Jeff Alessandrelli - Four Poems
The Leopard Does Not Change Its Spots
“Any awkward moment is a creative act.”
– Ai Weiwei
THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE BEGINS IN CHILDHOOD
An only child, I grew up with what seemed like two impenetrable adults looming overhead, one
continually sawing the air with his hands like a crazed orchestra conductor, the other whispering to
me in calm, measured tones that seemed to only solidify my unknowing. The socialized decency
that makes effective communication impossible for so many people was engrained in me at a very
young age—when I cried I was held and shushed into a caress, but when I laughed or pointed a haze
of silence was etched in the air. By the age of 5 I was proficient at being silent in English and Spanish.
By 10 I was an expert in silence in 13 different languages, among them Muskum, Chehalis and
Burgundian. However and whenever I spoke, I spoke in a way that announced a futuring both far
distant and as near as sky to blue. I was the type of child that always wanted something more from a
sunset, one that worked too hard at being himself. The anxious kind, with bones made of 24 karat
gold and flexilight plastic, possessor of a smile that even in its fullness seemed to glint with nervous
apprehension.
ANTS, NEAR AND OUT OF SIGHT
As I grew older I sent mail, postal mail. This was the pre internet era, mid to late 1990s, a period
when everything was on the cusp of rampant digitality but for most folks in America the internet was
still a CD-ROM sent unbidden from AOL, one promising 50 or 100 free hours of the world wide
web for 45 or 60 days. (Payment was a carpenter ant, forever seen in the distance but too incessantly
small to squash.) These compact discs arrived constantly at my parents’ house but being that we
didn’t get a family computer until I was a senior in high school postal mail had to suffice. I miss this
disconnection now. Home alone after school, restless, someone’s shadow was always working like a
hammer behind me as I stuffed envelopes and carefully positioned stamps. No one was ever there.
TOO EASY TO MAKE WORK
First encountering most of them through an open solicitation call in the back pages of Highlights
magazine, I had 14 pen pals: 11 in the U.S., 1 in Canada, 1 in England, 1 in Thailand. Who and
where they were mattered less to me, though, than what I sent and received back from them. Most
of my pals were purely pleasantries, our three-to-four times a year exchanges a combination of
misguided sociality and the earnest desire for friendship. Porous, our relationship exacerbated by
the burden of geography’s long grasps, these friends soon proved to be strangers to me, our
correspondence faltering soon after it had begun.
“I LOST MY VIRGINITY TO A RAINBOW.”
Older than me by what seemed to be a beguiling amount of years, my pen pal from England fancied
himself a visionary of sorts, sending letters that began “Last week I lost my virginity to a rainbow
skying above Trinity College in Dublin, the heavens desiccating their eternal glories for treasures
that only lie beneath.” Lasting just two exchanges, our correspondence ended when my mother read
the above and, her eyes housing small fires, two dull blue flames, angrily called my father at work.
AN OASIS OF GRIDS AND CENTAURS
Although for years we regularly exchanged expressive drawings and Venn diagrams, each a deep
state conspiracy against the primacy of language, eventually my pen pal from Thailand’s replies
slowed to a crawl, then a stop. Sent 14 months after I’d last written him, his final missive to me
contained the only sentence in English he’d ever included in a letter: Yesterday I woke from a bad
apple and now I turn around my back.
A MAMMAL’S HALF LIFE LASTS STILL LONGER
You get older, are older, use words like granular, aphasic and lack. When someone writes the
sentence “The wisdom possessed by the elderly is only gained because they cannot remember (or
forgive) the passion they once so dearly prized” you understand it in a way that you previously
thought impossible. All of the things that were once more important to you than everything else now
matter less and less; an aging dog grown tired of chasing its tail. Concerto finished, one of your
parents is dead; the other speaks little, aggressively little, in a voice as soft as the humanless snow of
a ghost. Silence. Knowing what they’re made of, as you age you excavate your bones flake by flake,
boil the residue for the cash the scrap brings. Purely for the joy of the world you used to send your
pen pals freshly formed icicles, green and red water balloons filled with lemonade, a papier-mâché
cat with comically oversized paws and a rabid sunspot for a tongue. Now the very phrase “pen pal”
seems absurd to you. All this and yet still your whole life still seems to revolve around and live within
the moment when you were 15 years old and opened a letter from a new pen pal that, in a mannered
and calculated calligraphy, light blue ink, simply had the words PLEASE BE WITH ME written up
and down, over and over, on two 8.25 x 11 sheets of pristine white paper. You hid the letter from
your parents, tried to search the sender’s identity, attempted to calculate a response. But with too
much and not enough to say, you never responded. PLEASE BE WITH ME. Most days now you
drive through town, work a job, listen to music, have dinner with friends. PLEASE. There’s half a
life there. BE WITH ME. I close my eyes more than I think these days. Even nonexistent insects
annoy me. Graduate of the School of the Furtive Movement and Roiled Fetter, in the dark I close
my eyes. Please.
