Joseph S. Salemi

Joseph S. Salemi teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University, and in the Classics Department of both Hunter College and Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y. He is a widely published scholar, translator, and poet whose work has appeared in over fifty journals and literary magazines in the United States and in Britain. As a translator, Salemi has rendered into English a wide selection of Latin, Greek, Provencal, and Sicilian poems, and his scholarly work has touched on writers as diverse as Chaucer, Machiavelli, Blake, Kipling, Crane, Ernest Dowson, and Wiffiam Gaddis. He has won several awards, including the Herbert Musurillo Scholarship, the Lane Cooper Fellowship, and an N.E.H. Summer Seminar Fellowship. He was the 1993 recipient of the Classical and Modern Literature Award for outstanding contributions to the combined fields of ancient and contemporary literature, and was twice a finalist (in 1994 and 1995) for the Howard Nemerov Prize sponsored by The Formalist, a journal in which his work has frequently appeared. He was also one of the 1995 winners of the Orbis Prize for fixed-form poetry, sponsored by the English journal Orbis. Salemi is also active as a journalist, writing on current academic issues and controversies for the publication Measure in New York, and for Heterodoxy in California. He is a grandson of the Sicilian poet and translator Rosario Previti. His two books of poetry Formal Complaints ($5.00 plus $1.50 shipping) and Nonsense Couplets ($8.00 plus 1.50 shipping) may be ordered from him directly at: 220 Ninth Street Brooklyn, N.Y. 11215-3902, and we can think of no better use for such a small investment.

La Nonna's Cracked Clay Jug
(La quartara ciaccata di la Nonna)

        Dura chiù na quartara ciaccata
        ca una sana.

        --Sicilian proverb

Whether it cradled wine with curved caress,
Whether it travelled daily to the well,
Whether it carried oil from the press,
Or stood as empty as a whitened shell,
This clay jug served to oversee and bless
La Nonna's kitchen, and just as a bell
Sings in its circled fullness, arching round,
The jug--in silence--still makes its own sound.

Nine decades since it turned upon the wheel
La Nonna's jug assumes a static role,
And scorns, in haughty honor, to conceal
From lip to base (as if from pole to pole)
A line that zigzags downward to reveal
A cracked jug will last longer than a whole.

Poetry Today

Since Baudelaire and Verlaine, the field has shrunk:
Mere feelings, hokum, moral cant, and whining.
In greater ages, poetry was drunk
On Bacchic dance, blood lust, occult divining,
The savagery of Swift, the wit of Byron,
Poe's death-wish, Dowson's pedophilic viols;
The obscene lisping of a sluttish siren
Formed Wilde and Swinburne's Dionysian styles.

No tawdry brothels now, nor spired cathedrals:
Just thatched mud huts for lemmings to call home--
Epiphanies of small, pathetic people
As pallid as a cracked and sunbleached bone.
Today verse wears the regulation dress
Of inoffensive bourgeois politesse.

The Missionary's Position

I maintain it all was for the best--
We hacked our way through jungle and sought out
These savage children, painted and half-dressed,
To set their minds at ease, and dispel doubt.

Concerning what? Why, God's immense design,
And how it governs all we do and see.
Before, they had no sense of the divine
Beyond the sticks and bones of sorcery.

Granted, they are more somber and subdued,
Knowing that lives are watched, and judged, and weighed.
Subject to fits of melancholy mood,
They look upon the cross, and are afraid.

What would you have me say? We preached the Word
Better endured in grief than left unheard.

The Lilacs on Good Friday

Tumult of noontide long ago dismissed--
The rent veil unremembered, and the sun
Relit, though shrouded in a new eclipse
Of rainswept sky. The garden seems to shun

That spectral agony of blood and bone;
Consigns itself instead to placid sleep
Untroubled as the moss upon a stone
And heedless while the three Marias weep.

