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    My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge: Poems
    My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge: Poems
    My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge: Poems
    Ebook116 pages1 hour

    My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge: Poems

    By Paul Guest

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “A Paul Guest poem likes to pull out fast in the first line, then zigzag from one eye-opening image to another: A high-speed, innervating trip all the way.”
    —Dallas Morning News

     

    Whiting Award-winning and acclaimed poet Paul Guest’s My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge is an audaciously brilliant collection—a compendium of honesty, strange beauty, and pain—poems Louis Gluck calls, “urgent and moving,” and Robert Haas calls, “vibrant with news of the world seen from an angle of experience not available to most of us.” Mary Karr says, “Guest is a spirit to be reckoned with. Here’s a body of new work to cheer about.” Guest's first book, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World won the 2002 New Issues Prize in Poetry, and his second book, Notes for My Body Double, won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness will be available in May 2010.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061980329
    My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge: Poems
    Author

    Paul Guest

    Paul Guest is the author of three poetry collections, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, which won the 2002 New Issues Prize in Poetry; Notes for My Body Double, which won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize; and My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge. The recipient of a 2007 Whiting Award, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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      Book preview

      My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge - Paul Guest

      USER’S GUIDE TO PHYSICAL DEBILITATION

      Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis

      last longer than forever or at least until

      your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart

      or the culture of death, which really has it out

      for whoever has seen better days

      but still enjoys bruising marathons of bird watching,

      you, or your beleaguered caregiver

      stirring dark witch’s brews of resentment

      inside what had been her happy life,

      should turn to page seven where you can learn,

      assuming higher cognitive functions

      were not pureed by your selfish misfortune,

      how to leave the house for the first time in two years.

      An important first step,

      with apologies for the thoughtlessly thoughtless metaphor.

      When not an outright impossibility

      or form of neurological science fiction,

      sexual congress will either be with

      tourists in the kingdom of your tragedy,

      performing an act of sadistic charity;

      with the curious, for whom you will be beguilingly blank canvas;

      or with someone blindly feeling their way

      through an extended power outage

      caused by summer storms you once thought romantic.

      Page twelve instructs you how best

      to be inspiring to Magnus next door

      as he throws old Volkswagens into orbit

      above Alberta. And to Betty

      in her dark charm confiding a misery,

      whatever it is, that to her seems equivalent to yours.

      The curl of her hair that her finger knows

      better and beyond what you will,

      even in the hypothesis of heaven

      when you sleep. This guide is intended

      to prepare you for falling down

      and declaring détente with gravity,

      else you reach the inevitable end

      of scaring small children by your presence alone.

      Someone once said of crushing

      helplessness: it is a good idea to avoid that.

      We agree with that wisdom

      but gleaming motorcycles are hard

      to turn down or safely stop

      at speeds which melt aluminum. Of special note

      are sections regarding faith

      healing, self-loathing, abstract hobbies

      like theoretical spelunking and extreme atrophy,

      and what to say to loved ones

      who won’t stop shrieking

      at Christmas dinner. New to this edition

      is an index of important terms

      such as catheter, pain, blackout,

      pathological deltoid obsession, escort ser vice,

      magnetic resonance imaging,

      loss of friends due to superstitious fear,

      and, of course, amputation

      above the knee due to pernicious gangrene.

      It is our hope that this guide

      will be a valuable resource

      during this long stretch of boredom and dread

      and that it may be of some help,

      however small, to cope with your new life

      and the gradual, bittersweet loss

      of every God damned thing you ever loved.

      MY LIFE AMONG

      I’m beginning to dream again of my life among

      the ornamental, the vaguely functional,

      the doorstops and paperweights, my tenure

      in the legion of lawn gnomes, my brotherhood

      with novelty decanters, my solidarity

      with the generally useless, the inscrutably devised,

      the deformed idea, the Elvis clock,

      the flea market phantasm, the broken

      stapler clicking toothlessly, the pen caddy unpenned,

      I’m driving towards nowhere,

      I’m listening to the station

      broadcasting the weather,

      I’m forgetting the weather,

      I’m shutting my vinyl coat in the car door,

      I’m leaving it there in the door

      like a strange maroon pelt,

      I’m dreaming of all the use I could have been

      but was not, the clock repairman

      lost in the Swiss coils of time,

      eyes ruined by the hours

      and the hours, the antiquated milkman

      leaving frost-rimed bottles

      on the doorstep of a 1950’s educational film,

      that burred boy at the door

      terrified by the split atom,

      by Sputnik, by his mother’s zombie absolution,

      that was not me, no, not so

      specific as that, not this morning

      which is not the same

      morning in my dream, strange

      to think now there are two

      of them, one in which my name is Paul Guest

      and one in which I can’t read

      the tag pressed to my chest

      or the name on my birth

      certificate, nothing in this morning

      speaks any language

      I know, maybe I’ve fallen into the mind’s endless

      Russia, maybe this dream

      has piled against my mind

      like snow and the cold radiates everywhere,

      through the windows and the door

      it comes like a battering

      ram, announcing itself with splinters,

      but no

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