SELECTED POETRY

by
Jacob McArthur Mooney

A GUIDE FOR WRITERS DYING OF ALCOHOLISM

(after “Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel” by Truman Capote)

First, do no harm, there are
things you could say that might. Focus

to a point of such refusal
that your breath becomes self-reference.

There are exercises. Also, there’s
hotels with doors that lock from the inside.

Act out in public, but privately,
act in. And bushel your books together like

a habit in your bedroom. No one
wants to be outspoken, it causes a strain in

the voice. Okay, you’re drowning,
but talking just fills the lungs faster. Friends say

you’re entirely too wrong in
your living. Say this: To be entirely anything

is a sign of some progression
for a complication such as us. I won’t pretend

to be feeding you these lines, these
prayers, unanswered by a God that’s in the decals.

You define a week’s consumption
biblically: a jeroboam, a nebuchadnezzer, a

melchiar (to the punt). What’s
impressive is how you can taste it back

to the scenic happenstance
of grapes, how you perceive in things

their nurseries, or the seeds
held unstudied in the skin of domestic trees.

© Jacob McArthur Mooney

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A GUIDE TO SYNCOPATION

“Holy Cow. Some creature
so completely music that its bones

burst into song.
Now we understand those stories of the savage

pianist, annually growing hands…”
Don McKay, Bone Poems

Up like a pre-
addict Jerry Lee Lewis

at 4:30 in the morning. Did you know I once
took lessons? Chop, chop-hands ranging down, a chorus of

small bells. Did you know I had an uncle who’s
a jazz man? Higher, higher, fourthing up the octaves. Damn this

ending bastard.
Miller, more wood! Kill me an elephant, we need
more keys in here! Get another stool, my arm’s

too short to reach the end. An endangered species, bloodied up
outside, and me with my machine, wowing up a stretch to leap the Atlantic, swing

out around the mountains of Old Europe. Mozart: Beethoven: Marconi. If we
built a piano that wrapped around the world; inventing higher notes, piercing
glass, killing

small dogs, knocking the moon from its orbit—
and if it met itself back around the other side
in snowy Eastern Canada, what would we call the point of its return to the
original
bass end?

What would we call that note?

© Jacob McArthur Mooney

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A GUIDE TO SPREADING LIES ABOUT YOUR NEIGHBOURS

The house was built to face, bravely,
the far edge of the world. That kitchen
had doors like estuaries, five
of them in all. The following is a
recent history of
its contents
— edited for entertainment

The 1st door faced the sun
and as such
gets recalled in fuzzy yellows, blurred
by squint vision. It led
to a pantry, and then
the basement stairs, requiring
bravery and rubber boots. It
breathed, haunted by field mice
and newspapers from the 1940's.
My sister’s cat would sleep on the deep freeze,
having snuck in the prey way.
Bloated and content,
it would think up ways to kill me in my sleep.
You hailed it as protector,
but I could never trust it. Don’t trust animals
that mock their meals. I could tell
it was evil, that it held yellowed secrets, when I was
four months old, the thing slept on my face and
I broke out like dandelions
on the May two-four weekend.

The 2nd door led outside,
through it our neighbour came on Christmas Eves,
decked in red and white.
Starting in 1987,
he would show up every year
all whisky and festive, floppy cheer.
His elvish wife, 4 foot 8
would often sleep all week, but on
her good days, she’d
gladly throw assorted balls
across our broken fence with me, and
explore the foundations of dead houses
in the woods behind the kitchen door.
She once had schoolteacher ambitions,
but settled on being a headcase.
Settling again,
she died in October, 1993.
She ate crushed pills for the brain-sick and
stage-dove off her headboard
— I was given the details four years later.

We had the wake in the kitchen,
and that night, removed neckties, you
peeling off your pointed shoes, us
switching to the den to watch the World Series.
The fear of God not diluted
by unending sleep-filled Sundays,
we left the kitchen doors open,
so that He would feel welcome.

