Prose Poems with Commentaries from My New Book While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
From Miracles & Mortifications
A Preamble
If I have and weaknesses as a writer, and of course I do, my biggest flaw is that I am lousy at self-promotion. I was taught by my WWII hardass father that any time you are praising your accomplishments, you are in fact diminishing them. In short, you should let your work stand for itself and shut the “F” up. The problem with this approach is that in a literary world where there are more writers than cockroaches, if you don’t promote your work in some way, it will only be read by your immediate family, and there’s a good chance even they may be too busy to take the time.
Why am I sharing this with you?
Over the next few months because I will be on vacation frequently, I am going to take the time to promote my latest two books of poetry and fiction: Shot: A Novel in Stories (MadHat Press, 2021) and While the Undertaker Sleeps Collected and New Prose Poems (just released this May of 2023, again by MadHat). See Amazon links at the bottom of this Substack entry.
One week, I will provide a sampling from my past books collected in While the Undertaker Sleeps; the following week, I will include a short story from Shot. Hopefully, this generous sampling will encourage you to buy the books, and to tell others about them. The below prose poems are from While the Undertaker Sleeps, which includes all of my previous books and also a section of “New” poems.
More specifically, the poems are from the first part of my second book of prose poems, Miracles and Mortifications, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. This section is called “Travels with Gigi,” which follows an unreliable narrator, who pursues his beloved in and out of major cities of the world. The “beloved’s” name is Gigi. You could call her “provocative” or a “ballbuster,” depending upon what generation you come from.
This sequence of love poems was my way of paying homage to the great love poems and stories of western literature, while also playing a lot with language, often making puns and even creating words you won’t find in the dictionary. I wanted to celebrate obsessive eroticism but also poke fun of it, which is why I created this unreliable narrator, who is a bumbling suitor, prone to hyperbole. There are many allusions throughout these poems, but you don’t have to be aware of them to appreciate the poems. Whenever you pay homage to a genre as a writer, the trick is to do so without excluding readers. Writers who expect readers to have read everything they have are self-absorbed snobs.
So enjoy these two lovebirds as they travel the globe. I certainly enjoyed creating them, and I hope they make you want to buy While the Undertaker Sleeps and see how their journey ends. I’ll give you a hint: it has something to do with King Kong. Also a wonderful introduction by the Australian poet and critic, Cassandra Atherton: Life and Times of Big Mr. Prose Poem
“Home”
Nighttime. I’m hitched to a machine, nursing a noun, tapping a verb on its shoulder, apposing appositives. Moments earlier, I was cruising the Internet, taping, then dancing to, national anthems of my favorite countries. “We never go anywhere,” I complained, maneuvering colored tacks around my wall-sized atlas. My vertebra has cracked; that’s what happened. Then it healed; now just an incredible longing for travel. This morning, tiny children hung upside down from damp branches of our dogwood tree, whispering baby, baby, baby. A premonition? A warning? Sure feels like a baby’s brewing, someone to keep company with our tow-headed boy asleep in his prince-sized bed. Burnt popcorn! Pigeons shitting on the patio! Insatiability of tomato worms! This is “home.” But also our Treasure Island bedsheets, with an ancient map of someone’s tropical paradise. It looks like a board game. “Gigi, I beg you to come closer.” And your response? “Don’t call me that.” It’s a childhood nickname, but one that stuck … Bedtime, all bashfulness banished. Quiet, save the croaking of a few insomniac crickets and the roar of a Harley. Tonight, we’ll tumble down Love’s dark hole, a trail of responsibilities, like breadcrumbs, behind us. “Set the bed for vibrate,” I whisper, wondering who will make the first move.
“Paris”
A white poodle named Gigi. A fingernail red as the fire breather’s face, red as my sparrow’s neck, which you sometimes touch. Louis XIV boasted, “I am the State.” Rimbaud, “Je est un autre.” But I respond, “Je ne comprend pas.” To come so far and stumble over a poodle named Gigi beneath an ancient fountain, beneath a tarnished Greek statue—his beard of seaweed, his baton and chiseled smirk. Impossible to be so sad beside this school of oversize goldfish and a poodle named Gigi. “Dear fated name!” So accustomed to miracles was Abelard, yet humbled by the pale of Eloisa’s shoulders, her oval mouth, as I am also. How my Gigi-magician pulls silk panties from our hotel dresser, like colored tissues from a fancy box. How she mocks my cotton pajamas until I yell in protest, “Forehead,” or “Foreskin.”
