two more poems by Frederick Seidel

Drinking In The Daytime


Anything is better than this
Bliss.
Nursing on a long-stemmed bubble made of crystal.
I'm sucking on the barrel of a crystal pistol
To get a bullet to my brain.
I'm gobbling a breast, drinking myself down the drain.

I'm in such a state of Haut-Brion I can't resist.
A fist-fucking anus swallowing a fist.
You're wondering why I talk this way, so daintily!
I'll tell you after I take a pee.
Now I'm back.
Oiloholics love the breast they attack.

I'm talking about the way poetry made me free.
It's treated me very well, you see.
I climbed up inside the Statue of Liberty
In the days when you could still go up in the torch, and that was me.
I mean every part I play.
I'm drinking my lunch at Montrachet.

I'm a case of Haut-Brion turning into tar.
I'm talking about the recent war.
It's a case of having to raise your hand in life to be
Recognized so you can ask your question. Mr. Secretary! Mr. Secretary!
To the secretary of defense I say: 
I lift my tar to you at Montrachet!

I lift my lamp beside the golden door to pee,
And make a vow to make men free, and we will find their WMD.
Sir, I supported the war.
I believe in who we are.
I dedicate red wine to that today.
At Montrachet, near the Franklin Street stop, on West Broadway.

Heart Art



A man is masturbating his heart out,
Swinging on the hammock of the Internet.
He rocks back and forth, his cursor points
And selects. He swings between repetitive extremes
Among the come-ons in the chat rooms.
But finally he clicks on one
World Wide Web woman who cares.

Each of her virtual hairs
Brings him to his knees.
Projects like a sneeze.
He hears her dawning toward him as he reads her dimensions,
Waves sailing the seas of cyberspace--
Information, zeros-and-ones, whitecaps of.

Caught in a tangle of Internet,
swinging in the mesh to sleep,
Rocking himself awake, sailing the virtual seas,
A man travels through space to someone inside
An active-matrix screen. Snow falls.
A field of wildflowers blooms. Night falls.
Day resumes.

This is a story about humans taking over
The country. New York is outside
His study while he works. Paris is outside.
Outside the window is Bologna.
He logs on. He gets up.
He sits down. A car alarm goes off
Yoi yoi yoi and yips as it suddenly stops.

Man has the takeover impact
of an asteroid: throwing up debris, blotting out the sun
Causing the sudden mass extinction
of the small bookstore
At the millenium. The blood from the blast cakes
And forms the planet's new crust:
A hacker from Kinshasa getting it on with one in Nome.

Their poems start
with the part about masturbating the heart--
Saber cuts whacking a heart into tartare--
Heart art worldwide
Meaning that even in the Far East the subject is love.
Here in the eastern United States,
A man is masturbating his art out.

In an Ice Age that acts hot
Only because the greenhouse effect
Is the sort of personality.
Beneath the dome of the depleted ozone, they stay cold.
Mastodons are mating on the Internet
Over the bones of dinosaur nuclear arms,
Mating with their hands.