minimum daily requirements

…and the preacher says may god have mercy on your soul. while all i can think of now is for some reason these old women, bundles in black shawls waiting for the bus in the rain, huddled under awnings, looking glum and dissatisfied, a bunch of dogs. the bathroom attendant sits and waits, the paper spread out over his crossed legs, skimming the box scores and race results. electricity used to be my pal, but now it’s going to go on ahead and be my demise. oh well. there’s times i’ve thought of doing away with this old thing i call me, the subway track sucking me down below the wheels, shocked by the electric third rail. retraining your mind to think in certain peculiar ways. plenty’s the time i’ve figured i’ve got the capacity for compassion, for mercy too, for shit’s sake. lousy kisses. that’s something else. i’ve had plenty of life’s gutters. sure. real sucker for waiting around. but who’s going to hold your hand when you’re down in the dumps? not me. not me. the preacher says something about salvation while an accordion booms at the back of my head. clamped to a wooden chair. a levy of muddy sadness. i am sleeping in chains. my feet are bound in iron. it was the way his glasses kept falling off, the greasy nose, the crooked eyes, and most of the time he was hounding me to keep quiet. i was too loud for him. i talked too much. well. oh well. that’s the short of it. the worst part of being an asshole is how the god-awful loneliness gets to you. the way life seems to be dancing on away without you. but that’s the way i wanted it. i am a son-of-a-bitch. i am the night. color me black. that’s the life i made for myself. doesn’t hurt that i’ve got a mug like jack elam. some say i’m ugly. i don’t know. a matter of taste. god seeping back into the mix. satan pleading for a second chance. eyebrows that matter. i’m figuring on a few things in this here afterlife. walking in beauty like the night, even if it’s through swamps and sewers, even if it’s a deluge of rat piss. the sweet guise of sweaty guys like me. milling around with nothing to do but frown. the lord ain’t cruel enough to do to me what i shouldn’t a done to others. appraising the situation like so, well, here what we’ve got is about one hundred and ninety pounds of hammy flesh dripping with low-end aspirations. lock it up. feed it chopped bits of tire and charcoal coffee. keep it docile. make sure it doesn’t get any ideas of its own. keep them genes to yourself, boy. that’s right. so i made up for lost time and ran afoul of the world they made for me. got my scrap-metal soul heaped into the frying pan’s fire, and like a smelter it made me what i am, all hardened globs of bitter revenge and stones of remorse. the bible spills riddles on the floor, and the tiles are cracked inside of me, and the grout grows wild into crooked rivers of mold. when i’m dead and gone. when i’m nowhere. lift a gauzy curtain of muslin over what remains. or maybe bloodstained organdy. i miss the sound of my own footsteps. the slap and bop of patent leather on concrete, climbing stairs, scampering to the drugstore, tapping to music, stepping softly through shag carpet, toeing around in the clothes hamper. there are sparrows needling my brain. events will not conspire to appraise the situation. time plays funny games with what’s left of it, and tosses aside your instincts for noticing it. god speaks through flushing toilets now. a emphysemic baritone murdering an aria. i’m torching all the places where i used to live. i’m taking my deepest dives with me, and if i ever come up for air, if i lose my loose change, my american appetite will fatten up on the meek, on the powerless, on those driven to distraction by infomercials, on the petty and charmless, on the lawnmower-motor-powered, on the mangy indigent irresponsible hordes, and i will not sink before i am full. i will be a nightmare swindled into your daydreams. i will plunge below mediocrity’s tide. do not think of tender things. that churl of a preacher’s passive in his insight. oily tar-coated shit that passes for compensation. i remember chicken that tasted like shoes because i’d put my wet converse in the oven to dry them out. i’m holding out for pity from higher places than this. my knees don’t got knives in them just yet. lost my teeth in a poker game. been clubbed by the indecent demands of jealous ladies enough to know kind shoveling from a bible’s greasy pages, and now they’re going to cook me, fry my brains, char this fleshy hunk of scabs and misery until it smokes and sizzles. while all i can do is ponder on back to the loops and horseshoes of that highway curving off and disappearing into the whorled mashed chunks of fog. came back home to nothing. went away. being gone is something i got quite good at. when you trail off down that miserable plume-smoked two-lane there’s really not much else you can twine to your thoughts except that it’s cold and the headlight’s ain’t doing the shining that they should be. milling around here i think about these things now and am not saddened but maybe made dumb by the crush of those there events that maybe shouldn’t have happened but there really is no help for that now. the white dashes take some getting used to, and it’s flickering and hesitant, well, if you make your way along the snakes and hairpins gashed into the scraped mountain walls, and if the radio’s churning static, and then there’s the sweeps of nodding off, almost zombie-like, a comfortable lull in the ankles between ups and downs on the pedal, a fuzzy safe place between dreams, and you come to and head-shake back into a hurried turn of the wheel, and screeches come and go, you smell pine maybe or taste ginger on your sandpaper tongue, the back of your throat dry and scratchy, your eyes itching with a steady burn, and the surge of adrenaline snaps you to attention and you think i can do this i can do this i can make it just keep these eyes on the road turn on the heater and breathe and keep going, and you do, and the turns keep coming and you’re dizzy, but there’s amphetamines in the glove compartment and you remember this and you think i think i can think i can think therefore i can do, and a popped blister of hope bursts and sambas through your veins, and you know this’ll not be the end. dope drove me to distraction, sure, and maybe destroyed some good parts of my brain’s cool-handed configuration, but that ocean-side highway that night spilled more of my ambition to the shore than anything else ever did. so you go ahead and take the pills, and at first it’s like you’re high just off the taste, but then you settle in, and the fog starts to get friendly with you, and the motorcycles are one-eyed monsters, friendly enough, come to help you along as they swerve and cough by. faces smile at you from the sheer cliffs, aiding your wakefulness, and then you start jabbering to yourself about androids and sugar substitutes and why it is you always do this, always end up alone driving late at night. maybe you get jittery. sweat-soused hands bang staccato on the wheel. just bumping and winding along with a beer-stained roadmap for the grizzlier places claiming rights to the crying jags of your always-longing club-footed heart. the trees are dragons swooping in for a little closer gander as you hem and haw around the bends. then maybe you surmise that confidentiality and privation are two very different things, and privacy is perhaps just a shoddy way of covering up for a lack of confidence, and you scratch your belly, and you crack the window so the sea air can rush in and lift your sappy sodden head out of this trance that’ll only end you up careening into the rocks below, smashed and alone while the waves lap up what’s left. what’s left. then there’s that. it’s an iffy business, trying to pole vault prevailing circumstances surrounding loss. just try not to leave too smoky of a trail. test out a few xanadus on the nail-tough verandas of your mettle’s dealey plaza. the road keeps coming at you and at you. on and on. and these small tacky obeisances buoyed up by reverence and middle-infielder instincts. so, you get in a cab one night. it’s pouring rain, of course. it’s got to be raining. you start to wonder about the word ‘inept’ and if there’s a word ‘ept’ to counter it. you want to feel very ept, if it were a word, at what you are about to do. when i was younger, when i was very adept at sitting around and not saying anything and not doing anything, i would contemplate art and poetry and opera and philosophy. now all i do is pace back and forth, snoop and pry into the lives of others, and think about girls and sports and money. it’s okay. i don’t do much regretting over it. i cut my fingernails. i snooze through the alarm most mornings. miss buses and get caught in the rain. socks soaked. so, you get out of the cab, right? you pay the cabbie. you make a beeline for a hotel awning. and then, maybe, some guy kamikazes out the front door like a man-in-the-moon marigold set afire, and he rams headfirst into you and sends you mister over sister into the street, where you scratch and bloody yourself up pretty good while narrowly avoiding oncoming traffic with swift dodges and lurches and skippings and eventually a clutch sidewalkward dive that gets you stomped by a bellhop in a red cap. some guy ditches his cigarette in the vicinity of your head. dog shit’s on your heel. and, of course, it’s raining. some binaca-breathed bastard is hovering over you, asking if you’re up to snuff, and you’re not, but you say that you’re doing okay, just to make him ditch you and scram. you’re not okay. you’ve never been more not okay. a circus horse rears back, bucks and kicks, and the weather is dark and loud, and the cops are selling cucumbers, apples, pears, and kumquats out of their trunks. it’s a bad business and you’re plunked down right in the middle of it. poor you. jesus. suck it up, right? get over it. move on. that’s the thing to do. don’t use up all your half-life wallowing in your own parking-garage sadness. use them old survival instincts. sure, but then amnesty catches up to even the sneakiest among us, like describing a bark to somebody who doesn’t know what a dog is, pistols go on murdering, grim becomes you, and even the losers scratch off a few lucky numbers between sometimes and a yawn. i keep my jaws clenched just in case the guard dogs sniff their way back around here. can you imagine? the preacher makes his signs of the cross. i was sitting lonelier than a dead chess piece in the back room of eddie’s where the boys were all dealing kansas city lowball, and the crashplunk of pool balls was just mood music for saints, and i was leaning back on two in a folding chair sucking down cigarettes and sipping rye whisky from a highball glass. tantamount to nothing i was coming to depend on the seedier sort for my luck, spending my spirit all over town in my robin-egg-blue highwaters, in my eskimo hare-pelt hat, in my tattered army jacket with the lining hanging on by a few threads here and there, with my torn fingerless gloves the color of mud, with holes in my shoes and holes in my pants and a few holes in my head, as i puttered off into the early morning scrubbing at the day’s stubble with sleep tearing holes from the scars i was using for eyes, telling time by streetlights. i had a certain tunnel i used. they didn’t run trains through it no more, and it was closed off, but i got myself in there, and there i could be alone. i’d lie low in the worried weeds and juniper shrubs, underneath a decade’s worth of graffiti and fifty-years’ soot, cuddled by a threadbare sleeping bag, spasming and seizing and grinding away my teeth, vomiting between the ties and tracks, losing what was left of my mind. nobody knew where i was, which was exactly where i wanted to be just then. sometimes places just find you. i blew smoke up the ass of what was left of the world. a girl found me that night at eddie’s though. her breath was gin. her mouth was oleander and mint. her eyes flashed like new pennies, and her hips swayed and took care of the rest. the damn best two legs i’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. she was something to be lost in, and i was, and there was nothing else i could do but think about her. in all this scabbed-up place in my head where it used to just read empty or out for lunch, well, this gal comes around with her pepper and spice and mushes up all my thinking like that, so she’s taking up all that space there, and there’s nothing i’m going to know about anymore except her. the music in her name sang me to sleep. the tunnel wasn’t so empty or unused anymore. i left them boys in the backroom of eddie’s, and this girl she messed me up pretty good. i’m not one to go on about blame. i know what i done. i know why i done it. sure. the preacher goes on about forgiveness, about getting my self straight with my maker and all the likes. but i know what’s what when it comes to equality between the genders, when it comes to who’s running the show and putting placemats on your sensibilities. boring summer afternoons have probably killed their good share of us, when it’s getting on into the twilight but not quite carving out gold yet, and you sit there and you think dumb dumb dumb dumb, and it’s all you’ve got, just this spoon-fed domestication that leaves you sapped and worm-headed, this monotonous now, this dull heavy thing that hunkers down and doesn’t wonder. what’s next is what is and what you’ve got is on and on and on. the nice things play themselves out, and then you find yourself stealing candy bars from the drugstore just to have something besides this blah that is becoming the blah blah blah of your every gesture. ordinary things don’t add up. you want silent thunder. you want burgundy rubber bands. you want to rescue choking victims in sad cafes. you want night to come and throw its starry blankets all over you. i sit here and i wait, just like i’ve always done. i’ve got real good at waiting. well, at least that’s one thing i’ve got good at. the sun’s fixing on setting low and lovely just above them hills over yonder i bet, up a piece where we used to hide our bottles tied to ends of ropes thrown down the well. well, now, i just shouldn’t go on thinking about such things. it won’t do much good. all i’ve got is this body shackled to this thick wooden chair, and it’ll soon not house me no more. the texture of the wood's grain under my fingers is familiar, smoothly rough-hewn and even, like a maple bat fresh off the lathe. i dig my fingernails into the chair's arm's slick skin, and they nestle and crook into an almost damp softness. the preacher man says repent. he tells me to accept jesus as my personal savior. and i want to do this very much. i want to make him feel good about what he’s doing with his life, what he’s chosen to do with his time here on earth. i pray for him. i pray inside. i don’t let him know it. he white-knuckles his bible and pulps his eyeballs, arching his head back, deep in the need of needing. i know that feeling. that unendurable want to have something bigger and better than yourself, something to save you, something to make you wise up and start living better, something that floats and lifts and hugs you back to safety. the preacher tells of trespasses and i forgive him his and mine and everyone’s. i breathe in deep and hold it and hold it and hold it, and i swear juniper’s gone wafting through here. but hell, the candles around these parts all burnt out long ago. hallowed be thy name, father who art, where? where? well i’ll just go on and assume the worst of what’s best the best i can, just like i always done. finally it’s all going to stop. it’ll all be no more and so will i. i breathe in this breath forever inside of me and never let it go, and never let it go, and never let it go.

