The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Bill Van Buskirk serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2025.
UNDERWORLD
A thousand half loves must be forsaken
To take a whole heart home.
Rumi
He who has forgotten how to shine
examines his intestines as closely as he can—
gurgle, cramp, convulsing pit of snakes, he says.
He hears a rumor that he’s really made of lightning—
a mighty flash unmeasured by the darkness of his time,
but when he looks at commuters on the platform
he sees instead of skin, a sheen of chitin,
fresh bulge of antennae, mindless chomping mandibles.
He hears the buzz of a frantic hive
where dirges ought to be. He longs to weep alone
for something lost and overgrown,
to feel a fresh self rise, dripping,
from a thousand years of roots and rain and silence.
He needs
something like a god to keep him company—
a daily resurrection to believe in,
a sweep of earth and sky
to breathe without a doubt.
He says Jesus—a white man
with a chestnut beard appears—Byzantine middle-class youth
exquisitely coiffed, who knows more than he is saying…
What ever happened to you in the desert—
the tangled, matted hair, the days of eating bugs
and drinking any liquid you could find?
What happened to the danger you grew into—
the blossom lopped, the roots entangling deep?
I want to feel it—the underworld doing its job—
seeds, roots, futures hatching everywhere.
He feels like meat-for-chopping. He wants to mean again.
So he leaves his old friend hanging
on the cross and calls out other names—
Buddha is more jolly,
Poseidon more wet,
Yaweh more bloody-and-gone,
Allah more alive in an ornate madness…
So he moves out beyond them to an edge
where it’s not the pit of hell he sees but a wild savannah
where a thousand mile-breeze blows on and on
without intention, howling through the groan and pulse
of soul consuming soul. Nothing here but an old ferocity
wanting its truth back, its balance, its vastness, its indifference,
its mysterious shifting gravities. It wants its name.
It wants him as he is—
tiny, abject
like a root
a seed.
Background: In college, I took every religion course I could find. I belonged to a group of friends who were lively participants in the Catholic Church of Pope John XXIII. Together, we found ourselves bonded in a community where the line between humanity and divinity was happily blurred. But John died too soon, and the Church took a turn back to its traditional conservativism. We lost interest. But we remembered the energy of those days. For some years we could almost taste it. What we could not do was maintain it. Sacredness, in its many forms—the universal love of Christianity, the quietude of Buddhism, the poetry of Hindu and Muslim traditions—faded into memory.
These absences, and my dissatisfaction with them, provided the energy for this poem.
Title:
The title was one of the last things to come to me. As I reworked different versions of the piece, I found it to be a kind of personal road trip through the world religions. Composition became an attempt to re-own lapsed energies I had felt in the god-images of my college years. Catholicism had been in the air I breathed as a youth (I was an altar boy for 8 years.) Buddhism came alive in the rebellion and activism of my twenties. Hinduism, the Muslim faith and ancient Roman gods were little more than rumors, but I was moved by their poetry. In my adult life, these energies had gone underground. So, to compose this piece, I had to revisit my own personal underworld—hence the title. Finally, I wanted a poem that would enlist the reader/listener as a fellow traveler.
Epigraph:
The epigraph is one of my favorite quotes from Rumi. It, too, came late in the process of revision. As the poem took shape,/ “wholeness” and “home” became my watchwords. Rumi’s quote summed up in two lines what I wanted this quest to be. I would learn to be whole. I would find a home.
The poem:
He who has forgotten how to shine
examines his intestines as closely as he can—
gurgle, cramp, convulsing pit of snakes, he says.
The poem starts with the poet/speaker in a disturbed state of mind. The implicit metaphor in the first three lines is “haruspicy” or the ancient practice of telling one’s fortune through examining the intestines of birds or other animals. The speaker, having lost his own “light” is left to more modern superstitions to find his way. Instead of a dead bird, his own intestines become a metaphor for sterile navel-gazing. I had, in the back of my mind, interminable psychoanalysis or trendy new-age rituals.
He hears a rumor that he’s really made of lightning—
a mighty flash unmeasured by the darkness of his time,
But navel gazing is not the end of the story. Even here, there is a brightening in the mind; but it is fleeting like a flash of lightening—here one moment, gone the next.
but when he looks at commuters on the platform
he sees instead of skin, a sheen of chitin,
fresh bulge of antennae, mindless chomping mandibles.
