Sounds like Traxx
I can no longer shop happily.
(The Clash)
Before I was all lost in the S*PeRM**K*T,
dubbing the fugitive recyclopedia, or agog
among the penumbras and hungry fatigues,
there was that club with mad pinwheel lights
by the highway off-ramp in DC, an outdoor
strip of beach with towering potted palms
and a volleyball pit/dance floor where rubber
parachute pants morphed in groove to Jesus
Jones and Candy Flip covering the Beatles.
All tuned in, peering over the hedge back then,
those perilous and surreptitious departures
from TamBram family law to gyrating free
time late night with old friends and new punk
rock girls near as the shimmy lasso of hip
would allow, dancing into someone’s orbit
then penetrating the periphery, near enough
to touch, to make eye contact, then teasingly
withdraw in bouncing backstep, bass massive
in the ears, the oldest human ritual imagined
fresh as cherry blossom scent at the Navy Yard
in the early nineties. No guaranteed personality.
____________________
How Far from the Rust Belt is it to Silicon Alley?
In the gleaming corridors of the 51st floor
—The Clash from “Koka Kola”
Well, the other day I heard about these $5000 houses
they are offering artists in Cleveland & how the real
estate in, say, the Bay Area resembles tribal print blouses
that were once in vogue, then mocked because of the zeal
for a fabric modeled on some ethnographer’s sketch book,
then worshipped once again for possessing sex appeal.
Meaning that somehow, more perhaps by crook than hook,
the bubble of the 90’s has started being blown once more.
Struggling writers and artists might have the right look
but they can’t even afford to live in the Mission anymore.
I recalled then when I lived in a shoebox in the Marina
atop a loft in a closet-sized living room that lacked a door.
I worked in publishing & hung out with a cackle of hyena,
film school dropouts who cooked crystal meth in a broken
light-bulb years before Breaking Bad or Hurricane Katrina.
One of them was this drop dead gorgeous, outspoken
ad exec with toffee skin & wild Jeanne Moreau eyes
who took a shine to me perhaps because I was the token
Asian in the bunch. More smitten with her than blowflies
to a gas leak. She signed me up for a smattering of focus
groups, on things like video games or the allure of oversize
women’s fashions for the normal sized guy. I was a locus
for bubbling in questionnaires to help with concept testing,
faking enthusiasm for the slim chance to know her crocus
to corm. Then one drippy afternoon, done with ingesting
& grading watercress menthol flavored energy drinks,
I tried the closed door of her office to find her resting
her head on her desk, her face the riddle of the sphinx.
Then I saw the mound, a mini-Scarface anthill of white
powder rising between a stapler and the flushing pinks
of her cheeks. She had spectacular cheekbones, a tight
black pencil skirt & wafted of some exotic flower.
A cross between an orchid and a spider. I felt light-
headed then & headed home to reconsider in a shower.
Occasionally, many years later, I still replay that scene
of her pause being refreshed in the corridors of power.
I never saw so many toys—water guns, polypropylene
signs & foam fingers—as in her sleek, modular offices,
yet still I’d rather move to Cleveland or Bowling Green.
_____________________
The Perils of Homecoming
with Priya Sarukkai Chabria
The castle looms blue upon the porcelain plate,
the shepherdess rests within the coffee cup’s gilt,
palm-sized Pierrot sits Pierrette on his knee for a kiss
her ceramic tutu ruffled by his haste while inches
away The Pied Piper leads his rats of silvery clay:
this menagerie once within memory’s chamfered glass
bolts, for pain’s insoluble grains gargle up the throat
in an inverse pantomime of tongue and tract. Such flow
of grief cannot be digested or broken down by bile
but persists moment after lifetime after era,
an inheritance of malady the mask of which a pale
face wears as persuasively as the ochre, the dead
as inexorably as the unborn alas! The Cumaean sibyl
peers (more granules than limbs) from her bell
jar on the shelf and whispers I want to die!
weighted by knowledge’s intractable metamorphoses
into light as the body shrinks. Around
her ampulla glitter shards of promises, illusions
lost, broken rings of love , the salver of desire
beyond salvaged. Yet all’s not lost, perhaps. Aren’t
all dichotomies birthed from a whole? Squint.
Unpeel eyes. Flurry the dust. What’s
that burning, burning, burning, burning sensation
like the smashed up bits of asteroids and comets
orbiting a planet to retrace a path hewn from prophecy
in a self-reflexive knot or biofeedback loop. Circulatory
ouroboros of eternal return where a serpent eats its own
tail. Just so, each of us a gravitational body around
which our past rotates–faces of lovers, shards of toys
we once imagined alive, the cave of a hundred
openings where songs take the shape of oak leaves,
where we may have played in this or that lifetime,
and where we may yet play again.
Yet the cool smoothness of porcelain,
the grains of gold gilt beneath blind finger tips, the dust
on Pierrette’s net tutu of glass that shadows touch –what’s
this lust that burns into bones, what’s this we cannot
turn back on, tail in our mouths, we who are toys
of eternal return? What’s this grief, this wonder, this
mesh of clay, colour, fire that constructs our glass, this
brokenness that bleeds prayer?
____________________
Forties 25, Ravi Shankar from Counterpath on Vimeo.
_____________________
Ravi Shankar founded and publishes Drunken Boat, teaches at CCSU and City University of Hong Kong, and his next book of collaborations and ekphrastic poems “What Else Could it Be” as well as his “New and Selected Poems” will be out respectively with Carolina Wren Press and Nirala Books in the UK / India in 2015.