the fatal uxoriousness of kal-el

even though in giving it all away, man, in shuffling priorities, the likes of this, well, man, to do so for some chick, well, that’s just what there is, in or about, in any, or all, any one to two or three less ways about it. so there are, like, principles involved, stirrings of pandering and or, well, quintessential pussyfooting behavioral patterns that cannot go, like, unnoticed. but we’ve got to involve logic here at some point, though love knows no solid-footing, well, there are survival instincts to blame or bemoan still, well, in the loggia of the thing at least. and then we fold. yep, that’s sure enough. move inward if there is to be no onward. always an escape, though. right? just like thinking it makes it so, and the power of love holds sway. well wishings are one thing. good tidings? well, that’s another orderly, static holdover from harder-than-these times. the cape? not really a functional device anyway. could lose it and not lose much but style. point that out to her. maybe it’s a barometer for flatulence. something kicks, man, it kicks my head in, and then there’s a brawl to get the hell out of, at a diner maybe, and it’s chards of glass to step over for a bit. i don’t know. spread thinner than this, maybe, but the sky’s just not the same when you’re stuck looking up at it. now, well, it’s just falling all around. but i’m not drinking. i don’t need to cry. no. i’ve grown passionate about my handkerchief collection, and, well, there’ll be some kryptonite in my soup tomorrow. i’m sure of it. and this prison of normalcy leaves me sluggish and entranced by sitcoms. there’s no imminent crisis of belief. my personality’s on loan, and, well, the chances of me scrapping some of it back are looking like a hologram of my folks in an icy fortress where my solitude’s dug its own grave. are lazy kisses worth the lack of super ones? sapped of all powers by the powers of love. how trite. how fucking cliché. but that’s just it. it comes true at last, and you go around being busy living your adult life so you don’t, like, notice much of it. but there’s more than a simple look-through-it to my sight, and my old puissant self’s just a bad dream i’m trying to conk out of my head. no need to be exceptional anymore. a relief? man, sometimes i don’t even care three ways or another. somewhere they’re playing mercy, mercy me. but not for me. not for me. painters have all the luck. being melancholy might suit a more artistic disposition. me? well, man, i’m here wasting away under the erased-chalkboard colors of day. i’m spending money on lottery tickets, taking the dog for walks, thumbing through dickens, getting haircuts and taking showers and buying groceries and neatly stacking dried dishes. i’ve got my story magazines and my shined shoes. the daily planet’s grind. a paycheck every other friday. the crackling of the heater burning dust in the corner makes me sentimental. i dream of long-gone swoops, nifty tucks of red-yellow-blue streaking into powdery tails, like jimmy’s old snapshots of me floating breezy and light in the arch of a softly tealing slab shoplifted from heaven. but now it’s just me slopping away here on a couch wondering why i exchanged a red sun for this lousy yellow one, losing hair and gaining belly fat, collecting junk mail, picking crumbs of toilet paper from the shower mat, and dusting off lois’s pulitzer medal with an old t-shirt. making the most out of being me, well, crippled like this, fragile, clumsy and boot-less, finding out who that me really is. well, man, you see it’s like i’ve been speaking with other voices for so long that i’ve now, like, forgotten the sound of my own, or, well, even how to use it. clark. jeepers. golly. holy skunk sweat. clark, clark, clark. thick too-big glasses, a suit and tie, slicked back hair. just a different uniform to have to fit into and be this thing that other people see and respond to in the way i notice that they do. indifferent. shit. there’s no phone booths left, and ducking into alleys just ain’t what it used to be. even though, now, well, man, i’m budgeting my feelings. i’m chopping vegetables in the kitchen, and i bleed, and i bleed, and now, well, i bleed. the usual so unusual, like being this way where i still, well, man, i won’t ever be one of you. but…but once, at one time i was known as the only son of the great jor-el. well, you see, also, way back when, well, it just so happens that i was superman.

