Jake Levine Surreal-Absurd Sampler
On the Surreal / Absurd:
The turn toward the surreal or the absurd, is the turn from tragedy into comedy. It’s not a matter of imagination, but a matter of perspective. The opposite side of the absurd, is that it is unbearable if we don’t imagine Sisyphus happy. All my poems are autobiographical. The mirror is unbearable. The surreal is that well I have to look down to capture my reflection. - Jake Levine
Shit Commons
I’m no longer embarrassed by the voice of my anus.
The person shitting in the stall to the right explodes in rhythm with the staccato of my anus like a call and response made by grunts the dead make right before they die.
Like the letter of an ex-lover folded into a paper boat and sailed across the sea, the person in that stall swings open the door and emerges as a ghost returned from the world of the dead.
Quick as that, he washes his hands and disappears from my life.
Surprised he survived, am I like that ghost, alone, wandering here and there in a form the living can’t see? Will I disappear in the green flame of my lover’s burning ink?
Wherever I go, my asshole follows me as a smelly whisper.
Looking for the holes of lovers I’ve licked, I lurch into an irrevocable past.
Like a soldier reaching over to scratch space emptied of his arm, my dickhead roams hotels looking for its foreskin.
Through bathroom walls, the assholes of strangers vacate their bodies.
Squeaking inside the body of someone else, a stranger’s dickhead shrivels and hides in shame.
In the morning my dickhead yawns, turns the kettle on and pees in the sink.
Connected to each other, my lovers’ nipples are thread to my nipples with a metal chord tuned in the key of a primal scream. Forever linked to the common world of shit, like the saying
Be at peace. Stem first, de-thorn the rose
and poke it in the hole of the ass you love most!
Waiting for the bathroom, I stare directly at your nipples as you leave the stall with a gaze that says I hold you responsible for whatever happens next!
And next thing you know you have the nipples of the president.
Like praying for retirement and waking up redundant, shit’s the same.
Like having five dreams in a row and dreaming the same G-d damn dream, the man inside the bathroom stall on my left is probably dead.
Or does he shit silently?
The voice of my anus calls for his anus.
I’m concerned. He’s been in there a long time.
Silent, history no longer exists.
Like the sound of a microscopic tear almost inaudible in the eye duct of an insect, I understand what sadness is for the first time.
The digital shutter of a smartphone app, a man taking selfies in the public bathroom.
Like me during a colonoscopy, under anesthesia.
Like a whole life could elapse, not knowing who is watching.
When they put the camera inside me, as I lay inside a dreamless sleep.
Breathing like a machine.
Not dark or cold, time flinches like the noise of an insect’s teardrop.
Echoing inside a limitless cavity, secure.
My body scuds across the womb.
Hwang Yuwon's Metaphysics
Languages I don’t know
make symphonies of my ear
without licking my mind
and Hwang Yuwon pukes in a taxi.
In order to be a poet
Rilke thought you had to be a hero
or a lover
or dead at 20
and Hwang Yuwon pukes in a taxi.
Hwang Yuwon pukes in a taxi
and I pay the taxi driver 50000 won
because Hwang Yuwon puked in a taxi.
Hwang Yuwon crosses a threshold
of social acceptability.
Hwang Yuwon is a little less Hwang Yuwon
without his puke inside him
and the taxi is more Hwang Yuwon
with Hwang Yuwon's puke
inside it.
Is the taxi driver that drives the taxi
interested in the metaphysical
transformation between Hwang Yuwon and his taxi?
Is 50000 won
an adequate entrance fee
for this deep and philosophical
metabolic exchange?
Like drugs, dancing, sex, or art
perhaps puking inside of a taxi
is a spontaneous and deep form of surrender.
Perhaps to illustrate to me possibilities
beyond what I have experienced
because I have never puked in a taxi
Hwang Yuwon pukes in a taxi.
All the taxis in the world
that Hwang Yuwon hasn't puked in
feel endlessly empty as
Hwang Yuwon endlessly empties.
Hwang Yuwon taps on the gates of infinity.
Hwang Yuwon pukes in a taxi.
Flowers Named After Testicles
When I’m not at home and the delivery man rings the phone, I wonder where the sound goes.
A businessman who hears the sound of a wooden chopstick breaking in two instead of a clam splitting in half.
A businessman who spills soy sauce on his navy tie stuffs his tie into a green recycle bin.
