A Wolfman Librarian's Dewy Pessimal System

WOLFMAN LIBRARIAN
​AND THE TREMBLING PAIR OF ACTOR HANDS

​By Filip Marinovich

Tell me this grove will protect me
From World Trade Towers Lightning forking the brain
(Mine Mine)
Why are there trains under the grass
And my butt is wet

Why do you constantly interrupt yourself
My rhythm is the rhythm of interruption

I walked down Wall Street tonight and it felt
As if someone was walking inside me
Another person taking steps for me
Fuck you who told me I couldn't write
September Eleventh poetry I'm moving
To Eleventh Street I'm breathing again
The world will become a new City
People will hug in the street Elizabethanly
We will invent a new language together
Queen Elizabeth will return from her coven
Covent Garden and all will sing opera La Boheme
on the steps of the Federal Building joining hands

Why are there trains rumbling beneath this grass
The Love Interest Woman will not die of T.B. at the end
of La Boheme the snow will go away
and we will find it again in our pencilcases
when we awake firstgraders sweating the first day of
first grade and Happy Birthday William Carlos Williams
September Seventeenth Two Thousand and Ten
How old would you be today what would you say
about the towers would you believe me if I told you
the unburied dead of Wall Street one of them
walked in me took my steps is this my flesh
peripheral vision greenery wolverines gnawing at me
and vomiting me up a new man with powers to heal
Wolfman Librarian Wolfman Wolfman Librarian Wolfman
Welcome to the world to heal Happy Birthday
Librarian Wolfman go to heal
Now Wolfman Librarian go to heal or else
lose all your fur and emerge pink
with a pus groaning along your collarbones--
Aliens! but not from the video games--The Alien
you are is here can you hear him you are him
Wolfman Librarian you are her you are not a man
            a Wolfman or a Librarian

You are a woman
Welcome to your first assignment of
healing the whole world
listening to all the cries of the world
KUAN YIN BODHISATTVA
no you aren't her you are a manifestation
of her are you you are
Wolfman Librarian wake up
you want to know why there are kerosene torches
by the fountain ask one ask the flames ask
the flames lie down and nap and find yourself
after years of searching napping on the grass
the subway rumbling beneath you
seven earthquakes have happened and
entering from the left               Snowman Ice-age
How cute of you to bring in The
Snowman From The Machine Snowman Ex Machina
to wrap up the ending               but I just cut his head off
with my frisbee. Bill, happy birthday, Dr. Owl,
Do you believe Don't you know I felt a spirit

of the unburied Twin Towers dead
walking inside me on Wall Street and I could not
wake up for long enough to tell you
I must pause and nap
My Wolfman paws tearing apart the notebook
given to me by the librarian gone fishing
I'm not listening I'm letting the talk dead
through me The dead talking to me
remove my eardrums and replace them
with earbuds Walkman Disco Fist
throbbing in my head I release you
and get my eardrums back
The peripheral greenery wolverines
are eating me and vomiting me up
onto a mound where pieces of me
are sucking at each other and sticking together
to form a new man with the power to heal
everybody even with his trembling actor hands
Wolfman Librarian, a man is walking inside you
who jumped from the South Tower 54th floor
who is he he just jumped again you are
jumping together
                        SPLAT       NO NO NO

you are scaring yourself too much
Wolfman END OF HORRORSHOW Librarian
you look very suspicious in your big beard
and grey backpack are you a suicide bomber
No I'm Wolfman Librarian HEAL IN MY GLOW.

A saxophone player blows NAIMA
by John Coltrane on the Twin Towers side of
this park. He plays me home
just when I thought I would have to
listen to the dead forever.
But I'm already home.
But I only know it because of
his saxophone.

The wolverines are gone
sitting on the grass how do you feel
Like the trains rumbling beneath
my feet are turning leaves.

That’s nice but how do you feel now
about preferring nothing, having no opinions.
That’s just a lot of Zen shit.
I love my companions, that's all, I'm Wolfman
Librarian and I'm a woman

Don't let this dick fool you.
It is a pen I fuck with
The dick is just there for show.
NO NO NO
Fuck now Wolfman Librarian Fuck Me now
Wolfman
                      Aria Aria Aria
                       fuck me now.

