An Actor's Prologue: The Poem Every Actor Reads Before Taking That Certain Step

By LosRay Mitchell

A highly readable, provocative, and comical short-lined verse meditation on life and living, "An Actor's Prologue" is fun to read alone or aloud with people who want to consider what it means to act in this world of beauty, love, and stupid ********. If you feel both excited by life and frustrated by the sorts of people you have to deal with, you may find this book not only a lively kick but also a comfort and an inspiration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781623094362

Book preview

9781623094362

I laid many a royal

brown cob reading pages

of James Joyce's Ulysses

(which book's weather system—

category five Eirlit

Walpurgisnacht fashion—

works the good on a student's

mind that nature's harshness

bristlecone pine enriches)

in the cluttered bathroom

(amid a cool schizophrenic's

collection of notions

within brick walls smear painted

as lint eggs and smegma

but for the most part obscured

behind strange med posters

signed glossies of film legends

and zen reproductions—

eat clean rice and wash the bowl

void and wash the sphincter--

but like a medical sketch

of the nervous system

maps of exotic places

varnished lang syne showed through

depending on the lumens

invading the convex

ship's port hole third world installed

in the wall through which one

watched the streets as a diver

space alien or frog)

of a third-story walk up

on a bosqued limestone bluff

in Dubuque on what the Sauk

called Father of Waters

the Mississippi River

into which the clever

sewage proles pumped tons of shit

scrubbed clean by chemicals

so fit for dinner for fish

which might be angled cooked

and served at family suppers

all along the Old Man

ending at the devil's crotch—

exotic New Orleans—

and while I never thought much

about the importance

of my usually plain brown

but sometimes nut-studded

trophologs to the river

valley's ecosystem

(if this frass dusts uvulas

or if this seems too much

on the secretion end

of carnal experience—

the rhino and tactile

funky mumps of human ick—

shit ear wax snot whatnot—

things on the gagaboo list—

well gourmets eat fungus

survivors roots vermin bugs

and as all life depends

on the eating of the dead

what's some converted shit

amongst pantranscendent friends?

and we information

scavengers stuff zaftig skulls

reptile stem to pongid

bregma—in truth we oonh oonh—

with warped arcane nonsense—

we bitch slapped ego-paths

longing to be transgressors

but fearing shadowed tongues

and dead insinuations—

yet what's this quintessence

of quondom g-d and quondom

beast and full time quid nunc

who communicates most deft

from a perfumed anus

as from a sulphurous mouth

all moods from id torched sang froid

to hot gelid passions—

with lube pumiced concepts

fertile to pyrotechnic—

viz practiced hysterics

toasting the oul Irish corpse

doomed sure as bawdy porn

to mock the resurrection

rising from the coffin

to alpha in bibulous

fun but whine in omega

weeping for a lost father—

and as I brooded amid

bulb candle or sun lucence

and shit's weird olfac comfort

(the average hominid

demonstrates selectiveness

in forgiving some bowels

the odor of their office)

and the splendid language—

playful sublime vexalted—

(hence Nora's boy's deserved

stellar lit reputation—

Nora the handy lass

Joyce met at the Finn hotel

on the date the artist

began to feel thunder words

beyond the burning head

and the odyssey commenced

that would change literature

with the stroke of a maiden

in youth comely enough

in age like Chico in drag

but praise Miss Barnacle

goose girl to a new David

whose Irish lyre mapped

humankind's mind in a grand

myth smithed genome project

and rode a monorail to

the rhinobrain's temple

the ever blooming woman

who molly coddled Joyce

and stayed Irish everywhere--

though perhaps a little

allelopathic but shit

who's a turd layer to say—

I grew sympathetic

to bright Stephan Dedalus—

hostile toward the pop

whose petit bourgeoisie life spelled

'a footnote of a schmudk'--

the artist never dead

unless martyred by critics—

though we differed at times

in attitudes toward the church--

sometimes the beloved mother

sometimes the tired old bawd

whose faith regrows the hymen

sometimes the spirit crusher

whose ritual bureaucratic

tissular hebetude

makes many Americans

selective kink birlers

or glass closet Protestants

(quick to salt the rectrix

of the disputatious dove)

and yet often a church

provides the kind of comfort

however mass mumbled

that hard or gee whiz science

in all its uncertain

bang fact hypotheticals

(and I am one who loves

science's connectedness

but not all its savants

or pursuivants—g-d love 'em)

can't secern with true blue

certainty a good response

to life's quintessential

and sublimely kick ass writ

to most questions: tough shit—

and the emerald nation

(America's beloved

whose stereotypes come out

every March one seven—

some people think the suchness

and whoness of ethnic

identity inhabit

dirt or bones but in truth

culture's soul shows in the tongue

so without language

most folks who shout or raise chins

talking of genes or sod

just wear holiday costumes

and with memory's straw

spin idolatry's theme park)