Here Is How I Want To Be Said
Indigent, shimmering, the pieces of reality that I like best are the ones that fit together so finely—
minutes rubbing into hours unto days funneling themselves (aghast!) into years— that it feels like your
whole life is a déjà vu, pervasive, splatters of consciousness at every edge and the accretion shards of
sight and motion and sound, lived out whole.
Coffin for Rent
Hell obeys me, God owes me money. I’m a spiritual athlete, adept at the nuance of venturous
position. When He’s crying and I split open the rain to find out what’s inside I don’t blather on
about acidity or alkalinity. I just smile, scratch my bone-dry nose with my bone-dry hand. My
spirituality is thus annotated in the famous Borges story when, on a whim, the stunningly attractive
protagonist decides to wear a nun’s habit on her international flight in order to tenderize the travelers’
secrets and, amidst the turbulence and discomfort, help them with their problems. Arriving on the
ground 11 hours later, having been relentlessly propositioned and prodded, offered free jigger upon
free jigger of vodka, her faith is destroyed, her belief in the Lord restored.
I’m an atheist, thank God imparted Luis Buñuel. Of the capricious mind and sight, he. And
somewhere in my body there’s a dim remembrance of a black and white photo of my favorite
Surrealist Benjamin Péret insulting a priest, spittingly so, while wearing a too-tight tanktop and
aggressively clunky glasses, but it’s an obvious place, vessel-constricted. Fear is nothing but an
abstracted vision of itself, compounded by the past. (No ideas but in things.) I’m superb at all of
them, down to the knuckle, but my best sports are played within tournaments of night, under
darkness of cloud and shadow. Look at the rain’s gray today, flickering on and off like an out of
service bus’s listless fluorescence. What we avoid controls us. What you avoid, I mean.
The Days of Wine & Roses; or An Orphan’s Tale
Aristotle. Andrew Jackson.
Billie Holiday. Joseph Smith.
Cinderella. Punky Brewster. Ice-T.
Marilyn Monroe. Elizabeth Bishop.
Leo Tolstoy. Tina Turner.
John Keats. Malcolm X.
Ella Fitzgerald. J.R.R. Tolkien.
William Wordsworth. Pollyanna.
Nelson Mandela. Tarzan.
Joseph Conrad. Ray Charles.
James Bond. Snow White.
Moses. Muhammad. Babe Ruth.
Eleanor Roosevelt. Edgar
Allen Poe. Louis Armstrong.
Tallulah Bankhead. Johann Sebastian Bach.
Little Annie, Little Orphan Annie.
Entering history at the margins,
in the cracks, the too brightly-lit
or dimly-apprehended corners,
crannies, crawl-spaces.
What are beliefs well-honed & nurtured
except beliefs that will one day be
misremembered. Dozens of times
I’ve surfed the coast of Nebraska.
Dozens of times I’ve skied
the frigid slopes of Haiti
& Jamaica & sweltering
Ho Chi Minh City.
The flatness of the world might
only be apprehended through
the universe’s vast spherical shapelessness.
Belief’s a plentiful act. Now take it back.
How in the end every translator is a traitor
to the mother tongue.
How through language—words worse than letters—
reading is a lie, a passing deceit.
How the little longness
of life is a lie, a deceit.
Great many broken secrets
impossible to twist & shout.
How the disturbing fact that
flesh flowers most fully in the summer,
the balmy spring.
Teal-blue tanktops & red bikinis & forest-green bikinis.
Then wild flowers out of gas
everywhere at an orphan’s feet
and how exacting lack
as a form of utterance is, can be.
A thief should be the keenest student of the law.
What proof then exists?
For reasons unclear
100% of all male orphans ejaculate
coagulated black sperm.
Everywhere they go they seem to find
harps impossible to play.
Lakes without shores.
What we thought were trucks
downshifting on the highway
was actually the sound of a meandering river
miles away an orphan slowly said
somewhere very quiet.
Dark muddy shores without lakes.
Pieces of an ignoble river
I’ve never seen.