Category Archives: Poetry? Oh-No-etry!

Poetry? Oh-No-etry!

Visa

He’s got a $100 bill
pressed to my forehead
and I’m shaking.
“Calm down,” I say
“we can work this out
let’s not be rash.”
And he snaps back with
“There’s no ‘let’s’ because there’s no ‘us’.
There’s me and you
but soon you’ll be outta here.”
He cocks back on Ben’s nose
and asks if I’d like to speak my mind
before it tumbles like spare change
on the pavement and down the street.
I beg, but it falls on deaf ears
like he’s just walking by, pretending I’m not there.
He says for every moment I waste
he’ll charge interest and tack it on to a principle.
I know he’s about to do it.
He focuses, and I examine my life,
the annual percentage of time well spent.
His arm shifts and he blows my right hand clean off.
“Now go out and make money,
you little son of a bitch.”
I run out into the cold night, clutching my stump,
only half as good at begging.

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Poetry? Oh-No-etry!

The Ghosts of Numbers

For E — thanks for the title

Time is an infinitely long number 2 pencil eternally sharpened by hand crank mechanisms.

I have a friend who never laughs when he cheats death.

We once dated the same girl; the other night I dreamed of her old digits.

You measure a man by his number of mattresses: firm, coil, soft, latex. Hybrids when he’s confused.

His time on earth is a winter beanie never covering his ears.

In Irish folklore, there are many stories where the card player cheats Death and the reader laughs even though Death writes the sequel.

What do you do in the spare time? Rub 40 proof tequila goo on your body. Affix your breathing apparatus before you assist the child next to you.

Go long. Intervals of 3 and 7. The ghosts of touchdowns past inside a burrito inside a taco inside a super bread bowl.

What now? Marry someone. Their worst smell is their realest, their dart never joining yours on the color swatch.

Death is when an oversharpened number 2 pencil tip snaps off for no reason at all or for all the reasons, falling into God knows where.

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Poetry? Oh-No-etry!

Death Letter

And this is the way we found you, full of taxes and elephants, bedazzled in sequins and crapped on by pelicans.

And this is how you looked to us as we painted art deco post-modern wallpaper art of your face mimeographed onto the soup label.

And when you left us, you took a little piece of our collective heart, but little did we know you needed little pieces of our livers to survive.

And the bills stacked up and we shed tears on the dotted lines and threw ourselves on the sympathy of the major lending industry, bemoaning too the loss of the minor league local banks that knew your name.

And we found the note by your bedside that spoke of your great pain and grief on one side, a ‘To Do’ list on the other with no mention of suicide at the bottom, so we all scratched our heads.

And there is no will or list of directions or people to invite.

And you will be buried in a cheap coffin for six months, then dug up and thrown into a wood chipper to cut you down to size, then cremated and poured into coffee and served with just desserts.

And some old flame burned through town to sip all of our whiskeys on all of our front porches on all of our free afternoons telling tales about what a bastard you were and now we aren’t inclined to believe anything about you, even your departure from a cruel world that sustains this woman.

And we sold all your objects at auction and earned a pretty penny that we placed on the rail of the Union Pacific, derailing it and killing all the passengers inside, hiding from bloodhounds and dispersing throughout the country in hiding, learning an object lesson in diaspora.

And we donated your social security trust fund back to the good people at the US government, which then had to pay a gift tax to itself.

And all of the other loose ends we could’ve easily dealt with were tied into a knot and tossed to the cat for safekeeping.

And etc.

And please find one enclosure of your wedding day, with all in the photo now dead, cozy and warm.

And please let us speak a few words every year at the dinner table in remembrance of your charming noises and radioactive aura and reductive opinions, and please let us do impressions of your authoritarian stance and backmasked voice.

And you’ve left big shoes to fill, so we’ve sent them to the small-footed poor people of somewhere, and you’ve left big britches to fill and we’ve left that task to the hungry hungry hippos.

And we’ve contacted the best-selling historian writer to tackle the mountain of you, but he isn’t sure if he is to throw fact or fiction out the window.

And tell us the one about the Chinaman and the banana again.

And you will be missed; people who never knew you are asking about what you were like.

And we’re doing fine, thank you for asking.

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Poetry? Oh-No-etry!

Curious Couple

She was a school teacher and he a botanist.
They shared a cottage in New England,
had two therapists, three cats, no dog.
Neighbors passed by as if the house wasn’t there.

Every so often the couple would take turns
setting a fire on their property.
The man liked to let them grow tall,
the woman laid complex brush that burned almost violet.
They collaborated on slick, brick-red masterpieces
that slipped up walls like dyslexic waterfalls.

Another part of this was the dousing:
water was a staple, but not satisfying;
there was tomato juice, milk and blue sports drink;
a liquefied pumpkin in the fall;
and, in the spring, a lawn sprinkler shooting their own mixture
of honey and Budweiser.

The final part of this was the cleanup:
the cleansing, rebuilding and restoration;
letting cats out of crates;
an analysis of how it went.
Never any leftovers or lingering memories.
No complaints.

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Poetry? Oh-No-etry!

Telemental

I wait for the sun to explode,
sitting here, carbon monoxide and smoke detectors fully operational,
counting minutes, folding laundry.
One coffee, two coffee.
I look outside to get some sun; it is still in the sky.
I blink and it is gone.

I place hand on heart every morning,
pledge to get blood work done.
I count saturated fats, line up calorie columns.
When hungry, I tell my body
to adapt.

When my mind tells itself to quit working,
it makes these sounds:
You’re better than this.
Other people are making more money.
They’re younger and faster . . . catch up.
You will never be free.
And I tell my mind to stop thinking
and just work.
The sun is in the sky.

Somewhere there is war
and I don’t care.
There is work to do,
and miles to go
before hand eclipses heart
in tribute to a new song.

I wait for the moon to rise,
folding minutes into hours
One whiskey, two whiskey.
I look inside for some glimmer; the heart still out of my hands.
It beats for an instant and is gone.

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