Four decades' growth of lilac by this wall
Stretches its shallow spiral to the sky.
Clustering blossoms, soon to swell and fall,
Gather themselves like nimbuses on high

Out of my hand's grasp, yet I still can bend
The pliant osiers downward to my face,
And sniff the buds that already distend:
Late April lilacs, delicate as lace.

Unlike that rigid tree, untenanted,
And red with memory of three hours' grief,
The thornless lilacs summon up no dread,
Demand no witness. Flower, branch, and leaf

Are only what they are. They have no words
For us to ponder, though we sometimes feign
To speak for them, as augury of birds
Construes an omen of impending pain.

The book is shut, the candle snuffed, the bell
Rings the finale of a troubled day.
Did lilacs grace the garden where we fell,
Or scent Gethsemane? I bade you pray

And watch with me a little while this night--
Could you not watch one hour? The world's bereft
Of that which once gave stomach for a fight
Or certitude to vision. I have left

The Office of the Holy Cross unsung
But patient on the rubricated page:
Open my lips, O Lord, and let my tongue
Announce thy praises--in some other age.

Here in this garden how could it displease
To let the lilacs offer up my prayer--
Sweet censers that, when shaken by the breeze,
Scatter their fragrance in the evening air?

And in that garden where a sepulcher
New-hewn from rock awaits the mourners' tread,
Where cerecloths, unguent, aloes mixed with myrrh
Will soon enshroud the lacerated dead,

There is some solace from the thought of how
Late April lilacs, coming into bloom,
Shall dance the currents of the air, and bow
To shed their flowerets on an open tomb.

--from Formal Complaints

Dizain for the Lamia

     The lamia was a fabulous beast, half woman and half serpent, that
       lured men to their deaths through sexual temptation. The lamia
       emitted a hissing sound so soothing and seductive that men were
       irresistibly drawn to her.

Go to a charnel house, and enter in--
Curled in a corner sweetly hissing lies
The lamia, a female shaped for sin,
Who writhes a serpent's tail below her thighs.
Uncoiling to meet you, she will rise;
You cannot move, transfixed by that dull hum.
Her scented breasts invite delirium;
Hope's lost in the profusion of her hair--
Those dead grey eyes say one word only: Come!
Her kiss is lethal. But you hardly care.

from Formal Complaints

The Bones of the Armenians

Son of man, can these bones live?
--Ezekiel, 37:3

Not the trump of Gabriel, nor the tumult
Stirred up by a clamorous resurrection
Can awaken bones from that desert nightmare's

Prodigal torment.

Not the prayers from myriad begging voices,
Solemn penance chanted by dirging fathers
In atonement's chorus of expiation

Cleanses the blood-guilt.

Neither screaming pleas of a gang-raped mother,
Nor the pistol shots to the heads of children
Rouse them out of somnolence. Nothing serves to

Summon avengers.

Just the dumb remembrance and silent breathing
Of those few survivors who still can picture
1915's Golgotha, red with murder,

Waiting for answers.

Published in First Things

In One Ear

In the Strand I picked up a little
profligate wretch and gave her sixpence.
       James Boswell, London Journal,
        4 June 1763

Boswell listened, Johnson talked.
Then the Scotsman went and walked
London's alleyways and mews
Seeking trollops from the stews.
All that weighty, sage advice
From the Doctor, without price,
Never made the slightest dent
On a youth whose natural bent
Drew him towards the rankest sluts--
Brains were trumped by churning guts.
Such are humans. At the best
We may listen, be impressed,
Marvel at sagacious wit--
Then go act as we see fit.
Mind and will stay far apart;
Reason does not touch the heart;
Impulse shatters logic's chain;
Argument goes down the drain.
Aristotle's books slam shut
When we are in heat or rut.