even assholes get lonely

shit. if my dogs could sing they’d be yodeling. bunions, blisters, warts on the toes. it’s torture just to walk around these days. so, i don’t know. i’m like 6 or 7 beers into the night already, you know. and by the way, when’s the last time you were in love? huh? well, so what. what-the-fuck-ever. i know what’s what when it comes to connubial matters, or concupiscent ones, for that matter. love it or leave it or something, or what’s something, at least, or not. what i mean is like you get to depend on the weather for making you feel a certain way, but maybe, you see, just maybe, that’s better than depending on another person for it. you’ve got to figure at least. for me? well, there’s the kids to think about. my little girl with her ethel merman eyes and her marmalade smile. and maybe the music’s better now that the lights are floored, you know, not coming down and shining on your pate from above. up at you instead. so it’s come down to this well-let-me-walk-the-night-away shit, in the heat, on these hot nights when you can’t sleep, can’t do anything useful, so you trudge broke and foot-sore all the over town, out-classed by bums and vagabonds, rivering along crooked down alleys and jaywalking over narrow one-ways, crusty with dried sweat in the scattered flecks of sunset light scabbing by, crabby but at peace too, and then i’m getting beer drunk in a dark bar, short-changing my dreams for a song, and humming myself awake again, becoming, well, comfortable in my body, at ease beneath my skin. records change. they get broken. sometimes the factory quits you. and, just to say, like plums in the icebox, these were times when i was getting wake-up calls at night. shoddy was the style of me. and it fit too. it’s likely i was taking my time, being lazy, in need of something dire to happen, to make things, i don’t know, more endearing. it wasn’t a chancy way to be behaving. it was no way for a grownup to be acting, that’s for sure. but don’t blame me for the reconstituted b.s. that people lust for. that’s not my personal responsibility. don’t hold me fucking accountable. understand me when i say that i’m no hole-in-the-wall sightseer. i want to be in the thick of things. lanky and outstanding and curled in the cut. but i’m a tremendous outsider when it comes to congealing with the likes of others. catch me off guard and i’ll join the huddle around the bar. in a roaring sophomoric-at-best effort i’ll eagerly accompany any ass scratcher to the nearest one-stop shopping spree. i’m tranced with hearts and gobbled up by change. humming gets me by. shit, my voice could make a chandelier weep. there’s no danger of that happening while the rain’s still on the make though. looking like any old randolph or hank. shit. i’ll climb a tree before i spend my money on a visiting jersey. shit. i’ll be quick about it in the meantime. wrestle a cigarette off a nearly-well-enough before the cops go home for the night. but don’t let me grumble about it all over hipper stances than this when i’m holding a leg bent behind my back and starting my sentences with logarithmic cutlery. damn the hell of it. fuck. i’ll start over before i get going, too, right like raining tupperware and fielding contact questions without advice. yeah, and the lottery picks a loser again. lost cause. over-charging the best interest in comeuppance. get distilled and invest your personality in a situation. that’s a sham, but it works more often than often. i cure my own anxious moods with stale beer. over is under. get it crooked. right? so, hell the what, and then some less of more, just in case the backlash is catching your jaw off guard. so it’s on purpose at best. tracks of mind gone to the hayfields. i don’t interpret boredom for anyone. being who you are is enough. getting better at being yourself. acting like you. that’s a stuffy thing, inside or out, and housekeep some in your soul’s living room, when you’re not living there, of course, while you’re at it. forget about hightailing or reupholstering or violating the moves you make. there’re compensations arising all the time. flattering light to the way you gaze. i don’t care twenty-two cents for it most of the time, but hardly is justification for itself. then you get women going all umbilical on you, and there’re prices that keep being paid. the sun’s dreading away. and there i go with another try at figuring out what kind of person i am. not this kind? maybe. the kind who smells things before he touches them? not the nicest try. hula-hoop around it. drop the salutations. add in a few valedictions. monday through it all while morning forbids itself still. ballsy move. undetectable also. like forking over some gentle odds. go back to the plucked stems in your garden and yank. i was stuck making fun of little children for some reason one blowy evening while drinking tea on a balcony, and there were florets carved into the building across the street. they resembled torches. i mentioned this to some tea-drinking nelly who shot me a look of desperation and pluckless waste. so seems well’s good for some nothing too. and here these no-look passes of days go by, rootless, everything old under the sun, and none of the differences, yeah, yeah. so, tremble. cordon off your guilt with yawns. go be little among the animals. i’ve got odds that’ll make your seersucker soul shiver. stand around in the street all day? under the leaky frond shadows palm trees make? that’s no way to behave. i won’t put up with it. go ahead and bumrush the clouds, so, and then you’re seeping with soggy thoughts, washed in the ballyhoo of being you, and trying is a bit more false than it once was. after spilling all this wanting all over town, i mean, shit, sometimes it’s just nice to feel wanted. i get more than 6 beers into it, well, forget about it. it’s not going to stop anyplace of a time soon. the night’s vomiting me up sure enough then. get a bead on ambitions and inhibitions and leave the tire taste of it all somewhere that’s closer than behind. i smoke my nights down past the filter. shit. the mornings? hang an out-of-service sign around my neck and throw me in the briar patch. i’m in debt to myself for more than i’d ever want to pay. underconfident and forever looking for a way out. life is just a series of having gone through a that to get to a this until that this becomes another that. an only why’d to a way to never have to try again. that’s a drifting hankering that’s not a little less than suspicious-looking. it’s just what it is and you don’t got to get scared or be nasty about it. everybody who lives has terrible things happen. it’s part of this thing we do called being alive. i’m not special. nobody is. cop to it. be eager in taxicab yellows and lab-coat whites. as special as being this thing that motions itself through it all. but we all are. in the hip pocket of the world. we all are. kissing the tailgate, fanning flameouts through basaltic throughcuts, caroming into the rumble bars of our independent yet all-together-now highways. we all are, too. dangling like leis from arrester-bed nightmares, hoping all heaven stays put for a bit. all this seiching between things as the ullage of what i was grows and grows. concatenate your dreams in the dead-ringer lines of what you once hoped you never were, and, god, it’s unlucky if you do and worse luck if you do it over. that’s what keeps my coffee strong enough to float a lug wrench on. that and my looks, which get mistaken for perilously close to decent, just over and teetering towards the lee side of handsome most times. but letter writing is a lost art form, and i don’t see many caimans round these parts lately. so i’ll lace my boots with greased copper wires, stand around with my hands outside my pockets, slum the shores of regret with empty bottles and a broken smile, pacing myself with laziness under the cloudy sky’s rumpled wedding dress, my heart an abandoned movie theater late at night, catering to the wounded clefts sliced into the hustle and crafty guts of being me. the moon’s just a pale-blue bowling ball guttered through spiraling rifts and gravel pits and ship-wrecked currents of my waylaid head as i wash my eyes with alcohol. damn, i should get this show off the road. i know it. stop speeling and reeling. get a hardy grip on the present and take a few steady jabs at the future. but i’m using myself as a prop to shout at, or with, and there are instincts for groomed sienna dirt that lead one over the dew of just-mown grass when had-about-enough gets even with plenty-more-where-that-came-from. it’s a drunkards prayer in a graveyard, a lost cause, a pie pan’s flash, a loss cut too deep to run away from. the lord picks on me sometimes, and, shit, i get indecisive too, but for now the beer’s running yellow-gold rivers through my soul, and it appears that i’ve got more than floating on my mind. you see, i’ve been sinking for so long that i can’t remember what it’s like to swim. the chicken shits lap me. the flies hover. my hands. my hands. my trembling god damn hands. if i can just lift this one last drink. if i can coax my trembling way out of this one. shit. i get a dozen drinks into it and i’m floored and dizzy and collapsing. all gone and lariated to where i can never quite get to be. sure, shame on me no matter how many drinks deep i’m into it, when one’s too much and even a thousand won’t be enough. lower than alone. stuck in the passing lane. jump-started with no place to go. somebody kick over a barstool. i want to hear what it sounds like.