The 3rd door opened
onto a neurotoxic purple carpet and a room
the realtor called a half bath
— the mirror was six inches wide.
I held the door shut
through the Mulrooney administration,
and half the Chretien years
for the girl next door
— archetypal and actual.
She coddled lonely like a newborn colic
puppy, grew an ulcer by grade five,
and dangled transcendence
from a fish hook,
five inches in front of her face.
I remember cupcakes in the kitchen,
the smell of flour and lip gloss,
the taste of brown sugar,
and
most importantly,
learning how to lie to old people.
Somewhere in the sunburns, our heads
grew small like cameras. Now we’re both
off preparing, and soon
we’ll be blank slates again. Beautiful
and bored, we found ourselves,
swollen to the bursting-point
by 1996.

The 4th door led to the dining room
where empires fell.
I saw you, broken in the doorframe.
The walls were dented, our
night of lost knives
— and they were never fixed
just beautifully ignored.
I stepped over broken dishes to get at paper plates.
I wondered whether to ask you for the milk.
That was 1997,
when the plane fell from the sky
as I studied world capitals
at the kitchen table. I still swear
I saw its lights flicker
and felt the window give as the sound wave passed (whadoomp).
On December 31st we stayed in and subvocalized
on the hard slow death of the year, you with your
wine which came in boxes, and me
in new Christmas clothing,
protected from the sideways snowstorm. Speechless, we
listened to the gun club
shooting off across the street.

The 5th door was a mystery
solved as we finally left
in June, 1999.
Behind the oven and the spice rack,
covered by layered paper, it
hid for so long.
It opened, to three inches of empty space
and a note. We held back,
how’d we miss this? Now,
these houses have their secrets,
locked away, wedged between boards, where
our greedy new-mentia can’t find them.
Witnesses to everything,
social scientists,
that house lived
in the squeaks and creaks and whistles
it shared with us
— a willing participant, an equal.
A piece of paper, yellow-old,
hung by a nail at shoulder height.
Holding it up,
we folded our eyes,
its marks not seen since the day it was new.
It read;

“Art built this:
“May 1st , 1902.”

© Jacob McArthur Mooney

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A GUIDE TO THE APPLICATION OF H2O2

Goodbye, mysticism. We knew it
would end like this. Goodbye, physical integrity
of my toe. I was told if I ignored it, there’d be a
chance of infection.

Molarity. Argentum. Plumbum.
What more would I know if I had learned Latin?
If I hadn’t thought science too structured, I’d be
one hell of a well-read pharmacist. Look here —
the nail bed; rabid, expansive. I’m becoming the
air near my feet.

Revive dramatic medicines!
My ancestors’ TB bullseyes (such a distinct
disease), or the flushed intolerance of an iron
lung. Call me phlegmatic, but whatever became
of leprosy?

Splash, pause, grumble,
and hiss. Was there anything so graceful as
the death of the wicked witch? The peroxide divides
into exponents of rocket fuel. How this is safe,
I’m not sure. Control is evidenced by the fact
I’m not melting.

Pus. Poison. Possibility.
Is there anything you can still get for which
they’ll give you leeches? Maybe we’re revolted
by parasites because they live by feasting
on the lines that separate the alive from

every- thing else?
The happy chaos of my infinite end becomes
an interpretation of absence in dance. The pain
must be somewhere in the bubbles; it’s gone,
either amputated from me, or me from it.

© Jacob McArthur Mooney

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A GUIDE TO GETTING IT WRONG

In the future,
we’ll have animals
genetically improved upon
to do our daily tasks; birds to clean our houses,

dogs that drive our cars. Anthropologists,
while unearthing the vault at
Hannah-Barbera, will convince their
benefactors
that the Flintstones were more advanced
than the Jetsons.

It will be recorded in their textkittens
and taught to kids by bats.

© Jacob McArthur Mooney

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A GUIDE TO GETTING IT RIGHT

Rescind your faith
in synonyms. They don’t
exist. Understand
that language is
like any living creature, a product
of forever evolution. No one suggests that
two animals
are the same thing, and even when
they do they’re just
waving at the species with
catch-all categories like
birds, dogs, or bipeds.

Know how to map out
the space the word makes, how no
part of it is something else at all.
Put ten properties together
in a sentence, let your nation shape around
the holes you’ve left unopened. I had this cat
growing up that
got hit by a car, my mother said he
went away, and then
passed on, and then
died.

© Jacob McArthur Mooney

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