Issue 20: Daniel Morris
WAY IGGY 13 x 2
Part One
I.
Out of love’s annihilated coo comes
A trickle of frustration. Warm jets summon
Iggy Stooge to the comedian’s resentment.
The Stooges, however, may only forbid
Straight men from combining fear and shame.
2.
Nothing changes so beautifully
As Iggy’s desire for one more bite
Of Nena’s stolen Comice pear.
3.
Granted, this is not a tragic lie
Like the Oresteia. Nor is it farce
Like The Republic.
4.
Iggy Pop says no to yes and yes to no, but Iggy Stooge
Sheds no tears of laughter at the birth of his only daughter.
His maieutic mouth, however, feasts at the mantic banquet.
5.
Horace Walpole fancied sucking on the shattered shell
Of Iggy’s speckled blackbird. And yet Iggy drew
Walpole’s giant hand in armour sliding down
His jeans. The Stooge caught the slipper
Chucked from an upper banister.
6.
Iggy pulled the plug on a plan to perform
“Encomium to Helen” with a new backup band, The Nocturnal Council.
He favored embarking upon the friendless journey all sighted singers
Must make from phusis to nomos.
7.
Among the Philosophic Dogs, only Iggy slips off
His imperfect chair
Under cover of blackball into Ypsilante,
City of utmost simplicity.
He plants the trailer, inherited
From his parents, in an undeveloped field behind a municipal park.
8.
Iggy had no patience for euphonious entertainers
Who favored the sanitation of Homer, but few
Socratics forbid his view that beauty has no why.
9.
How about repaying the mothers?
How about staying put? How about snapping
As if he were Eudora Welty?
How about sucking on his mother’s teets
Fearless of contagion?
10.
The impurity of milk was no fairytale in Michigan,
But Iggy was an honest addict.
”Mother didn’t contaminate me. I contaminated myself.”
11.
Alt-Right frat boys in chinos rock
The mobile home to dislodge it from its moorings, but
The trailer long ago had taken root like an industrial plant.
12.
Swelling his rocker as if it were a cathedra,
Iggy admires the scenic repulsiveness
Of smokestacks he abandoned like a straight man
Who slept beside the portrait of Mishima smuggled from Japan.
13.
With some repentance, but no penitence, he calls up home.
The static soundings sound Berlin, 1975.
The Turkish immigrants and the tectonic plates of the Autobahn.
The birds all named Esther and the garage devoted to stolen auto parts.
The doorbell on the fritz in the Schoneberg District.
Part Two
1.
Iggy felt forsaken. He became a Fritz Lang film in the UFA Studio
Rotting in a rusty can, like pears
Many years beyond their expiration date.
2.
Panning for a blemish of Berlin in the 1970s
As he accepts the hefty trophy on behalf of all the other ugly losers,
Iggy suspects he never did RSVP the MC5 about that roadtrip
From Ypsilante to Grant Park in late August, 1968.
3.
It is still 1968.
And yet history is not and antiquity never was and anyway Grant Park is not his brouhaha.
He scoured the rot and sluiced the riot.
4.
Forget kicking
Doors off jams and still trolling
Barefoot in the park.
5.
Of course he could not go through withdrawal at Grant Park.
And yet he cannot not demonstrate and so he somersaults until his eyes
Rise up and resound like Baritone Pasquale’s
“Trumpet Blues and Cantabile” in an empty gym.
6.
Iggy Pop takes a timeout from withdrawal in his parents’
Master bedroom. Let him thump on a 500 gallon Oil Drum.
Let him impersonate the vacuum, be the blender, mic the toilet.
Let The Stooge rebuke the Muse of Flush.
7.
Atop his altar of bronze, Iggy declares, “I shall never forsake
My lush three dollar and fifty cent an hour endeavor at Discount Records in Ann Arbor!
And don’t treat me as if I were merely another angelic charioteer of the Black Horse Tavern!”
8.
Is that the Ghost of Hoagy Carmichael rocking the cathedra as if he were Alcibiades?
The chairman of the bored wonders how to read that horny peacock
He knows Hoagy knit on the rocking chair?
9.
Iggy refuses to intrust pity to amor fati.
When everyone wants to erase sex from gender, why complain?
Merely because he compares a pug nosed
Family man with heterodox beliefs to his gi-normous blackbird of a pecker?
10.
Iggy needs no medicinal Stilbestrol to determine what sex he could be.
The way Iggy thought about the body you’d think it was still
The early 19th century. For Iggy saw himself as the end
Of Endrocrinology.
11.
Jim Osterberg has been punished a plenty, but, upon reflection,
Iggy Pop views summoning as an educative unfolding.
“When I was disciplined, it was always because I broke the law,”
He tells the Eugenspiegal Society.
12.
Like Bill W. and William James before him, Iggy stopped
Pretending he was the Bishop of Hippo. He never neglected
A sexy pair of pants with room for four legs, a tube
Of Crazy Glue, and a pleasing pair of shearing scissors.
13.
Iggy said farewell to the 100 percent Balinese dancer.
She has a thing for the Potato Girl.
He ramaged her at age 19 at a club called Mother’s where the Ohio poet James Wright
Told him never to eat.
Iggy Pop is definitely more than an unsolicited butt surveying a red carpet.
He’s a minor daemon compulsively in search of the impossibly perfect
Square of chalk. Jim Jarmusch corrected the Law of Oblivion in his
Great film, Gimme Danger.
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