Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit
It was once said of the Bean poems that "[they] remind one a bit
of Existential Nausea." To this, their defender said, "Well,
isn't that the point?" Indeed, upon the re-discovery of this particular
poem in the files of the editor, all such suspicions along these lines
are confirmed. The poem speaks for itself, but the sentiment speaks
for everyone.
---E.W. Wilder
Nausea
by Bean
Newton
All of these: the lights bombarding to green to yellow to red to the
acrid rain from the Chemlawn truck that turns the grass green, grass
green
The cats fighting on the bed-this is nausea. The red light the blue
light, the one fish the two fish . . .Q. A large container of the angostura
bitters? A. Nausea.
In the form of carnival rides and new new sheetrock smelling slightly
of nicotine, that new new drywall, mud caking on, filling in the gaps
between the city and the burb; the jagged edges of green hanging on
like that last scrap of flesh from a botched amputation, nauseating
truckloads of diesel chicken; flash-frozen diesel fish, cold as the
waters the were extruded out of; the bread truck baked golden brown,
a big loaf of nausea; abbreviated horn-blasts; the kid with the booming
Acura; a failure to mean as the head talks nausea, blue because of bad
color; Bosnia on a small, red map are nausea all. Hallmark-but I needn't
even mention the flesh-pink glitter-souled nausea. Cheap rhyme and elevator
hip-hop pop piped through the rusty wires into no-smell office cut-pile
beautiful, the building always new, the song always recycled chucked-up
vertiginous off-ramp-on-ramp skyway skyline viewpoint nausea over Colorado
Springs, Colorado. It's all trick, baby, trick from the gold-plated
Dayton rims to the bed that spins a calliope Tejano tune stomach-churn.
Salena, the Three Tenors, and a choking of Celine Dion (and it's not
what you're thinking) am nausea also.
I've seen the best mines of my generation broke down beaten for the
sake of a dime, a tee-spot, a crack rock a bag as white as white arm
black and blue tattoos, the flag, a tiger, a broken cross. Lightening
seethes across the heady waves of heavenly nausea, counterpoint to flashing
ak-ak and the drone of a hundred B-17s. Baldhead, barbed wire and brass
knuckle nausea, road-rash and crotch-rocket nausea, robot nausea, monster-truck
nausea, sport ute nausea, nouvelle cuisine nausea, plastic-princess
and Price Is Right nausea, broke the blasted elevator pump. The
elevator pump is broken! The blasted, blasted elevator pump has seized
its last! Don't look down, lady-you won't like what you see! And he
stunk and yelled in three coats and two pair of pants and a duffel full
of wadded-up plastic bags, and I thought, since "mainstreaming"-well,
maybe this guy got mainstreamed too. I'd finally found another tortured
soul who could see through the miasma, that pall of smog. But no, he
too only knew that tightening of the gut, that temple-spinning, the
sweats and the migrainous head that overflow the gastric juices.