Published in The Formalist

Calligraphy Lesson from a Chinese Student

She took my hand and showed me how to coax
The inkstone gently, to release black swirls
Into a well of water. Soon smooth strokes
Of badger brush--held upright--laid out twirls
And streaks of meaning. "Here I make the sign
For teacher," she said, smiling as she drew
A character, precise in every line,
And glistening with fresh wetness. I said, "You
Are now the teacher, and I am a student."
She made me no reply, but then extended
The brush in offering, as though impudent
Forwardness on her part had offended.
I laughed, refused, and urged her to go on
She smiled again, the chill of distance gone.

A Martian in Michigan Sends a Message Home

American folk are the dutiful sort
Who never would nurture a renegade thought.
Their minds move about in some well-travelled ruts;
They think with their glands and their gonads and guts.
They cannot see reason; they cannot make sense--
They're sure disagreement just proves you are dense.
They only know how to exhort and to preach
And pass regulations to govern your speech.
They gossip, drive cars, and consume franks and beans,
And haven't a clue as to what it all means.

Published in The Formalist

An Academy Painter Judges the Impressionists

Impressionists? Their palettes are ablaze
With upstart colors heretofore unseen.
The lack of expert drafting makes for haze
And blurring in their polychromic scheme:
Puce, lemon, antique rose, and tangerine;
Cinnabar shading into umber hints;
Streaks of a velvet peridotal green
Speckled with azure flecks and ruby tints.
Sienna strokes are stabbed with yellow glints
Of golden fire, while a violet hue
Bleeds into ochre patches; orange sprints
In flashes across lilac and soft blue.
Not unexpected--once you banish line
Color runs riot like an unpruned vine.

Published in The Formalist

Two New Sections from A Gallery of Ethopaths

with illustrations by Bob Fisk

New Formalism is dying from decorum. I don't mean "decorum" in its correct rhetorical sense, which refers to the proper allocation of tone and diction to subject matter. I mean the kind of social decorum that is expected at a cocktail party in the Harvard Club. For some strange reason many poets who have championed the revival of metrics seem to think that a corollary to their task is a revival of the Victorian mindset, with all its quaint notions of propriety, decency, and schoolmarmish reticence. As a result a great deal of contemporary formalist poetry is anemically bland. Very little sex, and no salty language.

A partial explanation of this phenomenon lies in a larger American social problem—namely, the unspoken and unholy alliance of the prudish Religious Right and the prissy Feminist Left. Like the Hitler-Stalin Pact, this marriage of convenience is one that left-liberals would prefer to forget. But the alliance is real, and it is effective. And it has had significant consequences for American linguistic habits, at least in the public sphere.

Our Midwestern Bible-thumpers hate salty language for religious reasons, and will quote you scriptural passages ad nauseam on the subject. If you actually look at those passages, however, you will see that they are about swearing, cursing, and taking the Lord’s name in vain, and not about using what are politely called "four-letter words." To swear is to take an oath; to curse is to call down evil on something; and to take God’s name in vain is to utter it disrespectfully or in a context that lacks reverence. But salty language? There isn’t anything in the Bible that says you can’t make generous use of George Carlin’s infamous seven vocables.

In the case of feminists, their objection to robust language has to do with a visceral rejection of anything that smells of male boisterousness or insensitivity, and is more a function of their white middle class status anxiety than anything political. Feminists are the true neo-Victorians in our society, a coterie of unpleasant little Orwellians who would dearly love to censor speech in the same way that they have wrecked pronoun usage. And together with their nominal enemies on the Religious Right, they are working assiduously to geld and denature public discourse in the United States.

In Book XXIV of the Iliad, the goddess Thetis advises her son Achilleus to forget his troubles by having casual sex. She says "It’s good to lie in lovemaking with a woman." A more up-to-date translation might be "It’s great to get laid." Would that sort of Homeric honesty fly in our overly decorous New Formalism? Probably not, if the Bible-thumpers and the feminists have anything to say about it.

