cody todd

Diabolical Music

Why is it, when you phone the utility company

to explain your lack of payment --

after they've littered your mailbox for months

with their final past due notices,

after they've shut you off

and left you sitting in your home

with no heat, no lights, in dark

of dusk -- and after they've humiliated you

by making you explain your life to some computer --

why, then, do they put you on hold

and smear some Muzak turd across your ear?

Always some schmaltzy ballad

like Brandy

or Angel of the Morning

or Will You Love Me Tomorrow? --

diabolical music

calculated to remind you

of some lover you failed to understand,

or who failed to understand you,

and still you wait through dial tones

and intermittent echoes

of voices who might or might not be

human, and outside your house

women are driving up and down the street

to and from their boyfriends' houses,

guys who are even now rolling down into

the empty middle of the bed, fast-

forwarding to their favorite porno

moments -- moments so familiar

they practically stroke themselves

across the mind.  Another set of gestures

that aren't in any handbook,

any manual of etiquette --

this need for someone to adore

and place upon a pedestal,

since you've already given up on yourself

too many times.

you want to explain to the utility company:

how you've been too bereaved of life lately

to keep up, too sunk in the past

with its promise of having been better

In the Sun

(After Baudelaire)

In the embalmed suburb

measured out by slats of the Venetian

blinds (a trellis hiding blushing pleasures)

the unruly sun bangs and bangs

on rooftops and doorsills,

wanting in.

I

want to lift weights and flex my muscles:

in the corners of the room

the gridwork of the poem:

skipping and tripping on cobblewordstones.

(And finally bringing into focus, now and then,

fuzzy verses from my ancient dreams.)

The lifegiving father is an enemy of weaklings

and anemics.  He wakes up the roses

in the garden, sets the worms on them.

He drizzles honey down the cavities

of the hive, and the wrinkles of my brain.

And then a king, without retinue or valets,

silently slips into the hospital ward

where the lepers are.