Jose Padua: Feasts, Reincarnations, and Other Elegies for Days Gone By

(Part Three of Ten Sonnets for Electric Motherfuckers)

.

Feliciano Balastiqui Remembers the Days of Milk and Roses While Listening to an Old John Fahey Tune

When I was a child and liked to eat sardines my
mother would fry them up in a pan for lunch or
dinner, add garlic, onions, maybe a bay leaf and
some vinegar and we’d eat them in the kitchen
with blissful interest as if I were watching
cartoons and she her soap operas even though
there was no TV in the kitchen, just a view of
trees stretching up to the second floor window
of our apartment. Now whenever I eat sardines
I am disappointed. The fish is tasteless, dense
like slow traffic on a bridge over a river where
no one ever fishes, and its bones don’t break apart
like dandelions against my breath and summer days
are hot and the city that surrounds us feels like fire.

Fruit of the Loom Billy Contemplates a Glorious Summertime

In the 90s I began marketing my Kafka mattress—sleep
on it a few nights, and one morning you wake up transformed
into a giant cockroach (or vermin, depending on what translation
you read when you were in school and studying German
language literature). It was a hit, and man was I living, all
the babes and booze, and I no longer had to share my time share
in Myrtle Beach. It was all mine. Once in a while I’d pass
a giant insect on the sand and he’d wave his antennae at me,
or nudge me with the edge of his compound eye. But now
they want to tax me to death, transform my wealth into the size
of a squashed fly. That ain’t the America I know, where obscene
profit and the skill to turn existential dread into reality made
it the greatest nation on Earth. Oh well. Time to move my
corporate headquarters to Luxembourg. Or at least Delaware.

A Song by Sweet Jane and the pre-Raphaelites

Because we have reached the era of commemoration and
tribute; because now is the time for staying in our lanes,
accumulating expendable income, dumping plastic in the
ocean and sending probes into space to create massive celestial
seas of useless space junk. I look up to the sky and go whoa,
a piece of old satellite plunging to my green, green valley;
wow, rocket parts falling down to Godzilla’s beach; ha,
whatchoo gonna do now, Godzilla? Me, I’m in a rock ‘n’
roll band. I’m going the wrong way down your one way street,
and my pants are down and I’m singing, “Geometry’s bunk and
Euclid was an asshole, just gimmie your junk, and I’ll sell it
at the Brooklyn flea market along with my copy of the Stones’
Beggars Banquet with the original artwork, and, if it’s a nice day
in New York, I should be able to make a decent amount of cash.”

A poem written while waiting for Godzilla on the corner of North Capitol and K Street

Sometimes I wonder what names my poet friends would have
if they weren’t poets but were professional wrestlers instead.
Brian Gilmore would be The Michigan Stomper because he lives
in Michigan now and his poetry stomps out all the bullshit. I could
go on with more names but then the poets I leave out would ask
“Why weren’t I included?” This way the only question is Brian
Gilmore’s who’ll ask, “Why the hell did you put me in your poem?”
I don’t know. It happened while I was doing the dishes. It was a Monday,
and I only got around to writing it down now. Meanwhile, wrestling
goes on during this pandemic to empty seats, much like a lot of poetry
readings. A massive pile driver, with no one in the stands to watch, or
a beautiful metaphor with no one in the library conference room to
catch its subtlety, laugh a little too politely, and applaud me, the poet,
who if he were a wrestler would call himself The Electric Motherfucker. 

Memo from Turner, pt. 2

Oh wretched stretch of madness, take me like
a stone tumbling down a mountain of avarice.
The centuries have not been kind to gentle souls,
only beings of timid charity and bold negligence.
Take me toward the vile light, snatch me from
the grip of beautiful darkness, consume my labor
to build lavatories made of gold where withering
demons with bitter, graceless tongues offer their
shit as sustenance, their secretions as inspiration
for our faith. So if you will, plant flowers for my
fall, and preserve my lovely flesh paintings in a
room with black marble walls and the climate of
a breeze in Greece. I am you and you are me and we
are all gathering moss on our slow journey to the sea.

