Free Contemporary Men and Women

Today, in many places, thanks to globally circulating culture, the privileged highly educated man and woman have high expectations--of one another, of themselves, of lives and life. Their constitutions, politicians, social movements, and media products relentlessly assault them with a refrain: you are free. No matter the protests of his successors, Sartre lives on, his bastardized words become biblical.

Women. Women are just as capable as men (or more so) in any number of careers. The property of husbands a distant echo--despite pay ceilings and the recalcitrance of unconscious expectations in the habits of their husbands' domestic workload. The demand to have everything a real and maddening pressure. Forget the physical abuse and financial and intellectual infantilization of the unliberated past (and, to be sure, for some, sadly, still in the present). The new restlessly dogged pursuit of perfection brings little-studied impacts profound. How many know what they are pursuing? How many know what they want and how they acquired those wants, expectations, and desires? Women: Mothers, Grandmothers, Wives, Lovers, Sisters, Daughters.

Grand/Mothers. Impossible role models wearing scarves over whiptoppinged hairdos, throwing apocryphal tupperware parties, keeping immaculate homes, and forming welcome wagons for the new neighbors. Taking orders. Never communicating inner problems and desires. Repressed. Pathetic to the new women, and both know it. A sense of a worthless life entire. Grand/Mothers.

Men. What has become of them? Shall we continue to generalize in a poem? They are as much in a crisis as their counterparts (or even their same-sex ones--what are their expectations, with their public models all but banned?). Do you hear Faludi whisper? Men.

Their grandfathers/fathers. So their role models, pater familias unpatered by a cultural revolution, are paranoid and resentful toward the gendered world going to hell in a handbasket, which they desperately vote against through brands of "family values." Used to giving orders (including sexual), they find themselves generals being ordered by their mutinied subordinates, peasants who have stormed the Bastille and all but wheeled out the guillotine. Their grand/fathers.

Their parents/they: rebelled. Free love. Expensive divorce. Were the answers! Broken homes, parentless children, emotional holes that would land on the doorstep of future relationships, loves, marriages. Unwitting unrequited demands for parental attention, for parents, in the couple, in friendships, on the job. Unperfected changes from grandfathers, -mothers, parents. Heavy baggage--but invisible. Their parents/they.

They. New men, New women. The territory is un-charted; the exigencies to be other than their models like making every move under gunpoint. What are the new 7-year itches? The new mid-life crises? The new couple dynamics that volatilely mix with unresolved individual pasts in a misunderstood witch's potion voarciously lapped up? Pressure to move on, not develop, not mature, not learn from mistakes, not develop new maps together--change fast, a cheap panaceac promise. No devotion to a life-long best friend and lover, a companion above companions, ups and downs, maturation. Too much trouble. Too quaint. Too humiliating. Too unfree. Too grand/mother. They.

They. If the job is not bliss, if/since the husband or wife is flawed, there are pangs of change from fears of inadequacy. When crisis sticks its fork-tongued head out of its hole and visits them, they remember promises of change just last year, big and permanent changes, not slow ones. Instant Gratification, Speed, even though, to be sure, the trials of time have not been insignificant. From the view of free men and women the past is then a long dark night, the memory of which an endless nightmare. Staying the course, developing, maturing is humiliating, is old-fashioned, is torture when it should all be there in the job, the family, the couple, the life. Too keep on would be to regress, would be masochistic. What would it take to resist the desultory destiny of the newly freed men and women, eternally but vaguely searching for constant love, physical gratification, social and professional recognition, and unconscious resolution of deep internal wars without repeating the crimes of the grand/parents?
They: the free contemporary man and woman.
We?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Tonight, I came home. I took M out. She took a long dump, the kind where she squat-walks the length of five or six feet, dribbling turd chunks here and there, then jumps up as if squirted freshly out of the womb, swiveling her head and stretching out her paws, crouching and then running in circles, full of child-like glee--mirth. She sniffed the piss-marked buildings, and tree trunks, and various detritus on the sidewalk, sometimes giving them a fresh coat of her own. She whined as we ascended in the elevator in anticipation of a treat, a nuzzle, a prance across the hardwood floor. She begged for the last remnants of the baguette we nearly finished last night, as I re-heated a bowl of chili. She turned away from baguette watch, toward the door as she heard the elevator clanking and someone arriving above. She waited and finally dropped her head sorrowfully. I took the almost-too-hot-to-handle yellow bowl out of the microwave and lumbered indifferently toward the couch. I turned on the TV as M darted up on the couch and turned methodically in her circle to snuggle up next to me only to then unravel herself to beg for food. On the cable channel that slowly illuminated before me was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The ending was happier than I remembered.

Paris (Revised)

Paris (revised)

Paris,

Shadowed,
Tunnelled,
Tenebrious
Old bourg,
Glittering vainly
In the past;

Fortified
With ipods
And cell phones,
Fleetingly
Focused and
Unfocused
aliens,
citizens;

With
Hairdos, boots,
Silk cravats and
Colored scarves--
Some humans
Attention
ain't human
elegance;

Where shopping
Substitutes
Cheaply for
hierarchy
And homeless
Armies on
The canals;

Long journeys to Day
Short jaunts to Night where,

Well chiseled
Facades bow
One to the
Other, dykes
Repelling
Vigorous
Day as much
As flowers
Stretch sunward--

Umbrell-ed
Metropole--

Daydreaming
People down
Her sidewalks
Shuffle while
Studying
Cobblestones
Dark with age,
And searching
For Haussmann’s
oases,
Middle-class
Safety Valves,
Monopolies
On envied
resources;

Properly scarved
Republicans
Claw their way out
Of stinking
ratful caves
And labyrinths,
Escalating
Like moths.

Living as
Advertised.

Paris,

Neither Eiffel’s
Nor the martyr’s—
Baudelaire’s nightmare:
A dim damp bourg
Burning bright on
A Page.

technorati tags: poetry, poem, paris, france

The Hour

By the fung-dappled stones

Two flies cavort

Above marrowless bones in their bliss

Through the soil slides the worm

Happy, hungry, then devoured,

When round earth

Opens mouth up above

And the hour gains its grains

And the sea immortal rains

And the jackalous earth is unsated

But the heart shrinks in horror at the earth, the sea, the hour

Falls to its knees and bays for our tombstone-earth-sea-hour.

Light In December

Light in December

Light in December

Like a green love pushed

Surprisingly forth

From the brown compost

Of a scorched summer.