The following two unpublished sections of A Gallery of Ethopaths are presented here, along with illustrations by the superb political cartoonist Bob Fisk, as a symbolic counterweight to this mésalliance of homegrown American crackpots. We cannot allow discourse, whether poetic or forensic or political, to be strangled by fanatics. Do you think otherwise? Then visit one of those hideous Third World tyrannies where the politicians will make you spend every waking hour thinking about what you can and cannot say.

Clean-Language Freaks

A boring sort of ethopath
Is one who’s seized by livid wrath
If you use "bad words" in his hearing.
He gets upset if talk goes veering
In a raw, obscene direction—
He’ll hit you with a stern correction,
And say that you must watch your tongue
And not throw vile words in among
The purer vocables of language.
His warning has an adder’s fang’s edge,
And I have not the slightest doubt
If you don’t stop he’ll punch you out.
You mostly find these prim-lipped clowns
In stupid little one-horse towns,
Or hamlets where some Baptist howler
Makes Sunday mornings even fouler
Telling folks how to dress and think.
There is a pretty solid link
Between the fans of Nice Clean Speech
And tendencies to gas and preach.
These puling, milksop moral lambs
Can’t stand the sound of hells and damns,
And if you say a word like shit
They’ll go into a holy fit
And blow their little moral stacks
And lambaste you with thumps and whacks.
Don’t dare to utter cunt or prick—
They’ll have your liver on a stick.
They even grab their birchen rod
If someone simply mentions God
(They think He should be called "The Lord"
In tones that are quite overawed.)
They cannot even be enticed
To say the name of Jesus Christ
Except when muttering a prayer
In rapturous devotion’s air.
These prissy, squeamish, tight-assed nerds
Who can’t abide four-letter words
Are lacking in the basic grit
That makes a man a mensch. A bit
Of blue-toned language spices life
And keeps one sharpened, like a knife
Ready to slash and cut and stab
Some dull opponent’s mental flab.
Plain language tells all gutless types
That you have got the balls and tripes
To say whatever you are thinking
While they are tied in knots and shrinking
From honest and forthright expression.
Their pallid speech is a confession
That they lack spunk and inner drive,
And hence their words are not alive.
Vapid twits who do not swear
Give off a tweedy, pious air
Like otherworldly English vicars
Who pass out at the sight of knickers.
But as for one who’s not averse
To belching out a raw-boned curse,
The arsenal of human speech
Is well within his grasp and reach.
His tongue’s a well-honed bayonet
Kept in its scabbard, safe, and yet
Quick to be bared when danger nears—
Liars and fools and sloganeers
Are terrorized by his tongue’s bite,
Its stinging lash, its will to smite.

Copyright © 2008 by Joseph S. Salemi
All Rights Reserved

The Dating Service

The modern world does not take chances—
We even regulate romances.
We don't trust Cupid's random dart
To pierce us with its burning smart.
Instead we ask a bunch of experts
To smooth our path to lively sex. Skirts
Aren't chased the way they once were.
Indeed, you'd be a total dunce, sir,
To use that antiquated means
For getting in a lady's jeans.
The process is no longer sleazy—
The businessmen have made it easy.
They've turned dating to a science.
A smoothly running new appliance
Couldn't function any better
To find a girl and help you get her.
Here's the way the system works
To guarantee your carnal perks.
Once past thirty, girls get nervous—
They sign up in a dating service
That promises to locate men
Who'll call them every now and then.
The girls hope that the men will wed them;
Most guys merely want to bed them.
They do one girl, and find a newer;
The average man's a serial screwer.
That's the basic situation:
Male lust, female desperation.
A girl is hungry for a beau—
The dating service knows it's so.
They charge the chick a hefty sum
And pair her with a jerk, a crumb,
A psychopath, a nerd, a cretin
Who then expects some heaving pettin'
On the first night that he meets her.
He doesn't even spring for pizza!
He's vile, disgusting, smelly, dull,
And brainless as a hollow skull.
His breath's atrocious, and his talk
Is raucous, like a mallard's squawk.
He rips her blouse and runs her hose,
And spatters semen on her clothes.
The girl's enraged, but still determined—
She tries again, and yet more vermin
Show up at her door unshaven,
Pock-marked, horny, or plain ravin'.
She tries once more. This time it's you
With suit and tie, and flowers too.
You escort her around the town.
You don't act like a selfish clown.
You treat her well, you buy her dinner—
In her eyes, you're a hands-down winner!
Suddenly the skids are greased—
Romantic chances are increased.
When girls meet a halfway decent
Guy, they think of their most recent
Date with some obnoxious boor.
And here you are—polite, mature,
Friendly, funny, sweet, unsweaty.
At that point, to Jane or Betty
You're a godsend and a blessing.
Pretty soon you're freely messing
With her hair, her cheek, her ear
And unhooking her brassiere.
The dating service triumphs nicely!
She gets what she wants precisely:
A man who's not a loathsome geek
With scabrous skin and body reek,
And you get free, untroubled mating
Without the cross of prolonged waiting.
A brilliant ploy for every fellow!
This service is a cheap bordello
That sets you up with some cute honey
And doesn't cost you tons of money.
Capitalism has it planned:
Let supply control demand.