An Elegy from Godzilla as the Reincarnation of Basho

Out here on the ocean I long for the ocean; passing
by a swart ship with sheep aboard it, I long for a
swart ship with sheep aboard it, no matter how difficult
it is to speak of my desires. Decades have passed since
I’ve had a good eight hours sleep, centuries have passed
since the great paintings, sculptures, and literature of
the renaissance. The drama of the skies above me are
from out of El Greco, the swirling of these waves like
a buoyant line from Marlowe; if you aim to shoot me
out of fear remember it was you who shot first, you
who dropped the bombs that made me. The concept
of saving me is as foreign to you as a moment shaped
like a plum the color of the ocean, or the soothing balm
for which I long these dreary nights I find myself in need.

A Letter to Godzilla from the Princess in Puccini’s Turandot as Interpreted by a Reincarnated Malcolm McLaren

Dear Godzilla, I am your biggest fan. I know you must
have so many, young and old, who see you as the symbol
of what lies ahead for us if we continue on the path of
predatory capitalism and unchecked corporate greed. I know
you’re the monster who has the power to destroy the oligarchs,
lay waste to the excesses of the bourgeoisie, and knock an
F-22 Raptor out of opalescent skies with a swift swipe of
your tail; but I wonder, too, if you’ve ever fallen in love. Perhaps
you’re gender fluid, maybe you seek sinewy boy demons, curvy
girl monsters, or something akin to a third sex like in some
Samuel R. Delany book. Me I’m so young and romance seems as
messy as smashed honeydew melons, but I hope when all is done
and obscene wealth and the patriarchy are destroyed, you find some-
one to love and relish and liberate, and I hope that person is me.

Feliciano Balastiqui’s Masterclass on Labor and Logistics

While I was a gatherer of sad, drunken days in New York, I wasn’t
drunk at all on one of my saddest. My mother in DC had made me some
Filipino marinated pork, one of my favorite dishes since I was a child—
comfort food you call it now. Packed with dry ice and sent express mail
to my apartment on Avenue B, it got ‘lost’ somewhere along the long,
lonesome way. I don’t think it went to Philadelphia or Baltimore,
Wilmington or Newark, though maybe it was taken to the Bronx or
Brooklyn where someone thinking he might find a pound of pot or some-
thing even better in a plain brown package instead found marinated pork.
What made me sad wasn’t the lost food so much as her lost labor, the effort
to feed me that failed, because for those of us who are lucky a parent doesn’t
begin to fail until a parent is old, and this meant she was old, that from here
on out I would be living on luck. Mother, Father: let no bad day erase us
from the memory of our labors. Mother, father, let us age gracefully.

For Lovers and Other Refugees of the Fascist State

Love is like an element in its place on the
periodic table, its properties made clear
through comparison to all other elements:
how easily love turns to liquid; the energy assumed
in maintaining a gaseous state; the cold it takes
to create a dense and fearsome mass. When solid,
love is where we live, for there is nothing we can
carry from it in this form. When it’s liquid we
travel to and from love the way one rambles
west in one’s youth to find fame, then east to find
fortune. Now we live in the age of vapors, gasping
for breath, running for the exits. In the middle of
dim rough days and cruel centuries, let our love
be electric, and our home a movable foundation.

Why I Am Not a Chieftain

A peculiar fact: if you lend me a book you will never get it back. My
neighbor Kevin in Alexandria, Virginia lent me Bob Dylan’s Chronicles:
Volume 1. I still have it. Conrad, my friend Casey’s boyfriend when
she lived in New York, lent me the two books Oscar Acosta wrote. I still
have them. My friend the writer Liz Hand lent me Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow
of the Torturer and I never returned it. And I never read it. What the fuck
is with me? Why do people trust me with their favorite books? Pangil
was the legendary chieftain of the land that became Laguna, the Philippine
province from whence my mother came. When you came into my mother’s house,
she offered you delicious food to eat. When you come into my house, I say “hello,”
then sit and stare at the wall. I am not a chieftain, I am a poet. I am the author
of these verses and this is the continuing story of my life here in America and
of all the precious things belonging to others that I have taken as my own.
This is the story of how America began, not a fairytale about a nation’s birth.

---

Copyright 2023 Jose Padua

Photograph by Jose Padua