Boys and Girls by Ai

Ai,, beautiful, magical, velvet, exotic, Ai.. I read you today and was taken by the richness, the depth, the unrepeated aroma of your tension and wildness... I'm happy to read you and to share you with all those who you tried to reach to.. thank you Ai..

Manar

From Ai's poetry book "Fate" 1991

Boys and Girls, Lenny Bruce, or Back from the Dead
For Williem Dafoe, Ron Vawter, and the Wooster Group
1
So how's it going, folks?_
Broke, exhausted,
Shtuped and duped again.
You can take it.
Hell, the meaning of life
Is taking it,
In the mouth, the ass, the _
o-o-o-h
it feels so good.
All together now, stand up, bend over,
And say a-a-a-h.
Now sit down, relax, enjoy the show
That asks the magic question,
With such a stink,
Can shit be far behind?
But no, what you smell is an odor
Of another kind,
Fear, disgust, plus all the things
You don’t want to hear,
The things that drive you
From the club,
A body, a name, and nothing more.
Alone, on stage, I take
What you have left behind
And wear it like a wide, gaudy tie,
A sight gag
For the next show,
When I'll pick at some other scab
Until it bleeds,
Until that blood turns to wine
And we get drunk
On the incomprehensible
Raison d'être of our lives.

2

I address myself
Most often to guys,
Because guys are least
Able to express themselves.
You women know that.
You've read it in Ms. And Cosmo.
I am not a woman hater;
I 'm a woman baiter, I like
To argue, I like confrontation
As long as I win,
But you women make it hard,
You don’t play by rules
But by emotions.
One minute you're devoted,
The next you've placed
An ad in New York Magazine
That says we're impotent.
Know what I'm saying?
You women tell each other things
A guy does not want told.
You hold these secret sessions
Over coffee and croissants.
We disappear in your complaints,
And in our places, those things
You've created.
So guys, I advise let'em know,
You wont be violated,
You won't be changed
Into their tormentor.
You women out there,
All I'm trying to say,
In the end,
We're only bad impersonations
Of our fantasies.
Just let the accusation Waltz be ended,
Not the dance.

3
I tried to reach
That state of grace
When performer and audience fuse,
But each show left a hunger
Even sex could not satisfy.
The closest thing_
Heroin, No,
Like the velvet Underground sang it_
Her-row-in.
Shot, snorted, smoked,
Even laced with sugar
And spread on cereal for breakfast.
But I was cool, it was cool,
Until one night I thought
To hell with this moderation shit.
I took one needle too many
In that last uncollapsed vein,
That trail up the cold Himalayas.
I climbed and climbed
And finally it was just me
And the abominable snowman,
Starring in my own Lost Horizon.
I had arrived
To Miles playing background trumpet.
Ice encased me from the neck down;
The snowman never moved,
Never made a sound,
Maybe he wasn't even there,
Maybe he was the pure air of imagination.
That's o-x-y-g-e-n.
I breathed faster
And faster, then slow
And let it all come down,
But that was just before
The floor, the Hollywood
Night and smog,
The quick trip to the morgue
To identify
Someone I used to know.
He looked like me, he was
Me,
But in some other form,
Of incarnation,
My rib cage cut open, my guts
Bluish gray and shriveled,
Liver going black,
Heart too,
My dick sucked back inside,
As if through a straw or tube.
I lay like that for days
While they hunted me for drugs,
As if prospecting gold
And that gold was my disgrace,
But now I'm back
To claim my share of whatever's
Left out there among the ruins.
And on stage,
Under the white-hot spotlights.
Give it all I've got.
So greetings from the reclamation zone.
Like Christmas , it was bound to come,
And like some hostage savior,
I'm here to stay
Till everybody's sanctified
In laughter.
That's right, it's not your balls, your pussy,
Or your money
That I'm after; it's your soul.


more about the magical Ai .
Ai is a poet noted for her uncompromising poetic vision and bleak dramatic monologues which give voice to marginalized, often poor and abused speakers. Though born Florence Anthony, she legally changed her name to Ai which means “love” in Japanese. She has said that her given name reflects a “scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop” and has no wish to be identified “for all eternity” with a man she never knew. Ai’s awareness of her own mixed race heritage—she self-identifies as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche—as well as her strong feminist bent shape her poetry, which is often brutal and direct in its subject matter. In the volumes of verse she has published since her first collection, Cruelty (1973), Ai has provoked both controversy and praise for her stark monologues and gruesome first-person accounts of non-normative behavior

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=80637