Dug For Victory: Poems from RIP-TV Read online



  DUG FOR VICTORY

  POEMS FROM RIP-TV

  by

  Liz Mackie

  © Copyright 2013 by Elizabeth Mackie

  The pieces collected here were originally published on the internet and have been substantially revised, once for print in 2009 and again in 2013 for this first and much-expanded digital edition. RIP-TV and its complete diaryland site are on-line at www.rip-tv.com. In the present edition, poems 3, 6 and 20 contain links to their original pages. Photographs and images are by Liz Mackie as follows:

  Cover, Postcard, Churchill War Rooms, London, 2002; digitally-altered

  Inside, Ephesus Archaeological Museum, Selçuk, Turkey, June 12, 2012; Last week of Astroland, Coney Island, Sept 5, 2008

  For my parents.

  CONTENTS

  Kurt Cobain (1967-1994)

  Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

  Seymour V. Reit (1918-2001)

  Marcel Duchamp (1883-1968)

  William Henry Harrison (1773-1841)

  Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944)

  Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)

  Barbara Hutton (1912 -1979)

  James Joyce (1882-1941)

  Hieronymus Bosch (1453-1516)

  Florence Griffith Joyner (1959-1998)

  Truman Capote (1924-1984)

  James Baldwin (1924-1987)

  Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

  Divine (1945-1988)

  Washington Irving (1783-1859)

  T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935)

  Edith Massey (1918-1984)

  Max Schreck (1879-1936)

  Eva Braun-Hitler (1912-1945)

  Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)

  Homer (750 B.C. - ?)

  Mary Shelley (1797-1851)

  David O. Selznick (1902-1965)

  Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)

  Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987)

  Galen (131-200)

  Madame Chiang Kai-shek (1898-2003)

  Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)

  Francis Joseph Spellman (1889-1967)

  Beatrice Portinari (1266-1290)

  Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

  Veronica Lake (1919-1973)

  Madame Récamier (1777-1849)

  Mary Leakey (1913-1996)

  Anne Frank (1929-1945)

  Luke Howard (1772-1864)

  Billy Preston (1946-2006)

  Harry Houdini (1874-1926)

  Nelson Riddle (1921-1985)

  About (RIP-TV, The Poems, The Author)

  Famepunk (An Excerpt from Part 2: Middlemarch)

  Read More

  1

  Kurt Cobain

  B. 2.20.67 Hoquiam, Washington / D. 4.5.94 Seattle

  Suicide/Shotgun

  What are you looking for in a woman?

  Someone who can cut my hair.

  2001-05-23

  2

  Edgar Allan Poe

  B. 1.19.1809 Boston / D. 10.7.1849 Baltimore

  Alcoholism / Voting

  Anyone in your past for whom you’d drop everything?

  Anyone? Anyone?

  An echo beckoning from any quarter of your globe?

  Be honest.

  Everything. Everything.

  Recurrences of absent people’s faces, forces, powers to charm:

  At Christmastime, these séance chimes

  Why do they sound?

  The calendar’s silvery tintinnabulation

  as beauty muffled in loose wraps pays a holiday call:

  How can you hear and not answer?

  Go walkabout among the sere overgrown sites of old flames

  Toast your shivering ghosts with cups of sacrificial dream-blood.

  It’s become a custom.

  2001-12-15

  3

  Seymour V. Reit

  B. 11.11.18 New York City / D. 11.21.01 New York City

  Fright

  My vanity haunts me like a ghost

  Boo!

  A vengeful ghost

  I killed my vanity before I could correct it

  Now it’s just as bad as ever and it never lets me rest

  Hahaha hehehe. . .bump every night!

  My needs haunt me like ghosts

  Bang!

  I jump out of my skin at their topplings of tables and bureaus

  bookshelves and mirrors

  and the world sees a twitch

  There was it again

  The world diagnoses: frustration

  The kiss of death.

  2002-11-12

  4

  Marcel Duchamp

  B. 7.28.1883 Blainville, France / D. 10.1.1968 Paris

  Suddenly in sleep

  a snapshot of myself at night when I bother to switch off the light while undressing

  something in black and red or black and chartreuse

  a well-framed still of the pantomime I perform while denying myself to the neighbors

  the clock radio time bathing my naked haunches in haze

  as with hands like rakes and fingers like bat song I pursue my pyjamas, bottoms and top, into their separate hideouts

  “nude fondling a bed”

  I know exactly where they were

  “nude persistent in fondling the same few patches of bedspread”

  full-color image of my naked self, one arm withdrawing from the light switch

  “woman completing a series of gestures”

  2004-01-03

  5

  William Henry Harrison

  B. 2.9.1773 Charles City County, Virginia / D. 4.4.1841 Washington, DC

  Pneumonia

  Woke up wishing I could split or be unzipped

  Prolong the “z” a pulse for every zipper tooth

  Or that I was from chin to groin already slit

  Make a powdery "Poof!"

  Like a milkweed pod

  Let it all hang out

  Please

  Please

  Can't I tip a canoe-full of need onto the wind’s tongue?

  Pity.

  2002-12-05

  6

  Aimee Semple McPherson (b. Aimee Kennedy)

  B. 10.9.1890 Salford, Ontario / D. 9.27.1944 Oakland

  Barbiturate Overdose

  You put a chip in me

  Ba-wah-wah-wah-wah

  Baby since you

  you in the colors of the flag

  my eyes have never closed,

  not properly.

  I think you put a chip in me

  and ulu-lulu-lation!

  Being, beneath you

  I'm splayed in perpetuity;

  In-a-gada-davida-da-da-dah

  you planted

  my civilization.

  2003-11-08