Dregs Benedict: Kate’s Own Clunkers

Such sport I’ve been having with the dreck of the greats! In the spirit of fair play, I offer these wild misfires of my own.

But first, a few words about the bad poems that flow from all our pens. A poet’s early work, commonly called “juvenilia,” is almost always weak work. It takes a long time for the apprentice in any field to achieve mastery. Early poems tend to suffer from obviousness, sentimentality, overreaching, ranting, and either a complete lack of craft or a poor use of it. Sweet, sad, that young poets are so enraptured by their own pathetic lines—or anyway I was. I admit to that. I’ve often wondered what might have transpired if I’d been a taker of workshops then. Would I have improved faster? Or would the negative reactions of others been so soul-killing as to silence me forever? A sense of unbridled play and even unconditional self-admiration seems to me, in retrospect, an important part of the process of becoming a poet.

In time, those with talent break through to a distinctive and mature style. And still, bad poems keep coming. The focus rambles, the rhythm bobbles, the fizz goes flat. The best you can do is recognize a clunker when you see it, and either tear it up or file it away for a rewrite down the line.

I’ve thrown a lot of poems out! These I’ve kept. Most are souvenirs of my feral youth, wretched, yes, but nostalgically so. Something like “The Strap” serves as a sort of hairshirt, a penance weeding out pride. The last one is the type of outrageous thing I’ll probably keep writing now and then, just to let off steam—writing, but not publishing.


The Hungry I

From the earliest of my early juvenilia, here is a poem that wants to be sexy but just sounds yucky. As I recall it, at the time I’d never even heard of oral sex. Perhaps Catholic virgins ought to think twice before they take up such themes?


Craving something gushy and rare—
like a burger oozing catsup, dripping oil,
is nothing to keep secret on today’s day.

It’s fall.
Time to gulp in something luscious—
like the leaves
or someone’s skin
or even drooling redmeat on a warm bun.

Mud too might be delicious.
Mud and marshmallows,
pillow slips, and
gooey candy apples topped with tongues!

Ah ha, you’re laughing!
Does that mean you’re ripe?
And just crave to sink your teeth
in warmth and wetness?

There’s no surprise: it’s me.
And there’s nothing warmer, wetter
or as free.

So on this oozy, candy day
consider eating
me.


Susan of the Quiet Haikus

After an old gal pal called me on the phone sounding drunk, depressive and delusional, I took up the pen and wrote this sentimental little poem in her honor. Sincerity can be so insincere!


Susan of the quiet haikus, at midnight you call for me,
soul’s crystal crumbling.
In two years you never reached to me
but the wine in you is humbling.

You breathe air sour as old milk.
You are sealed in wax. Containerized.
Sirens sing from the razor blades
and the mirror that eyes you magnifies.

Your self is mist mirrored in a lake.
Will you grope for it, will you give your shadows shape?
Beyond you, doctors drone and strangers gape.
But oh within you, quiet haikus yearn for you to wake.


November’s Vertigo

This is what can happen when you’re a wannabe sophomore poet who (1) sees a squished pigeon on the street, (2) burns herself ironing, and (3) gets drunk, all on one November Saturday.


First the pulp, the remains.
Gutted nucleus of a veering street
where shoes and tires sped.
The red.
The slaver-stains.

Next the scorch, the deep bleed.
Seep of iron and of smelted skin
that made the brain uncurl.
The pearl.
The blister-bead.

            Then the clock.
                      And it counted off
                          the seconds
                      like dynamite
            unseen.
                      And it spun out
                          all the hours
                      like
            a washing machine.
                      A daughter
                          of its fury
                      pounded
            on my wrist
                      and it horrified
                          the pulse-beat
                      and made the heart
            twist.

Tonight the sheets, the round shock.
Knots in legs full of acid lymph
till whiskey-vomits surge.
The purge.
The purgisnacht.


Wind

This hails from my college years when I first took up a robust sonneteering. The simpler, more measured diction represented a quantum leap out of the heavy-breathing and over-writing featured above. But midway through, for no good reason I abandoned the rhyme scheme—my teacher didn’t even question it—and I just couldn’t bring the thing to an effective closure. False notes are frequent with beginner violinists, and beginner poets.


“Merely weather,” he tells me. “Merely a sign
that earth obeys her maker’s rule and spins.”
So if it storms, the wind commits no crime.
And even when there’s ruin, nobody sins.
A wailing gale is not a whore screaming:
so if, outside, the trees are desperate
and seem, drunk sluts, to slouch and implore—
I misinterpret them. Twisters eat up houses,
silos, whole fields of corn, but aren’t monsters
or the devil’s jaws. “Such fables are unhealthy
in an educated age. You had better be
inspired by less measured things than wind!”
   ”A poet is the wind,” I said.
   ”Remember that we’re ruthless and won’t be underfed.”


