A Review of C.M. Crockford's "With One's Own Eyes" - Page 2

For when you gaze long into America, America gazes also into you
Facundo Rompehuevos

It’s like visiting your crazy friend in the psych ward and overhearing the rantings of his insane neighbors, and then suddenly realizing they sort of make sense.

It’s like getting lost on your way out of the psych ward and wandering into the rec room where a 30-something-year-old philosophy-major community-college dropout, rocks back and forth, muttering something about dialectical materialism while he listens to a leftist podcast with a dedicated following of ten political-science-majors who have yet to drop out, and one secret-Marxist foundry worker.

It's like running to the emergency exit of the psych ward and passing an insane patient masturbating feverishly to Mini Mouse on his phone, sitting on the cold, overly-sanitized floor. But he can’t cum because of the antidepressants—happy but impotent or depressed but erected, a miserable irony. His tears fall on his wet and limp dick.

West Philadelphia-based poet C.M. Crockford offers us 59 poems from his second book of poetry, With One's Own Eyes, by Philly-based publisher Moonstone Press, that capture the poet's moments of political lucidity like an intellectual tourette syndrome—as quickly as they burst into consciousness they drift back deep into the wrinkles of Crockford's perverted brain.

He offers his readers stream-of-consciousness, exploratory and carefully-crafted poems that are both aesthetic and substantive. The poet understands the balance of form and essence. 

The poems are sometimes structured like little sculptures. One even included footnotes (a sort of sub-poem): The prose-poem about specific moments in Crockford's life "Time Travel."

But other times the poems are purposefully destructed, made to look disorderly, made to get the reader half-frustrated and to slow down so they don't get lost in the short maze of lines.

Yet, still, the reader gets stuck on poignant and painful insight, like in "The Plan":

 

Some children died today.
 
What’s important is
The trade routes are clear. 

 

Or from his concise and profound summary of the absurd rat race in capitalist society, the aptly-titled "Ouroboros":

 

Buy the fare
To take the train
To get to work
To buy the fare
To take the train
To get to work
To buy the fare
To take train
To get work
To buy fare
To take train
To light train
On fire

 

Crockford delivers sharp political commentary, sometimes in lower-case, free form, unpretentious poems. But then he gives us an unambiguous form, even conventionally structured. Yet, in typical Crockford, where nothing is typical, he uses the wholesomeness of the traditional rhyming poem to sneak in a murder ballad. Take a look at "I took a babe, and I made it mine...":

 

I smacked that skull on brittle rock -
His head grew red, he could not talk.
Then I waved goodbye as he sank into the sea -
And promised I’d visit, just baby and me.

 

This order-chaos style is consistent throughout the book. It's a mirroring of the poet's mind. When is it not? Sometimes things are clear, sometimes not. And sometimes they're somewhere in the middle where we watch the poet go nuts with order and formatting, like in "Extremities": 

 

mutual                         ecstasy              politics
                                     aid                   poetics
                                     filth                  poise
                        “Your politics seem ________
                                                 oh I don’t know”
naïve naïve naïve
                                                 oh
what a wonderful word

 

Crockford must have had fun writing With One's Own Eyes. Because he got to explore the gamut of the pseudo-creepy American 30-something-year-old male specimen with the thick-framed glasses sitting alone in the coffee shop drinking fair trade black coffee that has gone cold (just order the cold brew like how the baristas keep recommending, bro). 

There is something refreshing about Crockford's works. He did something here that is challenging. He has written about politics but done it in a way that isn't boring or trite.

He is clearly anti-capitalist, unapologetically anti-fascist. But he's also on Tinder, if we are to believe the poet's poems are true, which they don't have to be. The truth in poetic fiction is sometimes good enough.

No offense to comrade writers out there. It's hard not to be preachy when you're political. It's easy to be subjective and paint yourself or others as one-dimensional cliches, the dichotomous good versus evil. Nuance and authentic realism is sometimes lost to stereotypes.

Yet, Crockford, even when he gets close to being preachy, isn't really preachy, like in "Plural Suffix":

 

Liberalism’s principled debate beside mass graves –
Fascism’s white-knuckled grip without hindsight –
Marxism adds, to this concoction, hindsight without benefit –
Anarchy is right, and thus, quite useless –
Conservatism always chasing tails –
Capitalism trends, aims, fires –
 
The heart beats - beats -
Stops –
Indifferent
Which soft mouth
Clamps
Down.

 

Crockford first introduced his book to Unlikely Stories for review with a delicious dilemma: "how one grapples with the distinctly American problem of being a bad person while trying to find a sense of peace, even in the age of climate breakdown and live-streamed death."

But I didn't find a "bad person" or "bad people" in the book. I found regular (or unspectacular and irregular) people—cartoon-watching intellectuals, young and old, searching for reprieve, scouring and dog-earing the pages of Yukio Mishima, T.S. Elliot and David Foster Wallace.

The relatability of his poems such as "Overheard and Spoken Words at the Movies" or "For the Stick Thin Scene Poets Wearing Shein" lure readers into a false sense of safety. You're getting to know the poet, and in turn the people of Philly. But then Crockford decides, hey, you know what, let me show you something about bugs, like in "Invasive Species," but it's not really about bugs, or, like, it is, but it's also about us. 

Or like how the Russian revolutionary novelist Maxim Gorky once said: "It is a known and incontestable fact that nowhere is the capitalist system capable of producing a 'good' man."

No, there are no villains in Crockford's poetry. Just American consumers, perpetually on the verge of great leaps into radical conclusions or of the dark realization that there is no peace, only war. For now.

His ability to be honest, to the point of making us really uncomfortable at times, is brave. Because Crockford is not the working-class hero we may want or need. But he doesn't want to be the hero. Yet, he isn't the villain either. He's not pretending. He isn't a liar. Although he has a sick thing for Disney cartoons and may be someone you'd want to avoid if you're lonely and horny, Crockford is a product of American capitalism, and his poetry demands, even while the poet's soft voice cracks, that you gaze upon its glorious and grotesque creation.