Copyright © 2008 by Joseph S. Salemi
All Rights Reserved

Another Two Sections from A Gallery of Ethopaths by Joseph S. Salemi

with illustrations by Bob Fisk

I recently had a long exchange of e-mails with Michael Burch, the webmaster of this site, on various religious and aesthetic issues. Concerning some things, after exhaustive debate, Mike and I agreed to disagree. But we had no difficulty at all in jointly asserting that most poets today are wimps and conformists.

[Please allow me to interject that I certainly do agree with Joe that American poets should strenuously exercise our hard-won freedoms of speech and dissent. As many readers of The HyperTexts know, I have challenged poets to give us their best poems on controversial subjects, as our Heresy Hearsay page attests. But I tend to be more optimistic about human nature than Joe, and my method is to challenge rather than berate poets. Joe's choices of words here are his own, not mine. I don't believe that "most poets today are wimps and conformists." That's what Joe believes. What I believe is that American poets should (and will) follow in the tradition of heretics and truthtellers like Blake, Shelley and Whitman, speaking boldly and forthrightly: the sooner, the better. —Michael R. Burch, Editor, The HyperTexts]

I don’t know why this should be so. There isn’t a thin dime to be made off poetry, unless you count the piddling little prizes that are offered here and there. Absolutely nothing is riding on what we write, so why shouldn’t we express our viewpoints as freely and as openly as we wish? The film critic John Simon once pointed out that when an art form ceases to bring a commercial return, it is then liberated, and can proceed to develop its highest aesthetic potential. Well, poets have never made money, so why in hell should they be as timorous as untenured assistant professors? We are free to say whatever we please in whatever manner we choose. But we don’t. A tremendous opportunity for aesthetic achievement is being ignored.

Consider the insufferable nerdiness of so many modern poets: their pusillanimous ordinariness and vacuity and lack of interesting character. Driven by a pathetic need to be liked by as many people as possible, these types are always on their best behavior. It’s this overanxious, parent-pleasing conformism that I find the most offputting characteristic of contemporary poets. Go to any public reading and you’ll see what I mean: the hesitation, the tentativeness, the barely audible voices, the self-deprecating humor, the suppressed fear, the hypersensitivity to audience reaction … all this makes me wonder if I’m listening to human beings or to androids.

Are there exceptions? Sure. But the exceptions are increasingly exceptional. Poets—like everyone else in this over-regulated and security-camera-scanned world—are learning to toe the line of what is acceptable and not acceptable. Those who don’t are quietly sidelined and ignored. And a great many of our self-appointed neo-Victorians think that this situation is right and proper. “Poetry is becoming responsible,” one of them sniffed at a forum recently.

