[The prose poems in this collection were written during my undergraduate years, mainly between 1984-87. I put out a small edition of them in 1991, while still in Madison, Wisconsin. This is the text of that edition. --E.M.-L.]

ANTEATER

MERMAID

COCKATOO

by Eric Mader-Lin

Preface

Dear Friends:

I hope that you commence reading this book with a gargantuan sense of humor. Or with a dry, squeaky little sense of humor more in tune with the times. Humor, in any case, isn't something I would attribute to many of you.

I hope you realize that even in prose poetry the speaker or "I" is not necessarily the individual named on the poet's driver's license or in his passport. In any case many of you already refuse to believe in "the individual" as a political, legal, psychological, or linguistic entity. So be it. Perhaps you more than the rest will have sympathy for the poems collected here.

Some of the people I've shown this book to have thought it sad work all around, some of them have said they were "in support" of what I was doing, some have pretended not to have read it so as to avoid saying anything, and one (my sister) thinks it's great, and tells me that everyone she shows it to down at the Chicago Art Institute also thinks it's great and wants to meet me. A woman in France who got a hold of it against my will asked me, with a significant look, "How do you feel about your mother?" (as if I hadn't ever though about such questions before). And my best friend told me it was "a piece of shit."

"Really," he insisted. "It's terrible. I mean pure shit."

Why would I want to publicize such an unnameable collection of [stuff]? Am I looking for pats on the back? Am I hoping thus to fan my ego? Perhaps I just want to stir things up in my dull little circle, and I'm bummed that no one ever gives me anything to read (nothing other than their endless term papers at least). I think my reasons for publishing this are probably closest to the last. But also I am wondering myself how to name these writings: after not reading them for years, I read them through one recent day and realized that, whatever else they were, they were certainly the most pleasurable things I've yet written. Are they also the most powerful? "Pleasure," "power"--two words I've had plenty of dealings with in the Comparative Literature department. Perhaps "rage" and "jouissance" would better fit the bill? Nawww. But you, dear friends, will name this shit what you will.

Eric Mader,

January, 1991,

Madison

I like cows.

They like me.

I like cows.

They go "mooo" when

they eat.

I like their friends

the shaved sheep.

They got the skinny feet.

I like birds

because they can fly.

But careful looking up,

might get it in the eye.

Be a schmuck,

Learn to cluck,

Wiggle your ass

just like a duck.

Anteater!

Mermaid!

COCKATOO!

IN THE GARDEN

It was morning in the Garden. Eve sat quietly by a little brook, her black hair hanging in wild curls down to her waist, the sun glowing bright gold in her dark brown eyes. Pan and all the wood nymphs and the water nymphs spied silently from behind trees and vines, a host of hundreds hidden from sight. Eve leaned back and sat the apple on her belly. She contemplated the sunlight playing and glistening in the beads of water on the apple. The sunlight warmed her brown skin. She heard birds playing noisily in the trees above, she saw the brown bodies of fish suspended in the clear water of the brook, she watched a bright green snake slither over the top of a log and disappear from sight. Suddenly she brought the apple to her mouth and took a bite, smiling triumphantly as she did. Pan and the wood nymphs and the water nymphs and all the forest burst out in laughter and applause and Eve danced joyously, laughing like a little girl.

POEM FOR AN ACEPHALIC CLASSICIST, IN A LIGHT VEIN

For the librarian who discovered Agamemnon's mask;

For the other who beat the heart of death.

Sysiphus was a dung beetle anthropomorphized by Ulysses's dog Argos as the master himself stood at the gate in rags.

"There, there, good boy," said the great tactician in rags, as he stroked his own penis with an Aztec torture device.

Eumaios--O my swineherd!--was meanwhile ripping his guts out with a nailclipper, while Telemakhos watched from his tower window through a cracked mirror. "Bloody disgusting!" Penelope hear him say.

"What's that, hun?" said the wise Queen, stepping brusquely into the room.

(The question at this point was whether or not Telemakhos should give up the farce. He did.)

"Your king's back, Mother. Look at him down there by the gate with that Aztec expender round his bloody tool. He was gonna acephalate the suitors today, m'lady."

"O rocks!" said the Queen.

Down by the dungheap that wily man's eye was drawn from Argos's cancerous anus up to an omen, a white eagle perched on the roof of his own long-suffering manor. His eyes beheld also the image of his lusty Queen, with her fine sculpted breasts, her mouth smiling.

