At the newly forming break in the cement,
as the creek slowly washed the firmament away,
my tiny chelonian friend stopped at my encroachment,
wary, viscerally calculating friend or foe
and how much of him should, could safely
be exposed as I approached. Suddenly
aware that my delight was his terror I turned,
ashamed to travel on, beyond this break.
Um.. you can’t sit with us.
We heard you absorbed your twin.
Total growdy, sleazeball move.
IDK how thinks work at your old school,
but here, that’s supes uncool.
The willful dissolution of the Dioscuri?
Total poser move, you fratricidal freskazoid!
Try sitting over there with the band geeks,
they’re all a buncha zit-faced chimera, gene-spliced uggos.
she has
skin as soft as
satin sheets
welcoming and
kind to the body
after a long day
of endless exhaustion
her eyes
shine brightly
of green in
the summer sun
reflecting nature
in the heat of the day
she has
worn down
and angled features
charismatic to
the beholder
unwilling to allow
the undeserving to pass
her hair
glows in
dark shades of
clay and mud
deep and bright
all at once
she has
a brain
like a shelf at
a secondhand bookstore
each cover a mask
each synopsis a fraction
of what is
her mind
is complex
and fragmented
to an extent
that only she
would know
and i
love her
why?
you may ask
she
is
me
I’m on my fifteenth President,
voted for or against ten.
My first vote went to Dick
Gregory (how’s that for enjambment)
and my how I wish he had won.
During Clinton, I quit the only
real job I’ve ever had, needed
health insurance, and started
paying serirous attention. My God,
what is America becoming?
Willie Horton or Harry and Louise.
Can no one see through the fog?
People, what on earth have you done
with your bullshit detectors?
It’s odd what you can hear from SEALs
especially if they think you like ‘em
and,
in the spring of nineteen hundred and sixty seven,
they did,
you think,
think you and your friends all liked them,
in part because you were musicians
and might be as crazy as them.
And,
besides,
who else but musicians who liked them
would sneak out
in the middle of the night
to play hot licks in the fog
while SEALboys –
boys who’d been tossed off boats
a mile or two beyond the breakers
and told to swim home on their own –
hauled
their bedraggled asses
out of the tide-turning sea?
“Training” they called it.
And they were grateful for the music.
“America’s professionally amoral” you and your friends called them,
but never to their faces.
You were way too polite for that and,
besides,
their existence made you
nervous.
Yep, it’s odd what you could hear at the USO
in the spring of ‘67,
especially if you’d all been doin’ rowdy drinkin’
with a little weed sucked in to boot,
like,
just for example,
you might hear
that the Gulf of Tonkin
was a lie and lotsa people knew it,
or,
maybe-but-not-really-maybe
because it really happened,
the SEAL,
the one across the table,
would say
he just got
a fresh imported package
from a friend and
“See this here?
This here’s an ear.
It’s Charlie’s ear, but that VC won’t miss it.
My friend took good care a’that.”
And it’s odd what you think
when the stars come out above the beach
in April of ‘67,
like
How many ears is too many?
and
What can I do to stop it – I mean short,
of course,
of standing up to the SEAL
who is,
of course,
our most elite
amoral?
(Not to mention all his friends are in the bar
and they don’t like it when you cross ’em,
not even if you’re a musician.)
So,
late in April,
way late in April of ‘67,
you spit on your shoes,
put on your best dress uni,
leave without leave,
and reenter the world you call “real”
in order,
yes,
to visit a girl.
She’s Quaker.
You ask her
what a spit-shined
musician-in-uniform
son-of-a-WAC
can do
to call out the lies
and stop the war
so you can save the lives of your friends
before they,
too,
start sending home ears.
And when your mother calls
to see if “that’s where you’re hiding”,
it’s the first time you hear the word
traitor.
I won’t get to see you at the end of the long drive,
field a scratchy phone call as I drop in and out of service
coming over the mountains- what is my eta? Have I eaten?
The door will be unlocked, you won’t wait up…but you always did.
The mountains stretched out and overlapped the sky
like an image from an Eric Carle book;
I cried a little for him, and then for Daddy as a song from his service queued up, and finally I cried for you, I have been stuffing it down these past weeks. I am tapping this out on my cell phone after driving 9 hours, and no pound cake to greet me, just an easy chair at your son’s house and the uneasy distance.
I will head to your place in the morning, now just a house to be packed up.
Shall I hide my face?
Pretending comes natural
when I am with you.
I wish that wasn’t the case –
there’s just something in your eyes.