I imagine him on the train platform, going to work, looking at his fellow passengers. He sees them as insects (“chitin” is that crispy skin that many bugs have). He feels like a member of another species. The alienation goes deep. His own squirming intestines feel like snakes.
He hears the buzz of a frantic hive
where dirges ought to be. He longs to weep alone
for something lost and overgrown,
to feel a fresh self rise, dripping,
from a thousand years of roots and rain and silence—
If the commuters are insects, the culture is a hive. Instead of a chorus that will join him in his song, he hears a vast hum in which no voice is distinguishable. Noise has displaced meaning. Yet there is a kind of direction in his grief, a kind of longing. If only he can find it.
He needs
something like a god to keep him company—
a daily resurrection to believe in,
a sweep of earth and sky
to breathe without a doubt.
As he suffers, what he needs begins to take shape. He needs “something like a god,” the god of his youth perhaps. He can’t envision it, but he can feel its absence in a “daily resurrection.” Perhaps he remembers a youth like mine—an altar boy in whom Church ceremony evoked a self-evident brightness. But there is little clarity. He needs a symbol. He turns to the god of his youth.
He says Jesus— and a white man
with a chestnut beard appears—Byzantine middle-class youth
exquisitely coiffed, who knows more than he is saying…
Scholars have found that there were no images of Christ until Third Century Byzantium.There were certainly no photographers in those days, and Christ didn’t have his portrait painted. So even the earliest Christ-images are filtered through centuries of imagination. So instead of praying, the poet complains. His received images of Christ, “exquisitely coiffed,” seem passionless as opposed to the god-in-the-desert, consumed in an ecstasy of fasting and prayer.
What ever happened to you in the desert—
the tangled, matted hair, the days of eating bugs
and drinking any liquid you could find?
What happened to the danger you grew into—
the blossom lopped, the roots entangling deep?
I want to feel it—the underworld doing its job—
seeds, roots, futures hatching everywhere.
In this, the only stanza in the poem where he directly addresses the god-figure, the poet tries to pick a fight with Christ, or perhaps with his church. His resentment begins to take shape in the absence to whom he used to pray with boyish devotion. In the bitterness of his complaint, the god he longs for finds a form in images. It is beautiful (blossom); it is rooted in the earth; it knows suffering and death (lopped). This Christ is an intimate participant in the life of the human race that destroys him. The poet wants these paradoxical energies (“seeds, roots, futures hatching”) for his own (“I want to feel it—the underworld doing its job”) … but…
He feels like meat-for-chopping. He wants to mean again.
So he leaves his old friend hanging
on the cross and calls out other names—
Buddha is more jolly,
Poseidon more wet,
Yaweh more bloody-and-gone,
Allah more alive in an ornate madness…
Each of these god-figures has its own myth, its own kind of beauty. Yet in each of them, there is still something wanting. The poet cannot find wholeness. He is not at home. And he will not settle for half-loves.
So he moves out beyond them to an edge
where it’s not the pit of hell he sees but a wild savannah
where a thousand mile-breeze blows on and on
without intention, howling through the groan and pulse
of soul consuming soul. Nothing here but an old ferocity
wanting its truth back, its balance, its vastness, its indifference,
its mysterious shifting gravities. It wants its name.
It wants him as he is—
tiny, abject
like a root
a seed.
So he arrives—at a place beyond gods and creeds and churches—the desert of Christ, the emptiness of the Buddha, the nameless Yahweh of the Jews. Where is he? Who is he? What is he? The poem ends in a pristine savage place, that charges him with an answer he can feel: a never-ending breeze that’s a thousand miles long and intimate with both life and death. It is ferocious, but it is not hell. It is where deity and poet find themselves in one another, where they inhabit one another, possess one another. Each has its own longings. Each makes its own demands. The poet finds a whole heart and a home. The deity finds its truth, vastness, balance, indifference, mystery—it wants a name. Where will these two searchers find themselves but in the mind and heart of a poet who has found, in his own breast, something worthy of prayer?
Bill Van Buskirk’s poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, The Mad Poets’ Review and many others. His chapbook, Everything that’s Fragile is Important, received honorable mention in the Jesse Bryce Niles Chapbook contest sponsored by the Comstock Review (2007). His book, This Wild Joy that Thrills Outside the Law, won the Joie de vivre contest sponsored by the Mad Poets’ Review. (2010). His latest book is The Poet’s Pocket Guide to Steady Employment (2023).