"I think I'll keep these rags," said Ulysses to the bleeding corpse of Eumaios, the yellow rot of leprosy working its way through his neck.

The great king was just positioning himself to sodomize old Argos when the rot got through to the other side, and his head rolled off to the left.

VIRGIL

Two doves fly and rise sharply against a giant black ember. A man with a golden tooth is out there somewhere. We played games in the sand and felt soft leaves, boughs of tropical evergreens. She had a candystriped dress or maybe there was a candystriped ribbon in her hair, or maybe I am thinking of the lush cherry red of her lips or the protruding red of her nipples standing out on her full white flesh. There was a branch to be perched on over a dark lake, a somber branch against a gray sky. The wind moved ships and night, green seas, across the cover of our book. The night was not so much night as it was a patch of darkness studded with bright stars. The gold was not so much gold as it was the perversion of mushroom and vine. The land was much more land, though, than the cover of our book.

Troy was a dilapidated sewing machine hanging in the background. And Aeneas was a large upper-torso with something of a feather for a head.

THE GEWGAW DIRGE TO OUR

LAST LORD AND BENEFACTOR

I.

Picture, if you will, picture Jesus as a workman building a house in a rich neighborhood going to the dogs because too many houses are being built there, too many dinky houses that end up being painted yellow or green or, Heaven help our souls, yellow with green shutters. Picture Jesus with his giant beer-swelled bulwark of a corpse lying on its side in a rather beached position, and Jesus has such a girth to his Entity that his legs stick out as they would on dolls, the upper one not having that luxury or irritation (we will never know) afforded to the more slim philistines among us whose legs lie scratch on top of one another when they lie on their sides. Jesus is wearing a grubby blue, gray, off-white flannel shirt that, unbuttoned, shows to advantage his huge ventral bowl from the center of which sticks out, no, not a flaw, but the yet hanging last few inches of his umbilical cord, which unlike the glowing umbilicals of the maharishis, or the red firefly light in the navels of the gurus, is merely a hanging little drooper of a dirty little thing which does naught in the way of feuerworks, but merely hangs there, often grubstained, dirty with black grease, like the rest of his fundamental ventral.

The navel, which we can consider in this view, a valid engraving of our own shimmering imagination's reproduction, hangs there as a dirty reminder of the virgin birth, a shameful thing all around, resulting from the horrible repressions and focused flights of fancy of a young girl, who in no way deserves the appellation of Mother Force just by virtue of the twisted and occult means she sank to in order to give birth to this Most Exalted Whale of a son. The psychotic manifestations and terrified dreams of that jittery little would-be office girl Mary in no way merit her the attention she has gotten for her nice little magic trick. It is surmised by doctors, in fact, and many healers as well (though we cannot vouch for their knowledge here) that it is the outrageous method of conception so fitfully employed by the mother Mary that has resulted in the active physiological imbalance in Our Lord Christ which causes his all-night bouts of soul-swelling beer drinking, which have in turn led to his gruesome bowl. We can only offer her censure on this mark, white lilies or no white lilies. "Think of the poor boy," as many of our wise parishoners are heard to say, relaxing wonderfully on top of their white patio furniture. "Think of that poor boy."

What's more, we are not apt to employ the secretly rotting paradigms employed by feminists and other sorcerers to the effect that unisexual reproduction is healthy and common and, funny that they add this almost as an afterthought, possible, given the correct nurturing of a little womyn in a nice little magical environment, one tending to, as they say, creative mythologies and the death of all syllogism. Lord bless our souls but this is not the time nor the place for "creative mythologies" as presently such can only lessen material, ergo real, production. This is not merely our own opinion, our own creation, as you more bacchic lesbians would insist, taking your vision whether you know it or not from your phallic thyrsi--this is the conclusion reached from the combined labors of Sphincter and Bourghese, 1974. We can only censure any overtly or covertly snatchy insistences to the contrary, so help us God.

II.

Jesus is in charge of laying the foundation. A job in no way tending to his spine, Herculean though it may be on better days, because it requires so much bending. This problem has been looked into by M. Bedier in his seminal work, The Spine of Our Good Lord Pontisface, Mouton Mifflin and Sons, 1968. The conclusion finally reached in Chapter 18, a somewhat belated conclusion, I found the text quite windy personally, states that "Our Good Lord should drastically reduce his ale consumption and should spend a couple good hours a day in an extensive exercise program." Several methods of weight loss are suggested in this dreary tome, including the exercise bicycle and the rowing machine. It is our opinion, however, that he would never consent to either of these methods, preferring rather, and this can only be viewed by us as a last resort, astral projection.