Hanging in the store at exit 7 in the Gangnam subway station, a clip-on necktie tries to make eye contact with the other ties on the tie rack, but it can’t turn its head.
The destiny of the face of a tie is to face only what its owner faces.
The destiny of the microscopic dust that gathers blackly on the unsold ties that sit in an abandoned garage in a port-city garment manufacturing district in Bangladesh is like the fate of the black finger cut off the hand of a sherpa carrying western mountain gear up a Himalayan trail.
Also, it is like the energy of the key for the letter K pressed down the second the computer screen goes dark.
Or the meat of a cherry growing without a pit.
Our meeting at this particular junction where time flows in different directions must have something to do with faith.
Faith in the rhythm of the heart, that it continues.
Even if the data provided isn’t sufficient enough to tell whether the beat stopped or skipped.
I’ve always wondered, does a man not know he is a man until he puts on a tie?
Or does a tie not know it is a tie until it is hung on a human neck?
Every moment of self-realization is based on the relationship we have with others.
And the distance between, a space making way for the idea we have of ourselves.
Like if the black finger cut off the hand of a Sherpa that has never tied or touched a necktie
gets buried near a river, does it provide moisture and sunshine to the flowers on the flower-patterned necktie of a businessman at dinner at a clam restaurant in Paju?
Every time the businessman yawns, does a yellow or red orchid bloom?
The word orchid comes from the Greek word orchis, meaning testicles.
The flower reminds me of the poet Kim Min Jeong.
She is my older sister that scared off the childhood enemies who threw rocks through the bedroom windows of a two-story house my parents never bought.
When the branch on the tree I thought I could climb broke and I fell, she rubbed my cheeks and bought me green tea ice cream.
When my older sister Kim Min Jeong walks into the grilled-clam restaurant, the businessmen blush.
They tuck their ties into their shirts and the orchids in the patterns on their ties begin to wilt.
Kim Min Jeong came here tonight to buy me dinner.
She is wearing a black kimono and high heels and her purse is very big.
I think she might be hiding a sword in it.
Tonight, I Am an iPhone Factory
My beard protests my face, jumps into the bathroom sink and self immolates
The shirts I donated suddenly ignite on the backs of kids when I step in the sun
And girls dangling from monkey bars pull off their skin and toss their pubic hair in the wind
Still hiding from the bomb, underneath the desk with thousands of empty milk cartons, teacher pokes her arm at the board and the board walks out the room
Justice is like that. Our world is without trust
Like stained glass, the sky blushes yellow with dust. Eyes crack and pop
In the lungs comes dust and out coughs pink iPhones
At school, Coach with hairy legs digs a hole in the four square and jumps in
All night he barks at the dirt wall depressed like emphysemic cats lamenting the birds they cannot catch
And birds hacking in the sky stick their black tongues out the sides of their beaks and fall to the ground, left for dead, with all my deflated tetherballs
After blowing noodles out their noses, fat kids drool on contaminated birds they cannot eat
Making sluuuurp sluuuurp sounds, birds suck the bodies of suicide girls out the river
And turn them to milk liquid shit
While I secretly snort ramen packets in the bathroom stall with my rabbi
Dribbling milk drops from a milk box out the straw and on to the stomach of a white goat
Saying, you will be with me in paradise, rabbi licks three hairs covering his lip and he slowly raises the knife
I accept that vulnerability is the closest feeling we have to human love
and I am with you in this life
the white goat says, and I wave
hello kitty // hello kitty // kitty goodbye
On the Banks of Having-your-shit-together River
On the banks of having-your-shit-together river
holding the compass of human responsibility
the needle spinning around the dial
on this steed, a steel donkey with bronzed legs
I struggle upriver, tipping my feathered cap
to the purple-mouthed nymphs
wobbling in the wine drunk fog
that floats atop a batshit breeze.
Is that wheeze the death rattle of a great beast?
Some dragon's breath?
In the night sky, out of all the filled moons
that emptied out, I wonder
how many of them peeped down before vanishing?
Are stars just innumerable flashing sparks
in the eyes of people too distant to love?
I open a letter rolled into a corked, glass bottle
that I find floating down the river.
There is beauty in this world
but all that’s left of the rose bouquets
are thorns.
Yes, there is a quiet no one can imagine
and sometimes I lop both my ears off
like an even crazier version of Van Gogh
and I dismount the steel donkey.
