GORDON MASSMAN

V1n3
Summer 03

 

1248

 

POETRY

 

Confessions of a lunatic: Penises the size of psychological monsters
buried in everywhichway presented female genitalia in a festering bene-
dictine sabbath of procreation surrounded by icons, totems, and phalluses
of copulation in a phantasmagoria of love, a delusion of love, lovesick,
lovestruck, mooneyed biologies infinitesimally megalomaniacal micro-
organisms teeming and fizzing in the Petrie dish of multiplication to
Rachmaninoff or Def Leopard what gives a shit, imaginings of
grandiosity and permanence veiled and trained under the blessings
of God to some idiotic sober but intoxicating wedding march, the
giddy bacilli or bacteria drawn forward through the quaint historical
mountain town by double blind chestnut horses, "just married" scraped
across the carriage eye, our saviors which shall plop forth from
split silkiness conquering replications of the themselves, Harvard
heroes or Julliard geniuses, their little sweetie pies swaddled in Jas-
on's elusive fleece. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the
German National Laboratory for Heavy Ion Research, The Institut
National de Physique Nucleaire et de Physique des Particules,
Brookhaven National Institute for Nuclear Physics, The Indiana
University Cyclotron Facility, The Bates Linear accelerator and
collider, giants jutting through the clouds, Woton and Hunding
protruding through cumulus their superior countenances, spec-
troscopy and monovalences flashing through their minds, linked
by a double drop forged deep sea hook to Presidencies and Prime
Ministers equally omnipowerful in the stratospheres, inaccessible
as quasars, delusions of grandeur stiffening them with blood till
they are hard as doors or Eiffel geometry, these puny pitiful elec-
tro-isotopic visigods prickling off Earth's rotundity like flaccid
root hairs visible to the microscope, fuck them all their apocalyptic
folderol, and their ever-worshiping wives dining at Cartiers.
The great powerful literary contemporaries I could name like death
rattles by the hundreds: Rich, Schnackenberg, Lauderbach, Ep-
stein, Lux, Economou, Valentine, Sobin, immortales, maestros,
hands like facial tissue, translucent Sampson Agonistes parting
the reverentials like sorcery wanting to pick at the lint of their
clothes, prophets, sages with the verbal acuity of pupa worm
in tuxes at the National Book Award ceremony at the New
York Sheraton sticking up like a miniature domino in dirt full
of applauding and petit mal champagne sodden minds, the devil
take them all to the cauldron of no alphabet at the sulphur erupt-
ing pit of the inferno's hungry gut. Coldwell Banker's one hun-
dred top performers — the Platinum Club — at Belagios with their
Audemars, Vacherons, or Roger Dubuises, bronze, polished, in-
culpably genuine, the woman understatedly magnificent and gen-
erally plus-sized like pouted sage grouse dabbed in rouge, at
the pool, the tables, the shows, the beds getting a little extra-cur-
ricular cold-call commissionless fun, mutually admiring the dia-
mond shaped plexiglass platinum award each received at the
plenary banquet one by one like diplomates, may each reproduce
themselves by a billion, fuse, and ascend like a misty cloud of
the brokers extraordinaire to the 30,000 sq. ft. mansion in the
sky of Peter Neederman, Pres. and CEO of Coldwell Banker
Worldwide, sleeping like a goat protruding satyr after multiple
masturbations on his boil infested ass. But I crashed out half-wit,
mentally handicapped, my medulla oblongata, a.k.a., my spinal
bulb juiceless and infantile, a dwarf and rather hideous to gaze
upon, slightly thalidomide, so forgive me my rage, my indescre-
tion, my vulgarity, my plain misinformation, but I fail — and have
always failed — to appreciate the difference between man and grass.

 

Gordon Massman has published in numerous journals across the US, Canada, and the UK (Harvard Review, Antioch Review, Prism International, Windsor Review, Fire, Georgia Review); his third small press book, The Numbers, was recently published by Pavement Saw Press.