A Suite: On the Eve of the War on Iraq

"A SUITE:
on the eve of the war on Iraq"

by Jim McCurry

Something’s afoot, the menu glossy.
Something’s gamey,
half-indisposed,
but maybe it’s just
the old paradoxical complaint.
Maybe our students were better served
if we were robots.
I call my secretary:
Go home and rest, let’s work together.
She answers on tape, saying,
I am at home.


By now Nurse has tapped the vein
within my elbow hinge.
I hold the gauze fast upon the red spot,
by habit, thanking her.
The wretched nose spray,
a wave of sweet malingering
nostalgia, I
sprawl in the foam,
another mental health day
wake, nausea,
the night of anarchy & insurrections,
choppers,
the last aerial attacks -- I am
at last the dispossessed,
the red spot,
the scrap of meat & bone,
mindless, bleeding,
the infidel we liberate
from ignorance,
the one who fails to worship
freedom’s icon,
the slave of tyranny
who will not bow
to the red white & blue.


The duct tape on the mother’s
collar bone
marks her
for Saddam’s agents in black pajamas,
the last metastasis, the final
cancer
that will take the only kind wolf
in the West to suckle me.


II


Students, let us get together and chant—
Keep your Juvenal,
your flaming Tacitus barbs—
not nearly tacit enough!
Who can pay for us
the price of layers uncovered
by Tuscany stonemen?
Tactless tactics, one admits,
but who can afford
these sunstruck vintages? So—
here is today’s History--
bare or rudely dressed.


Add, if you will, fresh thyme,
a wand of wayward rosemary,
a pungent, brittle sprig
to this corse, if ready to hand.


III


Sweating at the end,
the utmost verge of Lethe,
I stare bullets at
the last domino to fall
before I exact my dull revenge:
a red plastic
nuclear automatic spits blobs
of octopus ink progresso,
dots accumuloso on my adversary’s
torso, the Brown shirt foe.
A cloned cross of Larry, Curly & Moe,
this barking basso
laughs himself to death beside me
& who is this dreadnaught in curlers
who seems to awaken beside me
to yet another cramp
of angst—scraping at
an empty jar for a scrap of malaise,
postmodern shortness of breath,
postmenstrual policy draft,
another CFR pill?


IV


Don’t send a boy, et cetera,
don’t wait a day or two.
Those marbles, those
shot dice. As fall’s no mere
mirror-bridge to winter, hello’s
that old tune
you thought you had to learn
to play, the claw
at the levis crotch,
nostrils, howitzers too,
cool eyes, some caliber
of bore—March
weather ‘s the window we need
to make hay. 50% of the people
of Iraq are 15 and younger,
but git Sad-
dam.

He
cain’t hide.


V


Horns venture.
Your ears grow points,
you stink
of raw red meat.
Sulphur. Classic
iconography.


Top secret layer of intelligence
warbucks aplenty
I need for you to go off
into the night,
Mr Roman fucking Candle,
Mr President,
explode into sexier neckties,
more italicized brows,
smirks more obvious,
anti-kowtow.


Loiter with intent
(beware, you Gulf Oil Sabines)
the avenues of happiness


beneath the leafy indications
the poplar-like plumes,
the Virgil vigil, the virile
exclamations.


Arrow feathers.


Colonize the terror zones.


Our mind’s the bodies’ itch.


Posted over on Identity Theory