December 2024
Author's Note: “The Story of the Cigar Box and the Counterrevolutionary” is a title Robert Frost had in one of his journals, for a poem he planned to write but never did. “Some of It” is a parody of Frost’s “The Most of It,” written when I discovered that Frost and Gregory Corso shared a birthday,
Story of the Cigar Box and the Counterrevolutionary
I’d just come from the field, pulled off my boots,
And settled in before the fire, when
Discovering I was fresh out of cheroots,
I told myself, “I must go out again.”
An empty box at the tobacconist’s:
El Rey Havanas, with a list of contacts
Whom I suspected might be Communists
From north of Boston to the Adirondacks.
Well, truth be told, I’d contacts of my own,
Dick Nixon, Parnell Thomas, Martin Dies;
I rang up Central on the telephone,
Gave her a number: ‘twas the FBI’s.
Here in New England, we can’t be too wary:
Poets are counterrevolutionary.
Some of It
I just figured out
that for ten years now
the universe has been my job
I drove a cab through the trash-strewn streets of New York
looking for multitudes to smash
but when I honked my horn all that came back
was its own goddam mocking echo
I ran it off some cliff across in the Adirondacks
and as I hurtled toward the rocky lake
I cried out Life! Life! Life! and all I wanted back
was not some goddam echo
but a girl waif with stringy hair
shouting Death! Death! across the seat
while I kept screaming Life! Life! not because I meant it
just to keep the dialogue going
looking for love in contradiction.
If I had a girl, I'd drive off a cliff with her
crash into the scree on the other side,
splash into the rotting water
I'd let her swim for a while
but that might prove me too human
maybe I'd rut her like a great buck
pushing the crumpled water with my stallion fury
and land pouring like a waterfall
and stumble through the rocks with horny tread,
and leave her as I hit the underbrush
and that would be all.
Editor's Note: If this poem moves you, you must be a very strange person indeed. You should email Tad and let him know he's not alone. -JL