III.

It is perhaps our duty now, in this dirge, to present to our gentle readers some of the more piquing aspects of our Good Lord Christ's average day in the employ of Chenequa Highlands Developing. The Good Lord rises with the sun each day. (I beg a slight parenthetical digressive here, as it is, I believe, of the order of things. Despite the contrary insistences of New Agers and others, the sun, in all its nuclear glory though it be, is by no he would never consent to either of these methods, preferring rather, and this can only be viewed by us as a last resort, astral projection.

IV.

It is perhaps our duty now, in this dirge, to present to our gentle readers some of the more piquing aspects of our Good Lord Christ's average day in the employ of Chenequa Highlands Developing. The Good Lord rises with the sun each day. (I beg a slight parenthetical digressive here, as it is, I believe, of the order of things. Despite the contrary insistences of New Agers and others, the sun, in all its nuclear glory though it be, is by no means the true father and origin of that blue-flannelled whale we tend to call Our Lord. Rather, as has been proven by St. Parsimonius in his early work De nada , the Father of Christ is none other than an area whose bornes do not exist and whose center point is the sum of all points. Ego tamquam centrum circuli, cui simili modo se habent circumferentiae partes; tu autem non sic. Nisi, ergo in escondido es, in terribilitata . In, ut amplius scribere, chiarobscurata . In flagrante delictata chiarobscurata. Sed satis dico, satis. Et scusi. ) Jesus takes his lunch with the children, who make whale jokes in languages he does not understand.

A day on the job with our most Sanctum Deis is reputed to rarely attain heights less than miraculous. Whole armies of ants have been seen pouring out of the earth like magnificent chancres of blood. Frequently as of late houses have been observed to be completed months before schedule. It seems that instances of brick levitation have been observed by Wallace, Crookes, Wagner, Butlerof, Varley, Buchanan, Hare, Reichenbach, Thury, Perty, de Morgan, Hoffmann, Goldschmidt, Saiz, W. Gregory, Flammarion, Sergeant Cox and many others. It seems as well that Jesus is wont to stop dead in his tracks on dirt roads and stare fixedly at the dust-covered lower foliage in the ditch of the road until he has gleaned and processed every single detail of the, to our feeble eyes, small scene he was so cosmically pondering upon. In what is assumed to be a prodigious fit of rimbaldian rebellion focussed against mother Mary, Jesus Christ has been blamed--for there are many eye-witnesses who actually claim they viewed him creating the little rapscallions--for the small bands of white dwarf-like humanoids which have as of recently been conducting absolutely horrifying sadian orgies in grocery stores and in the back windows of cars even when young children are on board. Jesus has been observed, for instance (according to the eyewitness report of the famed motocross racer Tom Roscoe) resting his huge haunches on a dirt mound in an unfinished building site masturbating furiously--bellowing out cerberan groans according to our report--while small groups of these pale dwarves ply their lubricious trade on the dirt clods around him, in constantly various libertine configurations. These scenes only occur, according to our spry young ____, when the workers have all gone to their homes and the sun is setting behind the full silos of corn.

V.

The demise of Our Good Lord Christ can only be felt with the most painful sensations in all areas of our town save those few where older pagan traditions still reign. Our women's keening will undoubtedly go on into that dark night until the stars fall from the sky like dead, dry pistils in the dead, frozen heart of fall. That Shanny O'Keogh was roaring-boy drunk at the wake has been finally substantiated by the frequency of reports to the positive. We are sure Our Dearest Benefactor will find it in his heavenly heart to forgive him. That the Good Lord will resurrect in three days has yet to be proven, and many of our more circumspect citizens are hoping that it won't happen in this lifetime or the next.

LA CAMISA VERDE

Sitting in a Spanish course I heard the phrase la camisa verde. I leaned over to the guy next to me and told him it sounded like the name of a restaurant. We both chuckled a little. And then I told him that I was going to name a restaurant La Camisa Verde and I wrote LA CAMISA VERDE on the piece of paper on my desk for him to see. And this is all the further my idea for opening a restaurant called La Camisa Verde ever got.

La camisa verde : the green shirt.

LE PAPIER DE TENTURE DE M. M.J.

