Fortuitous Poem by John Leonard

When his battery’s charged,
Mailer windmills from one paragraph to the next—
Baroque, anal, Talmudic, olfactory, portentous, loopy, coy, Egyptian;
Down and dirty in the cancer; the aspirin or the plastic;
Shooting moons on sheer vapor;
Blitzed by paranoia and retreating for a screen pass,
As if bitten in the pineal gland by a deranged Swinburne,
With metaphors so meaning--moistened that they stick to our thumbs,
With “intellections” (as he once put it) slapped on like “adhesive plasters”.

When he chooses to, he also speaks in tongues.
Harlot sounds like Whittaker Chambers.
Modene Murphy sounds like Lauren Bacall.
Bill Harvey sounds like L. Ron Hubbard or Lyndon LaRouche.
The guilt—ridden Uruguayan double agent Chevi Fuentes sounds like Franz Fanon or Octavio Paz.
Harry sounds like Rousseau’s Emile when he isn’t sounding like Wilhelm Reich,
And Kittredge sounds like Flaubert’s Salammbo when she isn’t sounding like Hannah Arendt,
And together they all sound like Nichols and May.
And everybody sounds like Mailer, as if picking quasar signals Sirius
The Dog Star through a plate in the head;
As if bodies, vegetables and objects all had distinct vibrations,
Special stinks and personal divinities, angels in the meatloaf, demons in the Tupperware.
Even money comes ‘in all kinds of emotional flavors.’
Ghosts! Pirates! Indians! Animism! Alchemy!
You either like this stuff or you don’t
And I do.