Surrender, and: Recent Revisions of the Vernacular, and: Ten Reasons Why We Cannot Seem to Make Progress

Surrender

Did I ever give up power to a woman? Before I tell, I want to know who is asking the question.

But what else would you call sleeping with my teacher? Miranda Fairchild, assistant prof., Western Civ.,

Tuesday-Thursday schedule, Cincinnati State, conference by appointment only.

It wasn’t to conquer, but to pay homage that I placed my lithe brown body in her hands.

Did you ever see that movie about Uri Geller,       the famous Israeli psychic, who could bend a magnet with his mind?

I could have played the magnet in that movie, and the mind could have been played

by any one of those stupendous women to whom I served myself like an hors d’oeuvre,

in those sweet years before I learned to say the words “erotic equity” and

“introjected Oedipal self-commodification.”

I tell you, we men are not so utterly dim-witted as the history of the world suggests;

Just ask any one of those women who tossed me over her shoulder

and carried me home, like Achilles picking up a saddle

from the battlefield at Troy. That’s history—

Miranda, who murmured midnight Latin in my ear. Who knew the backstage gossip on the Treaty of Versailles.

Miranda, from whom I learned a thing or two about love:

how sometimes, to be property feels just like being treasure.

Recent Revisions of the Vernacular

Kids on the playground don’t call each other Benedict Arnold anymore,

or Low Man on the Totem Pole; And the phrase A Season in Hell,

as the title for a book, doesn’t have the bite that it once did.

People don’t have “nervous breakdowns” either; they are “hemispherically imbalanced,”

or suffer from “nonlinear learning styles” that make them weep, burn themselves

with cigarettes, or leave their children in the car.

Strange times. No wonder, now that television has replaced the Bible.

Few persons left who will climb the hill at dawn to listen to the wind,

or gather on the plaza with their drums— last ridiculed adherents of the sun religion.

At least now we are moving out beyond the era

when people said “It happened for a reason,” and “that’s a blessing”—a word which also

has a checkered past like the long dark shape embedded

in the varnish of my great-aunt’s parlor floor, where something heavy once had stood,

that great ramshackle piano, around which all the people stood and sang.

Ten Reasons Why We Cannot Seem to Make Progress

As long as the cheerleader keeps watching the movie about cheerleaders and the businessman keeps a copy of The Art of War in his attaché case.

As long as the money retains no memory of where it has been but keeps on running like a river

Until going to war is explained in terms of child development

Until the man is shown licking his fingertips and reaching down to brush the woman’s cunt,

until her wetness wakes and matches his. Until every candidate for Congress is required

to work for a year in the military, rubbing lotion onto the stumps of the amputees,

which will be so frightening to most on a sexual level, that soon only women will run for the Senate.

As long as meaning is pursued and captured and placed on display like a trophy or a piece of meat

As long as shoppers continue to enter the heaven of the shopping mall

like ants climbing in a long line into the nozzle of the plastic honey container

to die in a golden profusion of what they planned to bring home—

As long as there are these things that we are not allowed to think or say out loud.

Until we can speak them out loud, we will be trapped inside the dream.