Fale Pyre (or, The Priory of the Poetry)
A routine practice interrupted so
Unpredictably; can soften the blow
Of canoes falling from airplanes. Hellcat
Drowns in hot dog water her bureaucrat.
Head to toe reddening of blood rushing
To a dead end. You despise most, blushing.
Vignettes the brain molding, crystalline.
An adjective reality straight-line.
A fist, slick with lube, can gesticulate,
In a minutia of cold, masturbate.
Gone is the individual’s sense of
Dignity. Watching brotherly love.
As are the gnats in the concealed, stale, groves
Slick back my hair in the oil of cloves
Eggs, I can only wish will hatch under my
Skin. Stale breath complete me and transmogrify.
In the western dermis of ants, termites
Overpopulation of like, as trite.
Antagonize the colonies consent
On with the motley! Old jokes we resent.
Heard before to wide adulation, find
A moment in the sun and don’t go blind.
(Sweety, Fale Pyre, lines 21-42)
Line 21: A routine practice interrupted so
Line 22: Unpredictably; can soften the blow
Of the many external stimuli which can bludgeon creative practice, alcohol and cigarettes were the preferred deterrent of our poet. I read an interview of his once, talking to Norman Door in a report for 27th street, and Shel Sweety said that beer was his utmost imbibement when writing. Liquor hit too fast, in his opinion. Wine made him erotic, in his opinion. And drugs made the keyboard firm as cement.
Drinking beer, however, is a creeping intoxication. Scaling the brick walls of the mind with blistering fingers and eyes blinded by the white, noon sun. But in that physical discomfort are birthed great American sonnets. Frequent breaks to relieve himself urinarily and have a cigarette lasted about 10-15 minutes and during which the brain amortizes with fresh inoculations. And of course alcohol’s most desirable quality is the buffer it provides between individuals, it is a sad and isolating high that artists of his torment are rarely without.
Once, Shel Sweety asked me, “Dr. Aero Coddlers, you’re a bright man. In your opinion, what will be the death of the artist?” To that I said, having ruminated the question many times before, “the death of the artist shall be himself. For there is no greater sorrow than that which comes from inside. There is no amount of pity which can overpower a vapid conscience. Only man has the power to change that, often he does not.”
Sweety sucked his teeth and scowled at the ground, humoring my theory, tossing around the philosophical ping pong ball in a match against himself. He smiled, and said, “to that we shall drink.”
Line 25: Head to toe reddening of blood rushing
Line 26: To a dead end. You despise most, blushing.
Of the men I’d met in my life that had a profound imposition on my person, Sweety’s was the strongest, the most withstanding. I know most felt the same, and if they didn’t I’d assume they had been scorned by his wit. I believe these lines are in reference to his possessed masculinity of solitude. What man alive is unfamiliar with the compromising flagstaff of an excited manhood? Certainly not many.
At a gala one night, a benefit a for inner-city pickleball leagues, Sweety anointed me a comely charlatan of his warmest desire. Despite being a man of wit and with no shortage of spring worn on my face, I was taken aback. I hesitated to indulge the words of a man topping off his champagne with brandy. Had he swelled with libation and floated to the atmosphere in which one flies unencumbered by the wont of adulthood?
No, he assured me, he had not. Sweety was only remiss he hadn’t said anything sooner. To boot, he was no more under the table than fellow writer in attendance, AD Thorp Yorko, who’d been caught twice already in closets with the waitstaff and once in the bathroom on her knees trading saline with the toilet.
He loved me. There was a firmness hanging from his belt which frightened and yet confirmed to me he was endeared to my presence. For the duration of our friendship it had been, in my impression, strictly academic, but now had the potential to be more, and I was alive at the thought.
Line 27: Vignettes the brain molding, crystalline.
Sweety saw the world in geode structures of film. It was apparent without having even read his work that this man was an abstract of bohemia, a satire of consciousness, and this was expressed outwardly to his detriment. He regaled to me once having been at the home of esteemed actor, star of Green Cancres, Eva Gabortion, and together traded tales of old Hollywood.
Although, and I mean not to discern Sweety as dishonest, there is no evidence of him having been a member of this scene, unbeknownst to Eva. To the contrary there is actually evidence to support the idea that Sweety was in Texas at the time. Corroborated by photos taken of him with former president, John F. Kennedy, the morning of his assassination, no less. I would refrain from assuming, in the immense grief that ensued, that Sweety did not commit himself to numbing that pain in the glow of Hollywood.
I have spent time combing archives for photographic evidence of this period but fail to find anything concrete. Although a shot at the Hollywood bowl of actor, Benet Rills, and director, Chadd Vinyl enjoying a dinner for two is interrupted by a peace sign orbiting the back of the actors head so as to mock him with false rabbit ears.
