Laurel Mercantile Company
Taste-test
the odds and ends
of the hometowns
of small-town America
Collected and curated,
mythologized with nostalgia,
at the corner mercantile,
placed haphazard into bins:
mailboxes and yard signs,
dead candles, garden tools,
nicknacks and soda cans
You can wander the aisles
but these aisles
never end
Contemplating Friendship at Owsley Fork Sanctuary
after Meng Hao-Jan
The road I live on is full of single-wides,
buzzards and dogs running free.
Today a bald eagle circled in the warm
thermal currents high above my forest cabin,
sun rippling through its white tail feathers.
As we argue about politics, a crotchety
neighbor brings soup when I’m coughing,
chopped hickory when my axe handle breaks.
An idea with no form. Long slender fingers, sharp
letters. Enclose an idea and wraps around the world. Looking for faith in the characters, the vowels are the vowes of a broken mirror. From both ends of the sentence, there is broken glass and jagged veins. Every action obliterates chance. A mass of flesh with no skeleton, long slender fingers, sharp letters. A message with no audience. A thought is meaning crashing. “Look at my hands. I exist just to have one thought.”
Colonel Porkchop played the spoons
at the tavern for drinks weeknights
and weekends in the saloon room
beneath the roof garden.
He ripped away rousing sets, spoons
carved and looped through
with ample scoopers, singing Amazing Grace,
and He Touched Me in the style of
the Dick Handler Quartet.
Porkchop was an older black gentleman
who liked to drink, wearing a ripped
black studded leather jacket, tight jeans
and red bandana across his brow.
It was 1983.
Too Shy by Kajagoogoo,
and I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues
by Elton John pumped through the speakers
when bands weren’t playing, but
every night we saw Porkchop wailing
some down country flurry like to pop
a wagon off a hitch running down his dreams
of cheap wine and liquor. He would announce
to the bartender that for a round of five shots,
and two Millers, and a glass of red wine
he would take out his teeth, stomp the stage,
and play.
In musical terminology “spoons” are a concussion
idiophone, related to the castanet,
and the playing is known fairly well since
they were invented to primarily carry food to the mouth.
The male of the species especially has a need
to hit things and let people know he exists,
thus anthropologists deduce this crude instrument
was happened upon by man, whereas the actual
carving of this original spoon was not the work
of Homo Habilis – or “handy man” –
but most assuredly a female in the commune.
Porkchop was good at rollicking train rhythms,
lending a psuedo-Johnny Cash edge to his gospel
offerings. Porkchop would pop them on his shoulder,
down to his lap, and back to his hand.
He would croon, He touched me, oh-oh-oh he touched me,
and the joy that floods my soul….
We brought him drinks as tips. He was happy.
By then he couldn’t have played the spoons anymore
if he tried. He didn’t even care.
Later, passing him on a bench, neither did we—
going to our beds to finally lie down.
We spend so much time asking the same question,
What if,
We think about what may have happened if we asked them out,
What would happen if we hadn’t broken up,
Thinking it could make things better than today,
When we ask “what if,”
We are thinking about parallel universes,
Ones we can never visit,
When we ask “what if” we are letting fear get in the way of our lives,
We fear that tomorrow may be worse than the last,
Maybe it will,
Maybe it won’t,
Why let a possibility prevent you from living,
Tomorrow can be bad sure,
But it could also be the best day of your life
God’s in the attic
burnin up
The devil’s chillin
in the basement
high as hell
We’re stuck in the living room
at the bloody beautiful sunset
Nocturnal wandering
into the obscurity
beneath the angular branches
of stilted, halting thought
fragmented images
that shift and morph
convoluting to visions
of people and places
I do not know
or wish to encounter
in the lucid world
of day-lit awakening
Falsely secure
in the knowledge
that we shall not meet
under the golden sun
because they are aware
of their vulgar utterings
their grotesque features
their demeritorious behavior
and so they remain hidden
until I close my eyes
and tumble back into
hallucinating torpidity
fighting valiantly
to remain conscious
to keep them
where they belong.
