.PROSE OF ARRIVAL. by Robert Klein Engler

.PROSE OF ARRIVAL.

--Robert Klein Engler


In life, there are no perfect affections.

--James Merrill

Hard Drive.

Listen. I bring news of the dead. They are not electronic, yet they have arrived. They are abandoned shells, half here, half there. They are the cast off exoskeletons of cicadas, perfect outlines of what used to fit. They are the wind that trails a ribbon. How do I know? I saw them. One lost his foot in the middle of the road, the rest of him was ten feet away, face down on a decal of blood. Other bodies were piled like kindling wood by the door, waiting to be used in death as they were used in life.

Listen. There is a story about how the dead are raised, but right now, these words only raise memory. Read the data from the drive, then stop. In the newer models, the heads park automatically. In revolutions, heads roll. Caught up in it, the executioner asks, "Paper or plastic?" No geek reboots his cut. The green light says its on. Love illuminates and so does loneliness when it burns. It tastes like earth. At first you call it milk. Listen, there is spinning and spinning and spinning as currents stream across the screen of the world, then, clunk. It stops.

Eeny meeni mini mo.
Catch a faggot by the toe.
Eeny meeni mini mo.
Wayne's a faggot. I told ya so.


Gigabytes.

Don't let the sons of bitches tell you, you can't write. The passive voice is the perfect voice for writers who happen to be gay. I have made here a lovely room of icons, lamps and liquor.

"What do you need?" the clerk at the computer store asks.

Outside his lovely room, the poet answers,"A new hard drive. My old one broke. The memory froze."

"We have one on sale. It's 80 gigabytes. Has space to hold everything!"

"That's too big," the poet, answers. "I only have a 40 gigabyte life."

Oh, dear, bread and beer.
If my mother wasn't married,
I wouldn't be here.


Software.

It's foolish to speculate about the qualities of a great poem no one has succeeded in writing. 0100101. Off. On. Off. Off. On. Off. On humid days the leaves have a translucent green. We ate at this patio restaurant among vines and succulents. I was hungry. I ordered meat. The stone horse head between potted flowers collects moss. Pesky flies persist. I googled his picture last week. Get on. Get off. I never imagined his hair would become so white. She must have been hungry, too.

Tiger, tiger burning bright
in the alley of the night.
Tiger, tiger, what is right,
to live with fore or hindsight?



Liquid Crystal Display.

Bite your nails, bitch. The Barbarians are here. They come from the land of books, rowing dragon-headed ships of postmodernism. There was a body, made from this body, but it evaporated. I remember using it to press against another. Look at that man over there, tight as a strap, his buckler shining in nightclub neon. Betcha he'll know what I mean, someday. And if he doesn't, so what? Imagine a monument standing for a long time on a hill. Then it falls over. Air rushes in to take the place stone used to fill. Maybe the air remembers an outline, maybe not.

The gap when lovers part is but a day,
Yet longer now it seem, a century.
What is the name for this? Not gay--
perhaps a golden penitentiary.


Printer.

They eat pasta shells in mariner sauce off enameled plates. The back door to his apartment is open and the warmth of autumn fills the small kitchen. There is red wine and cherry pie. A candle on the cabinet flickers with the wave of passing forms. It is perfect. So is his smile, and for a second dessert, the sugar of their bodies.

Eeny meeni mini mo.
Catch a faggot by the toe.
Eeny meeni mini mo.
Johnny's a faggot. I told ya so.

On the rug, pulleys in their limbs, lift them to a high and dangerous cliff. He cannot get enough of this salt. There is the danger--the more he drinks, the more thirsty he is. When tectonic plates of earth shift, so do earthquakes rattle cities. When love shifts, there comes a quake, too. He arches his back and jets into the air. Ink is blood to words. He blinks, then looks away. A line of code is missing. There are no moving parts that spin the soul.


Uniform Resource Locator.