shorn to the slab

when not just any something will do

in contemporary hues

escaped convictions stow hope

colors brave the weather’s care

seeped in worry

seamed to uncountable sheep

where never is a thing without feet

splendor settles in

for skin

cronies we’ve got either’s poor

to put up with or’s

happy smarting

while every anything won’t

unbuild

tempers and for’s

guess at the hunch

of over’s estimation

at lone’s less than two

in god willing’s try

to be caught in like’s only

goodbye

horn broken; watch for finger

Greta’s riding low on distractions and unfiltered courage. She’s somebody else’s Pensacola baby, and she’s got a crush on Harold Lloyd. She says, “Put ‘er there,” with a smirk and spits in her palm. She wears burgundy corduroy jackets and cusses under her breath when somebody sneezes. A working class schmooze, she’s got John Lennon’s pajamas and Luise Rainer’s haircut. There are wishes in her eyes that’ll stay put for as long as she’s able to keep that cigarette lit and dangling from her lip. Greta’s got it unmade in bed beneath an Oakland moon, and her legs are lazy with restless twitches. The land’s never is her ever. The best of her bad is somebody else’s good, and she fries eggs in camel fat. Don’t look her way in the mirror; she’ll get moody with an applesauce tongue and a broiled vinegar-soaked heart. She appeases the sun with a white panama hat. She quotes Samuel Johnson, listens to Halloween music, and she’ll ride any carousel in town. The takers give her away almost every night. What’s left is what’s able to get her up and at ‘em and dancing once again. The devils of her whims are the angels of my every care. When the ravens dart and dash, smarter than any crow around, she dumps perfume in the gutter and spills chartreuse in the cracks in the sidewalk, and she fights fire with canola oil. She watches airline movies in the bathroom on a portable 10-inch TV set. Nothing gets her to give up her switchblade-- or her comb. It’s all mashed potatoes and boiled light bulbs, and the cops all know her as Mockingbird. Greta’s making fists at chickens. Greta’s hauling around a vat of rat tales in rainwater. Greta’s putting the you back in New York. Greta’s lining the bottles up just to knock ‘em down. Greta’s lying to the president and the pope; she’s teaching magic tricks to kindergartners, and she’s shoveling mud on the mayor’s grave. Give her a mile and she’ll take a good pull of felt and rip. Show her the holes in your shoes and she’ll show you hers. It’s not up to the sky to give her the time of day; it’s not up to her to mislead the piper all the way past the bank and back, scratching olive-shaped scars into day-old bruises, topping off the parlor’s best shoebox display case with oatmeal and walnuts, coloring in stills from black-and-white movies, guessing all the clues back to forthcoming; and she’s got misguided motivation, and she’s got champagne in her veins and a chancy sparkle in her heels; and she’s intimidating raccoons with a water pistol; and she’s the closest thing to soft that any plumber’d ever find beneath the sink. Her legs should win a prize. She lives in hotel rooms from time to time; you can find her out by the pool wearing a white linen suit and silent-film-star sunglasses. She changes the color of her hair almost every week, depending on how she feels. Greta’s over being underwhelmed by it all. Greta’s cold-water cool. Greta’s bad and Greta’s great. And most of all, Greta’s always behind the wheel anywhere I go.   



  

the blunt edges of being

THOMAS JEFFERSON: I woke up maladjusted to the world today. Suddenly, now, I don’t fit in. Can’t make it like the rest of them do. I’m here willfully on the outside of everything, drooling towards Saturday’s bliss-point crave, not a place for me in the whole sun-smeared world.

EUGENE V. DEBS: You? You’re just confusing your “writerly sensibilities” with the endless conjunctive clauses, dangling modifiers, and comma splices of your circumstances. Come on now. It’s time to reboot and shape things back to shipped instead of shopped.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: I’m not suited for the frenzied pluck of the world around me. I’m ill with resistance. I’m ornery with fashion’s mold. Plus, I’m in the mood for fighting-- for or against, really.

EUGENE V. DEBS: Be a stereotype. Classify yourself and become a number alone. Go ahead. It’ll all be okay.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: My name’s written in the sky with chemtrails. You’ve got to live in the outer limits of things to be awarded this grace, this freer way of gazing.

EUGENE V. DEBS: No. Just contrails. Nothing more. Your name’s just a nine-digit farce, a generic statistic, a slogan on a cerulean business card in a bucket of other blue-toned business cards. We are micromanaged to make us fitter, smarter, and more productive. If it ain’t broke, it works, you know?

THOMAS JEFFERSON: The bobolinks will sing of me, proud and strong and…unproductive!

EUGENE V. DEBS: No. FOR you.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: And the difference is….!

EUGENE V. DEBS: Whatever you make of it, it would surely seem.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Well, I’ll take what’s behind doors one, two, and seven. I’ll take the over/under on it too. Just in case.

EUGENE V. DEBS: A bettor better bet best beholden be or in behooving blind both besmirched and brined be bested.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: The salty aftertaste of poorly placed “run-on” wagers. Those fly-by-night gambling debts adding up. Yep. That about always does you in. Me? I’m all for reconciled chance. The slips of grumpy versions of myself hobbling about most midmornings, placing bids at an auction of my better sides. Hell, everybody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Everyone knows my sorrow, my little missteps in the marbled haunches of things, my bricked free throws, the deliberate joy and unfounded fury of the whole damn plane crash of being me.

EUGENE V. DEBS: Excuse me while I sob and rend my garments for you. Pity this rich ogre, kind pusillanimous man.          

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Rive what you will about it, I am still cleared for takeoff-- always cleared by the semaphores of doubt, but with no means to go.

EUGENE V. DEBS: Oh, the places you won’t go.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: I want brass bands playing my praises, instead of this bland elevator music disengaging my thoughts from accumulating on their own accord. I want to dodge golf balls being thwacked at me by middle management on the field of a sold-out stadium where the crowd roars, “Roar!” and chants, “Chant!” into the gilded glaze of afternoon sun. I want to be defeated.

EUGENE V. DEBS: Perhaps therein lies your dilemma. The desire to be dunked and dumped by those whom you’d otherwise play at holding hands with-- in the meddling of charm-and-bow posterity-- just to be crowned shopworn and decadent in a recalcitrant bend of the knees. You want to have something to rail against, and so you put yourself in situations where you will appear downtrodden, wronged, undeservingly brushed off or jailed away, just so you can attempt to make potatoes out of perfectly good vodka. It’s way too much effort spent at keeping up appearances, if you ask this father-of-a-bullet.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Who’s asking? Whose mask is this, the one I’ve come to wear so well?

EUGENE V. DEBS: Yours. And it is no longer a mask. It has come to be attached-- as if by some magical epidermal form of insecurity and wistfulness-- to your corporeal self like some carapace of cowering, self-delusional, capital-B Bullshit. Believe it. There is no “or not” when it comes down to it. Just believe it.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Keep it long, for the sake of my gut’s holy elasticity, at least.

EUGENE V. DEBS: Sued for time, we are here, but I’ll be as longwinded as a mutton pie will allow instead of kit-catting for a bargain.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Kit Kat?   

EUGENE V. DEBS: No. Ahem…ahem…ahem.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Proceed without caution or heedless repulsion for the length of proceeding, I guess. The club door of our little band-- always being and always having been-- is jimmied. We are trick-card-counting and asunder with fake bills that we keep paying and paying, and the counterfeit shades of our days are welded with kind look-this-way disasters to the radio’s final wakeup call.  

