an infant’s eyes
and what’s behind
how about when love’s denied
for the first time
the longing for milk
that look of anger
will it haunt memory
at what age will judgement
seize the child
the separation
the absence
the labeled cardboard boxes
filling the otherwise empty room
this is the change
that does not come about
this is the thought
of forgiveness lost
to the void
and yet love remains
even if it’s battered and abstract
A bizzare, surrealist experimental poetry performance I created in 2012.
You fell to your death
in order to impress your peers
or maybe for yourself. To prove
something, but what, we don’t know.
The parking garage complex was vast
and the vertical drop exhilarating.
Painted styrofoam was the decoy,
a little ledge on which you thought
you could land, but couldn’t.
The owners wanted to keep up
appearances, and so did the morticians
for your viewing. A shocking event
when we all quietly considered the implied violence.
The guys you were with laughed when you did it,
until they leaned over their ledge and saw your crumpled body.
Now that’s all they’ll ever see.
I.
Last night Luna rose
over our Eastern Sea
like no human’s ever seen.
Only one porthole view
through deathly clouds
incubating the Great Egg Harbor.
Luna rose a perfect circle
tossed by Myron, now in suspension.
Remnants of Theia reflected
in alien orange,
brighter than Sol
(whose rays provide color
still, but not the same).
As lightning strikes purpled
the Atlantic structures underneath
the ocean rose with Luna, rose ominous,
pillars and pyramids stood naked.
Our nation, in three century utero, collapsed
off the coast of New Jersey. Another failed experiment,
another corrupted civilization left to liquid, then to ash.
II.
Fear, survival instincts in full swing
while operating machinery speeding
south on a bowed bridge looking
east as Luna rose. Death
embodied in the sky
explosions, natural explosions
in natural grandeur white death.
Luna rose as she never has
as illusions nullified fear was reality
at its clearest. Luna rose and she never will
in similar form, life and nothing in one moment.
The storm consumed the atmosphere. Consumed itself.
Atoms vacuumed into oblivion.
Bovine humans munched cheeseburgers
while driving through dark energy warping
vapid brains. Magenta tissue bled
out sentience. Luna rose.
III.
These humans were not scared
out of sheer stupidity. They felt safe
in their machines. Congested asphalt artery,
nine at night, Friday, June 13th, 2014.
Luna rose in proof of their ignorance.
She devoured particles in purgatorial drift,
planet Earth. Space shuddered Terra
dark matter pulsed into minds
people felt frightened
inexplicably. Immediate fear of blackness.
Animals froze in abeyance obeying nature.
Humanity continued to destroy,
to feign solutions, to pop pills,
to disdain their immune system
to ignore their self-inflicted wounds.
All the while precedents loomed
in the past. They never realized
they inhabited houses of Masonic stone.
Let alone understood that the Scottish Rite’s
preeminent child would fall faster
than those deemed lesser.
That the child’s scrapes would fester.
IV.
Luna rose on in spite,
out of spite of America.
Oxygen sucked out of air.
This time the fire.
Although pharaohs chose the stars
which killed their enslaved, unwanted brothers and sisters.
As the empire fell in pre-meditated fashion, the elite escaped
in Russian rockets. No more humans
needed for sustenance of the few.
No longer human humans would float
past Luna, and harvest her gray helium 3 tears.
Luna rose no longer over Earth
for there were no humans
left to see. Luna rose in witness
and condemned yet knew she could do nothing;
she vowed never to forget
until everything collapsed again. Luna rose
until the end. And as her visage faded
from the collective memory of all sentient existence,
Luna rose again, somewhere,
since death could never die.
The following is the foreword to Rocky Wilson’s upcoming book of poetry, which will be published by Whirlwind Press. It was a pleasure editing and collating Rocky’s poems for this collection. Mr. Wilson has been a friend, mentor, and inspiration. His collection should be released by the end of this year.
The bus ride to Camden from the JFK Airport felt longer than I’d expected. The passing scenery of post-industrial New Jersey was depressing in contrast to the rolling green pastures of western Ireland that I’d grown used to in the past week. I owed a fellow traveler a couple hundred Euros borrowed out of desperation. I was to immediately head to an ATM as soon as we arrived at the Rutgers campus in Camden, and pay him back with even more borrowed money from my parents. Human Resources decided that I didn’t work enough hours to earn vacation pay.