at times proved whole genius

and sometimes insufflated

phallus—though most J barbs

proved so sharp one might suspect

his mind eyes and even

his penis acuminate

but boy oh boy what sort

of mother country smothers

the greatest rising son

(the dapper lion whose art

served much the same functions

as the much prayed to and loved

serene Lady of Cnock)

in his ineluctable

modality of art

except perhaps each nation

strives to kill or silence

those prophet sons and daughters

(persistent as roaches

honest as Anderson's girl

likely to go silent

as imams to eat umbles)

who see the fell ass work

of cultures and governments

resist politrectness

and find in toxic b-spheres

as rare scapegoat children

in thoroughly fooked up clans

means to turn the abooze

into a world-changing art

and so Joyce left Ireland

but carried the terrible

beauty in each crevice

of his body and spirit

to Schwizzleland through France

where he cooked his puns orn one

jape at a tome and proved

the inner life of each man

and woman ticks and blooms

wild and beautiful as aught

in visible nature

and each human lives out myth

and breathes in enigma

such that one who leans to break

wind in a tub becomes

Ulysses in Charybdis

and pinching an olive

one banquets with a prophet

and Erie microcozed

the wandering Greek or Jew

in whose great or common

footsteps walk h-sapiens

from Olduvai to bliss

or Dis and hurt like rebels

the British laid across

fey history's ruthless anvil

and beat into regions

where eloigned knights and lovers

sop dolor and poets

compose vigintillion songs

with pure silver voices

even as they nipple lick

the breasts of daemonic

nymphs with orange areolas

and hear sprites with cleft tongues

nurtured by vulva unguents

and the iron rich blood

of wounded and doomed princes

lament the daily fall

of each human who chooses

a plate in a hovel

not a cup at g-d's table

and as to mother church—

which during the Renaissance

condemned sex but nurtured

genius (such as bisexual

painters of nude figures

on the most sacred ceilings)

and seemed to understand

shepherds might find more than one

way to use the old crook—

in long suffering Ireland—

home of sorrowful Celts--

defeated but arrogant

preservers of western

civilization and kings

of internecine wrath

and parochial notions—

bullshit artists' fathers

(those dunned sons of froearsed pops

and exculpamartyrs

with warped inside descriptions

of Abaddon himself

and hell's territorial

dimensions and secret

procedures and strategic

plans and mission statements)

who laid their pain's way and angst

(failing to squeeze formless

forms or hear g-d's soundless sounds)

on g-d's own witnesses

as if their souls on which g-d

writes were furnace metals

in need of heat and violence

by the cult's princely smiths

with grand hammers of dogma

(jusdoozyrtol laws wrapped

up in impone hell's dolma—

to say true most adults

wear Cain's nevus on their ass

and speak with Dracula's

deft tones and hemaltic breath—

one day another fool

may contemplate the turgor

of eyes souls and rectums

in the politics of grunt)

so aye spirit crushing

in their overscrupulous

(fell primates gone cuckoo)

zeal to scourge afflict with guilt

yoyo boyos with thus:

thou shalt handle the pecker

with peccant reluctance

and pretend maid's caviar

the genesis of sin

(but what sin in the world

stinks higher than fudged science)

and through creepy sacraments—

say confession in which

one hangs laundry in closets

in which tormented men

in dresses absolve rotters

of dreadful transgressions—

petty lies thefts words and thoughts—

or suffer the élan

(hispid as an oaf lad's chin)

to be burned irenic

as with a zoo keeper's blow torch

(cleansing the divine spark

till next week—filthy vessel!)

but whoa what did sinners

but seize or perhaps accept

the strange invitation

to step into g-d's phone booth

for a conversation

with a representative

most consecratracted

to guide proud fat stupid lambs

to the right mindfulness

of the other's infinite

grace communicated

through dim broken receivers—

the least of our brothers

from skeletons in ovens

to African orphans

to street or corporate whores

to bigots with sheepskins

(some of whom lead lesser fools

to memory's abbatoir)--

to the crazies wedded to

Siva's retarded friend—

being a fish ash Christian

I oppose the notion

of calling the ten percent

of human beings who

through the most stupid violence

or the most egregious

wall street or capitol theft

cause some eighty percent

of society's problems

(but I'm sympathetic)—

and the conviction their shit

(some kind of metaphor)

glides and signifies sans stink

(if they threw effluent

against a cinderblock wall

people would proclaim it

a Picasso or Pollock)

but more often than not

with a priest who did to sins

what sewage engineers

did unto shit in Dubuque

(sure what the fathers said

sounded grander in Latin)

or sinners gruntfessed shit

in oracle's auricles

which priest flushed the spirit—

and so the confessional

served as a water closet

for our souls—unh! amen!--

perhaps the catholic cop out

remains ah shrift happens--

of course one soul's absolver's

another's brain lesion

another's apparatchik

or failed psychologist

or driver of the artist's

bright soular chariot—

and too many believers

hold that the word made flesh

popped home after the nail thing

and speaks not till the doom—

those who show their love for g-d

dance free to a music