The incredible bravery of some people! To suppose that they can walk a sidewalk without all space suddenly disintegrating around them. To suppose that they won't wake up in a closet full of mummies some morning with the hollow crazy laughter of God piped in through a speaker up in one of the corners. To suppose that they won't someday open their eyes up underwater and find a giant shark in the swimming pool; or that some humid night this summer there won't land in one of our fine Wisconsin lakes some horror from outer space which will propagate by morning into a hundred-million furry crab-like creatures hopping through the forests and suburbs and eventually down every city street on the continent. To suppose that just behind their head doesn't constantly fly a little cluster of Boschean devils, careful not to make a single sound. To suppose that they're not an electronic brain rigged up in a vat somewhere. To suppose that they won't suddenly forget their name in the witness stand. To suppose that they can move their arms around any way they like unpunished. To suppose that death isn't far more horrible than we could ever imagine.

A POEM WITH A HARSH ENDING, SO BE PREPARED

I'm sitting on the Union terrace. A woman is reading the New York Times and talking to the sparrows which flit back and forth from tree to table and then from table to tree, from table to ground and then from ground to trash can; from white chair to orange chair to empty tray. The woman is laughing maniacally, talking to the clear blue sky, directing the birds with her index finger as if they were part of a symphony. She's happy: she hears the music. She reads the paper. ICE TRUCK TURNS OVER IN COLUMBIA KILLING 843. Oh, that isn't nice. That isn't nice at all. MERCURY DUMP SITE SEEN AS CAUSE OF UPSWING IN DEFORMED CHILD BIRTH. Oh, what a strange world! What a strange world this is!

The swallows are like little automata if you watch them closely. Their heads twitch back and forth in tiny mechanical jerks--instantaneously. Click, click . . . click, click . . . bzzt . . . click, click. Their eyes go in and out of focus like automatic cameras. There is a tiny set of crosshairs in each eye.

The swallows which the woman brings with her to the Union every Saturday afternoon are only the finest Swiss-made swallows money can buy. She spends the entire week oiling them, fine-tuning them, practicing her pieces in the basement of her house where there are a number of makeshift perches corresponding exactly to the rests and stops available on the terrace. She is happy. She hears the music. She is working patiently, living like a crone, scrimping and saving every penny that she earns so she can afford the set of beautifully crafted parrots she saw in Herr Mutter's shop in a dream. There are quetzals, penguins, wonderful lavender ostriches with smiles and big black eyelashes to be had if only you had the money. She wouldn't think of training her birds to steal. When she gets the parrots from Herr Mutter they will be wrapped separately, each in its own cardboard box. She will cut the waxy red packing string that Herr Mutter always uses and the parrots will hop out one after another onto her kitchen table, flapping their mechanical wings in glee. They will hop about her counters and her cupboards and her sink, all in a flutter about how they waited so longingly for her to open them up and about how they had heard from Herr Mutter what a wonderful and talented woman she was. Why, she was a genius even! Yes, he had said that!

Oh, how nice it will be when I get those parrots out on the Union, how the people will all gape with wonder and the children will crowd around me laughing and smothering me with kisses! It will be beautiful again! There will be penguins and dwarves and beautiful young princesses and such soft feathery nests for one to cuddle into everywhere! It will be Christmas all year round!

In short, the old bag was batty.

EDUCATION IN AMERICA, I

A beautiful young man with a huge white plume in his hat and a golden sword by his side came prancing into our patio party on a gorgeous steed. The guests all thought him a gallant young chap and enjoyed talking with him.

"He's so very witty!" said my cousin Celia.

"He must be a devil with the women!" I heard a flustered old matron say.

Then my little cousin Jenny, who was only four and who had no business knowing such a word in the first place, blurted out: "He's an anachronism, Mommy!"

All the guests immediately hushed up and looked at her in fright, as if she had done something terribly wrong and as if she should be ashamed of herself. Jenny held her ground, though, didn't even flinch, and when the guests looked again the mystery rider was nowhere to be seen.

EDUCATION IN AMERICA, II: YEAR 2086

We where flying in a rocket when We blew the old school up. Then we went to our New future school. We went home to get our glowing suits. On When we went to our rocket Then we were at school. We were doing our space comant doodling. When our siren came on that mean's were going to eat it. pizza Roni day and Soda it's asid when the red bell rang that means were under attack. By illegel elians. One off the elian blew Ronald Regan's head off. With a lazer gun. When we were shoting them with our lazer gun Ships. After it was over we were in the space Jail because they captured us. We were in there until 2016. We were going to break out. We did then we went to our new weapon it was a lazer ship when we were little we got a new ship it was Delta 446 and then we were back here getting our new ship Air wolf go's 6000 miles per hour. And then we got lost then we land near a cabin and we went in and we saw weapons all over. We took some and flew of. We found our way back home. When we got home we stop for more weapon. We got in to our air wolf again and head for the white house. When we got to the white house we shoot with weapon and the white house blew up we flew home and all the president die at the same time.

