Aimless As A Ghoul Poem by gershon hepner

I wander, aimless as a ghoul,
apart from the incurious crowd
where all the madding people fool
around, and see in clouds the shroud
in which I will be wrapped one day,
laid in the earth like bulbs of daf-
fodils, while men like Yorick say:
“No tears should rain––he made us laugh.”

I wonder if I really do,
but even if I don’t, perhaps
they’ll laud me as a lonely Jew
who tried to cheer up all the chaps
who listened to the words he wrote,
and, mourning, some will read aloud
short excerpts, like my famous quote
comparing words to shrouds of cloud.

Inspired by Ben Brantley’s review of the memoir of Edgar Oliver, performed at the Axis Theater Company (“So Inviting, That Dark at the Top of the Stairs, ” February 16,2009) :
Edgar Oliver invests the word “dark, ” which he uses a lot, with two syllables and much fondness. “Dah-aaahk, ” he says, his voice dipping in flight like a bat on the wing. And suddenly shadows seem to gather around him, like dutiful pets summoned by a doting owner. In “East 10th Street: Self Portrait With Empty House, ” the sweet and sinister memoir written and performed by Mr. Oliver at the Axis Theater Company, other words receive similarly lingering pronunciations that stretch syllables into chasms. In particular, “horror, ” “terror” and their derivatives are uttered with the same mix of affection, amusement and awe. When Mr. Oliver says, “I was hahhhhrrified, ” a sentence that might be expected to denote mere dismay or disgust becomes a deeply sentimental declaration….Mr. Oliver is a poet, playwright, performance artist and actor. But above all, he is a Personality, with a capital P, a type celebrated in England as an Eccentric and in middle America as a Character. It’s not easy being a Personality in the East Village, where the willfully weird abound (or did once, anyway) and where Mr. Oliver has lived since the late 1970s. It requires an exaggerated consistency of character and style, which should seep from every pore. Like the better-known Quentin Crisp — the British-born stand-up aesthete and stately monarch of East Village Personalities, who died in 1999 — Mr. Oliver wears his affectations like a birthright. And implicit in these affectations is an entire philosophy or, if you prefer, an artist’s frame for life itself. That worldview might be summed up in the famous final lament of Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”: “The horror! The horror! ” But unlike the poor, demented Mr. Kurtz, Mr. Oliver has learned to live with the horror and to make it his friend…. He says that the main thing he does in life is “wander aimlessly, ” seeking “some ultimate solitude from which there is no return.” Sounds bleak, doesn’t it? Not to mention melodramatic. But Mr. Oliver delivers this self-analysis with a whisper of cheer that finds warmth in the lonely darkness. He may sound like a ghoul, but he is oddly comforting company.

2/16/9