It wasn’t always this way. Think of the long string of past poets who lived what can only be called irregular lives, and who dissented audibly from the received opinions of their times. Villon was a thief and a scapegrace. Marlowe was a blasphemer and an atheist. Ben Jonson was a murderer, Rochester a pornographer, Byron a rake. Blake’s attitude towards the God of the Old Testament was one of contempt and loathing, and he was arrested once for political subversion. Poe was an alcoholic, Swinburne a sadomasochist and pagan sensualist, Dowson a hashish-smoker and a would-be pedophile. Rimbaud dealt in gun-running and slave-trading. Even Shakespeare, who is often held up as a model of bourgeois propriety, led a racy private life in London while leaving his boring family in Stratford to their own devices. The list could go on and on.

Could poets do stuff like that today? Sure, but at a price. Your legal fees, you alimony, and your medical bills would be overwhelming. It’s much easier to teach in some little community college dungheap, run workshops, and scrounge for grant money. Your poetic life can revolve around faculty meetings, conferences, and the occasional coed groupie. It’s a lot safer than gun-running and pedophilia.

Think of the trouble Baudelaire had when he published Les Fleurs du Mal. Conventional and bien-pensant French opinion was outraged. Would anyone risk that today? Aeneas Silvius, the Renaissance savant who later became Pope Pius II, wrote a hysterically funny and bawdy Latin verse drama about prostitution. (It’s called Chrysis—look it up). What poet with any hopes for a higher position would dare do that now? The great Ovid took flak from the Emperor Augustus for his racier books like Amores and Ars Amatoria, and he was eventually exiled to Tomi for “indiscretions.” The closest thing to that today is Amiri Baraka getting canned by the State of New Jersey.

Wimp poets write wimpish poetry. And that is what strikes me as particularly troublesome in a great deal of modern poetry. Poets are unwilling to say anything really provocative and potentially trouble-making. They won’t address an issue that might cause controversy. Instead, what you get is a totally bogus courage that manifests itself in the writing of poems against the war, against oppression, against racism, or against any other conveniently safe target that helps you make a fashion statement about your own enlightened liberalism. That’s about as daring and courageous as combing your hair.

Here are two sections of A Gallery of Ethopaths that actually go after real targets: the Protestant fundamentalist proponents of Creationism, and the stupid out-of-towners who come to infest Manhattan. They are accompanied by the illustrations of Bob Fisk. Will these poems make enemies? I sure hope so.

Creationist Fanatics

It’s time to wag some savage tongue

At those who think the earth is young.

“Creationists” are what they’re called

And frankly, you would be appalled

At what these yahoo dorks believe:

Apparently, they can’t conceive

An age beyond six thousand years

For all the planetary spheres.

According to this witless herd

The Bible’s the inerrant word

Of God Himself, and you had better

Believe it right down to the letter.

He made the earth and all we see

Around four-thousand-four B.C.

In one short week of frantic bustle

(God, you know, can really hustle).

The animals, the plants, and man

Came fully formed from God’s own hand

Without the help of evolution.

Jerks in thrall to this delusion

Think fossils are an evil ruse

Placed by Satan to confuse

Mankind, and foster non-belief,

Thus leading to eternal grief.

Creationists say dinosaurs

Lived with cave men, and their roars

Could be heard on Noah’s Ark,

And Eden was Jurassic Park

Where T. Rex and his monstrous ilk

Walked about as mild as milk.

Brontosaurus browsed the trees

With Eve and Adam at his knees,

And our first parents washed their dishes

In streams that held pre-Cambrian fishes,

For all was made at once, they croak:

God did it at a single stroke.

As for Darwin, these folks claim

He’s now awash in penal flame,

And all who take his devilish path

Will join him in that fiery bath.

It really takes your breath away

That anyone with brains could say

We can ignore the age of rocks

That serve as stratigraphic clocks,

The speed of light, and isotopes

That prove (except to fundie dopes)

The earth’s age is at least four billion

Of our years, give or take some million,

Or that these crackpots can deny

That simpler life forms live and die

And give rise, after countless ages,

To changed ones in successive stages.

