Greenland: For Jim Craig on the Day of His Funeral

The oven was ticking.
It could have been a bomb.
You were eating with gusto.
Testing the Thanksgiving turkey
so we wouldn’t get poisoned.
Dinner made you noble.
We were watching college football on your dinky thirteen-incher.
A Kia commercial got me babbling
about my dad’s exploits.
Dead Chinese.
The wounds which occasionally suppurated out of his back,
like tears for his dead mates. And you said:
‘Greenland!’
How N onward got slaughtered at Pork Chop.
Snow melted, wound your clock,
Letting you chug-a-lug your living.
You sliced a hunk of meat, dipped it into gravy.
‘Greenland!’
A to M were slaughtered.
Diamonds glittered out of your eyes and teeth.
You smiled.
The oven clock rang in agreement;
Sweet buttered yams ready.
Like one of those perky girls, waiting to be examined in Kevin’s darkroom.
Her plentiful thighs, fat, sassy.
Then you were crying. Memory.
The dice of the alphabet.

—Ivor Irwin

A Short Distance from the Pennines

Night dissolves into sorghum dawn.
Soggy Manchester sunrise.
Yahweh’s finger tight against the rent jugular.
A trickle by the mountains. The rest
sucked into cumulostratus.
Gray candy-floss pulchritude over Alderley Edge.
And I, just out of the Twisted Wheel,
amphetamines and Mandies tingling under my skin,
blink as rain dive bombs my eyelashes.

—Ivor Irwin

High Blood Pressure

The military industrial complex grins its evil grin.
Having cagily plotted to kill me in a conspiracy
so nefarious, I wake up fluttery-eyed.
So diabolical, that even my paranoia died.

Somewhere in my DNA. Trapped,
Like a vicious sliver of transparent candy
between two shiny-white American teeth,
my predilection for high blood pressure plots.

Hiding everywhere there’s salt.
Realer than any rumor about God.
Concrete longing. Addiction. Bitter.
Ten times harsher than my wife’s tongue.

Salt. You fucker.
Didn’t consider it ever, till I’ve been forced to do without.
Nothing to look forward to but fruit and vegetables.
Compote, slushies, taking a good shit and death.

High Blood Pressure, baby.
It’s killed more Yids than Zyklon B.
Tonight I think I’ll live dangerous. Eat some pizza..
It’ll be better than sky-diving or shtupping a skanky whore’s ass bareback.

—Ivor Irwin

Cissie’s Song

I took a train to Sault-Saint Marie.
There was a Mississipi virgin waiting for me.
I had a treasure map, an attitude, a longing, a plea.
I said: Can someone help find the old faith in Me?
You won’t believe it, it’s unfortunate, see
 I adhere to the ghosts of Robert E and Stagger Lee.
And she said, I come from Indianola and my name be Cissie Dupree.

Oh Cissie, Oh Cissie, Oh Cissie Dupree.
I go down there. You know where. And I swear you taste like sassafras tea.

We looked hard to find the Queen Victoria Hotel,
where old ladies in corsets and crinoline dwell.
It's a familiar hell, one where satisfaction dwells.
I was all loosy goose, while Cissie cleaned up all my juice.
Now I see there’s nothing in Upper Michigan but tomfoolery,
flannel-shirted hostility. Ol' tore up pictures of  the Pope and J.F.K.
And a treatise in the paper on the way we die today.

Yea, Cissie, Oh Cissie. Oh Cissie Dupree.
I go down there. You know where. And I swear you taste like sassafras tea.

I said, Cissie, Oh Cissie, I think you lied to me!
You played fast and loose about your virginity.
I just wanted to feel like one of them apostles feels,
when the leaven of mercy gets stranded.
This bottle of whiskey, it cannot save me.
You see my heart is so full with an ache for purity,
but it's  just God’s always joking, and now he’s laughing at me.

Oh Cissie, Oh Cissie, Oh Cissie Dupree.
I don’t care about your hymen. Just get back in bed with me

— Ivor Irwin

Beloved Infidel

I definitely am an infidel.
Own no doubt about it.
My people are the stiff-necked kind and can not be converted.
Before you chop my big head off,
I will trash talk in bad Arabic, grin and wait for payback.

Go on. Bring it on, Bint.
Your scimitar, your sodomy and your suicide vest.
I laugh because you're pathetic.
Bathing in the blood of your enemies, consuming our hearts raw.
A billion lemmings looking toward Mecca.
Cheering for Manchester City.

I look forward to your dirty bomb. The blotting out of the sun.
Americastan: A nation of mutant converts.
Framed pictures of Osama, Farrakhan and Khomeini on the wall.
Anemically keeping our bitches in line.
Veiled. Speaking our Arabic with a midwestern accent.
"Bismallah e-raHman e-raHeem, motherfucker!"

Don't fear the green dawn!
Sharia in Skokie. Palestinian comedians.
The poor, like grains of sand, still poor.
All on the same page, chanting the same Surah.
Don't worry, there'll be a giant selection of prayer rugs at Target.
And the Cubs will finally win the World Series.

Pretending to cooperate, I will eat my humble humus smiling.
Say my jaded phrases with gusto: "Alehu Akbar!" and "Death to the Jews!"
My buddies and me, we'll hoard our supply of bacon and porn,
drink home-made booze, sing freedom songs.
And, hunted by your secret police, we'll die manfully one by one,
Saying, "Yeah! Next year in Jerusalem!"

— Ivor Irwin

Definitely a Whimper

I’ve seen the greatest minds of my generation
busted for malfeasance.
Dinosaurs crying glib crocodile tears.
The codpiece of tenure ripped aside like so much recycled paper.
Keening.
Staggering through Bridgeport,
foul of breath from ersatz Cuban panatellas,
singing out the true stories of their lives,
fueled by Maker's Mark, Dylan and a heaped tablespoonful of self-pity.
Embittered.
Half-written memoirs, unfinished romains,
the glorious shimmering stank of student pussy in their mustaches.
Trapped in the afterglow of the grins of lesbian colleagues.
How they smile, bask in your misery. A far superior predator.
Grateful.
Marooned with sarcastic kids and anti-trophy wives,
their contempt like question marks burned into your worried forehead
by the tip of the white-hot rapier that was once your own sense of humor
but now belongs to your spawn.
Crying.
Do you recall? You only went into teaching for the three free months of summer.
To disappoint your parents, write your books,

show off your scintillating repartée at readings and receptions
and shag every little slag.
Laugh.
Giggle when you encounter the winners. Their classrooms trouble free.
Risk averted at the very gates.
The dross propaganda of Derrida, Beaudrillard and f-f-f-fucking Foucault,
dead without a gutter, without a singular tear.
Hallelujah.
I've seen the greatest minds of my generation purple with envy.
Preaching against the national debt.
Haunted by the prospect of perpetual war,
and a singular dream where their children's children bear prayer rugs.
Dream.
World's end, as the sun, a pitted, acne-infected orange,
spitting its halitosis accompanied by a bass-heavy worldbeat soundtrack,
weights and measures, whimpers-versus-bangs
God and the devil in the final World Series.

— Ivor Irwin

Derelictions

The Digital Conversion box in my head
Gets distracted by errant traffic upstairs.
Keith David: Narrator of all our lives,
pleasantly reciting all our yesterdays, for the right price.
Ken Burns all around. Ubiquitous. Educating Me.
Helping me think American.

Now that the sun, having indeed set, I
no longer a true Englishman.

Having learned to be a stars and stripes liberal.

Now I know all about
Baseball
The civil war
our national forests
World War Two
Jazz
Abraham Lincoln
Louis Armstrong
The faces of critics and experts. Their wiseness.
Stanley Crouch’s football head.
The nasel whine of Gary Giddins:

(His voice which reminds me of a kid I punched for no reason whatsoever in school one day,

because the timbre of his enunciation just irritated me)

Thank you all!

I now own the boxed set. The book. The soundtrack.

It's like I know Hank Gates and Simon Schama.

Now I can say, sincerely, at cocktail parties, with a straight face, that

the two greatest betrayals of the Twentieth Century were

The Pact of Steel and Dylan at Newport.

Now can we all hold hands
Shake our bling and sing
“This Land is Your Land!!”

—Ivor Irwin

Heart's Blood

Your heart is not just a bloody pump.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be heart ache
and heart burn. Broken hearted
hearts on fire.
The heart of the matter,
or, them what don't have no heart at all!

When they cracked me open
and put me on a heart machine,
they pumped me full of someone else's blood,
gifted me a void.
I lost most of my short-term memories.
But not you. Never you!

Sometimes I call numbers somehow
stuck in my mind. I get people I don't know.
Hear alarm clocks going off
from far away. Black holes in my life,
They are, I'm sure, carried in the corpuscles
of my blood: Mysterious strangers.

So, I know what's mine is mine
But there's someone else out there,
their heart pumping: Carrying my cells.
The burden of my lost memories
Straining sorrowfully at their atom heart
Foot tapping to a funk beat I alone hear.


—Ivor Irwin

Marriage

I explain. You
hear shouting. You
regroup. I see
you’ve picked my scab.