He sits three chairs away from me at the college library and yet I still feel his presence like a coat on my shoulders. He wears suede boots. He keeps looking at me. In another world my hands could follow his body to outline completeness. Instead, a girl passes dragging her rolling luggage caught in the river of the world. The night is a row of jeweled windows stretching to the stars. She looks in at us, then walks past, the way a lion on the prowl passes what is already dead.

Girl on the L. Boyish slick.
She's got the slacks. Got the hair.
Chews a toothpick.
Can't see her married to a millionaire.


Browser.

The young man ahead of me walks with a slight limp. The sole of his left shoe does not flex. That means he wears an artificial limb. He left part of himself from the knee down in Najaf, Iraq. After the explosion his separated flesh got caught up in the treads of a tank. The hamburger that used to be part of a man mixes with crumbs of dust. Thank God for morphine! They give their body to war the way they give it to love. Those arms are still strong and can hold someone, someone who will settle for a part. I bet he thinks, "Who would do a gimp?" Our flesh becomes the coins that buy a share in the World to Come. The beggar limps, the lover, too.

A man bends over the bank of a garbage can.
Does he make a deposit or a withdrawal?
Cancer. Six months to live. Count the crawl.
Might as well party while you can.


Terminal.

What's going down? He has to read Spinoza for his seminar. Shaughnasey want's to suck him dry. On the other side of the world, Jimmy steps on a Vietcong mine and disappears into a puff of blood. Double click another file. His heart has been gnawing on this bone a long time. If he gives up hatred of them, he will live with nothing. He already gave up love. Some men grind down the bone so fine, when they look at rock, tree and cloud, it is only You they see.

Oh, dear, brot und bier.
If your mutter wasn't married
you wouldn't be here.


Keyboard.

Alef, Beth, Gimel. Alpha, Beta, Gamma. Sometimes there is not time to make a world with another, except to make it out of poems. A, B, C. He's tired of typing--call it key bored. What's your type? Palatino. Times Roman. Helvetica. The flesh becomes word. ASDFGHJKL. G. GL. GLB. GLBT. GLBTQ. "What's Q for?" Questioning. GLBTQA. "And A, what's A for?" Look and see. In the World to Come, the Answers are before the Questions.

Eeny meeni mini mo.
Catch a faggot by the toe.
Eeny meeni mini mo.
Catch a faggot, then let him go.

e: RKleinEngler@aol.com

web: RobertKleinEngler.com

Interview: http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/interviewengler.html

Robert Klein Engler lives in Chicago and New Orleans. He is a writer and artist whose work is sometimes characterized as politically incorrect. Born on the southwest side of Chicago, Robert taught many years at Richard J. Daley College, until he was banned by the chancellor. Robert holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana and the University of Chicago Divinity School. He has received 2 Illinois Arts Council awards for his poetry. Just google his name to find his writing on the Internet.

Michael Morgan writing in the Comstock Review says that Robert Klein Engler "...is a poet of the first rank." Another reviewer on amazon.com disagrees. This reviewer says that Engler's book, A Winter of Words, is trash and that "Engler is a conflicted, sad man who likes to sulk in his book." He then adds, "Mr. Engler you are a Eurocentric nutcase and need to go to a mental hospital."

Larry Winfield of Los Angeles, CA writes that "...I must admit my grievous lack of artistic judgment (sic) in publishing Engler's poetry in past issues of Liquid Glyph"...Engler is "the poetry scene's version of Dinesh D'Souza."

C. J. Laity, editor of ChiagoPoetry.com claims, "I too published this hateful bag of slime...little did I know I was helping to create a nazi monster who was bent on destroying me and all my friends...There are literally thousands of poets in Chicago who are better writers than Engler...he is simply a rotten human being that I prefer not to associate with." These comments are echoed by Ramsin Canon's assessment in Gaper's Block where Canon refers to Engler's writings as a "sublime banquet of bullshit."