Where are the geniuses today? Techno-leisure has created such a mass of dweebs
Who have no poetry in their soul, it’s hopeless to look there.
Genius happens between the voluntary and the involuntary:
You refuse to take an intoxicating drink
Or join in on the racist jokes.
“Homophobia runs deeper than we know,” said Norm Macdonald,
The grinning genius, the philosopher of crack and sex.
Philip Larkin reminds me of my middle aged ex,
Estranged from her mother, and with no children herself,
Who likes to hang out with gays.
I sometimes I think of her on Mother’s Day.
Norm is the American Larkin.
Humor and poetry are involuntary answers to voluntary questions.
No guy needs to be racist. No guy needs to fuck another guy’s hairy ass.
I like comedy, but melancholy is my favorite mood, alas!
Sensitive moods makes me sensitive and the delicate listening I require
Is only supplied by myself. Some idiot reviewing Larkin
Said who cares about these boring letters, thousands, Larkin
Wrote to his mother. No, never under-estimate the bare bodkin.
“Yesterday,” that plain dactylic word which opens “Yesterday,”
Can you hear it? YES-ter-day. The moment this homely word
Is sung, you hear complete resignation;
It’s obvious to me Paul lost someone, at seventeen?
Before the Beatles were,
Before the jokey cruelty, the sound and pomp of his fame
Covered up how much this lost memory meant to him,
Covered up the suffering, the despair, her name.
Which doesn’t matter. But then the hopeful
Resoration of the iambic in those ascending notes,
The phrase ending in, “Oh I believe in yesterday.”
This belief is everything. Ironic and beautiful.
And I heard, “yesterday” for the first time, today,
As Paul, in his unconscious may have heard it,
As he was writing his teenage, sentimental song:
“Yes. Her day.” Aren’t humor and love both wrong?