This is a selection that I made today of poems
that I haven't read in decades.
And this one's called Mummy's Curse.
There were five movies about-- has a mummy in the title.
Cheap, black and white horror movies.
I see them all, and--
because, I mean, that's what we did in the 50s.
You know, go and see the double feature, triple feature
of horror movies.
Take your girlfriend, hoping that she'll be so
scared she'll jump in your lap.
[LAUGHTER]
But the movies were even, at the age
of a teenager, looked crummy.
I mean, I remember one of the mummy's movies,
and one of the actors--
not a mummy, but one of the actors--
leans against the pyramid, and the little pyramid shakes.
It was made of cardboard, you know.
[LAUGHTER]
So this is a homage to that wonderful cinema, those
forgotten, really bad movies that were so bad that they
were wonderful, actually.
"Mummy's curse.
Befriending an eccentric young woman, the sole resident
of a secluded Victorian mansion, she
takes long walks in the evening rain,
and so do I, with my hair full of dead leaves.
In her former life, she was an opera singer.
She remembers the rich, Neapolitan pastries, points
to a bit of fresh whipped cream, still left
in the corner of her lower lip.
Tells me she dragged a wooden cross once through a leper town
somewhere in India.
I was born in Copenhagen, I confide in her.
My father was a successful mortician.
My mother never lifted her nose out of a book.
Arthur Schopenhauer ruined our happy home.
Since then, a day doesn't go by without me
sticking a loaded revolver inside my mouth.
She had walked ahead of me, and had turned like a lion
tamer, towering with a whip in hand.
Luckily, in that moment, a mummy sped by on a bicycle,
carrying someone's pizza order and cursing
the mist and the potholes."
[LAUGHTER]