"Persecuting the Poet" by Alex Kudera
An excerpt from Alex Kudera’s as-yet unpublished novel, Spark Park: A Tale in Two Parts
Back at the office, a fanless Wrent passes from solid to liquid to gas, drenched in summer sweat and nostalgia. It’s all in the past now. At fifty, he finds himself a tortured man, a tired man, more a tortellini than a taco man. This last morsel resists definite sexual content. Food or sex? Indeed, the old two-pronged problematic engendered his fertile ballpoint in the early years. By sixth grade, Roger was the angry young writer par excellence, dishing out guzes and doles of vulgar Pop-Tartery, layer cake glued with cheesy verbiage, often heavily iced with suckatash smut. The stuff of which famous literary agents are made, in words, epaule de dogfood. A fool for pastry coincidence, he cut many a young rhyme in the school cafeteria. Neatly sandwiched between the hot dinners and the cold deli, he spied on the world, waxing loquacious over its steamy beefs, jerky adolescents, both gawky teen girls and geeky boys. For love of verse, he spurned the occasional heraldry of paper-triangle football or three-penny table hockey. His first poem, perhaps premonitory of future interest or investment, rented limerick form, with a couplet addendum, for a no-nonsense theme. It went,
There was a young girl from Filly
Who bit down hard on boys’ chilis
And when once upset
while sucking a pet
she gulped down some illy-gi-billies.commenting on the poem I’ve written
It seems with suckatash smut, I’m smitten.
And no, not another word written for two whole years. Guilt, pimples, boners, and draught. The middle school days were nary the most prolific ones. If in the seventh grade he chased girls, in the eighth he goosed the whole human herd. Yes, he became a brothel monger. At the ripe old age of thirteen. Boys named Jonny and Danny thought it was funny that a squirt half their grade was trying to pump away the family jewels. So what the hell, they’d help him pay for it and drive him down to the downtown scene—beats da hell outta old Wanda here, ain’t dat right, Roger? And once in the brothels they’d hook little Rog up with the meanest fattie, a full house of her he could call his own, or a coffee break’s worth of armchair anyway.
But even at thirteen, he had a patriarchal zest for traditional romance, the mating call of all juvenile poetasters despairing a dearth of personal prissy. With each brothel visit, he lost a peace of soul and wrote a piece of sonnet. These were the earliest odes to what was to him denied. Soon he and his chilli grew tired of the hot sauces of the cramped downtown taco scene. He realized, like most men, he craved more virgin territory, the free, unexplored, uncultivated inlets, or unviolated tufts of turf. Scarcity determines value. And hell, if you have to swipe daughters from some stern door-opener who insists upon being addressed as Mr. So-and-so, so be it!
And so it was much to his disappointment when his parents enrolled him in the Westphalia Catholic High School for Boys. Now how was a young whippersnapper gonna catch a young wisp of snatch in one of those monasteries? In high school, he grew old and hardened, choking his catechism behind the clatter of nuns’ chalkboard pointers, occasionally underlining ambiguous bits of Augustine.
To no sweet surprise, Roger possessed slurred drunken misogyny by age nineteen. His passion became composing hymns of adroitly estranged ’memberance of hard luck with the ladies. He wrote, then, “Sonnet #1,” an elusive ditty, overcoming canyons of dissent betwixt the sexes.
John Donne, lecherous scum, mettlesome indeed;
Heard you here by this self-supposed Woman!
Pretty Girl, cease to plead and seize to please
I am human—only all too human.Sensitive solutions should be themselves
Angry tensions released sexually,
For society convicts those who delve
Damned mothers made beds, and made beds made me!But further convincing questions convictions
Letting understanding seem plausible.
At times we survive continued questions
Considering agreement quite possible—Still we space ourselves species so apart,
Love’s objectionable form grips my heart.
As if he’d ever gotten past the sonnets to God. Yeah, he wanted his ladies old-fashioned and loving, cooking and caring, as well as objectifiably lusty.
But by the early-to-mid-life crisis of ’80, looking back at this penile poetry from his corporate cubicle at Long and Perot Realty, he was an unhappy man. Still horny, he was deemed spoiled meat by most opposing sexes. Also on the verge of job loss, he realized the failings of his poetry in ephianesque brevity. It sucked, so she wouldn’t. He renounced his previous coat of arms and sealed his life away to guilt and resentment. Soon intent on radical change or despair, the shit book long since back-burnered, he soldiered through poems by innumerable women, feminists of every shape, size, and sex life. He brought down all the books and quarterlies Maureen had used to sabotage the bathroom reading stack, the untouched stuff. These would have been cut into TP squares in a communist country or more conserving America, but instead crumbled and yellowed in the attic and basement aside old furniture, photos, and drug paraphernalia.
Begging forgiveness from a radicalized canon he had through thirty-seven years ignored, he vowed his art would produce an apology. Face grim, elbows tensed upon table, and ball point hard on pad, he waited. Soon, terse sonnet after sonnet streamed from the hardened bard. Just as Donne’s lechery sent him singing apologetically to God, so Wrent sent sorries to women. These were his most sensitive words for Woman, in praise of Her Good Works, even hopeful of reparation through pinches of the old canon, that other stuff. These poems were rung with tears of unrequited loves left to idle in grocery aisles over the years, yet the will to fondle secretaries remained. A sample:
Sing Song Sonnet Persecuting the Poet
Miss Woman, over here, Woman I say,
Won’t you please join me for coffee today.
Don’t worry, of course, I like it done Dutch
For the Woman’s sake, I don’t pay for much.Look, I’m reading a French Feminist play,
Women of Color, PC and OK.