EUGENE V. DEBS: The sort of day when you just don’t want to get out of the shower. The kind of afternoon when the rain won’t start or end. The missed extra point of it all. Damn. I should’ve went in for forgiveness long ago, but, hell, that was oh so long ago.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Alone is its own keeper. I’m replacing sadness with madness all the time. Substituting anger for grief. It does the job, on the surface, obsequiously objectified for the possum-like turds of the world.

EUGENE V. DEBS: I dare say!

THOMAS JEFFERSON: You daren’t!

EUGENE V. DEBS: Ok.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: The smashed wine bottles on the grocery store floor, splintered glass and the pungent vinegary stink of it all. Roses wilted on the stem. I’m all for misunderstandings and the drawbacks of being too closely in touch. But, mum’s just another word you aren’t saying.

EUGENE V. DEBS: It takes two to know none. I guess we’re just convincing ourselves that life’s cheaper for most and less rich than it should be for us. But who’s leading these other lives? Who’s taking charge of what’s left to make of them? Perhaps it is all just paper drapes and a hotplate in a small, stark coldwater flat with a view of an alley lined with overflowing garbage cans. The rats are circling. Maybe I’m kidding both of us.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: And so now I live in the marginalia and errata of all I used to know. I crinkle under the probing talons of Tokyo jungle crows in my sleep. It is all most likely unnecessary to my survival, and for now I’m going by Et Alia, so don’t ship me any of your sentiments or regards, even by overnight express; I’ll refuse to sign for them.

EUGENE V. DEBS: I suppose you’ll be busy hauling around your ego for showing-off purposes only. I suppose.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Already I’m getting anxious for appeal, for acceptance in the broadest of possible ways, for approval from those who’d never care for mine, or would even mind if I ceased to exist.

EUGENE V. DEBS: Drop it. Your self-esteem is not interesting to anybody but you. Let’s talk breakthrough pain, deliberate vomiting, a tad bit of a pinch of persuasion that’ll put hair on your back and a trickle of blood in your throat. Let’s get down to what it is, really, that makes you so damn insufferable to those who have the mostly unfortunate experience of not being able to skirt your tangential path.     

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Ahem!

EUGENE V. DEBS: Exactly. You’ve got the cadence of the thing on the tippler of your tongue.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: And the Tippler Of My Tongue says, “One more! For me, the bar, and for the universe.”

EUGENE V. DEBS: Does the rest of your diary entry go something like, “And then I got everybody to feel sorry for me, and it wasn’t so great, and then I hated it and myself, and decided that pity was the least-effective nondenominational form of currency going.”?

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Nope. Don’t keep one. Diaries are for sissies. I’m locked from the inside, and the key belongs to the benthos, lost in the seagrass, nestled in the crook of a gargoyle fish’s dreams, in the circumstances of hadal depths that nobody’s ever quite known.   

EUGENE V. DEBS: Whatever.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: The clipped tone is more effective, buddy, when used as a modifier. Don’t just leave your brashness lonely there like a dropped penny. Don’t tut-tut me and expect to be rewarded for it, buddy.

EUGENE V. DEBS: Whatever. PS-- don’t “buddy” me, jerk. I’m just bystandering around here, you know?

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Aye aye. Feelers set on stun, captain.

EUGENE V. DEBS: Okay, let’s boogie the hell around it all for the duration of these less-than-eventful events. 

THOMAS JEFFERSON: I’m cold thumbs and all feet for it. Have I told you about my invention? The automatic mute function that’d be built into a TV set. It would mute only and all the commercials without the push of a button.

EUGENE V. DEBS: Patent pending?

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Mustering support, still. By the other way, what’re your swept-by-the-wayside ambitions?

EUGENE V. DEBS: Well, me? I just want a female Orson Welles impersonator to recite the captions from The Sinking Of The Lusitania to me while I drink sardine-jelly punch from a highball glass through a straw in the shade of a pecan tree.  

  

THOMAS JEFFERSON: I don’t think either of us have got an icicle’s chance in Hades, or Elbert Hubbard’s on that ocean liner, for that matter.

EUGENE V. DEBS: I will now sing something to you about some things that I’m not sure you’ll ever understand, or even care for, for “that matter”-- all winking and nudging aside. Ahem.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: I’m mostly ears.

EUGENE V. DEBS: “In the spouted wash of unlimited calls, we hear the lives washed in the walls, and now’s the time to pray and paw, for we have got our minds, cooked or raw, in the scrimmage of it all, let’s jump and climb so we’ve got room to fall.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Crap. Where’s Al Jolson when you need him?

EUGENE V. DEBS: Pants-less. Standing in church. Bitching about the bird shit on the sidewalk. Unvested of all authority. Taking alms. Giving a piss. Testing the limitless berth of control.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: I’d do a commercial for your soul, but it’d be erratic and self-centered, and I’d believe in it too much and too little. You’ve had the poorest means to achieve hard-hitting ends with the belly-fat richest of belt-loosening motivational speeches. Sing it, you meager pragmatist of the dunce’s score, you soft-wired rankler of the dim, you suddenly-last-Tuesday whiner. Your pajamas are your only uniform, and they are ill suited to your purposes.

EUGENE V. DEBS: Whatever.

  

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Achieve! Last! Buy more gadgets! Tell better jokes!

EUGENE V. DEBS: I love women. It’s their personalities I can’t stand.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: The satisfaction of being alive lessens as our jokes come to define us-- just these sarcastic bubbles we trap ourselves in, trying to showoff our stupid wittiness, the dexterity of our compromised abilities, a mush-headed distant relative of who we might’ve been had we decided to be something more than a teller of one-liners, a pusher of cheap laughs, a whore for the roar of the crowd.

EUGENE V. DEBS: I haven’t laughed or cried in 11 years. It’s bad for the complexion.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Yep. There it is. And to think, I’m the one who’s the lost wretch, the do-worser, the sleep-deprived harasser of my own consciousness, the fickle exhorter of extinct causes and cases of malevolent caring, the cynic’s cynic and the miler’s pace setter, the passé ruination of all that’s simple and inarticulate. This does it. I’m done being sensible. Let’s harvest shadows of the moon and fry up some spiders with snake oil for a snack.

EUGENE V. DEBS: Sounds like boasting, still. But hell, I’m in. The tease of noon’s hushed longing stuck in your throat as some mussed sunlight sneaks over and plays on your face with a faint tickle of nostalgia’s faded bloom. Room’s full, but we’re suckers for the matinee previews…

THOMAS JEFFERSON: And look, over there by the typewriter…there’s some blank paper and a mug steaming coffee, and therefore, well, you’ve still got a chance.

EUGENE V. DEBS: No. Not a chance in the hemisphere. But, it’s pleasant to think so, isn’t it?

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Whatever.

dollyparton'sbrokenheart

            The doorstep is partitioned to upset any notion of walking straight up and into the heart of the thing. You can’t find it in guessing games either. The ideal homemaking nature of reconsidering likes for don’t-likes streamlines the important into the can’t-wait. It turns out that neither is hard enough to contemplate, and there is, by gum, real and hard work to be done. The doing of the work is essential to forming creased or wrinkle-free opinions of the matter. You walk up, see? You take some breaths. You spit at the doorbell and wring out your opinions. It is the past tense of being there. It is the closed door, too.

            Have the withering patience for it. Go to city with it instead of town. Go to greater metropolitan area. Go to country and God. There’s a mulched forgiveness for the asking there, and with it you’ll step. On one side, on the other, in cadenced disgust, you, partially at least, get done wrong to, get let down by, and then you are racing with chickens for loss’s finish line.

            What’s right with the inflected pitch of your worry? Not a thing. And if you look down, the doorstep is overgrown with moss. There is a straight to get, and if it bends then be dumbstruck with an intelligent idea, if you can. It bodes better than most drops in ambition levels. And don’t remember this: regret is no longer an option. Detach yourself from it all. It is difficult, and therefore worthwhile.

            Shake it.