This white poodle named Gigi, by a fountain, begging for a bone.
To whom shall I give it?
“London”
Our down comforter discomfited, your cheeks complementary, like one white sun passing its light to another. I want to leap back into your pouch, bashful as fledging corn. But there’s work to be done. My white shirt and striped tie, my thin, black belt and shiny shoes that balance raindrops like newly waxed cars. I’ll wear these. I’ll befriend women with bread batter on their hands, women who reek of beer. You’ll be jealous, but consoled, as always, by your opulent ear lobes, with which you toy, endlessly. Are you sleeping or mad? Rescue me from the sting of aftershave, the certainty of slapping myself awake. A sign perhaps, show me, a gesture or jester to soothe.
I stroke your cheek, and your cruel finger responds—points to a doorway that has no door.
“Rio”
“Scrimmaging with a fat-calved bossa novan,” was how it came to me in this far-off rainy country, delivered, as it was, by a hairy-knuckled, Limey poet with heavily endowed pockets and alligator cowboy boots. What a stinker! I was watching the telly, waiting for a response from the Lithuanian Writer’s Colony, which promised me time for introspection and sexual group groping in a medieval castle. I say, I was watching kidney pie bake in the oven, eyeing the peasants in our Dutch miniature as they glanced up from their gruel. I was frozen in that long-drawn-out “how” we call love. So take a bird to Rio, I thought, find out who’s been undressing the corpse, and poof!, like magic, my stewardess and peanut snack arrived. I opened my notorious notebook, amused myself, lyrically. I raved, I wrote, I roved between fine gray lines, anticipating that neuter nation promised in the brochure, though smart enough not to trust prophets, poets, or travel agents, and love, well, when it speaks in the first person, you better be listening. I strove for a mindset parallel to yours, I whispered your mantras “Hello” and “Goodbye.” I sought you in the infamous favelas with their terminally ill streets. Was sent this way, that way, driven by the memory of our furious five years of amazing starts and finishes. But it was worth it when drenched, at last, in the terrible narcolepsy of each other’s arms, we watched from our hotel window as peasants pilgrimaged to the outstretched arms of a giant holy statue. They were chanting, “We, We, We,” but the position of our bodies suggested the “I’s” had won the day.
“Costa Rica”
Whatever Gigi wants, Gigi gets. This time it’s the day-flying, cyanide-filled moth, Urania ripheus, infamous for copulating with different species. “Ugh! Yuk! There’s a bug, squash it,” I tease, not wanting to burst from my hammock-cocoon. I wanted to help but had promised our host, René, that I’d clean the poison frog garden. Then I remembered this aphorism: “Universal hostility and fear towards a species are the products of ignorance.” I also remembered Gigi’s promise of a juicy love bite to be given beneath a huge banana tree near the forking paths … Long-curved leaves the size of scimitars, bright green spikes of plantains, and a white-skinned woman, her bare breasts barely the size of serpent eggs, her dark eyebrows alert, like two facing centipedes. I’m adjusting my loincloth, then waving my butterfly net made from a clothes hanger and the thinnest of Gigi’s panties. “Leaping lepidoptera. I got one.” Two ear-sized wings fringed with golden hair, its underside red and veined like a tiny heart. Drip drop, drip drop. Then naked we lie beneath our banana tree, bold as two mottled stink bugs. I hold the moth between my fingers, then let go. “Erotic things occur in the rain,” Gigi whispers, about to sink her teeth into my neck.