I write modest poems, no rhyme and such;
Just true words, cautious tone—What? I can’t touch?You’re late? You’re going? Give me time, don’t leave,
I’ll flip you the queen shoved down my shirt sleeve:
I’ve read Rich!
“You?”
Yes, but she’s sure a bitch—
(Uh oh, bad bet, no, wet, yet, won’t concede!)
I only meant she’s difficult to read!Miss Woman, yes you, dear Woman I say,
Perhaps you would join me for tea today?
Alas, these latent rhymes were still composed in retreat, best read in the voice of a decadent aristocrat. Of some value at lifting him out of his depressed state, as reading them in a frenzy, they offered a fierier high than the exhilarating feel of her emancipatory Emma Goldman paperweight squashing his pinky. Just another failed attempt at fingering the receptionist? So be it. Roger’s hope and nerve yet lingered.
But not for much longer. Somewhere over the past thirteen years his pen dried up. Limerick, couplet, sonnet, shit book—it was all crap, personal drivel that left a tongue dry.
So here at fifty sits a lonely Wrent soaked in nostalgic ressentiment, the guilt-plagues and depressions of the middle ages. Into the last decade of the millennium, and there was no love, no sex, and no woman aside from a crazed bookkeeper in frothing lust with his bug man. To top it all, he’s losing his daughter to an impoverished poetaster—so the kid took a job, in failing Westphalian real estate of all things. What else? Not far from the tree, not far from the tree.
At his desk, he sorts through the memoirs. These scribbles could be his last chance to define his muse. Clumsy sentencing, curious diction, confusing structure, and an all around lack of polish, yes, but Wrent kind of likes them. Still too young a writer to admit he has also failed at slumlording, nevertheless, whenever possible, he composes on onion-skin leaf.
Perusing his papers thusly, an olifactory intrusion penetrates his nostrils. Indeed, an odd stench has invaded the office. It is a repellent odor, a scent of summer, perhaps one to keep insects away. The less than odiferous stench merges with his memories and grows pertinent to his past. He drifts off into another almost hallucinatory déjà vu.
The parents sent Wrent away after high school. But such a pent-up fellow won’t last more than two-thirds of a semester at college, particularly not at a parochial school, those son-of-Paul, panty-raid capitals of the western world. Before you know it, he was flunked out and back in Westphalia, writing poetry. He couldn’t escape the pen-on-skin game, and so the local steakerie became his café, and eclectic Spark environs his sixième arrondissement.
Back then, the park area was mostly working-class Irish and Jewish turf, and the local food factories—from baked rolls to soup to pasta to ice cream—kept everyone (read “mostly Caucasians”) employed and happy enough. The peaceniks, hippies, blacks, gays, kooks, and then the whole mongrel horde weren’t to arrive until after the great divide. That was the sixties and also when good jobs began to leave the city in droves, migrating to more suburban clime. It always seemed more like work flight than white flight although the grad students and intellectuals could argue away the difference until it was smaller than the roach ember burning in the prongs of your tweezers. Whereas Spark-side poets are a dime a dozen today, before the great migrations, Wrent was a true anomaly. A sensitive lad? “Must be queer” was the only way the neighbors could understand it.
Now it’s one thing to sing a few sonnets or scrape together a few lines in high school, but a hundred pages of the stuff could overwhelm a poor fellow. He spent most of his time gulping fizzling colas and cheese steaks for lunch. Even then, Wrent never managed to string more than five lines together on the same subject. He couldn’t tell you when his attention span left him. TV, drugs, sex, rental showings, laundromats? But weren’t these post-poet events? A poem takes days of draining brain work whereas most other chores and diversions require thirty minutes or less. At the cheesesteakerie, he would be tossed at closing, thrown out again with the rotten lettuce and stale rolls—his limbs, pencils, and notepads strewn on the sidewalk. But back then, at least his writing went.
His parents, innocent working-class folk from an earlier Westphalia, knew not what to do with this useless artist kid. It was 1960. One day after work, his father came upon a strange ad in the back of the paper. It seemed to be for some sort of writing camp. The ad’s large print read:
Are You Fed Up With Your Child’s Interest in a Dying Art? Did you know that poets are pussies? Do you comprehend the complete unprofitability of poetry? Do you wonder where the money is? It’s in novels. Everyone’s reading them. Studios are buying the movie rights. Send your child to our novel camp and we’ll get his literary pen pointed toward monetary reward!
Sounds good to me thought Daddy Wrenzovich (Wrent, the shortened version, was at first merely Roger’s non de plume, in anticipation of a readership hostile to vowels, “v”s, and “z”s). While Roger wrote rhymes, sharpened pencils, and otherwise knocked around by lamplight at his desk, Papa and the Missus discussed the camp idea over dinner dishwashing. All parties agreed that something, or somebody, had to give. So that very evening, they told Roger to pack under the guise of a vacation to Grandma’s. Mom ground up sleeping pills and mixed it into his food. Avoiding brussel sprouts, he wolfed it down all the same. They smuggled him out in a little red strait jacket.
Alex Kudera's award-winning adjunct novel, Fight for Your Long Day (Atticus Books), was drafted in a walk-in closet during a summer in Seoul, South Korea. In 2016, he published Auggie's Revenge with Beating Windward Press as well as a Classroom Edition of Fight for Your Long Day with Hard Ball Press. The e-singles "Frade Killed Ellen" (Dutch Kills Press), "Turquoise Truck" (Mendicant Bookworks), and "The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity" (Gone Dog Press) are available most anywhere books are downloaded. His published short stories include "Awash in Barach and Bolano" (The Agonist), "My Father’s Great Recession" (Heavy Feather Review), and "Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served" (Eclectica Magazine).