Boy Bands

BOY BANDS

A Cinquain

‘Nsync

The Back Street Boys

Little girl candy toys

Of synchronized monotony

They stink.

A Night in Kitchen Stadium

A Triolet

If memory serves me right,

I summoned forth the Iron Chef.

Squid’s the ingredient tonight,

If memory serves me right.

Sauce from the suckers and he might

Make ice cream from the ink that’s left,

If memory serves me right.

I summoned forth the Iron Chef.

Illustration: Still from the original "Iron Chef" TV Show

Exhibition

EXHIBITION

We went to the Art Gallery

To the exhibit:   “American Realism”.

Four                                    walls                                    of                                     recognition

Seascapes,                        landscapes,                         still life                         and nude.

We were early to the pursuit

And entered with a crowd of anxious lovers

To view in admiration

Seascapes,               landscapes,   still life                             and nude.

All eyes went every where.

Far wall            and centered             one lone nude

Finely detailed as a colored photograph

     A woman of distinction

Watched us view seascapes,                                                not the nude.

All eyes were over there.

We moved, crowded clumsy clusters

Along washes and waves of watercolor,

So full of inspiration.

Seascapes, landscapes, still life,                                                             the nude.

All eyes were over there.

Absorbing all and every detail

Of bird and boat and bolt of lightening flash.

Absorbed, in anticipation,

Seascapes, landscapes, still life,                                                             the nude.

With arms down,            breasts disrobed            and legs audacious

She sat posed in dedication

Beyond landscapes, still life,                                                            the nude.

All eyes were over there

The sea behind; the land before.

Glancing,             we gazed at candied fruit,

Candlesticks, chrysanthemums, and glazed glass.

It gripped our admiration;

Seascapes, Landscapes, Still Life

                                                            And Nude.

Our eyes were cautious here. So much to see, so little time. We cannot linger if we were to see more. Quick through the door to                        

Abstraction

     To study in safety the nude.

Our eyes were back in there.

Who Was Saint Valentine?

                                                       

.

Here it is Saint Valentine’s Day again.

Who was he to start our heart’s aflutter,

Our tongues to stutter,

To melt us like butter?

Oops! I think I had a Hallmark Moment --

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

There is a living for a poor poet

Drooling out doggerel and growing fat.

But I digress

From my treatise.

Here it is Saint Valentine’s Day again.

Who was he to have us buying roses

From florists who hose us

Or candy that blows us

Up like a balloon on Thanksgiving Day

And then watching an overhanging butt

Trying to strut in sexy lingerie?

What’s romantic about my bouncing gut?

But I digress

From my treatise.

Here it is Saint Valentine’s Day again.

Who was he to make me spend my money?

Fatten up my honey?

Does he find it funny

That we spend thirty bucks buying bouquets

At the super market that wilt by dawn,

Fancy French dinners with puffy soufflés,

Sentimental music that brings a yawn

It’s all a mess

I’m done, I guess.

High Performance

1

TEENAGE TROUBLE

I ran away from an abrasive home at sixteen

Into the slaps and slugs of an abusive lover

Till a day I lay him open with a frying pan

And disappeared out a window in a country night.

I never finished high school and didn’t know nothin’

You’d call useful, but I had a body built for bounce

And a deep down desperation that helped hitchhike me

Three hundred miles to Old Street in Philadelphia.

2

OLD STREET

Ever been down on Old Street where nothin’ ever changes

But the music on the juke at Gil’s? Probably not.

It’s a place amateurs don’t come ‘less they’re feeling small,

Lookin’ for pussy or the jolly pop jive doo jee.

First night I walked into Gil’s, Simon and Garfunkle

Were strummin’ through the stale smoke when I bridged my first hit.

I‘ve been layin’ myself down on Old Street ever since.

Don’t know why they call it that. Just an old street, I guess.

Looks old, beat, dark and dusty, cobblestones down the block discourage cars.

Shadows of time discourage the soul.

Sidewalk wrinkles will crack your ankles if you tread quick.

And there is those’ll crack your skull if you tread too slow.

Nothin’ but flop houses, guttersnipes, bars like Gil’s and

Crevices in-between where whores do stand-up business

On the quick. It been that way forever and then some.

In my lifetime I don’t think it was ever New Street.

It’s got a permanent smell of age, death and stale sex,

Perfidy perfume. It clings like dirty soap scum.

3

MAKING MY PLACE

First night in I thought I’d slid to hell. Gil’s was as dark

As Poe’s pit with its own stink of failure and old beer.

Sittin’ sulky at the bar and hid in the corners

Was the debris of life. I took my place as litter,

Ordered a whiskey sour on the rocks and sat letting

The tears in my eyes melt with the ice cubes in the glass.

Nobody did any carding or caring on Old Street.

I set a Marlboro pack from my purse on the bar.

Stuck one in my mouth and ‘fore the filter’s wet some guy

Lights me up. Ten minutes later I’m lightin’ him up

Back in the alley on my ass behind the trashcans.

4

SIMON AND GARFUNKLE SING MY TRUTH

Few humps later I’ve got me a flop and a kit

And I straddle a bumpy old mattress on the floor

Where I can spread my poison out like a hard won prize.

“Dry your eyes and come with me. I’m on your side,” Simon says.

