Every once in a while, I get an idea of writing things
because I'm in a class--
somebody has something to do.
And once The Chelsea Review, which
is a funny magazine that comes out about once a year--
They decided that they were going to have an issue devoted
to technological poetry.
Very strange to me.
So I said I would try to write a technological poem.
And I wrote this poem which is called "Screw, a Technical Love
Poem."
[LAUGHTER]
And I begin with a definition for the word screwed
from Webster's New World Dictionary, page 1,310, World
Publishing Company, Cleveland, 1954.
Noun, Middle English, screwe.
Old French, escroue, hole in which a screw turns.
Latin, scrofa, sow, influenced by scrobis, vulva.
One, a mechanical device used for fastening things together,
consisting of a nail-like cylinder of metal
grooved in an advancing spiral and usually having
a slotted head.
It penetrates only by being turned, male or external--
screw.
Two, anything like such a device.
[LAUGHTER]
Three, a hollow cylinder equipped with a spiral groove
on an inner surface into which the male screw fits,
female or internal screw.
And this is my poem.
Sometimes I think of your father in his neat gangster shoes
sewing into your mother your eyes, then the strange teeth
touching blood on her ankle.
Turning yourself inside her made you
as graceful as a stillson wrench, which
can be twirled into narrow mouths or open ones.
The joints of selenium make you still
photograph me or any other woman who comes close.
34, I say, is the atomic number.
When you find 34 women with 34 grams
of selenium poured into 34 places--
the knees, the fingers, the ear holes,
those delicate junctures of the pelvis.
Oh coming out of me is yards of piano wire.
Unwind it, it should have been wound around the machine screw
with a square head or the machine screw with a round
head, or a wood screw, or a lag screw, or a set screw.
The hardware cannot compete with the software.
[LAUGHTER]
My brain, my throat, my anxious wrist.
On the female side, I must wait for the proper motion.
It is internal.
But impatience makes me want to push all the buttons,
flip all the switches, turn you on.
Yes, I technically want you and technically I can't have you.
How did life get so full of technicalities
when I only wanted to touch you but found
I didn't know enough formulas, did not have
a low enough atomic number.
Could not put out my hand and say,
I love you, because it's not a technical term.
[LAUGHTER]