MOMMA SAID NEVER DATE

BI-POLAR ALCOHOLIC DIVORCEES

poems

by

Louis Kahn Nin

Smashwords Edition

2011

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Copyright © 2011 Louis Kahn Nin

Acknowledgement

Some of these poems first appeared in Another Fucken Review, Dog Review Review, Elimae, Occasional Review, Taurus, Thunder Sandwich and on Facebook.com

CONTENTS

Kindergarten Indeed

The A.A. Wheel

BP

Momma Said Never Date Bipolar

Alcoholic Divorces The Birds Memory

The Blue Jays The Scar on My Chin

8^th Grade Orphans

The Finger

The Idea of Home

iPad iPoem

Nothing

Brtrayal

Passion

The Wrinkled Dress & Two

Bottles of Wine

Tijuana Hookers

The Couch

Warmth

Baby Bird

to

Michèle Arnesen

That's as well said, as if I had said it myself.

---Jonathan Swift

Kindergarten

When the teachers

asked me

in kindergarten

what I wanted to be

when I

grew up,

I said,

“Cruel.”

Indeed

I've
become a
fatalist.

Well, shit,
it was
inevitable.

The A.A. Wheel

She said, “I’m going to A.A. now.”

I know better, I know her,

she went to A.A. before and didn’t like it,

no friend of Bill’s, the 12 steps.

She says she’s going to Alanon just to keep

family off her ass,

to make her employer think she’s getting help,

to silence those who say,

“You need to go into rehab, lass.”

I know that after whatever meeting she attends,

she opens a bottle of cheap wine,

justifying: “I’ll only have two glasses

instead of two bottles.”

Keep the D.T.s away,

tomorrow is another day

to either get it right

or crawl into a vat, cat,

get arrested for a DUI, Sly,

go to jail, do not pass go, yo,

do not collect $200 but pay

$2,000 in fines and fees, please.

It’s too much like a Raymond Carver story

and in another context it would be amusing.

In this tale, like a glass of flat Pale Ale,

it’s only sad, much like watching a hamster

on a tread wheel, trying so hard

to get somewhere

but not moving a millimeter.

BP

You are like British Petroleum --
causing a lot of damage
& pain
then pointing fingers
everywhere & at everyone

but you yourself,

never taking
social responsibility
for your destruction
& (in)action.

You are like the BP CEO…
lying before Congress, oh!

—never assuming
the blame for
all the things
you spilled & broke.

You are like BP's oil:
ruining nature &
beauty w/a choke,
w/out a blink or a sigh

a look in the eye;

& the way you lie

to everyone & yourself:

the trained denial

like clergy, Republicans,

or a pedophile:

the Queen of

Escape Artists

wallowing in exile,

shunned from Solana Beach,

your past life out of reach.

You learned from

Daddy well,

to drink & not think,

so many lies to tell,

curse & scream & hit;

verbal abuse & physical

violence a genetic marker,

standing in the middle of

the street

like a carnival barker

pontificating nonsense

& angry threats,

the veiled frustration to

ex-husband,

to the friends you betrayed,

the jobs & homes you lost

& destroyed

like all that oil

in the wide and vast Gulf,

your life a crashed ship

like the Exxon Valdez:

the Captain is drunk,

the boat is sunk

& the waters are polluted

like an alcoholic’s poisoned blood,

convoluted.

Momma Said Never Date

Bi-Polar Alcoholic Divorcees

& of course

I didn’t listen to

this sage advice

& I did it twice,

always drawn to women

with too much vice

like lice

drinking & sobbing

about their failures

Hollywood

fame

poetry

infidelity

sterility

an ex-husband who smokes pot

& wishes he were a rock star

an ex-husband who was really gay

& cruised for tricks

@night.

Oh these bi-polar alcoholic divorcees

& their wine & whine…

bottles & bottles

corks collected in a bag

hundreds of them

& the anger

the violence

shattered glass

ruined homes

sob stories

& bad poems

about all those friends

who betrayed

about all the futures

delayed

& all the men

drunkenly laid:

karma paid.

The Birds

There were seven dead birds on the porch when I opened up the house after being away for three months. This is what happens when things rely on me for survival. I felt bad for these seven lives lost. I decided to leave the bodies. I was just here to collect memories into suitcases.

