the outlaw poetry network

Saturday, March 6th, 2010...7:53 pm

wolfgang carstens | lost in america: a review of the broken and the damned

THE BROKEN AND THE DAMNED | By Jason Hardung | 90 pages | $15.00 | Epic Rites Press

Love is the blank space
in a magician’s hand.

It used to be a red ball
maybe a coin,
the queen of spades,

a dove
so disoriented
by fingers
it flew
towards the sun
only to be eaten
by a hawk.

**(from love is)**

I sat down with Jason Hardung’s the broken and the damned and was immediately sucked into the poet’s rich landscape: “red spiders” playing “London bridge” on pubic hairs, little boys pulling wings from butterflies in parking lots, and love exploding like Atom bombs in our chests. These monstrous vignettes become our tour guide through the American underground: drug addiction, prostitution, homelessness, incarceration – leading us deeper and deeper into middle-class America.

I blow smoke in winter’s face
pick up a stick from the sidewalk
peel the skin back with my thumbnail
and keep walking until I’m somewhere else
drop the stick so when it comes to
it has to start over like the rest of
the broken and the damned

**(from small silver cross)**

Let’s throw our balled fists
into fun house mirrors
before they show us how other people
really see us.
Let’s do it just enough
to save face.

**(from paper roses)**

The poverty of the poet’s childhood is portrayed brilliantly. In the poem my father was a famous painter, the half green half yellow house that his father started to paint but never finished is likened to a “paraplegic pine tree” that is “dying from the bottom up.” The house becomes a metaphor for not only the spiritual poverty inside the house, but also for the poverty blooming like cancer inside the neighborhoods of middle-class America. The poet’s potential, much like his house, (much like the American dream) is a dream half realized.

Ours was the only house
on the block that didn’t
have a lawn in the backyard
or a fence.

Our Doberman was in a kennel
out back
its ribs showing
and somebody called animal control
to take her away
to a better home.
My ribs showed
and I’m sure they said
something about that too
but I wasn’t that easy to get rid of.

Our secrets were exposed
like the walls were glass.
The ghosts were tired of hiding.

**(from my father was a famous painter)**

And so much for the elusive American dream! In the poem stoplights are the only guarantee, the American dream is likened to a boy waiting for his mother to pick him up after school.

In kindergarten my mom forgot
to pick me up from school one day.
I couldn’t remember what the colors
on the stoplight meant and I wasn’t
allowed to cross the street anyway.
I stood on that corner for three hours.
Each time a car rolled up the road
it wasn’t hers and each time I was let down.
The sky shifted blue pink orange gray.
The last bus left and the wind picked up.

**(from stoplights are the only guarantee)**

I thought it was normal
to never have food in the fridge
to never have new shoes
to never have a clean house,
toilet paper, a made bed,
a mother’s touch.

I was just a kid
it was my reality.
It didn’t bother me.

**(from boyish pride)**

The stark images of poverty and deceit crash against the canvas in wave upon wave as though the floodgates had broken. The poet tries everything to recapture that warm feeling of the womb: through love in all its forms, power, employment, and finally drugs. It is the latter that finally gives the poet the security he’s been searching for.

I always tried a big shot
of dope
a warm train that always ran on schedule.
My heart Promitory point
the needle the golden spike
in my transcontinental railroad.

At least that way
I would have a few seconds
so I could feel
what it is like
to never have
left the womb.

**(from mister misery)**

Everything that the poet had been promised by America had been a lie. The poet was dragged screaming from the womb, thrown into a lonely home, in a poor neighborhood, in a spiritually defunct country. Hardung’s response is timeless:

Burn the flag
burn the text books
burn the greed
burn the sky
burn my veins, my heart, my eyes
burn the neutered children clueless
that money has everything to do with happiness
and you can’t always be what you want to be
even if you try real hard.

The truth is they will end up in a job they hate
they will spend more time with co-workers
that they fantasize about killing
than with the people that make them feel human.

and one day, yes, they will fall in love
and hundreds of thousands of innocent
bystanders will die in the blast

(from skeleton’s dance)

The poet who longs to recapture the sensation of what it was like inside the womb imagines the hour of his end.

Some day my body will be buried
in dirt, flowers will bloom from my chest
like an old toilet, a tractor tire,
a rusted wheel barrow,
or a claw-footed bath tub.

**(from my body is white trash home improvement)**

What happens next is magical. The poem extends beyond the surrealistic landscape that Hardung has so masterfully painted. It reaches out and grabs us by our guts! The poem becomes ours.

Babies will be born and some will
die before they can walk
and some will grow up and get married
and some will have everything they ever wanted
while an amateur gardener pulls weeds
from between my ribs.

**(from my body is white trash home improvement)**

Hardung’s the broken and the damned is a powerhouse presentation of the shattered American dream. It takes a special kind of author to make a book like this work, where the personal experiences of the author transcend his life and speak for an entire generation. This book has been described by S. A. Griffin as “a love poem for schools of lost children” and by Todd Moore as “a raw, wounded version of A Season In Hell.” I agree with both Griffin and Moore but would add that Hardung’s the broken and the damned is much, much more than that – such comparisons only scratch the surface of this phenomenal book.

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