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WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL IS LIKE FOOD
AND FATTENS ME

Oh, gee, jolly am I, and when I am jolly I am
The jolliest. When jolly I out-jolly the cheekiest
Mall Santa, and I grow jollier in that knowledge.
I am bigger than you. I am happier than you.
Your glee is a golf ball, pocked and lost.
My glee is a glowing moon, a day short of full;
I have grown and am growing;
I am including in my shine all the lost golf balls.
I am including in my shine all the tall grass.
I am shining through windows and outlining
The shapes of sleeping girls with white-tipped fingers.
I know my favorite words: yes and more.
And every object is a morsel and every morsel
Is a fiddle and adds to my orchestra’s noise.


matthew yeager headshotMatthew Yeager’s poems have appeared in SixthfinchGulf CoastNY QuarterlyMinnesota Review, and elsewhere, as well as Best American Poetry 2005 and Best American Poetry 2010. His short film “A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment”was an official selection at thirteen film festivals in 2009-2010, picking up three awards. Other distinctions include the Barthelme Prize in Short Prose and two MacDowell fellowships. He is the co-curator of the long running KGB Monday Night Poetry Series, and lives in Ridgewood, Queens, NY.     

 

 

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following poems are from an unfinished manuscript (begun in 2002) entitled THE STORY OF CHI-KO & THE GUT + THE GUT SONNETS & THE GUT’S GRAND STRAIGHTENING SONG.  It is a hybrid of a prose tale (written by a bumbling narrator named), a great many sonnets, and a long, long-lined Whitmanian song.  In the tale, a small paunch detaches from the belly of a dieting college student named Chi-Ko, alternately “Crisco” (Chris Kozoloski), the narrator’s housemate.  Hailing itself as the Gut, this half-plant, half-animal fat ball, which can talk, grows and grows in personality, unsightliness, and literal size.  Its plan is to turn the tables on Chi-Ko by swallowing him whole, like a snake, thus rendering Chi-Ko a small part of itself.  Paralyzed into inaction, however, by an equally powerful urge to shrink and get back together with Chi-Ko (as well as a melancholic temperament, generally) the Gut ultimately orchestrates its own grandiose murder in a misdirected play for survival.

A quote from C.S. Lewis, taken from his introduction to the Screwtape Letters, Revised Edition offers a clue to the Gut’s being, and general modus operandi in regard to Chi-Ko:

“[It is an] absurd fancy that devils are engaged in the disinterested pursuit of something called Evil (the capital is essential).  Mine have no use for any such turnip ghost.  Bad angels, like bad men, are entirely practical.  They have two motives.  The first is fear of punishment….The second is a kind of hunger.  I feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another; and us.

“On Earth this desire is often called “love.”   In Hell I feign that they recognize it as hunger.  But there the hunger is more ravenous, and a fuller satisfaction is possible.  There, I suggest, the stronger spirit – there are no bodies to impede the operation – can really and irrevocably suck the weaker into itself and permanently gorge its own being on the weaker’s out-raged individuality.”

In the meantime, the Gut, whose only exposure to poetry is a Norton Anthology of British Literature Vol. II, “secretly” pens a series of sonnets in unabashed hopes of living forever.  Included a sampling here of these sonnets, of which there are upwards of one hundred and twenty, of a highly uneven quality.  Many are about writing; many reference eating in some way; a few are directly about food.  A Ben Jonson epigram serves as useful introduction to the Gut’s personality:

On Gut

Gut eats all day and letchers all the nights,
So all his meat he tasteth over, twice;
And striving so to double his delight,
He makes himself a thoroughfare of vice.
Thus, in his belly can he change a sin,
Lust it comes out that gluttony went in.

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