Memory

Ever wonder what happened to wonder? No one believes me when I say this, this is what I say when I talk about memory: I clearly recall being inside my mother. Not all the time, but I remember a moment, an event: I recall my grandmother—my nana—looking down at me, touching me but not touching me, there was something between us. It was like watching her on a screen. She said: “Oh, the baby kicked!” I kicked again. “Oh!” said my nana, “again!” I could hear my mother groan. My nana had her hand on my mother's protruding pregnant belly. I felt loved. I felt safe. I went to sleep and stopped kicking.

The Blue Jays

One summer, when I was nine, my cat Smokey ate the hatchlings from a blue jay nest and the blue jays held a grudge and sought vengeance—first, two blue jays would torment Smokey all day; later, they enlisted others and I witnessed a formation, making a V, of ten blue jays, who swooped down like kamikaze divers one at a time, their beaks pecking at my cat (this would start at sunrise: 5:30 a.m.) and it woke me up every morning and I was getting annoyed, school was out, this was my vacation, so with my BB-gun, I shot all the blue jays and some died, some flew away, one remained in a tree, staring—Staring—I could feel its hatred for me, its need for justice, its desire to peck at me and so I aimed, fired, and shot the bird in the head and it fell to the grass and I decided to leave the body there.

The Scar on my Chin

My parents, who were teenagers when I was born, fought a great deal when I was a child. There was physical violence. When I was six or seven, I woke up and heard my parents arguing. I was thirsty and wanted some milk. I got out of bed and saw my mother standing at the end of the hallway. I went to tap her on the leg and ask for milk. She quickly stepped out of the way and I felt a thud hit me on the chin. My mother and father went silent, staring at me with abject dreadfulness. “Oh my God,” my mother said, grabbing me. I saw a beer can on the floor. My mother touched my face and there was blood on her hands. My father had thrown the beer can at my mother; she moved away so she wouldn't get hit and I was hit in the chin instead. The opened edge of the can cut my flesh open. I didn't feel anything because I had no idea what happened. When I saw the blood, and felt the open wound on my chin, my mind and body flooded with enormous pain and I screamed, I cried—my parents rushed me to the emergency room and the doctors stitched up my chin. They had to sedate my father because he was acting like a madman, hitting the walls with his fists, screaming, “What if I had hit him in the eye? What if I had taken his eye out? Why did I do that? What is wrong with me?!” I still have that scar on my chin today, thirty-four years later. People always ask, “How did you get that scar?” I never tell the truth. I don't want people to think my father was a child abuser. I still remember the anguish, though, and that night—the moment of impact, beer can to chin, has followed me everywhere I go, a mark on my body, and every time I see a beer can, I am reminded of what my father did, and how the issue was decided.

8^th Grade

Quietly, Kimberly sits there,

staring at a piece of paper

& writing numbers on it.

Whatever interest she had,

I scribbled in my notebook like a poem,

died like a fish in polluted water.

Orphans

Does it matter, the lost songs
of the heart, the abandoned notes
left in the city dump at 5 am,
the orphaned chord arrangements,
all as real as the piped-in audience
applauding to the ghosts of fiction?

I ask: who will remember
the random tossed flares of youth
colliding with the mangled
flourishes in some minor key,

tuned to the brazen gray
of too many wired dawnings
in that sad, sorry vehicle--
no, that blessed vessel,
a shelter from the ragged puppets
masquerading as kindred souls
as they burrowed into our lives
like rabid gofers on a hot, dry day,
all for a half-empty beer can
or the price of a line?

These were not
our kinder selves, nor
the better angels of chance.
From the kiln of their confusion
they lit a mortal (and moral) blaze,
arson for the heart of hearts
that corrosive gaze
and a beauty which even now
stirs this house of leaves
near the master’s tomb
and the dying trees
across the globe
in Père Lachaise.

The Finger

belonged to the hawk girl
possessed by Ramtha¹
lost in the pines of her delusion,
bleeding on the misty arborvitae in moonlight madness²
dancing and laughing
with unshaven legs, the wannabe-goddess with a
succession of “uncles” to pay all the bills
causing you to wonder
what was truth, if there was any truth at all?