“Don’t worry ‘bout the rough times. You’ve found a friend. Whenever

You feel down and out, just come to me. I’ll comfort you.

You feel lost in the night and I’ll light up your darkness.

I’ll ease your pain.” I pulled the plunger and filled the tube,

Slammed silvergirl into a vein and I sailed the night,

Flowed above my troubles, eased my mind, stilled my waters.

5

ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE BRIDGE

But it ain’t 1970 anymore, is it?

I’m still here. Ain’t as easy you’re hard pushin’ whatever

As it was at seventeen. Darkness is my buddy

And shield and makeup on the street. But my body’s lost

Its bounce and it ain’t takin’ me anywhere tonight.

I’m old, beat, dark and dusty. So I sit in my flop,

One of the many I’m been in since now and creation

And ain’t one any much different from another.

I’m sittin’ on a bunk bed with my faithful kit spread

On the pillow, Uncle Kracker on the radio.

6

AN AGING WHORE’S LAST COVERSATION WITH UNCLE KRACKER

“I am tired,” I say.

“I’ll make everything alright. I’ll tuck you in tonight.”

“I don’t want to be tucked. I wanna leave. Want to quit.”

“Where would you go?”

“Don’t know. Don’t matter. Get ‘way from Old Street and you”

“Guarantee you’ll never find anyone like me, babe.”

“Why, what do you do for me? You don’t give me nothin’

Don’t get me no money.”

“Don’t blame me for the way your life strayed. I don’t care you want to leave. You wanna go, then go.”

I say. “I don’t know if I can. I don’t know”

“Follow me,” it whispers, “I make you free.”

I unwrap the bindle of China Cat I scored tonight and prepare my kit. I sit naked in one more dark flophouse room on one more Old Street night. Alone and wantin’ it done and over. I feel along my inner thigh for the least scarred spot and do up.

“This’s mortal combat, “I hear it hum. “Real high performance schmeck.”

And I smile. “It is pure thoroughbred white horse, the uncut stallion, an unbroken bronco.”

Silvergirl sails in.

“It’s a ride to survive,” and I laugh.

I press the plunger and let that high performance Harry Smack swim through my veins like the fish in the sea, and he tucks me in that night, and he eases my mind.

And then he stills my waters.

Euthamania

Christine was the only pet I ever put down.

All my other pets just died.

Dy-

ing seemed the natural order of things.

I don’t want a kindhearted killing of my life

I’ve said too often I want to

Die,

Kill me! But I remained to better things

I think it much worse when they snatch from death a dead life.

Yet I killed a man once; the father of my wife.

The doctor’s brought him to life.

Life?

Back from the heart attack to his other things.

Harry was an old man with lesions in his brain

And asbestos in his lungs,

Keep alive by tubes and wires

And black beeping boxes,

But with empty eyes.

Of this haughty decision of little moral courage, doc-

tors scrub their souls clean and suffer you to pull the

Plug after thwarting sincere death.

Death

Is just the natural order of things.

Flight Delayed

Sitting in the airport.

Flight was scheduled long ago.

Please don’t leave your baggage unattended…

Squirming on a hard chair.

Maintenance breakdown I know.

Please don’t leave your baggage unattended…

Screaming of a lost babe.

My determined mind echoes.

Please don’t leave your baggage unattended…

Starting to load first class.

While waiting on a rear row;

I don’t leave my baggage unattended.

Images of a Wild West

Blazing campfire, blistering hot sun, blasting shotgun, blaring six-shooter.

Brown and battered leather saddles chasing down stampeding cattle.

Thunder claps, brown stained chaps, neckerchief flaps

And shooting craps at tables in saloons,

And barroom spittoons and girls in pantaloons in upper rooms. Broncobusters in long gray dusters

Or the dead dog soldiers of Custer’s.

Whiskey neat, blood in the street, mesquite and tumbleweed.

Branding irons and shooting irons, muddy boots, old chuck wagon coots.

Wagon wheels busted by prairie stones among the bison bones.

High plains weather.

An angry Indian feather unsettling settlers.

Showboat gamblers, prospector mules and gold mining fools

And the hard-biscuit batter.

The camp-following slattern at the garrison.

Pony express horses in a lather.

The cardsharp hustle, schoolmarm in a bustle, the songs of Tom Russell.

Sheriff stars and hangman noose,

Elk and bear and wolf and moose,

The Indian maid and her papoose, teepee and wigwam and wampum and Geronomo.

Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, the flowing wild mustang’s mane. Cash box on a stage, John Wesley Hardin’s rage, Purple Riders of the Sage.

Mountain passes in the Rockies; the Danner party eating flesh on crockery.

Barbwire fences along the livestock route, vigilantes with a shout burning The farmers out and Tom Horn, hero-turned-villain, hung for juvenile killin’ In the pay of the ranches.

The branches of the river, the dry desert shimmer, the cold winter shiver.

Range war in Wyoming, oil gushers in Texas, old Corrals in Kansas, Banditos in New Mexico, snow in Montana, rodeo in Colorado,

Dry gulches in Idaho, boot hills in Arizona, prairie grass in Nebraska

And the plains of Iowa.  And everything’s okay in Oklahoma.

And all the rest of my childhood myth of the old Wild West.