john compton’s my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store
Disease lives in this collection, oftentimes manifesting itself through acts of intimacy and startling realizations made about the ephemeral composition of the body and mind. john compton’s ghosts are many and purposed and puzzling–physical echoes branded with the terminal, the terror of difference, and the totalitarian states of diplomacy—bent sideways—in this post-apocalyptic state of residing we currently find ourselves claiming existence in.
“but the hands that own me are only photographs / & i’ll have to wait to know / whether i’m still a reason to declare war”
(from “poem for the poets like me”)
my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store brought an onslaught of personal remembrances to pond’s surface: oftentimes, I avoid cancer narratives simply because of the pain they promise, but his was different, his–so overladen with purity (some call it love)—that this reader didn’t look away, but instead found myself rejoicing at the tenderness in which he treats the difficult subject of cancer.
compton narrates the trajectory of his partner’s leukemia diagnosis in writing that serves as the weft for a calico weave laden with disease: cancer, certainly, but also brain pain, the infirmity of the soul, and the sickness of homophobic action and thought, all token reminders of a larger problem: societal illness, chronic and so advanced that World War III’s a common topic amongst college age students, common enough that it has its own trending hashtag on a Wednesday afternoon.
At the same time, compton’s collection speaks to spiritual matters, which saves it from the despair it so rightfully deserves—if it wanted it—it doesn’t. “on earth we’re briefly gorgeous” serves as introduction to compton’s husband’s diagnosis, discussing the effects of chemotherapy in lovers’ terminology: “estranged” pulls emotional weight in the midst of a poem about duality, sex during treatment, the savage reality that in order to cure yourself, you must methodically kill parts of yourself.
In “lifeline”, compton writes: “i wear your cancer / around my neck / like a pendulum”, aestheticizing shared trauma in ways that jimmy open the liberation of acceptance, giving it over to Time. A discovery of agency in moments of waiting.
In “eleven things i like about summer”, compton writes: “i like summer like how leukemia / destroys the body,” subsequently re-addressing the monster in the hospital room. The poem itself is filled with the season’s sticky-hot oppression, curiously beginning in the dark, wielding a narrative met with monsters and air conditioning and unsatisfactory sex.
compton’s way of handling realism is succinctly matched with his penchant for the deceptively lightweight line, the short clause, the breathless bite to the cadences that I, as reader, imagine him reciting them in, forward-facing a crowded room of non sequiturs.
Mental health is an equally prominent member of compton’s motifs, bringing the collection to the near-dip-tilt of the depressive pond, saving itself from the crude terminology of navel-grazing through its obvious merits.
The collection stands for community–“i’ve seen gorgeous men / aligned in rows / with horoscope eyes / pledging a truth” (“i’m practicing to be a pornstar”)–is, in many respects, a selfless act of loving. In “my dirty language”, compton writes, “your thin bottom lip / makes an exceptional / brace. i use it / to prop my wrist. / it calms the tremors: / the diaphragm of my mental health.” Take a moment to examine those lines and try to tell me that love isn’t the greatest power on the planet. “dreamers of a real world” examines gayness, suicidal ideation, and emotion in tandem:
“i sat too close to crying / too close to throwing my body / off the edge too sentimental / too gay”, while “a conversation” clutches to its breast one of the most chilling lines of verse I’ve read about madness: “i’ve got shoes inside my head”.
In what I’ve decided is compton’s magnum opus, “the house in the attic”, the poet milks dry twelve pages of their life force, leaving the reader with a radiant, stand-alone poetic architecture mindfully in tune with (bear with me) Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”.
Let me defend this. compton’s poem is structured in response to The Epic, relaying a barrage of apocalyptic vignettes, beginning–in sly self-acknowledgment–with the act of writerly creation: “i drop / ink / onto paper / like / machine gun / shells,” leading us then to a disturbance of images.
Fish swimming beneath skin, pitchforks–protest–a prophetess, nightmares sanctioned by beds of petals, before, four pages deep, the penultimate line in the poem: “look into the portrait / of your eye / the shine produces / exact replicas”. The effect is a stunning one, similar to what I imagine it would feel like to discover a poem–sprung to life–staring back, as you blithely examine it like an inanimate.
Moving forward, “the house inside my head” transitions to a hellish landscape replete with sound and physicality and mention of paradise.
The reader’s thrust into a different landscape: Love–demonic, even, and perhaps of the literal and literary variety–reigns supreme. Chronologically, the poem begins unwinding backwards towards birth—provoked by a removal of jaw—before placing us briefly in Boyhood to sit in attendance to an ode to a former self.
Our next stop is conception, blurred with the staccato cries of “dictator”—the dictatorial demands of new life—or something wilder, before the poem forsakes the maternal for the tempest. Storm in sky and verse nudging the insect from inside the skull:
“symptoms exist / in the precipitation / the sky / over-exaggerates / the cause of illness”
The language moves into the communal, then generational, which is exactly appropriate for madness dialogue, which absorbs the remaining five pages of “the house in the attic”. compton quietly compares his own father’s generation’s beasts (war) with his own (medication), before, once again, brushing “Kubla Khan” on accident with moon and sun, demons–the variety of which–argue ultimatums of exorcism by doctors, only to place our narrator in labs of deceit: “...that the doctor has left open / because inside there held / a masterwork”. Angels populate the tail-end of the poem, leaving both reader and narrator restless and breathless with lines like, “i wake to an unstable environment / something like heaven”. The poem leaves us with imagery of pigeon and poison and the wary glancing of fragility. Possibly, his ending pierces to the pointlessness of life; however, on another reading, “dirt” speaks to our rehoming, our eventual decay, and redistribution into the ground.
I’d like to leave you with community–it’s something we direly need in this strange tilt-a-whirl time, something I’d say from first-hand experience that a marginalized person requires most–more than medicine, more than clothing, and certainly more than the transient—oftentimes foolish—popularity on the internet, that we buy into the same way the down-and-out gambler buys his metallic scratch-off cards every Sunday morning. It’s all foibles, a gesticulation of ego hoot-hoots that bear witness to nobody, nothing, not even the enormous crater in the sky, save the self. What I mean to say is that this faux community lacks the necessary new-tire center of true value. Lack of community proper (and pure) brings about violence–the scariest thing about this statistic is that it’s a choose-your-own-character variety of the action. Mental? Physical? Or possibly the most detrimental of all—spiritual—as it sparks the others into headlong and dangerously blindered agency.
“we make community of buildings / at a glance, the windows are mirrors / & reflect everyone sent out to work.”
(from “tender community of fabled people”)
compton’s collection gets this.
It understands the assignment better than most, and that’s a given: he’s experienced those slim, rare portionings of pain that edify, rendering nuance moot in times of dear, honest-to-God anguish, the kind that splits, then collapses a person into the elemental building blocks of both other and ether. And yet he lives and writes about it. Let us rejoice in that.