A Tribute to The Poet Spiel
by Alan Catlin

Tom Taylor aka The Poet Spiel was a special friend for me though we never met in person as so often happens in the Internet age.  He was a man of many extraordinary talents: highly skilled graphic artist (if you remember the WWF panda logo, you know Tom’s work as that was his creation) as well as an original painter whose works exist somewhere in between surrealism and impressionism in a special niche that can only be called Taylorism.  He was a friend and neighbor to the black listed screen writer and best-selling author, Dalton Trumbo, who was a kind of hero for Tom as he was for me. Trumbo’s seminal, unforgettable Johnny Got His Gun remains the antiwar classic that transcends all ages and applies to all wars past, present and future. If you don’t know the book, get a copy now. The story is of a featureless soldier reduced to a torso though still able to think, remember, endure the indignities of his “new life”. Amng the many ironies is the bestowing of medals on his johnny. As if they might actually mean something to Johnny. Thanks for nothing, mein general.

Trumbo’s influence on Spiel’s work is evident in the faceless human beings, torso’s on coat hangers, the highly colloquial, almost unparallelled unique prose and poetry that Speil wrote.  The Poet Speil came into being after he lived beyond a medical death sentence, then a totally debilitating mental breakdown, that forced him to abandon his art and reinvent himself as a writer. 

To read Spiel is to enter the anti-establishment, anti-materialism American Gothic through the Looking Glass. The work is gritty, obscene, witty, violent, and always spot on. His crude puns are often beyond punny, always multi-layered, richly humorous and penetrating to the core of the characters.  Think Faulkner on acid and Coors Light. We often felt that we were soul brothers, spiritual kin, whose bond transcended the ordinary friendship of men and women. Our connection met somewhere else, in the indefinable, spiritual realm of a kind of deeply personal collective consciousness. His medical issues were many, including that slow killing cancer he was originally diagnosed with but worst of all for an artist, he developed Alzheimer’s. How he feared that! And yet with treatment he was able to remain relatively active, creating new art, and mounting several shows in Colorado. In his last years he published a book of collected stories that fully encompasses his bizarro world of trailer rats, old folks homes, ramshackle dead end hovels whose inhabitants existence was dominated by junk food, junkier TV, super market beer and the most amazing  conversations depicting these daily lives that  never had horizons only end points.  Imagine Kafka in Wonderland shooting the shit with Mad Hatter after taking some of the magic mushrooms on offer there. 

Outwardly we couldn’t be more different: he was a Western based, farm boy who was gay to the core and I am an eastern, straight husband and father, grandfather of four and yet, and yet we shared a spiritual bond. And now that bond if broken. Travel light along the banks of the river of forgetfulness in the underworld, my friend.

An Alan Catlin, Tom Taylor, “The Poet Spiel,” tribute poem

Insanity: a poem with an epigraph and a closure by
            The Poet Spiel

“It’s a good thing to die at least once in a lifetime.”

Life had become a place where
you could fall asleep in a world
that adhered to moral principles
and natural laws, and wake up in
another where all those rules had
been suspended.  Even the environment
unrecognizable. All the buildings,
public spaces transformed into
creations by narcotects, city planners
on cocaine using blueprints crafted
from splatter art like those pock-
marked Bill Burroughs’ paint smeared
canvases randomly created by shotgun
spray patterns and arterial blood.
All the faceless men and  women
stick figures fashioned from coat
hangers, high tension wire art made
bright with electrical charges that
illuminate the night.  Nothing moves
but the poison gas clouds, the blood red
sickle of a waxing moon.

“What if, in fact, the world does not end
but just goes on and on and on....and....”

 

Self-Portrait of the Disease That Is Killing Me
After Tom Paylor

The canvas of the self shows:
skin peeled away, revealing
an anatomy lesson in progress,
rib cage broken, all the organs
exposed, Vesalius’s open wound.

This is not an autopsy, per se,
but a prelude of things to come,
variations on an ode, imitations
of mortality on a timed scale.

An appendage is not welcome
here, may be as malignant as
thwarted desire, a knot of
wounds bound to a broken frame.

The health of the sick is
measured inside with daubs
of flustered color, free floating
pain that resists the painterly eye.

A few selected poems by Spiel published in Misfit and elsewhere:

Weighing In

Weigh a pint of the blood
     of the homo soldier 
     splattered on his foe
also a hero
     dying for his cause
     his country
what he believes is right.