A classic prank of Sweety’s this was. And for that reason I’m sure it was him orchestrating the joke. He told me, while at dinner one night after a book signing event in Missoula, Montana. He once had an affair with Rills. Sweety was invited to shadow the set of the film adaptation of his book, This Seat Sat This Thesis, of which Rills played the main character, adjunct theatre professor, Abram Ion Vidovik. After the shooting of a scene in which Vidovik escapes a mansion with three heads in jars, being trailed by paparazzi and serial killers, Rills was faint and asked to retire to his trailer for a nap. Coincidentally Sweety had stepped out for a cigarette and when Rills crossed his path the two took to running lines in Rills trailer three times a day for the duration of the filming.
I believe this line could also be a premonition of sorts. Perhaps the most ominous line Sweety ever wrote. Considering he died of alcohol induced dementia, a molding of the brain, crystalizing specific memories and reactions, I wonder if he had a vision of his own death. Although he was never very spiritual, despite praying every day as soon as he woke up and before he went to bed and at myriad points throughout the day, there is no reason to assume a ghastly figure did not present itself to him and hypnotize the poor poet into seeing himself dead.
Sweety, a vehicle which leaves behind treadmarks of spite, most likely wanted to prove the spirit right and effected his own demise, that of a dipsomaniac.
Line 30: In a minutia of cold, masturbate.
Sweety is, in my opinion, at his best when he bears it all. In the academic circles which study him he is seen as a master of illusion, up there with literary titans born of the concentrations paramount epochs. The self described post-post-modernist, is most in love with polymelian art which with one arm provokes its audience, with another teaches, and with its last and most deformed slowly masturbates itself. For Sweety would often say that “art is useless to everyone except the person who makes it. If you do nothing else with your work you should at least get yourself off.”
I combated this on a morning stroll along Chicago’s lakefront saying, “you mean to tell me the artist is a completely selfish being? That someone shouldn’t create even without at least a single other person in mind? Even if you don’t know who you’re talking to you must assume that the work you create opens a dialogue on the content of your tongue. Otherwise you’re talking at the audience instead of with them!”
“I don’t mind talking at the audience. I know what I want to say and I know how I want to say it. I do not make art for other people I make it for myself. I love that people can connect with what I write but at the end of the day I write for an audience of one and even he doesn’t sit in the front row.” He continued, “art has done nothing but deride me.”
This baffled me. I have always know Sweety had a propensity for self-interest, what man, especially one harboring such profundity, doesn’t? But as the waves crashed on the city’s concrete beach I thought they paralleled my own heartbeat, puncturing my being in claps of scum.
He said, “you only stop writing the book when you run out of things to say.”
I stopped. “Okay, and what if the book goes unwritten?”
He stopped. “I would rather die.”
Sweety confounded me; having no idea what it was that plagued his brain. Perhaps a winch turned by some devious sponge, or a bug implanted by a foreign spy. There was nothing that brought that two of us closer, and as he lay dying I refused the idea that I was going to miss him.
Line 41: Heard before to wide adulation, find
Line 42: A moment in the sun and don’t go blind.
At the highest rung of the ladder of Sweety’s ambition, the one which opened to a great expanse of gilded atmosphere, where only stars hung higher, was to win a Pulitzer Prize in the category of fiction.
I was in the audience of the ceremony, only a few heads behind the squirming poet. Nominated thrice and snubbed each time. Although the recipients of the award in the years they went up against Sweety were certainly deserving, moreso in fact, none hungered for the feast of this single adulation as much as him. The night before, and the morning of, and the afternoon of, and on the ride there even, he wore a stoic mask of malice. His tongue pressing so firm on his top teeth I was sure that when he next opened his mouth they’d be in the back of his throat. His lips were pursed so fiercely they were white at the border.
“To be nominated now for the fourth time and not win- I’ve got a pistol in my jacket pocket and a string of explosives where my ribs once were in case it jams.”
“Of your five most recently published works only one hasn’t been nominated. Win, lose, or draw I can guarantee you and this award will encircle each other until you stop writing.”
“If I don’t win I will stop writing. Eventually the whirlpool will swallow itself.”
“You said that last year, without the whirlpool metaphor, I have a feeling you only get better with age.” He said nothing. “You’ve really come into your own.”
“Cum into my own fist, perhaps.”
“If you had it your way the Kentucky Derby would set its goalpost atop the horses.”
Watching the envelope which had teased and repudiated Shel Sweety three years running be broached of its salivary seal, the poets head tweaked in response to a thousand pulsating neurons. In the years preceding I’d not once seen him so disconcerted, his nerves last year must’ve been soothed by the cosmic rule of a third attempts solidarity, the year before that thinking the first had been a fluke, and the year before that his selfish confidence loomed like an acrid fog and made those in attendance sick with pestilence.
This time it was either win or suicide, either way he would take center stage.