Two Cultures Press :: Bourgeois Pleasures (1984)

Bourgeois Pleasures
Ken Stange
Published by The Quarry Press (1984)

Hermann Hesse said "The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire." But The Fates pay no attention to human preferences.

As much about bourgeois pain as pleasure, this extended narrative combines prose and poetry in a long letter to a friend in denial of his roots. The poems in this book originally appeared in numerous prestigious journals and anthologies, but the book pulling them all together into an extended narrative has long been out of print.

The Quarry Press (1984)
ISBN: 0-919627-12-9
Softcover (6x9 inches) 62 pages
Signed by author edition: $20

Downloadable PDF Book
(60 pages plus original cover): $3

Bourgeois Pleasures (1984)

Excerpt

…Our early adolescence was a lesson in idealism - no doubt of that. Hell, the girls we knew were not real! What was real was the dream, the stickiness between the sheets. The girls we knew with their unlikely bodies had nothing to do with this higher reality of dream and ideal. Lust gave us a taste for the ideal: a case of rationality springing from the irrational crush of sexual need.
.
But of course Pride cometh ...
.
.

‘Our Real Teachers’
.
These teachers were invisible
discreet as sex and seasons' change
they only spoke in happenings
their only lecture was our pain.
.
We all grew along their blackboards
until like angels we fell down
far smarter than we realized
they made our silence into sound.
.
They used our stretching bodies' ache
and the high arching of our bones
to make their hard lessons
come home come home come home.
.
.
... in the spring. Which is long before the fall. The fall into knowledge.