            There are bullet holes in the bowling pins, and the lane’s viscid and warped. What if I just screamed, “I love you!” out the window to a girl sitting parked and eating a sandwich in her ’58 Dodge Coronet Lancer? Nothing. That’s what.                          

            Turns out that she was the Chief Water Officer in my district. What could I do? I pled All Contest to the springs and mineral baths. It was no good. She said, “That? That’s no good.” I figured that I might get some sort of leniency because of my delinquent sense of shame mixed with stingy honor, but it really was no good-- no good at all. And to think, she could’ve been one of the most delightful people with whom I’ve ever had the pleasure of having a sandwich. Or should’ve been. Now? Now it was all a jostle of compartmentalizing justice for the sake of sliced loss. Now? Yes, just measuring out your slow decline with shovels of clumpy fertilizer. Swallow it and move on. At least that’s what the signs all seemed to be implying.

            And then, limping Portuguese to the Laundromat:

            Be that as it may. Ahem. Be this as it may not. Another ahem to follow, longingly and with a torrent of calm. Here it stops and crumbles to going. And now Cid’s gone and punched her in the face again. He’s got a top-hat-and-cane sensibility, and will surely have a diamond-studded epitaph when he’s all through. I says to her, “Why do you do that? Why do you let him keep punching you in the face like that? You’re always getting punched in the face by him. You’ve got to stop getting punched in the face like that. Really.” She says, “Oh, I don’t know. I get my face punched, but Cid? Cid’s the okiest of dokies, really. I get punched in the face sometimes, sure. I don’t like getting punched in the face.” And I says, “Lady. That’s right, Lady. You don’t need that, getting punched in the face. It’s no good. It’s not okie or dokie, getting punched in the face.” “I don’t wanna get punched in the face,” she says. “I want other things too, you know. I want a flying exercise machine. I want hot molten lava in my bathtub. A spot light to shine at the moon.” So I says to her, “Lady, you just need to focus on one thing, and you know what that one thing is? Not getting punched in the face. That’s the thing you need to be concerned with at this here present moment in the times.” “In the times?” She says. I says, “These ones here that we’re living in. The ones you keep getting punched in the face in, by Cid.” She spits on her shoe, and then she says, “I’m on my guard a little. It’s true. But I got a good thing going here. Sure, I get punched in the face sometimes, and sure Cid’s not the cleanest chap in the yard, but maybe there’s a little more poison in his milk glass every day. But maybe,” she says. So I says, I says, “Lady, you have got to be shitting me. You have got to be dancing on pool tables here. You are getting punched in the face. Getting punched in the face is no good, for anybody. Stop getting punched in the face. That’s what I’d say. That’s what I’m saying. Don’t get punched in the face no more. Don’t go getting punched in your face.” She says she’ll try, but I know what that means. I know it’ll hardly do. Instead she’ll tell him something like, “Chew gum and be hilarious, and hold me all through the night.” And, you know, she’ll keep getting punched in the face.

            The doorstep is finalized. It prohibits all distractions, anything that would inhibit stepping, any two-timing shuffle that might work its numb way up the walk and to the door. There are no limits to reasons for affinity or disgust with the subject matter, and what they spell out in the doorstep’s hold on things is that whoever steps up this way is not bright enough to know the whys of their because. Spooned to the door’s final lie, you take each step as if it were a reprieve from a life sentence of dullness and moping, and the creased line of your own little truth is lost in the doorstep’s challenge, its partitioned grace and hold. You cannot step backwards. There are gold shingles fallen on the hard times of cheap dirt. There are weed-choked victory gardens of rotting youth swallowing what remains of your meticulous hold on things. The doorstep will not allow for reconsideration. It will not take orders or give out free lunches. It is planted firmly in the ignition of chiming for less, a sinecure for bored toothpaste pitchmen, a foretoken of sameness refusing to bloody its hands with despair. And you walk up it, shallow as ever, and its toll is forever unpaid, and...this post is no longer available.

                    

(the rain, it always starts when you go away)

            We are the prayerful and are among the least forgiving of the heathenish instructed players in splatters of trouble-in-the-making. We give out cookie-shaped business cards to most. Sometimes they are just cookies. There is telling what’ll occur soon, but who’s here to listen to it be told? Not the flint collectors. Not the sunbeam sellers. Not the wheelie riders or the hoop-of-fire singers or the beer-keg hiders. I am only barefoot one foot at a time.

           This is what was said to me by the sad ranchers: "Pelt the hardest part of her with soft tosses of iridescent stones, nacreous fillings, mutton tallow, and pieces from the private collections of Don’t-It-Yourself-kit hoarders. It takes no time to have the time to do whatever it doesn’t take to not take apart, lint by dust mote, the brine-washed structures in the chemistry of her avoidance. Leap into favor with the splash-sad throwers of after-dinner mints. Trust all the nothings you’d ever wish not to contemplate, at least where the asteroids are controlled by hydrogen bombs, if you must or can or will or possibly even should."

            Soon after I was bussed to north South Dakota. My eyes were covered with patches made of moth wings, which were removed (the patches, not my eyes) as I was hustled across the southern border of North Dakota by tire-slashing missionaries from Turkmenistan who would stop at nothing to barter leveler playing fields, even pull out their own teeth and rob candy stores before succumbing to the ecumenical plateau-making of society’s willful obliviousness. They were hardnosed but fairly easygoing in matters of smuggling. I had my choice of conveyance, and chose tractor. Wiser things have been done, sure. But I’ve always been for playing it eccentric.  

            “That place where your moustache used to go, I can see it in my dreams.” This was something said to me by a Moravian scout. He was a fellow who placed little blame on ulterior trains of thought, and instead patterned out new jests daily in his rococo workshop. I am not sure how he came upon me. It was very dark at the time, and I was muddling around in a thicket of imitation coachwhip, trying to avoid the trichomes of some stinging nettle while stomping flying cockroaches with my hog-flesh boots. He had a small hound with him that he called Ginger. They both smelled of burnt shards stuck in a vacuum cleaner.  I was in the middle of talking aloud, telling myself, “I’m not the sort to make eyes at strange girls. I’m not the sort who smiles back either. It’s just my nature.” This might have scared off most takers, but this scout was of the flagrantly mild type, and we subconsciously signed a subliminal nonaggression pact on the spot. It took, luckily, but that was only before it didn’t. Our separate ways became the norm, and eventually we licked our splits and ran on without them. Fondness steals the grime from what I used to remember about our times then. Moving on got the worst of me, I guess.

            While Canada loomed on the horizon of my thoughts, I made time for breakfast. Maple syrup drowned most of my sorrows; I drenched even pickles in it, and sometimes raw broccoli stems. I felt that certain foods needn't be excluded from certain meals just because of custom. I wanted a rearrangement of my senses. I wanted to be baffled at all times.

            I called my mom. She let the phone ring 14 times before answering and promptly hanging up in one resilient swoop. I am not sure what I would have said anyway. It was best for the all, or something similar.

            Soon all the phones were sold to dice makers, who needed them desperately to stay in touch with the always-finicky dice buyers. Maybe I shouldn’t have let this bother me. Maybe a lot of things.

            Teaching the trees to dance took most of my afternoons, that and the hurling of origami rocks at melanistic grey squirrels and American badgers. The trees were nothing without wind, it turns out, and it was mostly only their leaves that cared about dancing, and leaves don’t last through much of a season. I gave up and broke free on a Wednesday afternoon, just after dining on peafowl steak (a rare if almost unknown delicacy of this region) and mashed raisins. Perhaps it was something in the air, for much was afoul in my gut afterwards, and so I was left to my own doings to mull in the stink of my bowels. I held my breath and made a dash for it.

            A ribbon-cutting ceremony is the next thing I remember. I tend to block out most events that don’t entail non-risk capital involvement. A mayor type was wielding what seemed to be a giant gold Bowie knife. I wondered about that bastard Jim Bowie for a moment, and then was glad he’d died at The Alamo. It turns out, from most ear-witness accounts, that the knife was really an Arkansas toothpick, so there was little, really, to be excited about or moved by. The ribbon was cut. A new multiplex showering facility was opened. Hot water was at last made available to all. And there was music in the bodies of the audience, though they didn’t dance-- not a one of them.