The Host

This college poem was inspired by something spoken by Adrian Leverkuhn, a character of Thomas Mann’s: “. . . there are holy horrors brewing. The theological virus, it seems, does not get out of one’s blood so easily.” I was beginning to look at Catholicism, the religion I was raised in, in a similar light, and decided to write a poem revealing (and reveling in) what I saw then as a core insanity, the transubstantiation of Holy Eucharist. Nowadays I consider it the stupidest poem I’ve ever written. Then, it held me spellbound and I gloried in the blasphemous persona. I guess it was a stage.


The Host is talisman. A thing possessed.
A symbol of risen flesh that is what it symbolizes.
A primitive gift, primal as bread, lust, dreams
and the screams of Kithairon. We are its guests.

We are its placators. There are a thousand Hosts
here. A thousand ivory trinkets, tokens, eyes.
They peer out from a golden cup inside a bread box—
the immaculate tabernacle, kept clean as the ghosts

of the busy virgins who tend the votive flame. One,
this is not manna, sputtering in torrents from a cloud.
It is no marvel from the start. It begins in common kitchens
with tap water and ovens and a cook’s white thumb.

Two, we are not cannibals. We are victims,
chewed on by some languorous organism. We receive it
and our brains steep in black animate wine. They are beginning
to soften. We kneel, we kiss, we warble troubled hymns

and rub Our Lady’s abacus, her lapis coils.
We are owned. Understand this. We are prayed upon
by one of God’s ambassadors, one of His blest.
He knows God’s ancient language and toils

as God’s interpreter. He speaks the incantation, the spell
that quickens bits of bread with living tissue, capillaries,
cells. They melt like sweetbreads in our mouths, they ooze,
they are miraculous, oh they hurt you, they are pure hell.

I bring you now a Sunday, in April, in the glorious season
of Christ Jesus, He Who salvages, He Who mortifies,
He Who dogs it timid at the Father’s heels.
He is our virus, our chancre, our rugged Roman strain,

our saviour, our spouse, our baby, our for-being reason.


The Strap

Not all my bad stuff is young stuff, alas. I wrote this one in my 30’s and it was actually published in a magazine. I consider this a self-aggrandizing confessional piece which is unfair to the memory of my father and untrue to the experience it describes. The incessant end rhymes bug me.


He kept it in his man’s closet, musty
with leather smells and strange men’s dust,
hanging near bandannas and rusty
rifles, a dark presence eroding my trust
day by day, year by year. When I was bad, a lust
came over him. He’d fetch the strap, and hair mussed,
come towards me, explaining how I must
be good or what snaked in his hands, thrust-
ing and unbuckled, would whip me hard, leaving crusts
of blood on my behind, color of berry, color of rust.
He never struck: it was threat only. No one fussed
to watch it, not even mother, whose big bust
was a fine pillow for tears, usually. Daddy bussed
me on the cheek and hid the strap away till his lust
bloomed again. I’m telling you: it wasn’t just.


Cadaver Report

Here’s a very recent example of Dregs Benedict. Even writing this thing I knew it was rather reprehensible. After her death, I wrote a series of deeply felt, loving, and sometimes uncanny poems about my mother. This one, written in the persona of a coroner (NB: a whole-cloth contrivance; my mother’s body was not autopsied) served as an antidote to the reverence, I suppose.


Eighty-nine year old female.

Time of death: 1:05 AM, first of April, new millennium, no leaves yet on the northern
trees, ice receding in Egret Lake, hours of darkness and light: roughly equal.

No unusual bruising or scarring. Small scab on bridge of nose. Toenails overgrown,
possibly septic. Absence of teeth and body hair: not atypical. Thorned bleeding heart tattoo: not atypical.

Dissection b/a/u. No stomach contents to speak of. Liver slightly cirrhosed. Prolapsed bladder and uterus: not atypical. Splenetic rust: atypical. Striations in small intestine suggest shearworm infestation early in life. Left and right kidneys appear to have changed places: not sure what to make of it.

Brain clotted with plaques and tangles: typical, though tangles exhibit an unexpected symmetry, like a Chinese ideogram. Reminder: show Polaroid to Doctor Ng.

Closing of torso unexpectedly difficult; instantaneous dissolving of skin at each staple. Duct tape more successful. Note to mortician: cremate without delay.

Manner of death: old age compounded by chemical stress, early undiagnosed hence untreated disease, and an ardent belief system dependent on ideas of self-affliction and bodily resurrection. Not atypical.

Carol, hah, scratch that! Manner of death: Alzheimer’s disease: typical. Anything inappropriate, just edit it out, use your judgment. File under A and order some more of that almond coffee creamer for the office, will you, and another dozen razor point pens.

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