February 6, 2025: "Poem to My First Lover," Firsts, "My Mother Contemplates the Integrated Circuit"

Obviously, there are firsts for everything:  first child, first job, first tooth, first convicted felon to be elected President of the United States.  (That would be a hint for any MAGA Republican to stop reading this post.)  Firsts can be fun and exciting, or painful and terrifying.  

Sharon Olds writes about a first in her life . . .

Poem to My First Lover

by: Sharon Olds

Now that I understand, I like to
think of your terror—handed a girl
mad with love, her long, fresh
raw body thin as a pared
soap, breasts round and high and
opalescent as bubbles of soap,
laid across your legs, 18,
untouched. I like to understand your
terror, now, the way you took her,
deflowering her as you’d gut a fish,
leaving in the morning with talk of a wife.
          Now that I
know about the fear of love
I like to think of her white-hot body
greenish as a fish just landed, quivering and
slapping on a rock--fallen into your
lap, man, shuddering like your cock,
a woman crazed with love, hot off the
press, sharp as a tool never used,
blazing across your thighs and all you could
do in your fear was firk out her cherry like an
escargot from its dark shell and then
toss her away. I am in awe of terror that will
waste so much, I am in love with the girl who went
offering, came to you and
laid it out like a feast on a platter, the
delicate flesh—yes, yes,
I accept the gift.

If you think I'm going to write about my first lover in this post, you're going to be disappointed.  Not that I'm against writing about such topics.  Far from it.  However, that's not what's on my mind tonight.

What is on my mind tonight, you ask?

A lot of things--from the Republican dismantling of democracy in the United States to my next book of poems, which I'm currently revising.  I've lived through a lot of big things in my lifetime, from the Challenger explosion to the ending of apartheid in South Africa.  Thanks to COVID, I can add a global pandemic to that list.  

Now, I live a privileged life because I'm white and have a penis.  Personally, I don't have to worry about racism or antisemitism or sexism.  Basically, I won the lottery for living in the United States.  That doesn't mean I support racist, anti-Semitic, or sexist ideology.  The only thing I actually hate is hatred.  (And Adam Sandler films.)

Yet, here I sit in my house in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the United States, watching racist, anti-Semitic, sexist Republicans destroy my country.  I guess that's a first for me.  I've never witnessed a coup up close and personal, and it's terrifying.

Plus, I'm ashamed to be a white man in present-day America.  I don't want to live in a country run solely by old Caucasians with limp dicks who think the world owes them something.  The strongest influences in my life have all been women.  I grew up with five sisters.  My mentor in college was a woman from Louisiana.  Most of my closest friends are women.  I have benefitted greatly from my relationships with all of these strong, smart, independent females in my life.

So, on behalf of my gender and race, I apologize to all of the women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ friends and family, Muslims, and Native Americans in my life.  You are important to me, and YOU are what makes America great.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about one of the most important women in his life tonight, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

On this date in 1959, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed the first patent for an integrated circuit.  In honor of all things microchipped, write a poem in the voice of a stereotypical 1950s American housewife as she puzzles over circuit diagrams and contemplates possible uses for this new invention.

My Mother Contemplates

the Integrated Circuit

by:  Martin Achatz

October 1953

She studies the diagram the way

she studied my father's body

on their wedding night, all his

curves and lines and muscles

and promise, a fleshy scrying orb

playing some home movie not yet

made, her surrounded by kids

on a beach, all of them slick

as baby seals, pulling her toward

the waves and sand.  Perhaps

she understands the schemata, 

how it's a map to microwaves,

television, Sputnik, Apollo 11.

Maybe she glimpses a future

where I'm sitting with my notebook

and pen, writing this poem

about her strapped into

the seat beside Armstrong,

countdown commencing,

engines igniting, rocket

rising, rising, rising, rising

through troposphere, stratosphere,

meso-, thermo-, exosphere,

launching herself to the distant

bright moon of me.

November 3: Rumfoord, Nazis Marching in the Streets, Martin Niemoller

Rumfoord went on insisting for several hours that Billy had echolalia--told nurses and a doctor that Billy had echolalia now.  Some experiments were performed on Billy.  Doctors and nurses tried to get Billy to echo something, but Billy woldn't make a sound for them.

"He isn't doing it now," said Rumfoord peevishly.  "The minute you go away, he'll start doing it again."

Nobody took Rumfoord's diagnosis seriously.  The staff thought Rumfoord was a hateful old man, conceited and cruel.  He often said to them, in one way or another, that people who were weak deserved to die.  Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die.

Rumfoord is a hateful old man.  That point is not really debatable.  He is trying to convince everyone that Billy is simply a body without a mind, breathing only by instinct.  Billy represents something counter to Rumfoord's version of reality, and Rumfoord wants to eliminate him.  Erase him from the page.  That's how Rumfoord deals with threats.

Of course, the truth is sometimes difficult to accept, especially when it runs counter to your own beliefs.  Some people, especially ones sitting in or close to the Oval Office currently, prefer to make up their own versions of the truth. even if their versions have no connection to reality.  For them, the biggest threats in the United States are not Nazis marching in the streets and stabbing people on trains.  No, the biggest threat is some phantom underground army of dark-skinned immigrants, raping women, selling drugs, planting bombs, attacking good, rich Christian men.

Again, there's no connection between this truth and reality.  It's a Rumfoord ruse, like Billy's echolalia.  There is no fake news, except on Fox television stations.  Here is the truth:  thousands of innocent people were killed in the bombing of Dresden.  The current President of the United States is complicit in obstructing justice; encouraging racism, misogyny, antisemitism; and colluding with a foreign government.  Guns are a huge problem in this country.  Building a border wall is a stupid idea, costing billions of dollars that could be spent on providing health care or fixing up roads and bridges.  That is reality.

However, the Rumfoords of the world are in charge at the moment, and they are running unchecked.  That is the frightening part of the whole situation.

I try to stay out of politics in this blog as much as possible.  This blog isn't about preaching.  It's about poetry and life and love.  However, I've been thinking a lot about a quote by Martin Niemoller:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
 
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
 
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
 
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Saint Marty is speaking up tonight, before they start knocking on his door.