Tomcatting Poem by gershon hepner

How d’you think that I am batting
with my poetry tomcatting?
Do I score you as a run?
Are you ready for some fun
with me, reward for all my verses,
or are they merely pig ear purses
that won’t help me to spend some time
with you the rhythm of my rhyme?
If poetry won’t help me score,
I’ll try another method, or
be called out by the umpire, striking
out since I’m not to your liking.
It’s sad, I didn’t want to bomb
while catenating like a tom.

Inspired by Leon Wieseltier’s review of Martin Amis’s book “The Second Plane, ” in the NYTimes Book Review, April 27,2008:
Art is not the only impediment to understanding that Amis places in the way of his reader. There is also the impediment of sex. Among the many theories about Islamism and Islamist terror that appear in these pages, the writer’s favorite is the carnal one: he believes that 2,992 more people would be alive today if 19 Middle Eastern men had only found some satisfaction of the flesh. Like Updike, he chooses to impute the malignity in the terrorist’s heart to lust. More precisely, to frustrated lust; still more precisely, to frustrated male lust. Osama bin Libido! This interpretation has the advantage of returning Amis to his last. Suddenly his theme is no longer exotic. In the only really funny sentence in his book, Amis declares that “geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is.” It takes a man to know a man. Amis’s account of Sayyid Qutb lingers long over its subject’s dread of women, especially American women, and the consequent transfiguration of a man’s puritanism into a movement’s ideology. Despite his protestation that he is not an Islamophobe but an “Islamismophobe” — he ceremoniously concurs that the prophet Muhammad was “a titanic figure, ” in evidence of which he cites Walter Bagehot! — Amis explains that “the dominion of the male is Koranic, ” and more generally that “when challenged or affronted, the believer’s response is hormonal.” We are to conclude, I suppose, that the unbeliever is the master of his hormones. While the subjugation of women in Islam has been abundantly documented and deplored, it should also be pointed out — but not to weaken our will! — that the sexual stringencies of Islamic law and morality do not differ significantly from the exceedingly unvoluptuary codes of other religions, and that many millions of Muslim men have not become mass murderers as a result of the traditional restrictions on tomcatting. The masculinist account of terrorism brings to mind the feminist account of nuclear weapons, according to which all you need to know about the origin of the danger is the shape of the missile. The genital theory of history may be novelistically useful, but it is analytically silly. In this case, it reduces decades and centuries of philosophies and cultures and religions and tribes and classes and nations and movements and states and empires to the Levantine crotch. Surely we must be able to imagine, not only for the sake of our literature but also for the sake of our security, that there are sexually satisfied enemies of decency and modernity. And enough about those patient virgins in the sky: the threat from suicide bombing, and from the political cultures that prize it, is founded on deformations more worldly and more substantial than a harem fantasy.

4/27/08