            For the next 45 years I made a living robbing the homes of burglars while they were out burglarizing other homes. It was a decent enough way to be getting by, and I figured why kiss the feet of oil billionaires by harmonizing with the usual rhythms of pecuniary promise? I was already sandy enough with feathered loss, and when I said, “I don’t mean business,” I meant it. So, it came to be that I had stockpiled a great deal of others’ possessions by way of second or even third-hand theft. There wasn’t much room left in my home for even me. I took to sleeping outside on my porch, beneath the bullwhipped stars that blotted and jostled in the sky’s fluttering cape. The tymbal song of cicadas was like spittlebug forth to my ears. I melted into the night’s symphony and threw hugs at attackers in my slumber. Nobody else mattered. I was alone, and thriving in the ways of normal life was the least of my concerns.

            Today I awoke to a praying mantis on my doorstep. It had its raptorial legs grasped around an acorn. Jackal flies and biting midges were attacking it, but it didn’t sweat that; it just kept on rollicking around with the acorn. Soon I realized that it was in the midst of dancing. Acorns make great dance partners for mantises, it turns out. I watched them in this delicate display of dexterity and harmonious accord; the mantis performing rond de jambes and soubresauts like nothing that I’d ever seen. The finale of all this was a wide-sweeping sissone ouverte tombé, which left the mantis flattened out on the boards while the acorn tumbled away and dropped off the edge of the porch. I held my breath. The mantis rose, didn’t bow, fluttered its wings and flew away. Afterwards I thought, ‘Today will most certainly be the last for me.’

            There is electricity in my soup.

                         

           

               

Bad Poems Written By Famous Poets (Issue #7)

The Devastating Fecundity Of Being by Heinrich Hiene (translated by Harry Hiney)

I squirted hand soap on my toothbrush this morning.

This cannot be a good sign of things to come.

The things I ask myself while getting dressed:

How many days in a row have I worn this shirt?

Do these pants stink in the rear end?

Are there too many holes in these socks?

My Fräulein has left me for an artificial lawn salesman,

and the snow is piss yellow in my dreams.

The prosaic and dull lock arms with Saint-Simonian hoodlums

while my temper steadies and dips, and my spirit wanes.

God, would you look at this sad sack of Spätzle and Sauerbraten?

My right to whine is uncontestable, though,

and I get around the more obvious mores with less pizzazz than a subterranean mole.

Shapes that shape me,

the rough-edged powder-haired ditz of my ways.

I am offered less than lower seeps of try to give cares their worn out where,

in the bundle of sheep-eyed morticians’ contoured glibness.   

Guess my weight.

Win a doorknob.

It is all I’ve got.

The Oiled Motions Of Avoidance by Pablo Neruda (translated by Howie “Boy” Dukes)

Lowly, in sweeps the hybrid breeze to coastal nests and

climbs ringing

in surety. I too

have similar rants to match less wits than

those

who take home supper

late.

Seaweed pie and crabby hunches

I’ll never see--

aquamarine tides of thought lingered to forever’s bask.

Got placenta marmalade?

I platonically smash igneous rock to splintered chips, with

or without

detrimental attached worship of myself.

I glue glitter to my boxing gloves to avoid

malfeasance fees.

I oversee the feeding of Australian spotted qoulls in dreary late-night outcrops

just like 24-hour cafeterias at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday.

Nobody hassles me for the time of day.

Nobody snitches.

There are more colugos and nitwit eutharians in all the realms of

mystique and horror

than in any distant corner of the scrubbed and polished world

we partake in.

Guessing the difference,

our scrabbling overwhelms us with visitors; and

it is not

too early for some

atrocity of selfish love to wreck in the wrack

sailing ships come to honeymoon

with Spicebush Swallowtails in the sea-green clouds of destiny.

We are little, but

in touch. Forgive me,

mother, for I

have not

sinned enough.  

In The Peas by Arthur Rimbaud (translated by Grayson Silver)

I’ll tell you how it’s going,

Jerk.

It’s going shitty.

Fire me.

I’m not worth my weight in wine.

Dying is about all I’m good for,

deposed and shit on by sun and moon alike.

Deprive me of one fist and I will only

punch all the more with the other.

Bloody sheets. Bloody shoes. Bloody mouth. Bloody life.

I’m putting all my francs in the death trade,

in the jaws of wolves and hideous men.

I’m an upstart slacker,

a horseless carriage with no rider,

and on the shit-brown shores of uncompensated lust,

I get by on borrowed swagger,

swindled out of my last suit,

left for alive in the short burst of tedium’s dread.

Lonely?

Shit, I’ve staved off madness for this long.

Might as well not give up just yet,

I guess.

Gooby’s Lament by Federico García Lorca (translated by Henry “Shot Put” Cortez)

            I had a handle-with-care label affixed to my heart and a pack of temporary tattoos in my back pocket. There was everywhere to walk to, and we did. Just yesterday, presenting late company to be excluded, we lolled in tulips’ swiped daffodil-yellow. She had all the jokes, and all I knew were punch lines that didn’t go with them. A no-bell prize. A maybe knot. And in the sweeter tending of hapless jabs at jobless wonder, we had it and lost it at once. It wakened what wasn’t dangerous enough while the squirrel monkeys scrambled and fed, while the hats slept beneath the bed, while hours counted themselves out before we had time to be poor in days. A fold of up. An out of down. Brushed off-and-on with a tug at shabby skies, we held out for less and got bargained into more. For a ritzy shot at resisting rest, for a moss-and-string placard of dust-colored chagrin reading, “Just Be Klutz” in the shape of a ginger rhizome, for valueless valor, for creeps and jerks of old and doofus rage, we strained backwards to a perfect fault and found backwash tinged with love in the lees of our last together. Over lights. Covered under. Raining up with drunken kudzu. Splashed dry, we tumbled and forgave kumquats their slow float. We skimmed the nights with greedy eyes while the booze hummed my name below the music our mouths made out of neon and saffron and cephalopod dreams.   

        

        

Bad Poems Written By Famous Poets (Issue #6)

The Girls Down By The Striptease Shows by Charles Bukowski 

We are all worth less than what we owe

To all the worthless eyes around here

The saddest guy on the block

Tripping over his own dismal shoelaces

In the lightest dark you’ve ever seen

We are all tipsy in the afterglow

The sheen of buses going by

It’s less than windows breaking in the feints of dawn

But we keep tipping so it’s okay

In the musty clump of ourselves

To find ATM receipts and combs with broken teeth

We are drawn and floated over

We are packed up in a suitcase and smuggled overseas

We pay for our dalliances and then some

Nobody’s running green lights

Nobody’s stopping my mail

So get your goddamn hands off her

Sir

And let me pass

Waltzing by without a cent to my name

Just a bad haircut and a torn suit jacket

A battered brain and a patched-together life

We are well aware of the extenuating circumstances surrounding your demise

It’s just that the expiration date for your coupon for survival

Has passed

And we’ve got more indecencies per square foot than any place around

Baby

So

Get the paper

Sure

If that puts the pants on you mornings

And keeps them on all day

We expect less than most

And in the distance where the horses race the sad dogs of winter

For tomato juice disasters

And ground beef dealers

Who keep talking and talking no matter what and through all kinds of no matter what

So just for asking

For hire

For that long-shot hope that keeps ruin in your veins

Just for the courage to stalk the moon along streets long dead with lamplight

Because it’s just that the wise time has gone

Kid

And the blinding lights of taxis is enough to keep us from seeing

What it is

We’d rather not ever be

Loosed by Diane di Prima

the one-armed diabetic taxi driver

who swears twice in every sentence at least

karaokes The Only Living Boy In New York   

just about every night

after his shift

at Club Tango Tango on California

he wears a studded bracelet 

and a black ZZ Top tank top

and his voice trembles into a falsetto every time

and the audience roars

and the KJ claps and screams his name

Lewis! Lewis!

his name is Louie

the only living boy

or taxi driver

in New York

or San Francisco

or wherever the hell else

as if it matters

The Doorman Of Ewer Place by Robert Hass

I see this guy walk by all the time,

sometimes with a girl,

mostly alone;

and one time

cradling a bottle scotch.

