LOONY LOVERS
by John Marcus Powell
"Marcus, Miss Liberty's outside."
With the lights in the night lighting her
she is older than on her stamps. In anxious preservation
she wants an heroic fool to have his way with her
before the extinguishing of her torch.
The narrative is rife with languid detour, the subject often scandalous, and the language inflected with the sort of eccentrically personal rigor that can never be counterfeited.
The style is one-of-a-kind, they-broke-the-mould, genre-less, self-tailored, one-size-fits-no-one-but—, one-line-barely-fits-in-the-margins-of-the-goddamned-page. Perhaps those who have heard the tone and timber of the voice will be less surprised by the switchbacks and U-turns, by the comet trails and off-the-map collisions of these lines of print—but even they will never entirely escape from delicious bewilderments when confronted with the irrefutable evidence of these unruly texts jostling for paper parking space. The tempo is allegro attenuato.
Crimes are committed affably, forgiven fervently, exploited shamelessly. And those who commit them are liberally rewarded—though, most often, with nothing more tangible than the family jewels.
The jewels are somewhat tarnished, but still scintillating in proper light. That the proper lighting is not always available is a fact faced without petulance or regret. The cookies crumble, the milk spills, the planes crash and burn, the lies drift and settle, but Helen more-often-than-not returns with at least a horse-and-half-full of hot men.
The cry is one part cock-a-doodle-doo, to two parts coo-coo-a-choo. The flavour is somewhere between absinthe and strong black tea. The music is Mahler’s lost symphony for solo accordion. Occasionally there are jalapeños in the dark, merciful mineral waters in the white wine, bothersome gravels in the kidney, and a mushroom cloud on the horizon. The voice is more audible the more intimately it whispers. There is, at times, a bit of spittle—yet the saliva itself is a rare blend, a deep rich brew of sea foam on distant shores, of Bardic dews and daring oral vaudevilles.
Sacred cows and lambs are led to slaughter, stuffed, spiced, braised, sometimes even pickled—then served with loaves & fishes & chips & anti-retro-virals in the lobbies and restrooms of hospitals and community centers of ill repute. One is convinced that no real animals were harmed in the making of these poems.
The man in these poems, the poet in residence, is irresponsibly irrepressible, his wit barbed with warmth, his bait compulsively edible, his verve seemingly infinite. The Coat of Arms is Torch Argent, on Field Azul, within Cracked Heart Oro: silver torch, blue field, heart of gold. The motto, in Letters Négro on Banner Lavender, translated from the original Latin reads as follows: “Stitched with honor, oft besmirched—” followed, in pencil, by a phone number and an obscene suggestion scribbled in an almost illegible script. Scholars contend that this was added at a later date, perhaps as recently as yesterday.
Like any well or reservoir, the water at the top can be brackishly intoxicating, sweet and sour with season upon season of ferment. Yeasty and lusty on the surface, various objects can be found floating in the pool from time to time—empty beers cans and tequila bottles, dead leaves and insects, an old jockstrap, the cellophane wrappers of candy accepted from strangers, the usual scums and jisms of a life led to the fullest. But for those not averse to the occasional dive into murky waters, the realms below are cool and clear with the welcome sting of sobriety after an equally welcome debauch. To all your potential readers, John, and they should be legion, I say: “Drink up, boys and girls! This is how it is done!”
(E. Brille Beaumont: author, Welsh Pirate On The High Seas)
