemed to furnace-burn the yellow and the orange
tree leaves hanging limp there, waiting to fall.

What makes us dream? What touched me
as I stood out there in the noisy cold,

gazing at this iron dragon transforming art
into passion, the night’s darkness into heat,

the literal, back into metaphor, and then back?
The ardor of love, like a negation of death,

accessible, mysterious, where the image
is suddenly set free, in an influx of fiery flames.

Where werewolves or just kids roam free—
arriving here on bicycles, some of them

in couples, embracing one another
in a contagion of similarity, arms wrapped

over each other’s necks, their sleeves
becoming scarves as the dragon lit up

the night. Monomania of the artist, now
becoming all our mania, this rust belt I am.

—from Rattle #57, Fall 2017
Tribute to Rust Belt Poets

__________

Ken Meisel: “To grow up here was to grow up in glory and ruin. In the ’70s, this was a weirdly glorified place—you’ve got Motown, the autos, Jackie Wilson, this music legacy, jazz clubs, Miles, Ella Fitzgerald—there’s this glory, but it was also this post-apocalyptic ruin of burnt out buildings and heroin addicts in the streets. It was a horror, really. And so, even then, when I lived down there and was fumbling with writing mostly as a student, I was transfixed with that juxtaposition. How can it be this but also that?”

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July 28, 2013

“Reminiscences” by Ken MeiselPosted by

Ken Meisel

REMINISCENCES

Freud speaking with Breuer, in Lower Manhattan,
New York City, September, 2001

I

They’d completed their rounds of patients at the hospital and walked
through the damaged city for about one hour, before returning back

to the clinic. “All the world’s psychological traumas can’t be resolved
by the Talking Cure—” Breuer said to Freud as they strolled past

the railway of the Hudson River where a man, drunk on yellow bullets,
Nembutal, rocked back and forth like a Bedouin, a crazed orphan.

The park was full of young mothers and children, and the restless river,
punctured with refuse from the recent terrorist attacks, glistened

with floating glassware and plastic. Scrap wood and debris rippled lazily
over the sordid currents, and above them, swallows from a bombed-out

brownstone up the hill rose and fell in haphazard, drunken reenactments.
Someone played a saxophone under a tree, and a boy, his thin mouth

full of lipstick, his face painted in clown, did silent mime like a fragile doll.
The media had issued warnings about toxic debris in lower Manhattan,

and the police warned of other possible terrorist attacks and that citizens
in all parts of the city should maintain a calm alertness, wherever they went.

The two medical doctors paused, fed the ducks at the river’s edge
of the park before proceeding across the busy streets of New York.

II

“Oh, let me tell you of the woman I spoke with yesterday,” Breuer
said to Freud, nudging the latter on the elbow as they walked beyond

the park onto the street where the crippled clubs hosted dinner music.
“The woman had spoken to me with specific complaints of losing

the smile on her face, that it had been torn off, really, after the tragic
unfortunate death of her child, just a boy—a sixteen year old boy

with freckles and piercings, by suicide, by leaping, she said to me,
recklessly from an overpass north of here and high on hallucinogens

and too much Metallica.” “And that he’d been obsessively viewing
sociopolitical material about the East-West divide in our world, on the web,”

Breuer added, while pulling out a cigar, “and that his mother couldn’t
stop him from the torment of his obsessions.” And Freud, responding

to Breuer, said, “Oh that woman—I saw her shaking quietly on a hospital
bench, her little nose bleeding, her small mouth torn in half like red leafy

lettuce. That’s what she said to me, ‘my torn mouth like red leaf lettuce,’ ”
Freud said to Breuer, shaking his head back and forth like a pondering

clock. “Her father suicided, right?” “And she was of ‘mixed blood,’ yes—?
She was part East, part West, all of it, and so was her boy, isn’t that right—?

Wasn’t he a product of love and divorce, one of those children
hopelessly divided—?” Asked Freud, and Breuer, aware of it, “Yes.”

III

“The present is a reenactment of history,” Freud said, pondering
the piles of ash throughout the area, and Breuer, seeing this, reached out,

touched Freud’s shoulder, said, “Too bad about the brownstone buildings
that were demolished in the attacks, and also about the ruined hopes

for human peace.” And the sun, setting behind them, froze in their mouths
for a second, then burned. All of Manhattan glowed in dusk’s frontier.

IV

“Do you think the world will ever be the same?” Breuer absently asked Freud,
“Do you think we will ever resolve the factual elements of our

experience?” They walked on, passing the Trade Center’s crumbled debris.
Pigeons rose from a bronze lamppost that had collapsed in a pile of rubble.

