PROZAC AND ITS PERMUTATIONS
PROZAC AND ITS PERMUTATIONS
BY
David Gottfried
The Title of this Essay, “Prozac and its Permutations,” doesn’t really say much of anything. However, if I had given this essay a title that truly corresponded to its content, not too many people would read this because most people are bored by poetry. So I just picked the first groovy word, that popped into my head, that alliterated with Prozac. Hence, the title, Prozac and its Permutations.
If I recall correctly, I started on Prozac in the Summer of 1994. About two to three weeks after the initiation of therapy, poems would invade my sleep. In the morning, I had several lines of a poem.
Prozac inaugurated a dramatic change in my poetry. Previously, all of my stuff was free verse. With the advent of prozac, just about everything became rhymed and very rhythmic. A lot of the stuff I wrote was, perhaps, a bit too crisp, snappy, symmetrical and some of the ideas were perhaps even simplistic. But I have a fondness for them. Accordingly, I am giving you a few of my Prozac poems. I wonder if the psychiatric literature notes that patients have made up rhymes in their sleep after going on Prozac. I bet not. I am sui generis.
Here’s a sampling:
1) This is the very first rhymed poem I had written after the start of Prozac. Oddly enough, the rhythm is largely iambic septameter (seven beats per line). Someone told me it was seven beats per line. I didn’t know anything about poetic meter. The whole thing came to me spontaneously.
HARK THE WEALTHY WOMEN COME TO PRAISE VIRGINIA WOOLF
They saunter in the springtime air and say that they're so
fair
Trust fund gals, one and all, they never have a care
With smiley smirks and cutting quirks they show sarcastic
flair
Beware the male so impudent he dares to cast his stare
They've got degrees, fine pedigrees, and are so au courant
They know without a doubt of course the wretched way of man
And testicular turbulence they do so care to ban
And if they have their way they shall implement their plan
To cut the nuts from boys and men and make them be quite
sweet
Like little lovely fairy queens, a dowager's favorite treat
Kneeling, crawling, begging and offering up their meat
The little boys in English class are trodden on like peat
And when the women graduate they feel so strong and free
They glide from Greenwich to New York with exuberance and
glee
And make a mint on a manic market hot trajectory
Forgetting Woolf and all she taught in their Capitalistic Spree
THE LIBERAL CLUB WILL MEET AT EIGHT -- QUICHE WILL BE SERVED, AND POVERTY WILL BE DISCUSSED
Have you seen the wealthy liberals eating quiche lorraine
They're so dainty and urbane
Yes they Summer in the plain
And they dance in Spanish rain
They adore the poor they do
And the famine that's their due
They fight bosses by the slew
And shop on finest avenue
With degrees, grace and aplomb
They pounce on a dire slum
Tell the poor that they're too glum
While clutching Mommy's tidy sum
Their Theatre's Masterpiece
And the last century's cease
Gilded gowns and Christmas geese
Gives them everlasting peace
For when they contemplate the old
Wretched London dark and cold
Portentous poverty and gold
They have a cause, my dear, to hold
ON MY MADNESS
I stand aloof, august, austere
I silence suns with bluest sphere
These eyes that singe and flare and glare
And never, ever, shed a tear
My blood is royal, cold and blue
The world at large I do eschew
The "friends" I've known have not a clue
Why I stew a witch's brew
I hate you, hate you, yes I do
The way my mind is so askew
The world's a gawking, catty crew
Listen to the lies they spew
They whisper in the dark of night
Guffaw and giggle in broad daylight
"He's crazy, he suffers, see his plight"
Lot's wife’s progenic blight
And so they say some wayward gene
Made me mad, distraught with spleen
My ideas they need not glean
Neuronal quirks of blood unclean
With lots of psychiatric spite
And technocratic talk quite trite
They claim their drugs will set things right
In tactless tracts of thinking light
But I can tell you such a tale
Of horror and an infant's wail
Of how the World made me assail
And rave and rant and hit like hail
So come survey this paper trail
Of poems, polemics, that pierce the veil
Let your mind set-out and sail
And you'll be capsized in a gale
IT'S THRILLING, IT'S THRILLING, THERE IS ANOTHER TRILLING
Prefatory Notes:
In "An Unfinished Woman,"
Lillian Hellman relates that
Theodore Roethke once asked
her to complete a poem which
started with the line, "It's
Thrilling, it's thrilling,
there is another Trilling."