Peripheral greenery wolverines are eating me
and vomit me up into a pile
where I become a new man
Wolfman Librarian
To heal. To heal. To heal.

           Wolfman Librarian,
                      heal thyself.
                       Know thyself.
                         Self Self Self
       always changing, is time itself
        Then who are you with this
trembling pair of actor hands? I don’t know.

Not Wolfman Librarian
Not Not Wolfman Librarian
I go I go I go
         to find a pile of healing snow
to jump into
but all I find is grass to sit on
with trains rumbling beneath
in the deep the unseen
Hades eating his own pomegranate crown
spanking Persephone across his lap
She's crying she's me
I'm crying I'm me
NOT Persephone or Wolfman Librarian
only me. It's sweet.
But you can't forget or escape death
by becoming somebody else.
But I'm not myself either
I'm time, not separate from anything else
The circular fountain, the antique kerosene torches,
The cellophane rectangle of a cigarette pack
reflecting light from grey sky on grass.
The sky's not grey. You look up: patches of blue.
Get new shoes. You need better traction to walk

through rain on slippery Manhattan streets
Wolfman Librarian of Manhattan
here to heal
The 9/11          11.9          September 11th dead
and play them home
with the trombone pieces
lodged in your throat
you are choking
cough it up
you vomit yourself up out of yourself and
wolverines in peripheral greenery
are here to suckle your red thread
until white milk bursts forth and
you sing together beneath the trees
wordless songs and learn to breathe
awake again. Now the sky is grey.
The patches of blue are going.
Only the water spirits are protecting you
by this circle fountain. Rise, thank them,
and move on.
The clouds are rolling through the typewriter sun.
I really am Wolfman Librarian
for the porpoises of this poem sunning on the rocks
by the fountain I put them there with imagination--

Not mine Not yours The property of
Nobody
And Wolfman Librarian
Librarian of the Sun
arranging burning libraries in the sky into one light of
knowledge on a ledge in the Kaukases
Eagle Eagle have another bite of me
Knowledge is better than pate'
and whatever I have to pay for it it's okay
even your beak in my liver is
lightning lightning
lightning even is my birthmark
My book this cloud evaporating
as The Sun reads it closely
a close reading opening The Cloud's anus miraculous
with his Solar Speculum
inside the humans are in utero
you can see by the way they're
screaming
in the shadow of buildings not there
even nine years later.
We will never heal. That's okay.
Our wound gives us something to do.
Dress it. Undress it. Have babies with it.

The firstborn is Wolfman Librarian
not daughter not son
but moon and sun and lightning
the train rumbling under the grass
and rising to walk before you pass out
is your only task right now.

If I had legs I would
But peripheral greenery wolverines eat me
and vomit me up and I am reforming
as a new man Wolfman Librarian
knocked down 7 times
Getting up eight
here to heal you
even if you don’t want me and curse me
here to heal you, Wolfman Librarian,
here to heal even you
yourself hairy and trembling with your
actor hands hearing every
distress signal from the three billion
broken sailboats inside.

The peripheral greenery wolverines
are eating me and vomiting me up
onto a mound where pieces of me
are sucking at each other
and sticking together
to form a new being
       with power to heal
          every being
       by hearing its word
            for help in 3 billion
                                   languages
    and listening to it
         descending glistening
          on wet wolf fur steps
 to heal everybody
   with his trembling Wolfman hands
     no more librarian
       only night now on
                                          on
                                           on 
                                             OM          OM          OM

---

Prompt: Take a job you've done. Not a career you've had, or a title you took begrudgingly, a task you've tackled because it's part of your nature/something you love to do. Maybe you love to cook but are not a chef. Maybe your garden is gorgeous but you're not a landscaper. Something along those lines. Give yourself the title you've maybe not earned but are certainly adjacent to. Write about that aspect of yourself in the third person. If you're feeling fancy, add an unusual adjective to the title: Surrealist Landlord, Intuitive Landscaper, Peanut Butter-Covered Detective, etc.

Evaluate that part of yourself from a third person perspective. What's it good at? How could it improve? What's happening around it that makes it useful or annoying?

This isn't what Marinovich did in their poem, at all. But that's ok. Don't try to rewrite something like their poem, but use their verbal ticks and echoey nature a inspiration.