2007-06-27 - 1:56 p.m.
When we were at my parents’ house after the Westchester reception, we found this in a small notepad in my room. It’s obviously from late 1991, as the pad also contains notes from applying to colleges my senior year in high school (also a lot of designs for machine gun-toting vehicles for the role-playing game Car Wars – fine, I was a big dork at the time). These are the first drafts of a poem I wrote for Nya, set down again in dimly-remembered and updated form in an entry here.
Why is it called ‘Plastic Madonna Part 3’? I’m afraid I have no idea what parts 1 and 2 were. But I remember the origin of Plastic Madonna. In the late-1980s, there was a (somewhat dorky, in retrospect) high schooler I was rather taken by. He had dubbed himself ‘Val Veggie’ and created a secret society called ‘Val Veggie’s New and Improved Police State’. Boys in the society were called ‘Val secret name and girls secret name Val’.
I forget what my secret name was, but I wanted Nya to have one. So (this is before we were dating, in late-1987 or early-1988) when we were talking on the phone one afternoon, I asked her to close her eyes and roll around, then open her eyes and tell me the first thing she saw. She did and said she saw a nightlight shaped like the Virgin Mary (her father, whose house she was in, apparently had kitschy taste in decorative art). I dubbed her (as I recall, Val Veggie got mad because I had no “right” to give out names) Plastic Madonna Val.
This poem is a response to a poem Nya wrote and got published in our high school’s literary magazine her senior spring (my junior), 1991. I submitted mine to the lit mag in 1992, but of course missed the deadline. Feh.
Her poem started:
I look into his stagnant, shadowed face
and tell him of the baby, his baby,
which I never had.
A girl of glass…
It goes on to talk about the dangers of the glass child slipping. “Don’t walk in here barefoot dear, your daughter just fell.” It ends with:
Do you?
It’s funny, she noted that unplanned pregnancies are really no big deal and happen all the time. Maybe. But I know I used to dream about our kid well before Nya assigned it a gender (and the pregnancy was terminated way too early to tell this definitively). I felt like I had done wrong for years afterwards. (No, I didn’t go with her to get it done. But, as both of us recall, she didn’t want me to come.) Who is blowing softly on my cheek? Take a fucking guess…
Anyway, here’s the early drafts of my poem (I think the shortness of the lines may be due to the small size of the pages they’re written on). Again, a contemporary version of this can be found here:
This angel visits each night, ---> shriveled, wrinkly Cupid-prune smiling She is locked inside, behind your This angel visits each night, Can you see her © 2007 Geoff Gladstone
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I love
more than a thousand
unspoken glances and
silent days
more than spiral helixes of
blood on the sheets
more than the itchy smell
of your cats
watches me every day,
visits me every night, smiling, pink gums erupting
your cigarette butts
Dangling
smiles with cracked
cigarette butt teeth
pushing through dry
pink gums
Inside she is trapped
behind your eyes, a million possibilities, un-
realized thoughts bottled
up, wound tightly
around (a tiny glass
heart).
I think she must want to
explode, spring open like
a windowshade
(letting in who knows what –
(you?)
dry pink gums
(cracked cigarette butts are
just peeking through – look!)
eyes, child of endless
possibilities coiled
I love
more than a thousand un-
spoken glances and silent days
more than long dusty helixes of
blood dried on the sheets
where we slashed our
toenails
more than the scratchy smell
of your cats
watches me every day
visits me each night smiling, cracked cigarette butt
teeth pushing through
dry pink gums
She is locked inside behind
your eyes, silent
all that energy bottled,
coiled tightly
Child of endless possibilities,
If I press her will she fly
open, like a windowshade?
Or just burp?
I talk to her endlessly
puffy Cupid-prune
smooth blank head
at night, sailing out
further
who is it blowing
softly on my cheek
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