“No I don’t think we shall ever be the same,” Freud answered. “Not ever.”
“The origin of Hysteria Trauma,” said Freud to Breuer, the both of them

strolling along the frenetic grounds of The Roosevelt Hospital now,
“is one of inescapable shock.” And Breuer to Freud, “Hysterics, all of us,

suffer mainly from reminiscences. And reminiscence is the inevitable longing
for what’s been before, and for what can never be the same again.”

“It’s the perfect mix of rapture and mourning, our strange dilemma.”
“No talking cure can ever cure it,” he said.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

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February 19, 2013

“Woman Releasing a Tongueless Swallow” by Ken MeiselPosted by

Ken Meisel

WOMAN RELEASING A TONGUELESS SWALLOW
FROM HER VIOLIN

I

Because I am sad-Irish, I hear the screams of the swallow above me, her
tonguelessness in every woman I meet, in the way they become speechless.

And because I’ve grown frightened for the swallow in her throat, her
voice a mixture of screech and saw mill scratching, her ecstasy so bold

as she rises and falls out of chimneys and cold utterings, I listen, always,
for the song of the violin on any street, the violin being the heart’s larynx.

I see them here, these two young women busking outside a Starbucks
in Pike Place Market, the one hoisting her violin up to the blue sky

bursting with deafening sea gulls, and the other, straddling a wooden box,
ripping on a saw, making it moan. Look here at this woman in her black

dress, hair pinned up, fishnet stockings, her polka-dotted top, her eyes
raised up to the sun, fiddling on her violin, releasing from catgut strings

                          the Irish Swallow Tail Jig.

II

And once, when I was alone in the market, shopping for simple fruit, I saw
a woman struck by her husband. It was almost delicate, the practiced

deliberation, the care in his back hand as he met her cheek, and in slow
mode she stumbled backwards, away from him into the produce bin

where he caught her in his extended, outstretched arm, like they were
tangoing, the apples bobbling behind them in their rows as he languidly

scooped one up to give to her, the violence we do with each other being
intimate, being the way we cripple each other in our need. And, as she was

caught by his strong arm, her little mouth, opened up in fright, her teeth,
biting the small bird which was her tongue, the swallow in her mouth,

from her throat came a voiceless screech, the swallow song escaping her,
along with all the other swallows dipping and forking out of the open

shouders of the brick buildings of the market on that sunny summer day,
while a solitary violinist, someone hidden from view and fiddling behind

the broken, fetid crates of fruits and vegetables played a jig while the rest
of us, gathered here at the market, shopped for food, and as I heard it

                          I heard it as the Irish Swallow Tail Jig.

III

And so here, in Pike Place Market, along with the women in purple coats,
chestnut scarves covering pale throats, their slender shoulders winged,

I listen to the violin squirming inside the tongueless mouth of the swallow,
setting the jig free so that it swoops down and up the street in ecstasy…

I listen to the woman with a yellow flower in her hair fiddling away on her
violin, while the other woman moans away on her box saw. They do this

so that the tongueless swallow, the tongue sliced out of its pinched mouth by a
god so vengeful he’d slay his own kin in order to take into bed

the innocent girl with the song in her mouth and her desire so hidden,
can find release again…the tongue of a woman being a holy trope, all songs

for the violin being for the tongueless women amongst us who’ve forgotten
how beautiful they sing, or have longed to raise voice to linger, or have

yelped, or fiddled voice in sorrow, felt skin tingle under caresses of finger or
have been punished in the very act of doing it, all women being free, being

                          lovely swallows, that sing.