“Provincetown”
We laughed about the pine tree laying its eggs, the blue fright wig I bought last Halloween, then a little wine, and a little more. The bed next door began creaking a foreign, same-sex language. I was reading a thin book wherein a fat lady wrestles with nouns. A book taking sixty years to flower. Later, we stumbled into a tree-shaded courtyard where white marble lions drank from an albatross’ basin. We had run out of booze, and I kept having to pee. “So go one last time,” and “Okay, I will.” The mean mosaic of the courtyard floor was making me dizzy, anyway. Off-season, the narrow streets were barren, the frigid, salt air from another century when wreckers scoured the beaches for boxes and barrels. “Gigi,” I said, “in the fall the cows here often feed on cods’ heads! Did you know that?” “And capybaras have webbed feet and are excellent swimmers,” she replied, understanding my foreplay. We would have continued if not for a large poster of a petrified, Amazonian face eyeballing us from a tarred telephone pole. “The Fat Bitch Is Back,” the poster announced. And we had to believe it, suddenly confronted by a woman dressed like a bird cage, and another like an umbrella. Really nice people, though, in spite of their cheap costumes. “Are we hungry yet? Are we downright famished?” Gigi nodded, knowing a loss is not a great loss, and that the liquor stores didn’t close until midnight.
“Geneva”
Banished from one writer’s colony for blowing the whistle on a certain Southern plagiarist, this is true. Booed at The Great Poetry Slam—true again. Not to mention a certain liaison with a long-stemmed reference librarian who slashed Gigi with a letter opener for reading our love letters. This time, they promised we’d be “drunken, expatriate writers” for two weeks, and that the roast beef sandwiches would be juicy. Just clean tables and look intelligent, write a few poems now and then. So I grew a handlebar moustache to mimic the horny social-activist poet who tried to skim the skin with Gigi while she served the sorbet. He had seen her play tennis and was, as he said, “overhauled by her overhand.” I continued to clean the antique wooden tables of lettuce scraps and garbanzo beans, thinking of a good place to hide Gigi’s racket. Fortunately, we were saved by a telegram announcing that I had won “The-Man-Least-In-Touch-With-His-Feminine-Side Contest.” A strange contest indeed, especially since I didn’t enter it. And the reward? Fifty dollars and two weeks in Geneva to study with the author of the trilogy He, She, It—a man steeped in paternalia, who enigmatically fingered his fly, asking over and over, “Who are you really, La-La Boy?” In a dimly lit room, he tightened leather straps around my wrists, tied a rooster to my desk and ordered it to peck out my eyes. But the rooster was really a French poet who’d been transformed into a rooster for sticking pins into chickens for the fun of it. The rooster-poet balked. “Who are you really?” my tormentor demanded, his white head looking as if it had just been fetched from the freezer, his almond-shaped hands quivering. Je suis Gigi, is what came to me, and “Je suis Gigi,” is what I said. As if on cue, her ancient, wooden racket came crashing through my blackened window, signifying both triumph and rescue … Later, a stiff wind off Lake Geneva, Gigi stroking my hair, feeding me tiny chocolates stolen from a local confectionary. I’m staring into a white, head-shaped cloud, my universe running in reverse, my own head haunted by the vision of a half-stitched Frankenstein, searching the mountainside for his father. An odd thought, if not for the insight of our rooster-poet, who keeps reciting in impeccable French: “Even the dumbest dreams can astound us.”
“Fiesole”
Intrigues are exhausting, so are pets and professors, photographers and poets. It’s a long walk to the orange groves, especially when I was ordered to stay home. This time, Gigi clothed in little besides a fishnet tank top and a pair of sky-blue running shoes. Brand new shoes, the gel still ungelled. Shoes attached to her ankles, her ankles to her calves, her calves to her thighs—parts poeticized by this skinny Polish photographer in black, skin-tight Levis who could pass for a child, except for the scar across his forehead and missing left thumb. Cowering behind a mossy boulder, I look and listen: “A little kick this time,” he laughs, and Gigi complies, awakening a squadron of fruit flies. It’s early, still damp, the dew frozen on branches and orange blossoms, which look like fancy glass-blown earrings. Now he tells her to shed her tank top, and I think, It’s time for Rome. Yes! I have the urge to go Roman, to order broad-shouldered, Amazonian slaves to lug ice from nearby mountains and blend it with honey and fruit juices. Then I’ll behead them. But we’re not in Rome; just a cloud of fruit flies, and Gigi, bare naked in her sky-blue running shoes. I swear it!
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories