Poetry the poison, poetry the lie, poetry the venom shot through rattler fangs

The Essential Numbers 1991 - 2008 by Gordon Massman

Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009

182 pages


There's a lot of hyperbole on the Internet: Lindsay Lohan is the MOST fucked up stupid coke-whore EVER! OMG I have the coolest friends EVER for writing more birthday shout-outs on my wall than ANYONE, EVER!! This Jimmy Johnson-endorsed penis enlargement pill will transform you into a FUCKING SEX GOD and allow you to conquer third-world countries!!!!! 

Clearly there's enough of this kind of stuff going around on a daily basis, which is why I'm not going to review Gordon Massman's quasi-recent collection of poetry, The Essential Numbers 1991 - 2008. Because if I did, I'd be tempted to write that the book is the MOST viscerally disturbing, psyche-jarring jumble of words my young, impressionable eyes have EVER analyzed. That this is possibly the MOST IMPORTANT work of genre-bending literature to come out in the last five years, and if you read it, your blood might congeal and give you the BIGGEST, MOST HARDCORE brain aneurysm anyone's EVER documented. That your eyes might dislodge and your legs turn into rat shit as you crumple before its SHEER AWESOMENESS like a slug drowning in salt rain. But I don't want to sound like a bigger tool than I already have. And I have a hunch that Massman really detests assholes like me who get off on the worthless task of writing about writing. 

So I'll let him tell you about the poems himself, in the form of an interview he did a year ago that appeared on Trickhouse's Web site. It's some really interesting stuff. Sort of like taking the line between genius and insanity and shoving it up god's ass until it bursts into a pinata laden with candy. But what do I know. If you feel prepared to be enlightened, you can check out the whole thing here. Or here. Or maybe here. Choose wisely.

However, if you lack the attention span or the give-a-shit to read the entire interview, here are some of my favorite chunks:

- I throw as best I can, as believably as I can, the billion colors of human existence through the prism of myself. Over long and intense personal interior struggles I have unearthed my otherwise unspeakable capabilities and visceral dark emotions: rage’s boiling mud, shame’s hot cauldron, the alligators of self-loathing. Not only am I a beautiful child, I am a hideous monster.

Like us all. 

- I want to insist that my sometimes disturbing visions are more or less within everyone, with slight variations. Hasn’t every father fantasized infanticide? Doesn’t every husband want to binge on lovers. Doesn’t murder and suicide lurk in every man?

- This kind of clinical monster does not back down or mutate into something else. My clinical obsessions have numbered over thirty at any given moment, which I had to perform in a specific order at threat of having to repeat them beginning with number one, ad infinitum, through the night without sleep or rest. These involve locks, clocks, ovens, toilet seats, numbers, body lotions, dental floss, defecation, urination, noises, bottom sheets, light switches, hunger, toilet paper, and edges of desks.

- Surely “form” solidifies subject, is in fact subject, as subject is in fact form. My “form” is the brick of terror, guilt, shame, pain, horror, hope, rage, love, and innocence jammed into my head, square, compositionally shifting, and lodged like a bloody bludgeon I can only exorcize it by duplicating it on the page, repeatedly and, perhaps, eternally.


- The confusion is this: I am my poetry.


I discovered Massman's opus while perusing Tarpaulin Sky's Web site, because they tend to put out rad books. I was rewarded for my absentminded mouse-clicking when I stumbled upon The Essential Numbers' back cover:

  
 Not giving a fuck is all in good fun, as long as you can back it up. And Massman does, in a big way. 


And finally, some favorite lines from the book:


Dear God, I wish to register my unhappiness about a few things: mortality is a crock of shit, I could pop you in the mouth for that; genocide sucks, you deserve a penitentiary gang raping


I exacto-knife toadstool tip of penis, lift it off, the pee-slit forms a lovely salt-shaker

I masturbate to fashion photos of anorexics, Auschwitz ladies hips crooked outward slathered in blue cotton panties, elbow pelvises, furrows and funnels, cheeks like eaten stone, imagine fucking grasshopper bodies so close it rubs bone, wire sculpture of horror harboring a wet pussy

I petrify through the regal and towering land, the mesmerizing eyes, the vitality strands, the royal cataracting blood gorges of the beautiful and sad, once a breathing gaping hole, I grey among the statuesque


Hi, I'm Gordon, I'm a sex addict

Have a nice day.