Lionel Trilling taught English at
Columbia University and was
Reputed to be a Jewish “Uncle
Jake”
It's thrilling, it's thrilling, there is another Trilling
Her name's Diana and she's meek Lionel's wife
A lioness, a loudmouth, licentiously she's swilling
Bourbon, by the bucket, and contemplating strife
That cabal, of commies, in Columbia so willing
To disrupt and corrupt a civilized, sweet life
Of gardened, partied, prickly prose instilling
An aristocratic posture, cutting like a knife
She glares, and flares, at the rebels' top billing
The student dissidents, bursting, beaming, blithe
It's clear, their politics, is making quite a killing
Turning staid ivy halls into rallies downright rife
Sorely shocked, Diana defrocks the “Maoists” who are milling
In the dorms, with lower forms, where the pot-smoking’s rife
She exclaims, with great disdain, why are these slobs not marching
To a military beat replete with drums and fife
Sent to savage and ravage in a jungle, toxic teeming
Vietnam, after the prom, for a blue-collar life
Diana bitches, like a witch, that those boys were always erring
Should have bellowed "tally ho" and killed red wildlife
We weren't nice, mincing mice, Hegels for Hubert Humphrey
Exalting all the wars like obedient German Boors
We believed, were not deceived, and were vehemently free
You may kvetch, like a wretch, but our surging spirit soars
My love letter to Emily Dickenson
This is my death threat to the world
That gave weak tea sans sympathy
My angry banners are unfurled
I shout my mordant majesty
My lines of love will lacerate
Succumb, submit to my tirade
To hot and holy fevered hate
In martial quatrains on parade
A Stern and harsh Yankee march
Syllables clipped, cutting stark
Dressed up fine with lots of starch
The colors subdued, rather dark
A Cotton Mathered mouth of curses
On spinning wheel of lady love
The fabric's softened 'till the verses
Become a perfumed, poisoned dove
I read that in France, in the 17th Century, a school of poets wrote verse with the same number of syllables in each line. I did this in the following two poems, both of which are limited to four syllables per line and which rhyme.
The Hindenburg
Nazi Sausage
Fat Matron's Breast
Blond Beast's Corsage
On Heaven's Chest
Oober ocean
Witch's Broomstick
Plying Passion
In withered wick
Awaiting War
Sparks that glisten
Bombastic Boor
Pure and Christen
Surveys New York
Hebraic Hordes
The savage Stork
Unsheathes its swords
Sizzling City
Ignites to fight
Ghettoed glory
Will blight the night
Old Testament
Eternal, true
Pummels Portent
Of Prussian crew
Beer Belly Heaves
Infection spurts
The bile seethes
Appendix Bursts
INSPIRED BY EISENSTEIN'S "ALEXANDER NEVSKY"
Teutonic knight
Titanic night
The Christian Right
Sings "Silent Night"
In Gilded Courts
Guilty cohorts
Those feral sorts
Plan their blood sports
For Jesus Christ
A bible heist
We Jews are sliced
We're minced and diced
The Yellow Stars
The Babi Yars
Kill Caesars, Czars!
The Germans, Mars!
RHYTHM AND PARANOIA
Oh, but you don't hear the minor stresses
That squeak within my ear
Awry, these sparks, my mind obsesses
The sounds are never clear
Discordant chords, the warring lords
That shriek and summon me
Crescendos rise like heathen hordes
Devoid of purity
The pitch peeps in and germinates
The eardrum quivers, quakes
A mind of vaginated states
The grayest matter flakes
And fulminates and flagellates
At every itchy noise
That pollinates, contaminates
Depriving me of poise
FOR ABNER LUIMA, WHO WAS BRUTALIZED BY THE NEW YORK CITY POLICE
The priests screw altar boys
The police shove toilet plungers into
Black men’s rectums
And David Bowie had it right:
"A cop knelt down and kissed the feet of a priest
And a queer threw-up at the sight of that"
And it was Priest
Who ran the Nazi regime in Slovakia
And said "Bratislava needs no matzoh
All the Jews are dead"
And it was always Priest and a pig
A dress and a night stick
A phallus always flaccid
That makes a hand a fist
And they're denouncing all the faggots
At Saint Patrick's day parades
They hoist flags on kilted crotches
Applaud archbishops' tirades
And they're swilling lots of whiskey
While they're busting guys for pot
And their bellies, they are heaving
With toxic livers spewing rot
They loved it when Hanoi was bombed
When panzers razed half of Russia
Commies, kikes and gooks they knew
Deserved the wrath of Prussia
Your sweet Jesus in his undies
With his legs crossed on a stick
The juiciest Jew for goyim like you
Inflames your little prick
David Gottfried, Copyright, 1994 to 1997