My Milkshake

On a nice afternoon jog in Duluth, I listened to the July/August 2011 Poetry magazine podcast yet again. The editors justly complement poet Joshua Mehigan for a very evocative self-account in his essay on poetry and madness:

Everyone is stupid and horrible. Every human communication is an invidious lie. This includes newspaper headlines and strangers’ smiles. Poets and poetry are worst of all. Halfhearted death fantasies flash through my head all morning. It’s the will of an evil universe that I drop a nickel. Waiting at a drive-through for a milk shake—fleeting joy—I turn on NPR looking for news. Instead, nice people discuss cooking. They refer always to “soups,” apparently shunning the mass noun “soup.” “Soup” must not sound important enough. A caller says the best way to clean kale is with a dish brush. He elaborates for two minutes. Furious superiority fills my chest. Two women courteously advise against wasting any part of a vegetable. Leonard Lopate, whose show I like well enough when I have not missed several doses of lithium, asks with deep interest, “Do we call chard a winter vegetable?”—an iambic pentameter I notice, laughing aloud. And then, although alone, I scream obscenities at the radio and pound the steering wheel. People stare through the drive-through window. I continue screaming at the healthy, engaged people on the radio, then giggle, then feel a burning in my nose as if I might sob. Lopate’s voice continues like a spoonful of warm honey. I fantasize about shuffling the foodies’ priorities by leaving them in Alemão with only some kale and a dish brush. Later, arriving home with my jumbo milkshake, before I take a single sip I spill it on my bedroom carpet, then stomp up and down in it, screaming “fuck” over and over again, until even I can see there’s something wrong.