Everything was so beautiful in her view askew
her gaze on all that was old, nothing new.
Was she out of her Wiccan mind³
or just the daughter of
something slippery and not divine?
Her finger still stained with the
ceremony of her menstrual jig,
“you poor thing,” she would say with
a caress of cold hand on warm cheek,
“you used to be Judas Iscariot⁴ in a past
life, that’s why you are so weak:
you’re paying for a great crime
that was never addressed,
and so your soul is nervous
and in duress.”

While I was Barabbas⁵ back in the same time,
doomed to wander the earth after my pardon,
causing me to wonder what was the truth,
if there was any truth at all
in a poke of her finger, the hole in my shirt.
Where is that hand now, holding another
or buried six feet under the dirt?

The Idea of Home

I never felt more at home than I did when I lay in bed next to Karin and we slept.

Sometimes I would stare at her sleeping and feel lucky that I had found my way here.

I have always had trouble feeling comfortable, in the right place, when I am sleeping in a woman's bed.

Karin's bed was now my bed and I never wanted to leave.

I was like a reptile in a glass tank, with a heat lamp and plenty of insects to eat.

I curled up in the corner and felt at peace.

As long as Karin was always there, her body next to mine, I knew everything in the world was, and would be, all right.

iPad iPoem

when Bukowski first got

his macintosh desktop in 1991

he wrote in a poem

“my computer is fucking amazing”

so I am doing

the same with my iPad

like Buk

we have become advocates

for Apple literature

Steve Jobs is

tickled digital

later, Buk wrote:

“some day I will know more

about computers than

the computers themselves.”

a 1991 Mac is a low res

toy compared to

these new gadgets

so this is my iPoem

from my iPad

typed on a virtual keyboard

with a cheap plastic stylus

from Hong Kong

goddamn this is

so fucking neat

that I will Twitter

about it

& post this to

Facebook for

people to comment on

& then I will put

it on my Wordpress blog

&/or Myspace & Livejournal

so it will be indexed

on Google & show up

on search engine results

when people stalk me

&/or look for juicy gossip

& damning info

reddit

share this

bebo

they will eye this iPoem

hit the like button

like bingo players

on the buzzers

& then I will go to

some open mic

with a beer in one h&

& iPad in

the other & read this

iPoem off my glowing

iScreen

as I am doing

right now

like some drunken

product placement ad

in a YouTube vid

buy me

or your life will be

incomplete

etc.

Nothing

I lived with her, in this apartment, for two and a half years. I have lived here, in this apartment, alone, for three years now. She did not take the cats. I said, “Whatever you do, do not take the cats.” The cats are still here and they have forgotten her. When she left, the cats would sit at the window for hours, waiting for her to come home, waiting for her truck to pull into the driveway, that familiar sound. They would cry for her. For hours, they would cry for her. Then they forgot her. When I am gone for several days, or all day, they sit in the window and cry for me. When I open the door, they stare at me and cry. They are afraid I will abandon them like she abandoned them. She left most of her stuff here. I have, for three years, been trying to get rid of it all. I throw some of it away, and more appears: books, records, clothes, stuffed animals, board games, a blander, a George Foreman Grill, an earring and paper products and glue she used to create her book arts objects of poetry and drawings. She left her bed here; she left her couch here. I have had five different women sleep in this bed with me the past five years—some were for one night, others for many nights. Of the latter, this woman found make-up kits under the sink in the bathroom. “Is this your ex's make-up?” she said. “I will not come here and see you again until you get rid of her crap,” she said. She was jealous. I threw it out, immediately, but she would look around the apartment for evidence and say, “What is this? Is this hers, too?” I have not slept in the bed for more than a year now. Now, I sleep on the couch. I seldom go into the bedroom. The cats still sleep in there.

Betrayal

We were drinking Southern Comfort in the dark.

We sat on her bed. I held her to me.

She said she was nervous.

She said she wanted to be drunk before we started to do what we were about to do.

She said she cheated on Brandon, but with strangers.

This time was different: this time it was with “the friend.”

She said I would be her fifth lover. She called me Number Five.

“Hey, there, Number Five,” she would say, “how're you doing, Number Five?”

We agreed on no intercourse, just oral sex: I would go down on her and she would suck me off. According to Bill Clinton, this was not actually sex so it was not actually cheating: she on her boyfriend, me on my best friend.