He seemed happy that time--

more than the others.

I like his shoes;

they seem comfortable.

And he always,

always

wears a tie.

I respect that.

Sometimes I think that

maybe this guy,

he’s just a short-order cook,

or a busboy,

or a file clerk at a hospital,

but then,

hell,

who knows?

It could be he’s the manager of Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club,

or the VP of some up and coming startup,

or perhaps just a barista at Peet’s. 

I don’t know.

All I do know

is that this guy,

he walks by this building all the time,

every night pretty much,

and sometimes a few times a day too.

I guess there are still some things

you can depend on in this world.

Well, at least he’s not embarrassed about himself,

like

I am,

quivering alone here by the door,

listening to the sound of all these cars swishing by and

making their futile noise in the street,

opening the door for these refined duds

who reek of sour sumac and high-end perfume,

and who walk dogs that eat better than most people.

I have thoughts of other lives

I could be leading

quite often.

But not this guy

whom I always see walking by,

face sort of smashed in and pocked like a war-scarred anteater,

fluffed hair like a chopped-up clown wig,

wizened chap-lipped mouth,

and eyes--

well, I’ve never seen eyes quite like that:

sort of dim, but playful and deadly,

moody and sublime.

No,

this guy?

This guy,

he’s probably got it all figured out,

and I bet there’s nowhere else he’d rather be

than right where he is,

wherever it is that he’s going

walking by this building all the time.

Oliver’s Stoning by Li-Young Lee

brash professionalism

out of keeping with who’s diving up

turns in

to not be heart worthy

hardly a heel

though

would take a knack to it

sweethearts of another era

and now it’s the sunshine barking of the damn dogs

go without it

try and forget

one moist towelette

no longer wet 

another life story never told

weep in the cottonwood shade

because like ai wieie says

there are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship

Bad Poems Written By Famous Poets (Issue #5)

A Banana In The Moon by Lawrence Ferlinghetti  

Walk these streets in a sour and confused state, tongue firmly planted inside cheek. Lonely gargoyles? Check. Had to tooth it between Jones and Taylor. Forget it. I’m made for spying on guys carrying gas cans into alleyways. I’m on a list of automobile deserters. I don’t make small talk with strangers. Checkerboard windows overlooking cityscape of drab off-whites and clay-baked roofs. I do not have time for troublemakers. Please, tip me over so I can swim before I fall uphill. Torment the jackhammers of the morning with silence. Toss potato peels to the pigeons. Take care of my debts with horseshoes and Barleywine. Just don’t let the ribbons of your past get tied together to trip you or bind your hands. The tenement buildings and scrubbed-clean Vicotrians line up across from each other along the narrow one-way, steeped in some stolid posture of repose. Lines forever drawn in cement and in stone. I am idling near their prospects. Brandishing a lightheaded nerve, a mordant glee like pain’s joy, I co-opt a few dreamy misgivings from the liquor store and make reluctant thoughts my give-and-take glory. “Hop to it,” scream the socialite worms. “It is high about time nigh that you wrap your head around some of this gunk. Just you hurry. Wait.” The real indiscretion here is one of lazy bumptious swagger. The real culprit is a sad Blue Jay named Robin. Well, there’s more clomp left in these shoes then you’d think. But how happy we used to be sitting in sun-filled windows drinking beer. And now, well, the windows have all gone dark and the bottle’s filled with gnats, and I sing of listless things that round corners in the dark. You too might meekly rankle the leeway of power from fading daylight. A shift in temperament might be nice. Think of it: a daring welt in the surface of being you for a moment. Trouble is, we don’t make music out of enough of it. Trouble is. We’re down and off key, swinging with simplicity, implicitly troubled, late-sleeping bastards that we are, walking past liquor stores a few times before going in. It’s lights out in Worry City. I am not ever ready, and I don’t ever make my bed. The go is all gone from my afternoon. The watchers of game shows take the rift from the spoils and eat cake for lunch. I get wished a nice day about a hundred times a day by people who talk into their collars, who sniff the wonder from their lives with phone calls, who make money and then die with it. We are all steamed with bored delusions of everything being locked and simple into the memory our portable devices. There are no contact lists in heaven; I’m pretty sure of it. But in hell? Who’s to say it’s any worse than this? Download my sentiments. Store them for a later date. No. Shit. Here it is: Take pleasure in noticing the smallest things, the things nobody else notices. Be the tangible and incoherent and abstract nothing that you are at all times. Scrape by, just barely. Eke out what you can from the corrupt and twisted dynamics of the thing. And at last, be alone. After all, you are nothing without it. Could the rest of our cares wash the streets free of who we’ve been up until now? It’s a tossup, and I’m up for none of it. Down, down, down, down. That is all that is left.   

The Oldest Cowboy In The Bar by Randall Jarrell 

sail or search out

in for it

we’re 

rallying past a cry

to top or shove

glamour down

guess first

it’d test out

it’d drum for the lights

fashion taps at fingers

swell at last

to guess closer

still swimming

we’re

out of it

nowhere

keep shaving

keep in gear

we are not memories

the moon’s hung with violets

blunder better

we get mentioned

we get so tired of our own company

there’ll be a piano in the swimming pool

there’ll be ruins to explore

rattling traps

birch-sore

something leveled serious

through cahuengas of drift

no mottled cheer

no chancier weather than this

some dusky loft of complacency

grouped apart

there isn’t an ask left in us

so we cull a try

from a swarm of weddings

that’ll do no bad

that’ll pan fries and unplug the fridge

born right away from

vanished stereos translating love

into money

upped all the way down

only to swing with less sweep

bowling for neckties

a stick that squares

and doesn’t stay

eons gone since a last kiss

picked between strawberries

we’re hardly figured 

perpendicular to all parallels

in voice-activated gloom

as taxi lights

draw us asleep without windows

like lassoed clarinets whispering last call

all will be 

fine and magnificent

in the end

popular kids by Robert Frost (found scribbled on a napkin tucked away in a Band-Aid box in his old medicine chest)

you don’t like me as much as it’s true that one could like another one too we’ve had this hard-up time to spend in other lives and through other windows but you don’t like me and that’s for sure because my lawyer she tells me so before the money’s gone at least we’ve got each other but then again you can’t stand me and you’re on the way to other lives and you’re getting used to looking through other windows so that’s just something I can’t control so I guess I’ll run down to the shoreline and make some use of these sea legs at last at least until the money’s gone or my heart so I guess I can be free but who cares because you don’t like me because you can’t stand the sight of me because you want to erase me from your memory for all time and you you you you don’t like me at all no not at all and I am free and everything is never going to be okay again

Testament To A Goner by Patti Smith

A glob of yellow moon’s slopped on under night’s black eyes,

and Merle sits still on a curb

contemplating the sound that buses make going by,

and this while rummaging in copper-plated visions over another snack-less midnight.  

And this, too,

another “this too”

to add to the spreadsheet of her existence.

A bit of basil soaked in her thoughts,

it’s now that’s gone.

Comestible thoughts,

she thinks.

That sure does it.

She doesn’t think

it’ll be ever by noon again

in any hovering slowpoke of a way.

The greyhound clouds are escorting misbehaving stars on treasure hunts,

cruddy as Merle sees it.

And alone’s a disaster

she craves to be hers

alone.

A signpost she kicks at,

one that might as well read:

“Does not play well with others.”

But others play her like a Chopin nocturne.

But others…

It’s a swell that wanes to wax another day.

It’s the taffy stretch of care

swirled with smiled shadows,

with indifference and plunged compassion.

Merle stands up and does her best Harpo Marx,

balancing on her toes

on the curb edge,

off kilter and right in time

with the swayed shoulders of her past.

With what’s a battery-powered gumption

at least a sunstroke away

for her now

it is every girl for her

self,

which of course

in the gory streetlight’s sodium yellow

it is,

but just another

of course

hounding graver eyes than

any streetlights she’s ever thrown

a rock at

or stood beneath

just to be below something

that glowed

or suddenly broke

and then

just did not.