If funny and witty had to arm wrestle with surrealism and reality for the right to be a Jet Wimp poem, they would struggle, elbows on the table forever going from the big picture down to the tiniest significant details, which some say God is in, and some say it’s the Devil, but I say it’s Jet Wimp who’s in the details. His poems do more than focus, they observe and pronounce the right words perfectly; clearly they are there to see. I’ve enjoyed Jet’s work since I moved to Philadelphia in the 1970s when he was one of the movers and shakers in the phenomenal poetry scene that was happening then.
In February, he sent me two poems via email. After a long hiatus—we are talking years, if not decades, I was happy to read a poem Jet had written. This week, I took a train to Philadelphia to record him, my first time out of New York in over a year. In the Vimeo below, Jet reads some new poems. Enjoy.
Here are the two poems Jet sent to me in February. He doesn’t read them in the Vimeo.
Darwin’s children
Manhunter, a film directed
by Michael Mann
in this movie the
blind woman is leaning
over an anesthetized
Bengal tiger
her right hand navigates
its stripes the rich
unloosened flames its
man-vexed claws are
shuttered its eyes lazy
as an old clock. and
hers eclipsed in wonder
as she soaks her
small hand in the
forest of its breathing
this is what the sweet
gas tells her: 100,000,000
years ago they would
have been lovers the
same dawn sheathing
them in black and
yellow now her deft
touching is a song to other-
ness and all its
shaggy sleep her
kiss erotic but not
coming from the
groin meets the
smoke of that always
leaving just
arriving
journey whose
tracks no hunter
will ever
find
Rescuer
I surface from an insulin
delirium still wrist-
cuffed sauced with a ghost
coverlet more sheet
than blanket the head nurse
is a gnome scuttling
across the ward floor left to
right once twice three
times stooped head averted like the
crone on the Dutch Cleanser
can clack clack clack
her heels bound across
the white tiles
I thirst I want to scurry
up an orange tree tearing at
fruit to bob forever in
sweetness quick! this woman
isn’t breathing! someone
shouts machines trundled
in and out nurses “Ralph!” I
shout: “let me up I
can do CPR!”
no Jet the orderly
calls everything’s
under control
“but I can help!” I
whine jiggling my
cuffs “I know how
to help!”