It was hot for early June. I was a sweaty mess. My mindset was in self-centered, pissed off at the world mode. As my friend and I got off the bus we encountered a bronze figure on a bicycle calling out in a high pitched voice to passer-bys while waving a monkey puppet. I smiled, but my creditor-companion had a look of mild concern on his face. I turned back and saw the figure approaching us while walking his bike. This man was darkly tanned with wavy gray hair, wearing a black tank top, shorts, and sandals. His bike basket was filled with fruit and miscellaneous items. He was dazing off at the Philadelphia skyline behind us.
“Rocky!”
“Sean! I thought you were in Ireland!”
We hugged each other.
“I just got back. You’re so tan.”
“I was in Atlantic City. Where’s my post card you promised?”
I apologized to Rocky for not being able to send it due to something called a “Bank Holiday.” I almost didn’t recognize him without one of his signature rainbow tie-dye shirts. We talked briefly about the Aran Islands and western Ireland, as he’d been there a few years earlier for a poetry festival. He said he stayed in the same house on Inishmore as John Synge. I asked him when the next Pizza and Poetry reading was taking place (the date changes every month, a reflection of Rocky’s mercurial personality). I told him that we’d have to meet up for a Blue Moon at The Victor beforehand, but that I had something I had to take care of at the moment with my friend. Rocky said hello and introduced himself, as well as Bongo, his monkey puppet, then they both took off toward the Delaware River.
My friend was baffled.
“Was that a hobo?”
“No. He’s a poet.”
“Oh…”
Serendipity allowed Rocky to welcome me back home, making me smile in the moment I needed it most. Rocky actually lives one block away from where we had stood, on Penn Street in Camden. His house is a beautiful three story brick row-home built over a century ago. This wasn’t the only time that I’d introduce Rocky to someone and they thought that he was an eccentric homeless person. This is because Rocky Wilson is the epitome of what it truly means to be anti-establishment. Although he grew up in comfortable Haddonfield, he’s far from a bourgeois poser. In the 70’s, Rocky felt the need to return to the decaying city of his birth, Camden, not to evangelize, but rather to spread enlightenment. And to Rocky that involves both poetry and puppetry.
“The puppet man” some people call him, he prefers to declare himself the Puppet Laureate of Camden. Why not? Rocky Wilson is one of the few who actually makes a difference in America’s most infamous city, along with priest and poet, Father Michael Doyle (famous for being one of the Camden 28). However, Rocky isn’t a grassroots activist. He’s much more than that. He is in the grass, one blade among many; he lives the pure life that the beatniks could’ve only wished to have led. Rocky brings joy to the hearts of strangers, especially children. As a substitute teacher in Camden, Rocky has built relationships with residents of the city that have endured for decades. It seems like every time I walk down Cooper Street with him someone calls out “Mr. Rocky! Where’s Bongo?” Rocky replies with heart-warming sincerity, a virtue which is present throughout his poetry as well.
At first glance Rocky Wilson’s poems could be dismissed as confessional or romantic. The former being over-killed by the beat poets of the last century, the latter even more so in the century before that and since. However, there’s something deeper here, a myriad collage based off of an awareness of all that has preceded it, but with a subtlety that does not explicitly acknowledge it like too many contemporary, “post-modern” poets do. The status quo has been stagnant for decades. In the age when Anne Carson is touted as the avant-garde of North American poetry, Rocky Wilson brings us back to our poetic roots. He does this in the spirit of Walt Whitman, which may seem trite to some, but it’s necessary in our fragmented and bewildered society.
Rocky Wilson proves that what’s needed isn’t art which reflects more confusion, but art which cures confusion. Rocky does this through recognizing subconscious pain stemming from a lost baby brother, bearing witness to natural beauty surviving in urban ruins, reflecting on the potentiality of love, observing camaraderie between whales, and in many more ways. These poems may seem more like stories at times, prosaic, narrative driven, and even conclusive. That’s because Rocky sees life as poetry, and vice versa. He does all of this and still manages to avoid cliché, which is one of the many remarkable yet simplistic traits that can be found in his poetry. This is what America needs.
-S. W. Lynch