—from Rattle #37, Summer 2012

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August 11, 2011

“Psych Ward” by Ken MeiselPosted by

Ken Meisel

PSYCH WARD

The psych ward orderlies, pulling a woman off the floor
as she curls up like a smudged potato trying to nose herself
back into the dirt, resemble the common potato harvesters
in Jean Francois Millet’s noble painting The Gleaners,
and the young woman, drawing all of this on her paper pad
sketches furiously back and forth, one line at a time.
She says quickly to me ‘all delusion is a struggle with form.’
And the psychiatrist standing off sides, comments, ‘we
must administer more Haldol, she’s hallucinating.’
The gargantuan man at the window trying to reach God
extends his lethargic arm out and the playing cards drop.
At the edge of the room a man in spectacles pages through
a book. Laughs quietly, losing his religion, and he whispers
to me that ‘we have angels and demons in us—they
squirm like octopi in our grinning, as if trying to take shape.’
I trace my mouth with my hand, as if trying to find it.
The woman with a mole on her face shouts out that Jesus
is the example of dialectics; the struggle with opposites—
the struggle with life and death, meaning and oblivion,
and the young woman at the table scratches her right arm
with her fingernails. One of the orderlies pushes it away.
The young woman says, ‘I have a right to give up.’
Sunlight shines through the cracked window panes.
The room has a pewter glow to it. Shadows hit the walls.
The man points to my grin, says, ‘you see the human smile
is a twisted tabernacle; it’s the joke God made in us—
so that we show who we really are to each other whenever
we grin.’ That our smiles could contain a node of angels
and demons is taken up by the psychiatric residents—
‘I feel so revealed,’ a woman says and the other, a man,
whispers, ‘let’s get a drink afterwards,’ and the woman
who is revealed pauses, grins. Steps back behind the
psychiatrist, who says, ‘psychopathology is the revealing
of a brain disorder; it’s medically treatable.’ A man pounds
on the table, shouts out that there are bugs crawling
up his arms, shoos them off, and the residents, piling
together in a batch, cluster around him to look.
‘Disease is an amalgamation of misinformed thoughts,’
says the psychiatrist, pointing at the man with bugs
invading his arms and his neck, and I feel the tongue
in my mouth as it moves, suddenly, like a squid.
I can’t tell whether I have a tongue anymore or a squid.
‘Doubt is the attempt to regain perspective,’ he adds,
pointing to the lack of doubt; the delusion. The man
in the spectacles laughs again, points to his ½ grin—
and he announces to the room that ‘we’re just creatures
of deception at all times and it’s about time to admit it—
we can’t even tell the soul from the source…’ and he squawks.
The residents act bewildered, look around at each other.
And the psychiatrist informs them that uncertainty
isn’t something worth getting caught in, in psychiatry.
‘Medicine is the enactment of a cure,’ he reassures them.
‘Even if it is inexact for a while.’ I step closer.
Stand alongside the woman who is still sketching.
She’s drawn the gleaners. She says to me, ‘information
comes from uncertainty, don’t you think?’ And she
smiles sheepishly, and I can’t tell if the smile has an angel
or a demon in it. The psychiatrist reassures the residents
that ‘the cure is when a person recognizes reality again.’
I feel the squid in my mouth move around. And my smile
feels like it’s wrapped around two squirrels fighting.
The young woman scratching herself fights on. ‘I have
a right to give up,’ she announces again to the sunlight.
The psychiatrist looks at her and he rubs his chin.
Scribbles something on a prescription pad. Hands it off.
‘What about the imagination?’ asks a resident, puzzled.
‘That’s something for art,’ the psychiatrist answers.
‘And science, and religion,’ he adds, ‘but not for us.’
And they all turn and depart the room in a brawl.
The woman drawing on her sketch pad rotates it,
rotates it again, as if trying to find herself inside it.

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Tribute to Mental Health Workers