She asked if I felt guilty and I said I felt nothing.

“How can you feel nothing?”

A car pulled into the driveway

to make a U-turn and the lights shown through the window,

on her naked body in the dark,

and I could see her eyes were closed, she wouldn't open them,

she said they had been closed since her first sip from the bottle.

“Like a blind person,” she said, “I can feel and smell things better than you.”

Passion

That night she was scared, angry, in love; she had recently turned twenty-six and didn't know what to do about career and relationships; she threw the bottle of Southern Comfort to the floor with a grunt. The bottle shattered like a glass swan from a tender menagerie of glass creatures. She tore off her clothes and rolled around naked in the jagged shards. “Is this what you want?” she said. She crawled to him like a Persian concubine, bleeding from the legs, arms, neck. “Is this what you want from me?” she said. “Is this the madness you need?” He cherished the drama, yes; he required the vainglorious emotions to create, to write, to live. She masturbated in front of him, first using her fingers, her hand, then using his beer bottle to penetrate herself. “Oh, baby,” she said, “is this what you want to see? Is this the perversity you crave?” Yes, he said, taking her in his arms, her blood on his clothes, pulling glass from her skin, kissing her on the lips and tasting the alcohol; yes, he said, this is the passion I admire, but not from you, you are not the mother of my children, he said, there is someone else I love, and she is afraid of passion, honesty, and art. She was not listening, she was bleeding, in lament, whispering, “I love you, please stay and be with me,” she said, “be kind,” and for that night, for the gift of showing him there was still integrity in the world, he stayed, and made love to her, and loved her the way she needed to be loved so she could live another day, scars now on her flesh like the patterns of lies people tell each other again and again.

The Wrinkled Dress

& Two Bottles of Wine

I.

The death of the fetus

in Encinitas

still haunts me

like a piece of old brie

left in the fridge, opened,

for months, years.

Both do not taste good.

Was I really going to get married

and start a family

keep to the plan

adopt her daughter

and have what she called

an “instafam”?

You just want an instant family,” she said,

“without going through all the shit.”

She said, “I don’t want to go through this

alone,” and I said I would be there every

day, hour, minute, second –

why would I cheat myself out of

this experience?

“You’ll leave me when I start puking seven times

a day and get as big as a blimp,” she said. “And you

can forget about sex for six months

if I can’t drink wine for nine.”

She only got as big as a half-blimp

and then the plan was changed

like a bad auto accident

on a perfectly happy, sunny day –

II.

Looking for Jesus

in Encinitas,

I ran into

the girl who was once going to

be my stepdaughter.

She’s a teenager

now, she’s 15 but looks 25,

hanging out by

the E Street Café with a group of

other teenagers, all bored

and seeking adventure beyond

Worlds of Warcraft on their

computer screens,

the digital violence that numbs

their little brains like microwaved

pizza pockets.

She asked me if I would buy

some booze and beer for her

friends. I told her to get off

the street and not become

a North County alcoholic like her mom,

her mom who had her first

abortion at 15, an oops result

from a teenage beer party.

“You can’t tell me what to do!” she yelled at me,

hands on her hips in mock defiance.

“Stop talking to me like you’re my father.

You are not my father,

You were supposed to be my father,”

she added flippantly,

flipping blonde hair back.

“But you just screwed that one up,

didn’t you?” she said. “You and my Mom both,

you both fucked up something that

would have been really nice.”

Who put the shit

in the shithouse? I wondered.

She was robbed of her brother

and she knows it like I know it,

she’s as hurt as her mom

about a future that didn’t happen.

And this makes me want to drink.

I could buy the booze

and drink with her friends,

hang out on the corner of E Street and Third, shooting the shit,

get busted by the sheriff

for contributing to the delinquency of

Encinitas minors.

Boy would her mother love that

and hold it against me,

another thing to blame me for.

III.

After yelling at me,

the girl who was once upon a time

supposed to be

my stepdaughter

frantically texted on the old Blackberry

I bought her five years ago.