You are reasonable. I
see shades clipped onto your bifocals. I
aplogize profusely. You
sniff out expedience.

I am a nice Jewish dove. You
say I’m crazy, like Saul. You
throw me an olive branch. I
am cut by its thorns.

You gush blood. I
see no tears. You
will not take a dive. I
have loved you for eleven years.

—Ivor Irwin

To All You Yid Traitors Who Fucked Up My Passover

It’s nice having a country of your own.
It’s nice to own a house.
It’s nice to have a pair of shoes to throw.
All the better if your wife can wear a blouse,

and doesn't need to wear the veil.
Dubya said the Big D is it.
Democracy is what everybody wants.
He didn’t say it in a conceited way.
Just that he was certain.

The lessons of history teach us that Haman
was voted in.
And Mussolini
was voted in.
And Hitler, Oh yeah, Hitler
was voted in.
And now let’s give a warm Oak Park welcome
to Hamas and Hezbollah, because they
was voted in.

DO YOU SEE A PATTERN HERE?

Just like leaving a place for Elijah’s cup,
or the second sitting for the Last Supper.
I suggest: After your Sabra folk songs,
sung in your shitty Ivrit.
And having the audacity to trivialize 6 million dead kikes.
The next bit about “God bless the Palestinians!”
I wish, like an old Yiddisher witch,
that those words catch in your throat and choke you,

and that that affliction you get is stomach cancer.

I have an honest, simple suggestion.
Because you love the Palestinians so,
and, because, after turning all four cheeks,
you’ve got no more to show.
Give them your house. And, sure...
You’ll feel guilty. All Jews feel guilty
You can keep up the mortgage payments.
I would call you a traitor,
but I know already that you own no sense of shame.

—Ivor Irwin

Jews On Catherine Wheels

I
Not even tumbleweed
rolls as well as certain Jews, partially dissected,
vilified, pinned by their points, like high school butterflies,
to Catherine Wheels. Torture. Fireworks.
Their brown liquid, beagle eyes glimmering,
they shriek. They ululate. Each remembering how
they were warned by their Yiddisher mammas,
warned in cheder, warned by Paddy Chayevsky. Skidding

noisily down Wall Street, scratching
the snowy surface of the pounded pavement,
too raucous to avoid the obstacle
of the bull’s hacked-off balls.
Ahoy! Hey, I recognize that nose
Alan Greenpan, Louis Ruckeyser,
the giggling ghost of Arnold Rothstein.
You can run baby, but you can’t hide!

II
And: Speaking of clichés:
Meanwhile, back at the Connecticut Country Club prison:
Bernie Madoff is being blown by two toothless lifers.
He is contemplating upon the sticky-fingered Swiss.
Stagnant calm, television, the bull’s mutilated torso.
Propaganda. Anderson Cooper.
News: an endless wire of suicidal aristocrats,
spluttering octogenarians, bereft celebrities.
The oligarchic All-American rabbi, broke,
down to his tzitsis,
down to his gatkes, shrugs.
“Bernie,” he says, winking, “made off mit mein money.”
--DRUM ROLL--
On the wall,next to the door of Bank Leumi
Someone has spray-painted: 'Madoff is a Jew!'
Well, that much is true, but the street is vacant
and the writer and his subject are gone.

III
June, 1990. On his deathbed
My father was not amused.
What with the Wall falling down and all.
"They'll open the Gulags," he said.
"And the speculators will speculate!"
Seventeen years for his prophecy to take, but
that's like an atom within a grain of sand
in suffering Jew time. The Thing is:
Well, He's not making Yids like he used to, Dad.
Saul, David, Spinoza, Lepke, Shecky, Heine and You:
These were a few of my favorite Jews.
On the the turning Catherine Wheel,
it's the spokes that break you
'cos the ashes from the crematoria were
long ago inhaled into the opened nostrils
of a grateful Polish population like so much cocaine.
Catherine Wheels. Torture. Fireworks: We love it!

—Ivor Irwin

Let Us Eat Cake

Funny, innit?
I wanted America
You wanted money, but,
the cake was too small,
so we gobbled one another and ran.

—Ivor Irwin

6 a.m. – 9 a.m.

The snow may be 9 1/2" deep, but
I'm a resourceful He-Manly man, man.
Up at 5 a.m.
Layering layers upon layers.
I stagger around, puffy, prepared.
Stagger and sass, sass some more,
dawn dreaming in the inky dark.
As the sun slowly rises, grunting
like some 47-year-old ex-NFL quarterback,
I am the magnificent soloist maestro,
wielding my shovel heroically,
I dig a moat around my mansion,
clear the way for my wife and her wee dark-green Honda.

