Tony Barnstone
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The Suckee, Fuckee, Blowjob Sutra
Suckee, fuckee, blowjob? call the prostitutes
from the mouths of shabby shacks,
and I am fourteen and now my uncle Jack is offering
a woman ten bucks, five bucks, to do my brother
and me together, trying to make us squirm.
And now I am forty-five, typing black words
across a bright screen in the five a.m. dark
because night presses the window with so much erotic promise
and something that feels important has been eluding me
and the face that peers out of the dark window at me
is the face of an old man I don’t recognize.
And now I’m twenty-five and I walk downstairs
into the cavelike dark of a Berkeley pizzeria
where the line of video games chants come-ons
like hopeful wallflowers at a teenage dance,
with mirrorball lights in their eyes.
And when I’m in the game I’m the kick-ass king,
the one-armed warrior of the wasteland, Jean-Paul Sartre
with a strap-on shotgun, blasting my way
across the No Exit stage, jiggling myself towards
the climax that comes when the pattern comes clear.
But beyond the pattern is another pattern,
beyond each level is another level, and I’ve lost
quarters, faith, and patience and so I turn
from the machine and sprint into the numinous
white rectangle at the top of the stairs.
And yes, I’m overeducated, so it reminds me
of the Parable of the Cave when I leap like Nijinsky
through glass doors into to kalon, into the mysterium tremendum,
or at least into the pastel light of California,
leaving the basement level and reentering the world
of messages gabbling on the far side of sense:
digital phones diddling with satellites, mouths
and tongues playing the wind instrument of the throat,
streetlight grammar conjugating traffic,
panhandlers panhandling, handbills posted
so thick the telephone poles have inch-fat paper vests,
and all of it so hopeful, and all of it calling suckee,
calling fuckee, calling blowjob, though I censor it out.
And yet, just now, when I look down at my feet
one message spray-painted on the concrete slips through:
"Who really needs a red wheelbarrow?"
And, as my mind wheels that question back and forth,
trying to decide if it’s empty or a load,
an open Jeep yowls up, loaded with whooping frat boys
in baseball caps and wife-beaters, and one pumps his fist
and in perfect Californese shouts to me
and no one else in the world, Carpe diem, Dude!
The Video Arcade Psalm
When one boy’s head is chopped off, he falls dead,
and bright blood squirts out from the lurid stump.
You fag, he says, you got my fucking head.
Give me another quarter, or I’ll stomp
your face, he smiles. His soul leaves through the eyes’
movie projector, spills into the dream;
dark honey of his brain is crystalized
into men fighting on the video screen.
Then in the alley they chuck rocks until
black fur and wings seethe from the hive, but still
the wasps won’t dive. They bumble like dumb bees
in midair. So the boys go home to play
“House of the Dead,” though as the first boy says,
This game sucks dick. I’m sick of shooting zombies.
The Video Arcade Buddha
The video arcade Buddha looks like any other Buddha,
could have been transported whole from a shrine
in Nepal or Burma: chest sagging above a pot belly,
wooden, painted limbs pretzeled into the lotus position.
The glass eyes watch absently as surfers and deathpunks pass
in a scratched, fingerprinted, plexiglass haze.
The boy with the dangling crucifix and Whitesnake teeshirt,
eyes still glazed from the early show at the Starlight,
wheels off from a flock of Heavy Metal bighairs
and postures before the machine, trying to figure.
There are no instructions, only a quarter slot.
He’s put off, but he puts it in, if only to watch what happens.
A bell rings and with a jerk the hidden clockwork
starts to turn; the right hand lifts from the knee
and gestures mechanically, and the wooden mouth hinges
mutely open and shut. A fortune in a plastic bubble
drops into the shelf below like a slot machine in Reno,
and the wheels spinning the Buddha into animation
suddenly stop. Who knows what fortune he’s bought?
Maybe it says "Live long and prosper"
or "Never give a sucker an even break,"
but the bighair walks off looking disgusted,
and, until his next cheap incarnation, the Buddha settles
into nothingness, a panhandler between handouts,
his heart connected to the same wire
as the metal bell, and his eyes empty, empty.
Why I Play Video Games
It’s Rock and Roll and Bowl night.
The pins are flying, and machines call
from the arcade like stripjoint hawkers
selling electric bliss--a mantra of jazz riffs,
mad reiterations of Beethoven,
bops and bleeps and crashes
repeating like jawlines, nose bulbs, cheekbones
through the generations of machines.
I seek this cheap cacophony as a ritual of escape,
joining rows of video addicts as serious
in their pursuits as twenty monks at prayer.
And what would you have me do?
Wear a saffron robe and curl around myself
in the park? No, there is something here
at the center of the discord, a kind of exhaustion
that comes when you’ve found the rhythm
of your machine, a pattern reeling through you
until you can close your eyes and see
mandalas of light form and deform,
reeling and unreeling until you feel
its simple story might almost make you real.
Small, a small heroic endeavor:
I cannot be what I am
so I become money, quarter by quarter,
and live as long as I can live.
"The Suckee, Fuckee Blowjob Sutra" and "The Video Arcade Psalm" first published in The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press); "The Video Arcade Budha" and "Why I Play Video Games" first published in Impure (U. of Florida Press).
Bio
Tony Barnstone is The Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College and has a Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. His books of poetry include Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry (BKMK Press),The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, 2008), which won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry, Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005) and Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone (University Press of Florida, 1998), in addition to a chapbook of poems titled Naked Magic (Main Street Rag). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose and an editor of literary textbooks. His books in these areas include Chinese Erotic Poetry (Everyman, 2007); The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor, 2005); Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry (Wesleyan, 1993); Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei (University Press of New England, 1991); The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (Shambhala, 1996); and the textbooks Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Literatures of Asia, and Literatures of the Middle East (all from Prentice Hall Publishers). Among his awards are the Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Festival and a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, Barnstone has lived in Greece, Spain, Kenya and China.