Weigh the blood of the hero foe.
Weigh the blood of the homo hero.
Weigh the blood of every proud soldier
     downed by friendly fire
and the blood of every proud soldier
     who fired upon him.

Tell all their kids
     in pints, pounds, or buckets
     the quantity of their loss.

Does a pint of the blood
     of the homo at war   
     weigh less in a jar?
than a pint of blood
     sapped from his foe?
or a pint of the stuff
     from your average Joe?

Compare to a pint
     of dirt or sand,      
          a pint of gold or a pint of lead.

Weigh a pint of the blood
     of the homo soldier.

Phone his mother her son is dead.

 

The Poet Spiel, prev pub: First Class, Anthills, Lucid Moon, Strangeroad, Poets against war, League of Laboring Poets, Come here cowboy.

 

Returnee: Hot Blood

Everybody knew when Buck shoved
that cheapo wedding ring onto Sue’s dainty finger,
it was a misfit.
Tough shit that Sue couldn’t have known about the real scene
between me and Buck.
She barely knew him when he popped the question,  
just one day after he came home
from active duty, over there.

Tho his blood was not in heat for their honeymoon night
at the nicest cleanest Motel Six down on Canyon Street,
he bitched that he had a crushing headache
and she’d just have to wait to get nailed
til he was good and ready.
Good Sue, she filled him a bucket of ice
to soothe his troubled head.

But the way he’d figured,
it’d look better to town folk
if, next time on leave,
he’d come back to a cozy home
with clean sheets and homecooked goodies.

Buck's only two days back in the states.
Him and me are doing shooters
as fast as old Joey B. can pour them.
Buck’s got time off,
confused and grieving in this shithole bar,
telling when he first got back home
how he ground that crummy ring into
her bony knuckles,
then twisted her wrists
into the color of bad plums.
And now, he’s telling how much he craves
the stench of men in trenches
and the wild rush he gets
in the heat of battle.

As we douse our pity in a bucket
of brew and a few more shooters,
he's gripping my groin like the iron jaws of a vice,
saying he knew all along
how wrong he'd been about the war;
how he knew all along
how wrong he had been about wedding her.

His lust for man sweat has brought him back
to me — again.
He wants to know Can I help him, please?
I tell him,
Yeah, I always knew you’d come back.

So we slip out back to an alley so black
I don't know him from me;
not like when him and me were boys,
discovering each other,
growing leg hair,
chiseling silly love hearts into the bark
of an ancient cottonwood in Chapel Park.

Now, we’re simmering man parts,
so long apart, I’d forgot the sweet sweat from his neck.
How I used to tug his chest hair
between my teeth as I sucked his nipples.
But he yelps my name to remind me
You are mine.

He draws blood as he bites my tongue.
And just like when we wrestled as teenagers,
he pins me flat on dirt.
I’m ecstatic
to be his bottom man.

Sir, yes Sir! I shout,
as a trickle of warm spit hits my lip;
then I stretch upward for his bone.

Oh no ya don't! he commands,
then heaves me into his arms
with the kiss of a lifetime lover.

You can go down on me if ya want, he whispers,
but if ya really wanna give me a rush,
I beg you to bind me and shame me,
swallow me in your embrace
then haul me back to the stench of the trenches.

 

Letting Go

At age 80, I guess I am OK with dying—but not today.

And not on Mondays when I deliver Meals on Wheels to a dozen 80-year-old ladies who lay in wait to adore my presence.

Not on Tuesdays when I play a quickie nine-hole round of golf with Fred and Marcie.

Wednesdays would not be a good time to die because that is when the Swanson twins and I get together for a game of Cribbage. They are so well preserved; I think they will live to 100. 

Thursdays? No. Thursdays are the days when I visit my dear Freida’s gravesite to kneel and to place fresh daisies on her stone.

And not Fridays, that’s when I babysit my five grandkids while their mom does a week’s worth of grocery shopping.

Cannot do it on Saturdays, that’s when I clean house.

I’ve become too crippled to mow my lawn so a sprite ten-year-old kid from down the block mows it for free because he thinks I'm gonna die if I do it.

As for Sundays, all of my kids and grandkids pile on for a Sunday feast of my special mushroom and onion gravy on whipped potatoes and my slow-cooked balsamic vinegar pot roast.

I guess I am OK with dying—but not today.  

 

"epitaph"?

cast my ashes
  on agitated water

where my enemy
  cannot surround them

where my best friend
  cannot long to wake them