Wildest
I’m crazy
baby
I’m the 60 hour
cry about it.
The nail polish on the carpet
back against the floor.
I’m the wake up
freak out.
Fuck around
Find out
red Gatorade
lungs full of air.
I imagined it as a child – the world
as prehistoric sludge. No one
to genuflect. No fields of woolly
sheep by the Irish Sea. No high
speed trains or later-life Picasso
shows. I remember the fifty
pound catfish Jericho Higgins
brought to the newsroom. A giant
catch, like one of the first creatures
to emerge from ancient slime,
we plastered it on the front page
& sold extra copies that week.
The catfish, we call them mudcats,
is toothless. Fills his belly
by fastening to quick-moving
objects with a hideous sucker
mouth. Doesn’t need the top
layer of the lake where light shifts
to faceted fragments but finds
sustenance near silt & pearly
mussels. Scaleless, a mudcat does not
glisten as beautifully as a lake
sturgeon. But oh, this fat bottom
feeder, glowing white & pale yellow
from the belly, is lion of our dark currents.
A rewrite of yesterday’s monstrosity
Pop bottles, soda bottles, soft-drink bottles—
we just called ‘em empties.
At the White House Food Shop,
our family deli where Dad sold a little bit
of everything but mostly beer, wine and soft drinks,
empties arrived like lemmings
swimming in from neighborhood streams.
We’d marshal them from bags, boxes, cartons,
or in singles or pairs by kid-scavengers,
lug the castaways to the back room,
a vast space rivaling Xanadu’s storerooms,
where battalions of bottles–
Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Seven-Up, Barq’s,
Wiedemann, Burger, Hudepohl, Stroh’s,
and more stretched into infinity.
Ah—the mud-caked bottles,
pilfered from a shed in back of someone’s memory—
we hated these, had to wash them out,
chasing the bugs, roaches mostly,
lurking among cardboard beer cartons.
Kids cashed bottles for candy,
baseball cards, a small Coke.
Adults with cargo holds of empties
unloaded them from container ships moored out front
to refill their Sunday stash of beer.
The cycle repeated
as the “soft-drink guys,”
the “beer guys”
all came on Monday,
to let us tally their take,
then dollied in the week’s supply,
We watched as they took a sandwich from Dad,
and snuck him a cold quart of Hudy in thanks.
And the woman down the street
would summon us to redeem
shopping bags full of quart beer bottles,
to maintain her habit.
(We never questioned enabling her addiction.)
Thus our summers, falls, springs and winters.
Even on that dark Saturday, November 12, 1963,
there were still empties.
Waiting
Waiting
Waiting
An hour has passed
Not enough
I studied my hardest
Aced the practice
That’s what I said last time
Another hour
Time ticks slowly
Is it at three or four
I don’t even know what I’m counting down to
Stay calm
Don’t freak out
Dimly lit room
People paying taxes
That man coughs
The woman calms a crying baby
They call my name
Shaking hands
Pounding heart
Weak legs
Even the door is hard to open
Waiting
Waiting
Wait i n g . . .
i know it was
a mistake. but
your cheeks red
and freckled like
apple skin and
your laugh spilling
out of the phone.
and the way
you kept smiling
after the joke was
over. that you
made the first
joke i’ve heard
from you in months.
then a second. then
a third.
i know it was
a mistake so
it’s fine. link
arms with your
lover. say you
are in love. pack
up your thinning
childhood. put
it away. leave
it open for me
because i know
it’s where you
want me. lidded
and out of sight.
i know you are
tired. i can see the
gray getting your
face before
your hair. but
please.
Thrice eternal, pierced by beautiful blades.
My former wife, as well,
had this gaping hole in her,
a giant sucking chest wound,
this hole so big in her heart
that everything I felt,
everything I ever was,
everything I borrowed
from my future self,
was never going to fill it.
No one I know
is interested
in goat yoga.
Perhaps
it merely
the assonance
calling my name.
