Dug For Victory: Poems from RIP-TV
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