Poetry

“Listen, man, I am going to grow a mustache.”
 
~ Peter Davis
 
 
Dear Doctor, Ming is overthinking things again, how the insole of his shoe
is not just an addition but also a subtraction and removal and thin piece and
part and parcel of something else, like a bizarre gestalt, rumbling like this
mausoleum of cracked mannequins, each human shape dysmorphic, no,
more lived in and bawdy, more delusional and grandiose, not bottled like
a pale-faced Ming writing limericks about Hitler, said he hated Hitler, as if
 
alliterating it made it hit home hard, like a sock to things unassuming, as if
such reiteration, retelling of history and its darkness, was a boot, big shoe
in the face of tragedy, the moguls and fashionistas craving its gravity like
a libretto milked for dramatic tension, and their retinue of sycophants and
manic nursemaids still happy servants to arcane ideas of good and right, no,
truth and beauty, wisdom too, a superstructure of ideals glistening in this
 
miasma of sinking labyrinths but buoyed in a slowly dying dystopia; in this,
there is no equivocation clever enough, no logic, or just means, or smiles if
Ming would emerge from his room, all smiles as he did in the old days, no,
in his own stories, now recycled into void fill, or crushed to fit into shoes
as if they still served a purpose, their fiction fading, cheap ink in rain, and
how I am fanlight smiles, and the miles running back in time, memory like
 
Ming crouching in a street corner, sucking on a Winston and Winfield like
that casting director liking the sound of things he put into his mouth, this
Chesterfield after the Richmond, both borrowed, from the playwright and
Austrian model with pink bangs and tattoo of Aquarius behind Libra, as if
Arius had drawn both in with a Surrealist’s charcoal, darkened the shoe
so the sandal straps looked like shackles or falcon wings, as binding, no,
 
as ominous as a toothbrush mustache, its strict lines, black quadrangle, no,
more muzzled utterance, ready to roar into engines and rolling tanks, like
Ming downing a half bottle of Bushmills, then Shanahans, wielding a shoe
horn like a fencer’s foil, its invisible tip aimed at nothing in particular, as if
Ming’s anger simply needed emanation, whiskey coursing in his blood, this
feeling of ether, cloudless numen in dive bar body, making him levitate, and
 
his soul soared, an egret to scan the world below, its natural features and
hidden turns it already knew so well, until Ming stopped himself, said no,
that no poem could bear the weight of philosophy or its abstractions, and if
it did, it became something of an ugly manifesto, sly in its coercions like
this roofing slate as paperweight, barefaced, wrapped in newspaper, this
whirring quiet, caldarium like a sail vault, Ming shining his last good shoe,
 
making it matter, and frowning to concentrate, eyes into thin slits, horseshoe
mustache penciled in with his wife’s kohl, no, permanent marker, yes, as if
the shape returned Ming to think it’s okay to just stay in, be happy like this.
 
 
* This poem is a reprint. It was first anthologized in The “Mo” Anthology, published by Silkworms Ink towards the Movember Prostate Cancer Movement.The epigraph is an excerpt from the poem, “Hitler’s Mustache: The Teenage Mustache Sestina” by Peter Davis. The title of his book, Hitler’s Mustache, prefaces each poem title within the collection. There are two other sestinas titled “Hitler’s Mustache: The Hitler Sestina” and “Hitler’s Mustache: The Mustache Sestina”. Of this book, Peter Johnson writes: “Nothing escapes satiric scrutiny, even postmodernism. The mustache itself is a metaphor for both everything and nothing, allowing Davis to toy with and subvert discourses and genres, past and present, high and low, always keeping us off stride with his clever juxtapositions and puns.”