| ABOUT
THE FUNDAMENTALS
"If recent poetic fare has struck you as unsatisfying or bland at best, The Fundamentals consistently delivers "the real beef of things/ marbled by the lunatic real." Deftly able to fuse pop colloquialism with a solid sense of form, Purcell's poems are simultaneously well-crafted and whacked. Whether zealously reviewing movies in the persona of Ezra Pound, sketching a quick still-life at Denny's, or just out for a night of literary gangbanging, he is darkly comic, gleefully original, and excessively fun. This is an impressive and thoroughly entertaining debut."
--Elaine Equi
The Fundamentals is my first
book of poetry and it's still looking for a publisher. The title poem is excerpted here.
_____
He was Mercury
Mercury
And dropped
Scattered
In Amador liquors
A pack of Marlboros
And a pint of Canadian Reserve
Forget it
You'll never know
Fame
Forgiveness
Maybe you've got
A color wheel
For words
Mercury lights
Like iron
Or maybe a theorem
He's come to know
This malleability
So mercury come
Mercury come down
You're poison
On the skin
And in the belly
Like spilled water
Mercury come
Mercury come down
_____
So he is Rare
So rare
As
He was self-regarding
He trickled in words
And out came fuss
And fake lovers
Or the flash
Of discovery
Don't bother
Rarity will out
Or it will go to war
And smother
Hatred
Froths from the hearts
Of children
And clogs their arteries
So rare
Themselves, their mothers
So rare, teaching
What has gone before
Yet war in new ways:
Five fingers
on his puffing hand
Two eyes
On the fire in landscape
Two feet
Running
One rare child
Of three or four
_____
He was a Yearbook
A yearbook
Full of himself
Counting up from the A's
The Aardvarks near the Admirals
And all the alcoholics he was
Line up at the bar he would become
As a Cunt he followed Cunnilingus
As a Dick he drills
And toward the center, his
Identity
Suffers badly
Following a dermatological breakdown
And Halitosis
He was the Junior League
And Katharsis in the Greek
Just because he showed up
And was Lingering
He shut Mouth and Nose alternately
As he Openly, Ponderously
Queerly, Red-faced, Standing, Terribly
As through Unbelief
Ended
With a few signatures
From relative strangers
A few nice sentiments
Slug away, jerk
See you next summer
Keep lovin' KISS
Copyright © 2006
by Greg Purcell
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