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May 31, 2011

“Car Accident” by Ken MeiselPosted by

Ken Meisel

CAR ACCIDENT
          9th Street, St. Petersburg, Florida

The same month that woman
went into outer space,
and I mean Judith Resnik, who died
in the Challenger a few years
later, underneath the watching eyes
of God or NASA,
another woman I didn’t really know, either,
a common woman,
crashed herself into a telephone pole
in North St. Petersburg,
because she was drunk and speeding.
And she’d had one too many at the bar.
And maybe because whatever it is
that electrifies self destructiveness
in the brain, spit-fired disaster in her, too.
And so she wanted to get it all out,
and smash it on for size
against something bigger…
Her family must’ve wondered why.
Perhaps she wanted to escape
from the night, with the coolness of closed up
shopping malls and the lonesome
ramshackle beach bum motels,
and the shadows ghosting the windows.
Maybe she hated the smoky, paneled bars,
spotted alongside the beach roads
with their endless games of darts
played by blue collar dead beats
and their sad wooden tables
littered with ashtrays and old french fries,
and their juke boxes
playing songs of heartache
for the lonesome, clinging drunks
dancing against tomorrow.
Maybe it was for the smell of smoked fish,
clinging like invisible fingers to her jeans
that made her wish
for the salt of a man to grab her
in her bed at night and comfort her,
and take away all her burdens.
And maybe, also, for the men
who’d wronged her, or had stolen love
from her.
Perhaps she drove against the small
banalities of her thoughts,
or against the ledger of her failures
that kept knocking her back
into her final insignificance,
and into the stubborn palm trees
planted to beautify a sad, aging
fisherman’s city
stuck on the Gulf of Mexico
that, because it was sad,
kept on shining
under the sun anyway.
Whatever it is that made that woman
get angry, or lonesome,
or whatever it is that made
that other woman want to fly
up into the Universe, past the earth,
I can’t really say…
But I do know that jewelry,
and men’s love, and a baby
weren’t reason enough to keep either
of them here…
We’re all astronauts.
The heart owns its terrible burdens.
The heart breaks the strings
of pearls that are its ambitions.
You could hear the crash,
and then the silence.
And then there was the eye-popping
shock that followed,
the loud snap like a door,
where the brain tells the legs to run.
Whatever else happened then,
whether it was commotion,
or the survival of her drunken soul
climbing out of the wreckage
like a torn piece of jellyfish
soaring way up high to the surface
and trying to figure out
if it had turned into a ghost
or an angel,
or some angry, electric sparkling
of her brain’s gray matter
swimming up out of bone
and into the blanched humid night,
I can’t really say.
All I remember is that the radiator
blew up.
And then there was that hissing
that tells you the smashed car,
because it’s enraged,
is about to explode.
Sometimes, because we see it,
this light, this moon,
shining above us like something
avenging something else,
like some engorged bird,
seeking shelter in a tree,
we fill in the gaps,
the hand-fills of nothingness
with whatever else there is.
I guess it’s the way we tell ourselves
what to see and what not to see.
And what to remember or to forget.
For me, I was watching
Johnny Carson with my father.
And my sister had given birth to a boy.
We’d just talked to her.
She was nursing him.
And putting him into his little bed.
And, outside, where the moon
slid behind a gravy train of clouds
and the pin sized crickets
had started up their chirruping
like a black church choir
singing at a funeral in the weedy canal
behind the apartment building,
I called an EMS
even though I knew she’d be
a goner—
because I couldn’t think of anything
better to do,
and because it was better than nothing.
I was just trying to fill in the space
with something other than shrieking—
which was all that was left,
to do.

—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

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October 16, 2010

“Strip Clubs, Tampa” by Ken MeiselPosted by

Ken Meisel

STRIP CLUBS, TAMPA

Everyone has a story,
even the woman dancing here
in front of me fully undressed,
and waving herself like a palm tree
in front of my face
at a strip club in Tampa,
way back in 1983
while the music thundered
through the booths like a flood.
Can you believe it?
So I asked her to quit the lap dance,
and not to do anything else,
but simply to tell me
how it came to be this—
if there was an answer, it fell
into reasons
that have more to do with
the economics of love,
and how and where it is lost
or found in the eyes
of say her father, or her brother,
or her first time lover,
and less to do with money
for college, or for the trip to LA,
although she didn’t want
me to know this,
and, besides, it was for cash.
And for the black eye
she once earned for speaking up.
And it was for the aggression
that she felt in her belly
when she saw the men squirm,
and want her,
and pay for her time
like she was the Goddess Shiva,
dancing here on Nevada Avenue
in Tampa Bay, Florida.
And, if all this wasn’t reason
enough, there was also her
younger sister, who was raped,
and pregnant,
and there was also the reason
she gave which had less
to do with sociology,
or broken dreams,
or psychology and all of its
subterranean motives,
but more to do, she figured,
with passing the time
before the lights of the bay
dropped to their hard core,
and, alone in her silence,
she could wonder how it is
dreams get lost in the crab traps
of our small unraveled lives,
and end up here,
on another lit stage,
in the limelight of men’s lust
or misbegotten affections,
or mishandled attention,
and then finally end here with me,
a guy asking her questions
that she said everyone asked her.
And, whose answers,
like a handful of raw oysters
get misplaced somewhere
under the water,
perhaps in a bed of fish hooks
or collapsed in pilings,
and so she could never
really answer why.
It doesn’t matter to anyone,
is all she could say.
Some nights, afterwards,
you’d see them gathering
in a circle, giggling,
as if they were school girls,
before the pressure to dance
consumed them.
And you’d wonder
what kind of young girls
they were before the thongs
and the wine coolers,
and the hot little panties
stuffed with wads of cash
filled their personalities up.
Way back in the days
before the silver nipples
and the nightly ritual
of rubbing ice on them
cooled their breasts,
and also their hopes for true love.
And you’d wonder what
it was they’d once
wished for in their beds,
before the stripping naked
for us
chilled their sweet hearts.

—from Rattle #24, Winter 2005

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