Boondoggle dragons play poker
with napkins and public transit
while new yorkers eat
hot dogs and each other.
Frank gets his watch fixed
and dies in the dark
on the beach
and John mourns him for fifty years
while they build
and blow up so many buildings,
sometimes with airplanes.
On the off chance
you have a half dollar
can I buy a token for skee ball
on the boardwalk
or for the bus to get there?
I do not have to go to – New York-
to Smell it
to find the peace
and quiet to write my poetry?
That’s what I need,
not my teenaged son’s bedroom
not my couching with a boney
whining dog pressed against my leg.
So, I could just toss them
out, like that:
one, two, three.
Throw-away poems
you call them,
and I don’t even have one
I wish I had three,
I could throw
one away.
(Suzanne’s poem transcribed as she spoke)
bookended by two long
weeks of rain, dreary
green leaves hang past
the water glazed screening
A Sunday morning, maybe
the happiest of all
times: most are not
working, a pure leisure.
Reading, cooking, even laundry
goes at casual speed.
Where would I go
in this green muck?
Sunday morning stillness except
for gentle to gusting
bands of rain dancing
on the metal roof.
They lie.
They tell stories.
They hide behind words.
When all else fails
they make stuff up!
I have known poets –
a lot of them –
not a one of them
are to be believed
they mean to say
what you read
no more
no less
pretty boxy
metered rhymes,
scrawly, scraggly
lines bending and jumping
but in the end,
a poet is not to be trusted
the most
because, with all their lies,
they tell the truth.
You can never, ever,
trust the truth!
the sound of flash bulbs,
a wet electric pop,
the sonic image
of a bubble gum
bubble collapsing,
blinding light,
crumpled, deformed bulb,
after its momentary use
ejected and replaced?
The Moon sank with a clunk
like a wooden paddle hitting
the jon-boat
which is what I heard.
Rickey had kicked the oar
as he shifted in the dark.
The fish started biting,
we filled two five-gallon buckets
in darkness, talking softly of fishing:
he, of snakes he caught in the dark
pulling them into the boat
before realizing his mistake.
Me, I told him about us running trot lines
and set hooks with my father
and catching nothing but a turtle
on a Sunday morning before church.
Daddy telling his stories and me
repeating them half remembered
about jumping in after a bucket
and mornings of ice water
and pigs and persimmons.
Fish quit biting
as sharply as they started,
we noticed mosquitoes had not,
Rickey pulled the outboard’s rope
and at two am, we cleaned fish
on his tail gate.
He had Pabst, I had coffee
not quite cold from a thermos.
He wondered at my coffee,
it was still sticky and ninety degrees.
By 4 we had the boat on the trailer
and fish in freezer bags,
by daylight I was asleep,
no church this Sunday,
but one more story
of academia:
I am a two-dollar roadside poet,
that’s all I’ll ever be.
I’ve studied with the great
minds of literature.
I discovered
I am the pig
In the phrase:
Pearls before Swine,
I have tried but I cannot
See what others plainly see.
If you want me to write
About homelessness and soda bottles
please put two dollars in my jar.
I’ll do my best for you,
but whatever I’m saying
will only be about homelessness and soda bottles,
though you are free to see whatever you can divine.