This shows the human mind is liable

To rot when it assumes the Bible

Is a text of literal fact.

The truth is that the Bible’s packed

With legends, myths, and allegories,

Fables and fictitious stories

Composed for a didactic purpose—

One can’t believe them on the surface.

These yarns were spun to pierce the skull

Of shepherds, nomads, and the dull

Mentality of unschooled peasants

For whom myth was the living presence

Of Yahweh and His sacred word.

But now, it’s mulishly absurd

To not admit these tales fantastic

Are just an arcane metaphrastic

Way of preaching to the masses

Who can’t see things through reason’s glasses.

This potpourri of Torah-tales

Is fictional, like Jonah’s whale,

Or Joshua’s trumpet, or the Flood,

The Red Sea parting, Abel’s blood,

Sodomites made blind and halt,

A woman turning into salt,

Hagar saved by magic water,

Jephthah chopping up his daughter,

Manna dropping from the skies,

And all those other pious lies.

The scriptures tell us how to live

But don’t presume they also give

Us scientific information

About the details of creation.

The Bible’s sacred text was penned

To teach us of our final end;

It only speaks symbolically

Of how existence came to be.

So if you live in regions raw

Like Tennessee or Arkansas,

Rural Georgia, Texarkana,

The fever swamps of Alabama,

Or in the stretch of Geisterwelt

That Mencken called the Bible Belt,

Or in some mental dormitory

Where preachers howl for God and Glory,

Confine yourself to prayerful moan,

And leave the scientists alone.

Living In Manhattan

A truly ethopathic need

Is that felt by the sicko breed

Of folks who love Manhattan’s isle

And who insist it’s worth their while

To pay a huge, outrageous rent

For lodgings where they’re tightly pent

Up in a twelve-by-twelve-foot room

As cramped and stifling as a tomb.

These dorks live in a studio

That costs them the same monthly dough

You’d pay to get a hotel suite

Outside New York. What a treat,

To live inside a crummy box

Protected by six burglar locks;

To be confined in quarantine

Like sailors in a submarine;

To choke on your own sweaty stink

And take baths in your kitchen sink;

To sleep upon a sofa bed

With not enough room for your head

While using a refrigerator

That holds three eggs and one tomato.

And all because you love Manhattan

And look down on the Bronx and Staten

Island, Queens, and such-like spots

As places worse than empty lots.

You think the city’s wild, vivacious,

Sexy, cool, and—goodness gracious!—

You wouldn’t want to miss all that

By living in a Brooklyn flat.

You long to be where things are “hot,”

Although you’re just a little snot

Who lives inside a walk-in closet

On short-term lease and huge deposit.

The home you’ve chosen is a cage,

But still, suppressing grief and rage,

You smile and say you’re quite content

With mini-space for maxi-rent.

And why? So your return address

Can read “New York, New York.” I guess

You really are a bit retarded.

My prognosis? Well, it’s guarded—

Perhaps in twenty years or so

You’ll find out you’re a total schmo

Who could be living twice as nice

Some other place, for half the price.

Or else you’ll stay put and expire

While watching rents go higher and higher.

But since you are an ethopath

You lack what is called Sinn und Rat

In German—that is, brains and sense,

And so you are at great expense

To subsidize your private cell

In chic Manhattan’s crowded hell.

My God, what a prodigious joke!

My best advice to you? Go choke.

There’s no prestige in mere locale—

Shall I say what you are? I shall:

A pompous little arriviste

As common as a strain of yeast;

A small-town schmuck who glows with pride

Because he’s on the posh West Side;

A cheap poseur who wants to chalk up

Points for his sleazy Soho walk-up;

A two-bit dancer-waitress-whore

With loft space on an upper floor.

These are the slaves of New York City

Whose mindlessness deserves no pity.