I knew she was texting her mom,

my former fiancé,

the vessel of my son,

telling her mom I am here

at the E Street Café

like a bum

who has nothing to say

but give bad advice

like a silly case of head lice:

annoying to say the least --

I have no words of wisdom or sense,

utter like an idiot to

this angry and sad teenage girl

who looks 25

but will always be that

four-year-old child in a wrinkled dress,

flower-print and 100% cotton,

falling asleep in my arms

one afternoon

as we waited for her mother

to come out of the pharmacy

with her monthly supply

of bi-polar meds

and two bottles of red wine.

Tijuana Hookers

Momma should’ve also said

never fall in love with hookers

& strippers.

In Tijuana,

hiding from too many ugly un-truths,

I have fallen in love with

stripper-hookers who are all looking for

husbands for green cards

& fathers to adopt their small

children, those fathers (papis)

estranged, in jail, or dead.

There is Priscilla, 32,

half Russian-half Mexican,

hooked on heroin

& wanting a baby from

an American, a sibling for

her half-Chinese infant

she constantly complains about.

“I don’t like her slant eyes.”

“She cries too much.”

“She always needs milk.”

There is Tiffany, 24,

tall & skinny,

a golden shower expert

who squirts in an arch.

There is Belen, 19,

who just had plastic surgery

on her nose & wears a Super Girl

costume in the club she dances,

always drinking tequila & singing

along with Lady GaGa songs.

There is Yuly, 22.

high on crystal meth,

who likes a finger up her ass

when a man or woman goes

down on her.

There is Michela, 25,

with her dreadlocks & tattoos

& thick smoky voice, who makes

sure all hands are perfectly clean

before they touch any part

of her body.

There is Milla, 20,

skinny with buckteeth

but cute as a plastic button

with her dark Cancun skin,

who dances with her sister,

both have children to feed.

I go to the VIP rooms in the clubs

with them,

I buy them drinks so they get commissions,

I go to their motel rooms

or they come to my hotel room

$100-120 all night,

breakfast in the morning,

maybe some shopping.

Belen says she needs to send her

father 400 pesos quickly, down in

Sonora.

I give her the money,

because she expects it,

because I have agreed to marry

the 19-year-old she can cross

the border & have a new life.

Priscilla says she needs diapers

for her infant.

I buy them for her,

because I have agreed to give her

an American baby.

Tiffany says she needs a new dress.

I buy it for her,

because she has agreed to do kinky

things in bed with me.

Each of them fills the void

for a moment,

& when they leave

I am once again empty & alone

like an abandoned satellite

orbiting the quiet skies—

& this makes me go out

& grab one of the 13-year-olds

working the streets,

pimped by their hooker moms

or drunk fathers

or amoral abuelitas,

$20 blow-jobs

with empty young eyes.

Perfect for my disguise.

The Couch

I have been sleeping on the couch in the living room for the past year.

The couch has become my new bed.

On a TV dinner tray sits my laptop, where I answer my email.

I send email.

I send more email than I reply to.

I wait for others to reply to my email.

I talk to friends on Instant Messenger and Facebook.

I have cyber relationships with various women.

One of them I think I love.

I love to talk to her by way of the computer.

I like to look at her pictures.

I like to gaze at her tattoos and her skin.

She has dyed her hair blonde.

She has the whitest teeth I have ever seen.

She is always smiling.

I cannot stand her in person.

She is bossy, sardonic, and mean, like a cartoon version of herself.

She is sweet and kind on the Internet.

I am in love with her electronic double, her residual self-image to quite The Matrix.

I have no interest in her flesh.

In the virtual world, our souls connect; in the meat world, we disgust each other.

Warmth

All the cigarette butts littering

the entry and the bovine eyes of young blinkers

seeking a grade to redeem their confusion.

But I was here not so long ago,

when the ice age was still someone else's poor toss.

It settled in fast.

I need a coat.

Baby Bird

I didn’t go to that café this morning;

remembered that

my former lover and her daughter

often went there

for Sunday breakfast.

How unkind to accidentally run into

the family I lost and answer

questions, the “what are you doing up

here?” kind.

The death of a fetus in Encinitas

still harasses my head, insane:

the silent eulogy for the dead

is a song I’d rather not sing again –

the five-month-old

buried in the garden of tender dirt,

my behest –

a wispy soul that’s still

like a baby bird in a nest,

mouth opened wide and crying

for food, softly chewed,

by a mother who takes care

of hatchlings out of instinct,

not love.

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