Dean Young

The Velvet Underground

 
Everyone's sitting around and Kenny says,
The Velvet Underground was the first,
and then everyone realizes Dan's not there
because he would say, No, so and so was first,
someone no one's heard of. Expect periods
of rain becoming breezy. Maybe he's found
a girl. She backed her tornado into his windchime.
Raspberry sherbet. How long's it been since
anyone's seen him? No one can precisely recall
yet Dan is still quite exact like the first time
a shrimp is brought to you on a plate with
its head still attached. His equipage unslurred
in the holy mud. Of all the speakers of French
among us, Dan sounds most alert whatever he's saying:
The young lady's undergarments rued with tragic 
surmise or Please, porter, avaunt. It always sounds
convincing. A recipe for croutons. Still,
there is also a sense of openness, uncertainty
as when one carries a cup too full of something
hot or makes eye-contact with the zoo-ed
lioness or finds a twenty in an old pocket.
That sound during one song turns out to be
the guy playing viola scraping a metal chair.
Gee, I hope he doesn't have his head in an oven,
says Erin. On a timeline in which a year is
a foot, Dan and Erin's coupledom would be
a quarter inch long but ten thousand miles high.
She doesn't know years ago Dan was so wrecked 
by a librarian, his head in fact was in an oven
only to realize it was an electric oven
thereby beginning the life of the Next Dan,
the one known for his argumentative sense
of the absurd no one can imagine with his head
in an oven except Kenny who can imagine anyone
thus. Job liability. And jumping off a bridge
or opening a wrist in a warm tub listening
to chamber music. Are his parents still alive?
Doesn't he know someone who owns property
in the mountains? Maybe I should call, says
Kenny, unmoving. Theory of cloud formation,
theory of mimetic desire, market transfer.
Is he writing a book? Everyone's writing a book.
Barometric pressure, prewar shortages, bloused
breezes of whiskeyed spring--nothing holds us
for long. So many friends yet one is unknown.

Tables of Content

Seventeen (Fall 2003) Sixteen (Spring 2003)

Fifteen (Fall 2002) Fourteen (Spring 2002)

Thirteen (Fall 2001) Twelve (Spring 2001)

Eleven (Fall 2000) Ten (Spring 2000)

Nine (Fall 1999) Eight (Spring 1999)

Seven, (Fall 1998) Six, (Spring 1998)

Five (Fall 1997) Four (Winter/Spring 1997) 

Three (Summer/Fall 1996) Two (Winter 1996) 

One (Spring 1995)