Staggering back inside, I take off some of my layers,
wake the kid, kiss the wife goodbye,
bulk up our bellies with oatmeal,
dress him in layers, vaseline his tiny gob and cheeks.
I relayer myself, and then we go for the bus.
Two grand staggerers on an epic intrepid Dr. Zhivago walk,
bobbing and weaving through dirty gray snowbanks,
which have fresh crunchy snow layering their tops, and,
really, I wouldn't mention the frozen dog shit,
except it's fucking everywhere,
so that 31st is a toxic knickerbocker glory.
When the bus arrives, its engine stuttering as it vibrates against snow banks
I climb up the dirty mountain, lift the boy up and over
and nod at my fellow warrior, the bus driver.

Once home, I peel off my layers. Blow
my nose so hard it hurts my ears,
savor a cup of tea, listen
as my knee cartilage creaks. Listen
as my neighbors struggle to start their engines. Listen
to the ranting on Sports Radio. Wonder
at the warm wire I feel through the muscle in my heart.
Struggling up the stairs, turning up the heat, I
run a bath, spit out snot and get naked.
I bathe, ponder my aging balls.
Look at the clock: 9 a.m.
Now it's under the covers and
sleep.

—Ivor Irwin

Oral Learning With the Pakamac Heiress

Fellatio first happened for me in 1967. 

Frederika, (aka Freddie) was reading Anaís Nin, 

listening to the Doors. Rich girl.

Hale Barns girl. Resplendent
in the cotton puffery of gingham smock mini-dresses,

thick wool tights, blocky black shoes spit-shined 

by Berengeria,  the Portuguese au paire.  Freddie, 

sweet, not because it was her nature, au contraire,

but because she sprayed Paco Rabanne in her shoes 

and in her knickers, in the hair down there.

In retrospect, I can sincerely say, Anais
was not a good teacher, Freddie wasn’t very good,
she just nibbled away, her tiny mouth 

opening and closing,  her beautiful rich girl’s teeth 

sharp and definitely in the way.
I called my dick Field Marshall Von Runstedt in those days.
Why I cannot say. But, applaudably curious,
She would talk to the opening, dig a nail into a vein,
squeeze it every which way. Put on a fraulein accent,
ask what der Field Marshall had to say.

We had talked about it for weeks.
I had religiously consumed
glucose lollipops, honeyed yogurt and
a pint of pineapple juice per day.
To make my sperm taste sweet,
doing it in Anais' Parisian way.
The truth was that she didn’t see me as person, just a
good-looking, non-complaining utilitarian piece of meat 

in frighteningly tight jeans, pretty, pouty and poor.
 A hard-on with a foot-high Isro, ready to play.

So my parents went to see Manchester City.
My dad winked when he drove away.
And Freddie undressed me, giggling, giggling, giggling
cuffing my penis in a boxer speed-bag sort of way.
Laughing, nibbling, unwilling to spit.
When I came, she said, “I-eeeew!”
And I cleaned it from her eyelid with my thumb.
She said my spunk smelled like high-tide at Blackpool,
Tasted like Finnan Haddie*. I felt insulted,
and I never let her give me head again.

—Ivor Irwin

* Finnan Haddie: Smoked herring from Scotland

For Elsie

Each night
before I get some kip
I think about
Ebola, Al-Qaida, starving Sudanese,
Barack Obama, pornography and war.

That way
I’m not thinking about You!

—Ivor Irwin

Dear Yahweh

Dear Yahweh, can’t wait to be a burden on my kids.
Long long time, they’ve cumbered me
So, soon they'll deliver and carry
Bleach and clean and scrub-a-dub-dub.
And do it happily.

No Sun City for me. No old folks warehouse, please
No special strangers tossing me
like some smelly old sack of shit.
Each must take turns putting me up
in a sunny parlor, so’s I don’t have to climb
to the top of the stairs. A nice
glimmering walk-in bath with handles installed
A minor cost..... Yours, of course.

The purpose of children is insurance
A girded codpiece against the testicle-kicks of mean daddy time
A guarantee. Insurance.
Yeah, that’s what kid s are all about!
Bring them up in your own image, knowing that they
Owe you and oughtn't just farm you out

I’ve spent all the money on schooling and clothing.
Attended the ceremonies and soccer practices,
Cheered for you religiously at your games.
Knowing that, once you’re earning, you’ll be gone.
Only recreatable in photographic shrines,
Discount baby-sitting, birthday parties,
Christmas present competition and good Thanksgiving wine!

It's been a blessing.
Really!
Now Lordy Lord Yahweh, dude.
I’m gonna be a burden on my children
Yes. And on my children's children too.


—Ivor Irwin