from someplace to nowhere / a late night bad mood poem

the bus is despicable.

each head an empty coconut

rolling downward into a tube of skin and bone.

from the back seat at the window

I pretend I’m Rosa Parks.

I’m scared but I’m valiant.

but I'm not like Rosa Parks.

I'm cotton-eyed Joe at the lectern. 

I'm like the other coconuts 

nodding half asleep,

leaning right around the left bend

leaning left at the exit to nowhere.

                   the answer man

due to infuriating demands for explanations regarding the source

material of my poems from the obnoxious Giuseppe Gnocchi,

whose house (a neighborhood eyesore) needs re-shingling,

I’ve decided upon a reply primarily to get him off my back.

–– dear Giuseppe, remember that time when you were pumping

at the Esso station across the street from my house, and a tanker truck

filled with leaded high test gasoline rumbled-up behind you, and scared

the fuckin’ crap out of you, causing you to fumble the hose which

saturated your pants with cheap, 35 cents a gallon regular, and your mother,

(an extraordinary washwoman) could never get the smell out of them,

but you wore them just about every day to just about everywhere anyway?

well, it may have taken me some 60 years, but that’s a poem right there.–– see?  

                   on the recommendation of a friend

I travelled to Iowa.

a lonely place.

nowhere to go.

almost a complete

straightaway.

I travelled to Iowa.

a dusty place.

low-lying structures with

rusty corrugated tops.

the vehicle out front

was smeared in dust.

the dust of dead wranglers,

dead drovers, and dead lasso artists

although they say some are living.

I introduced "Eclipse Coffee Syrup"

to the counterman

who took a swig from the bottle then shot me dead.

 

                   Geritol-ism

I feel listless this morning;

tired, unenthusiastic, droopy,

uninterested, half-asleep or

half-awake depending on which

side of the planet I awoke from.

I’m like a new extension cord

in its taught-wound loop-de-loop

sleeved and hanging at the hardware store

in the fascinating electrical wing where

nothing is working.

not good for anything.

when I was a kid I was not good for anything.

“good-for-nothing”.

no income, no expectations beyond

cleaning up the mess I made

or washing my hands ‘cause they’re filthy. 

how’s a prize-worthy poem born from an attitude like this?

well, it ain't easy.

but the poem above has entered the ring nonetheless.

fini

 

                  concerto for contra bassoon and coloratura soprano

there’s a silence in the hall.

maestro stands as still as a plank at the podium,

his bushy bushy black hairdo falling across the shoulders

of his tuxedo, a furry black coconut.

a hushed rumbling can barely be heard in the perfectly

balanced acoustics as players adjust to their chairs.

someone in the audience muffles the clearing

of his throat which seems to be considered as an opening

for others to cough, sneeze, or emit unrecognizable sounds.

so far so good.

the houselights have dimmed, there’s no instrumentalist

who finds it necessary to shake the spit out of the winding

avenue of his horn. not yet.

the slender soprano, dressed for a night on the town stares

intensely into the void between everything and nothing

as the conductor raises his head, lightly shuffles his feet,

bends at the waist holding his baton, scans the forces of his orchestra,

and begins the upbeat for the attack.

but my iPhone, previously set to amphitheater mode, and forgotten,

intrudes with Bach’s 435th whatchamacallit, and I rise to address the audience:

“Hey! It’s Bach instead”!

 

                   how I undergirded a very heavy, cumbersome poem and failed

it collapsed under its own weight and fell to the bottom of the illuminated

screen with a silent thud only certain domesticated animals could hear.

with a new resolve, I collected the fragments in order to rebuild the structure.

I laid down a sloppy mix of adjectives with specific places of interest,

and when they formed to solidify a foundation, I laid a steely architecture

upon it, and began slapping and bolting elements of the poem into the armature,

constantly moving upward until I was certain the structure would hold firm.

then I re-scribed the wordy poem moving downward until it reached the place

where a “stick-the-ending” phrase would be in order to satisfy the critics.–– It held.

but the miserable poem was a failure, so I notified “Angelo’s Wrecking Co.”

who, with a large swinging steel ball, smashed it to smithereens, forming a new

sort-of rubble, and there it laid unresolved at the base of the illuminated screen.

in time I considered DeSpirito Barber School as an alternative vocation.

ahhh... those captivating twists in red n’ white stripes spiraling upward

until they disappeared into the cap of the pole, mysteriously functional,

and never-ending with a meaningful message: “there’s a barber inside”.

extreme unction

anoint the sick, the cancer sick, the sick and tired.

anoint the sick of heart, the sick joke, the sick of-this-place.

anoint the sick of industry, of politics, and the call-in-sick.

anoint the sick in-the-head, the sick bastard, and the bone-marrow sick.

anoint the sick anointer of those to be anointed, the sick voodoo of Church,

the hemoglobin sick, and the sick sonofabitch wherever to be found. 

anoint the sick old-timer in 906 who's never been seen

and never been heard, save for the scuttlebutt of the hallways.

anoint the intestinal sick, and the sick of the here-and-now, although

in nowadays parlance, "sick" translates to "good" which lies in contradiction

to the message herein.    

when in scenic Quequechan, visit the "Ye Olde Extreme Unction Gift Shoppe"

open 9 to 5 Monday thru Friday.

 

               of community standards and the new objectivity

It's been determined that my community

will be offended by my remarks.

there’s a photograph attached to the text which

is also found to be something to object to.

I’ve canceled my invitation to mister objectionist

for a midnight supper at my place.

this, after a thoughtful room cleaning, and a thorough

accounting of matching dinnerware. everything was in order.

history tells us there’s a man, lynched within the bowels

of the deep southern reaches of the middle latitudes of the continent.

the gathering there look to be content that justice

had been dealt to satisfy the standards of its community.

something about the hanging man intrigues:–– the neck

stretched like so much saltwater taffy. the tattered overalls

smeared with traumatic evacuations attest to his station in life, but

from edge to edge the stillness of the photograph made dreadful sense.

it had to be so still to make such sense of its stark otherworldliness.

the table is set. the lighting remains dim. the chamber players

are trudging up the stairs with the heavy loads of their instruments, but

there'll be no supper for you tonight, mister objectionist.

 

                   I don’t see them

portrait of a man in glass

grandparents and parents

before them old potato

farmers grape cultivators

cobblers of leather / the light-

skinned tucked

beneath the southern border of

blonde-headed Switzerland

and from the center-west boot kicking

Sicily into Tunis as they say

in Lucca to ward-off demon Cosa Nostra /    

then navigating the glass, the pentimento

of my skin barely reflected and even with

all that blood I don’t see them.