On the other side of the fog is my mom
in rehab, my dad the weed addict, my friend
that hung himself on Christmas
and a crackhead aunt who died of sepsis.
Every two weeks I pay a nice Buddhist lady 100 dollars
to hold my hand and tell me I am not a piece of shit.
I ask what is the difference between fog, haze and mist?
She says criticism is stronger than empathy.
Invite a moment to imagine criticism as an object
and try to distance yourself from it.
With my arms stretched
as far as they can reach
walking through the fog/haze/mist
I try to hear the Buddhist lady’s voice.
But I have no ears.
I can’t even hear the dying mice squeak.
The One About the Swedish Hair Metal Band
In the middle of a conversation
dad gets a call and says
I’ve got to run into town
to Pop off a kilo of Psilocybin.
Later, that same morning
mom says she is taking a break
from AA, thinks she doesn't
need it anymore.
Again, that same morning
my therapist tells me about
a concept called attachment trauma.
Attachment trauma.
How awesome
would that name be
for a Nordic hair band?
Before singing the opening song
Attachment Trauma’s singer
takes out a pink lighter
and a Swedish fish
and while holding the Swedish fish
in the lighter’s flame
shhhhhhhh
the lead singer throws the fish into the audience
and shushes the mic.
When I was small my dad sold industrial strength chemicals to the military.
One product was called
orange dream. If you rubbed orange dream
on your hands, your hands
smelled like orange soda.
Mom remembers dad pouring bottles
of nondescript chemicals into our hourglass shaped pool
and, maybe a decade later
dad began referring to himself as a weed shaman
after he consumed over a hundred edibles
just to see if he really existed.
Every time I go to the doctor with a problem
I imagine a weed shaman in a pointy hat
pouring industrial strength chemicals in my childhood pool.
A gas rises from the surface the color and taste of orange soda.
For years I watched bubbles rise and pop on the surface
and wondered
how can we tell if the person underwater drowns or laughs?
One summer I fell in love
and moved in with a professional dominatrix named Audra.
She had a dog named Noodles that was the best behaved dog.
Even before she sold our couch
to help pay for Burning Man
I knew we weren’t going to work.
At night she sweated metal.
When I wanted it
she wanted quinoa salad
and when she wanted it
I moved to Lithuania.
There is a saying in Lithuanian
that the finger always gets shitty
but the shit never gets fingery.
They also say
Atvažiavo meška su arielkos bačka
meaning a bear brings a vodka barrel.
The word Audra in Lithuanian means
“the storm.”
The last time I saw Audra
she was painting a mural in the children’s section of the poetry center.
In dungarees and a mechanics hat
hanging on her ladder with
a paint brush and paint can
hanging from each of her arms
she bent forward and told me
that when you fish for meaning
all you have to do is pay attention, but
what they don't tell you
is that most of what you catch has to be thrown back.
I thought about the Nordic hair metal band
Attachment Trauma
and the Swedish fish the lead singer throws into the audience.
At every concert
before holding hands and crying in the mosh pit
the big question is
which audience members have eaten these flaming fish?
I know their taste.
I’ve been eating them my whole life.
People in therapy, we are like fisherman
fishing for answers
but whether the catch is good or bad
the worms get eaten anyway.
Jake, Audra said
when we sing
ours is always a song for the worms.
She jumped off the ladder.
Or, maybe
we are the song sung by the worms?
Poor, poor worms.
Jake Levine is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Keimyung University. He has written and translated or co-translated over a dozen books, including Kim Yideum’s Hysteria (Action Books, 2019) which was the first book to be awarded both the National Translation Award and the Lucien Stryk Prize. He is a former Fulbright Fellow (to Lithuania in 2010), a recipient of a Korean Government Scholarship, served as an assistant editor at Acta Koreana, as a poetry editor at Spork Press, as the managing editor and editor-in-chief at Sonora Review, and currently edits the award-winning contemporary Korean poetry series, Moon Country, at Black Ocean. He has also translated other cultural contents such as Yun Hyong-Keun’s diaries and narration for the K-pop group ENHYPEN. His first full-length book of poetry The Imagined Country is out with Tolsun Books in 2023.
Shit Commons, Flowers Named After Testicles, Tonight, I am an iPhone Factory, and On the Banks of Having-your-shit-together River can be found in Jake Levine's recent book The Imagined Country (Tolsun Books 2023).