Courtesy of Duke and Blay, 6th grade.

EDUCATION IN AMERICA, III

The entrance exam was on a small piece of paper hidden out in the forest somewhere. There were a number of clues to find the exam: a low-relief black metal eagle against the front of a white brick house, an electrical box at the side of the road with the number 13 written on it, and a piece of obscene graffiti spraypainted on a wooden bridge which we will not mention here. The Dean of Students was a chubby guy in his fifties who wore welding goggles, Donald Duck ears, and gray shorts with a leather belt. When he pulled the trigger at the starting line I managed to get off to a good start, tripping at least three of the other contestants in the first stretch. Then I thought about it a second and decided to give up the race and chase the Dean of Students screaming bloody murder instead. I finally cornered the Dean on a grassy knowl and chopped off his left leg with a big blubber knife. The Dean let me into the school without the entrance exam, and now he and I often sit in his den talking about the good old days and about how the races should be run this year. He has a really neat pipe collection, this particular Dean.

EDUCATION IN AMERICA, IV

"If there is truly nothing else we can do, we could just sit here all day and stare at the surf," said Haines.

I was irritated at his heavy-handed syntax and I winced a bit in pain. He noticed this.

"Oh, you're soft and sour as a lemon, you! What was wrong with what I said?"

I didn't answer him. I was thinking how it was nice of the Marquis to install us in this upper room. There were no rats up here, and one couldn't hear the screaming of the other inmates.

"Listen, I know you know why I'm here," said Haines. "So lets cut the crap, OK?"

I snarled at him and walked to the stone railing and looked down. I felt a dizziness in my head and saw green stars cluster round the focal point of my vision. The dizziness was more from hunger than the height. The fortress was a big brick structure about 250 feet high. It was known around the countryside as the Big Stone Phallus of Vitruvius. What that meant, they hadn't told me yet. Haines was a plant put in by the Marquis to keep an eye on me. They had found a reference to Julien Sorel in one of my letters to Nastassia (Nastassia from War and Peace) and they wanted to make sure that I didn't escape.

"So you like Stendhal, I take it," said Haines.

As I looked at him he was looking more like I. A. Richards by the minute. In one quick bound I was at his throat. It was only a matter of seconds before I had him over the edge. He fell to his death.

I sat back down in the patio chair and took another sip of the lemonade the Marquis had provided. What would he say about my killing Haines? Who cares! Out on the beach I could see a number of figures waving to me. I squinted a bit so I could see them better. I'm not sure, but I think they were Sri Ramakrishna, Mme Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Andre Breton, P. D. Ouspensky, Bubba Free John, Mick Jaggar and the Buddha himself. The Buddha was waving particularly avidly, smiling from ear to ear like a big goofball.

The Marquis was a shifty character with a big diamond tie clip, a dove gray Ferrari and a ferris wheel in his back yard for his little girl to play on. He decided to move me downstairs with the other prisoners. I never saw the light of day again.

CHARITY

When I was a boy I was as greedy as all boys, which is to say that I was as greedy as everyone is at heart. Anyways, one Easter Sunday, after the service, my parents asked me how much I had put in my offering envelope. I told them that I had put in 75¢, which was the truth. My parents were not happy with this, though, because they knew that I had a little red plastic briefcase in which I kept all the change I could manage to gather and that in this briefcase I had somewhere around $7.00.

"It is too bad that you only put in 75¢," my mother said. "We would have doubled anything you decided to give to the church."

"You mean if I would have given them $5.00 you would have given me 10?"

"That's right," my mother said.

"Well, then I'll give $5.00."

"No, it is too late now," she said. "You will have to think of that next time. Here is your dollar-fifty for the 75¢ you gave." And she gave me a dollar bill and two quarters.

The church was a big stone building with gold inlay all around the altar. When I went to put the $1.50 into my red plastic briefcase with the rest of my savings I found that all of my money was gone and that in its place was a little crust of bread and a note which read: "Take this, fuckwad."

TERROR IN THE ELEUSIAN FIELDS

"When you get to the Eleusian Fields, Parker. . ."

"Who, me?" he said.