2002-01-16 - 3:41 PM
My Favorite Jim Carroll Poem
SICK BIRD
Void of Course (1998)
The positions we use when making love / Determine the next day's weather
Tomorrow it will rain / Then heat lightning by evening
Every time the telephone rings / A green sea turtle dies / And a phlegmatic guilt chants across your day
The side of your head / Where you part your hair / Dictates the direction / The trees lean / Left or right / In the yard out back
A poor Mexican teenager in the Texas panhandle / Is suffering from a venereal disease / And as he urinates in his bathroom the pain / Is too much to bear, so he smashes his closed fist into the plaster / Leaving a hold there and he discovers a shelf within the wall / Filled with stacks of fifty-dollar bills left behind by a drug dealer perhaps / Who departed in haste and so he is rich for a lifetime / Because of pain and urine
A blond woman with a silver tongue stud and gold rings / Above her left eye lights a cigarette with a candle / In the VIP lounge of a club in Minneapolis / And the candle drips wax to the red carpet, somehow causing / A lone fisherman on an upstate lake / To slip on some odd substance, falling overboard and drowned / Eventually eaten by his own propeller / While a child from a lake tribe / Kneeling in his canoe / Watches in distance and mist / Unable to do a thing for him / He mutters, "That poor man," / And paddles through the reeds / Skimming the surface with a plank / Continuing to harvest wild rice from the surface of Glacier Lake
A popular character actress removes her Emerald brooch / After a banquet to raise money / For the twin benefit of Los Angeles runaways / And the Dalai Lama's return to Tibet.
By her simple actions, undoing the clasp of the brooch / The Dailai Lama stubs his left foot on a cabinet in his room / At the San Francisco Zen Center's guest house, 800 miles up the coastline / Causing alarm among the Roshi and initiates, and a marlin-blue swelling / On the big toe of the gentle Lama, who meditates the pain to Maya
While in a cluttered shop in the thin streets of Milan, Italy, / Its floor filled with rosewood shavings / The air cramped with Oak dust, / The man who built the cabinet / On which the Dalai Lama's foot was stubbed / Slumps over his workbench with a cerebral hemorrhage. / He is dead. / It had been growing a long while in his mind. / It was simply a matter of time.
And a young Norwegian film student thoughtlessly / Decides to title his short film / It Was Simply a Matter of Time. / It has nothing to do / With time, however, nor the dead Italian cabinet maker.
A mosquito sucks the blood of a post-Soviet Baltic girl / And she falls in love with a balding Armenian / Who assures her that only girls with strong sexual drives are chosen by these insects / The mosquito dies and provides a small meal to a starving bird.
That bird's song awakes me at 5 A.M. / I shiver with a sudden sense of dread because the mosquito / Which it ate was poisoned by the blood of the girl which it bit / Because she was imbibed with lies and designer drugs and so the bird sings off key / As it jars me from sleep, and the room is folding over / Darker as I rise and I know a change is coming & bad & soon writing this poem
^ This must be my favorite poem by Jim Carroll (author of the Basketball Diaries, which the movie, despite the incredible performances by Leonardo DiCaprio, Ernie Hudson, and Mark Wahlberg, totally wrecked and changed around), the special mind he is. Watch the movie if you want great performances. Read the book for the true story.
