The following piece is in response to Read Write Poem’s prompt #90 – an image of a street performer balancing a flaming star. Rather than accessing the scene, making my way down that street or even turning into the performer, I waited for the picture to lead me to a title, via the first words it prompted. Those words were “laser light show”.

LASER LIGHT


Smith decided we should drive to DC for the weekend light show.
It had been ten-years since he, Patrick and I
were there together. A reunion of sorts.

Patrick lived in Arlington. We called on the way.
He told us to leave him alone. He had Reserves next weekend.
He wanted to take it easy. By the time
we showed at his door he couldn’t do anything
but offer up his couch and spare cot.

Smith brought acid. He didn’t tell us about the acid until
we were already half-drunk from a few hours
at a Tiki bar along the Potomac drinking Mexican beer.

None of us needed acid at this point in our lives. Patrick
had done two tours in Iraq. Smith spent three-years
in prison. I was an absent father of two children
with different last names.

But we were all feeling good with limes in our beer, fireworks
going off for some nondenominational reason,
together in the nation’s capital remembering the world of 1999

when ours lives went by in a fury of jokes about the president
and thoughts about the end of the world.

Now we were three old lumps surrounded by a table of empties.
Patrick with his razorblade haircut, Smith who smoked
like he was trying to burn himself inside out, me
with the spare tire around my waste that wore like a retread.

We decided to walk through the Capital on our way to the show.
Smith wanted to go see Lincoln. Patrick said we couldn’t.
Jefferson then, the Washington Monument. Patrick said
none of that mattered now, it wasn’t on the way.
We passed all the lights and strange glows in the periphery,
statues kept awake under security and patriotic flares.

Two-hours with the acid in our system, Smith said lasers
were already teeming in his head. Patrick crouched behind things,
regretted the whole night, regretted whole other nights
that didn’t include us. Whole mornings and days too. A whole year
and one whole long episode that was so classified
the hallucinations had a hard time reaching it.

I hadn’t planned on being the smart one, rarely was,
but got us to the field and our seats. We blended in
like we were anyone else, just normal people who’d never
killed anyone or beaten someone to near death
with a bar of soap, had never knocked up
an old friend’s girlfriend then another, never
had to decide which one to send checks to.

Just normal guys riding out a strong trip waiting for the lights
to take our minds off the fact our minds were gone.
People nodded at us like they knew. Tapped their noses
because they saw our eyes and identified.

They couldn’t understand. Our ghosts were our own.
It didn’t matter if one of theirs chased them up a tree.
We were stuck with ours, so far from our skulls
that the only words any of us could mouth
where things like never again and can’t come down.

But there’s that point, like when the Space Shuttle goes up,
where you’re not sure if it’ll break earth’s glass face
and get out toward the moon. Right as the boosters
jump off and the ship’s all alone, just its crew
with rations and the one bathroom they share,
the bird edges a straight line against the sky
and is gone –

That’s where we were when the music fired on. All the world
except for cigarette tips got dark. Then lights zoomed to life
in a panoramic grid, made water out of thin air.
Behind the sudden brightness and noise,
the faintest cry of crickets set the universe soft.

–

My good friend Ryan Mayers sent me a scorecard that I kept when he, Donnie Sabs and I took in a Cubs game a couple of seasons ago. My scorecards are usually a mess, and this was no different – a mix of hieroglyphs, scribbles and meaningless notes that only I could understand. Reading one from two-years ago was a particularly entertaining exercise, and it gave life to the following poem.

SCORECARD


The psychic in the bleachers calls a leadoff homerun
because of the wind and the hitter’s hot streak.
She twinkles her nose like a cartoon witch
and spooks her friends. In the second, a man
with a red foam finger misses the mustard on his chin.
Clouds look like dolphins in the third. A kid points this out
to his father walking back from the john. In the fourth,
fans wave the runner home on a two-out hit.
He’s out by a foot. It’s our fault when the manager gets tossed.
A foul pop in the fifth becomes a struggle for turf.
Flying popcorn. An elbow to the eye. In the sixth,
we anticipate the ritual of the mound trot,
the pitching change. When last call
and the seventh-inning stretch collide, my friend recalls
what Ken Burns said – that Jesus died in the on deck circle.
The sun ducks away long enough in the eighth to lose ourselves
in the slow loft of the wrong team’s deep fly. That’s when
dolphin clouds turn into whales, the sky opens with a quick
sad rain. The last rally fades in the ninth.
The ladies one row ahead cheer for their boys
like Little League moms. All claps and first names.

This poem’s been vexing me since May 13, 2002, when I pulled an article out of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with the same title. I can’t find the article now – it’s in a journal somewhere. And my attempts to find the story online yielded the this.

This latest approach is fairly simple: a dead couple having an argument.


COUPLE EMBRACE IN TRAIN’S PATH


There we are. See, a hand, a lip, one thousand bones
scattered the moment we squeezed shut our eyes.

You’d like to head back? Fine. Go ahead. Seep
into your sister’s dream while she sleeps in your bed.
Visit my father’s mourning couch, the remote like a crest
in his lap.

I won’t be at the funeral. They can bury us however they want.
I’d rather not float close to the ground, buzz someone’s leg,
have them think I’m there.

The moral? There is none, just the tracks that led us here.
Kids-gone-bad type PSAs playing in a loop
against dim afternoon health class light. A film

in the Say No to Drugs series, still-shots from prom,
my hand around the mark in your arm you wanted to hide.

We were never good kids. Like anyone else
in that shit town we finally left. There was never enough
to keep us from the junk under Jones Bridge.

You’re the one who talked about hopping a train, riding
one long ride west. You said you didn’t care
where we got. Just that we got. I simply said

there was no use getting anywhere. We’d still be stuck
in these frames. And you agreed.

Let’s break the speed of light tonight. See what it’s like
drifting into stars. Find a planet with an opposite pull.
I told you I’d give you all of this. Why so afraid?

The following comes from Read Write Poem’s prompt #87, working with vowel sounds. I decided to work with “A”.

Avenue A was the first place I’d look for Tina
when she disappeared. It wasn’t anything psychic.
I knew her haunts by the way
she’d crawl around the parquet floor scrawling loops
with bisecting pens, muttering Sweet Jesus
what will our Christian soldiers do now that the war
has wound to a halt?

Starting at the back of Alphabet City
she’d head north where St. Al’s parish was a shadow
behind canopies, its towers
pointing like missalettes at God.
There, the patron saint of Gaston Isles would hang
her wine drunk hair from the tallest perch
until all the birds came back.

The following poem feels rather undone to me. It comes from Read Write Poem prompt # 85 image prompt, “Cemetery in Malvern”. It’s a sepia print of two men squatting in a graveyard. I went in a couple of directions before I boiled it down to the idea that these men were old buddies, not necessarily friends, but former coworkers. They were grave diggers – one of them still worked there, the other had left but decided to walk through on a morning and find his old friend. Obviously, in this setting, what more could you have but a conversation that somehow relates to work?

GROUNDS CREW MORNING

You said this work shouldn’t hurt. It only did once, when a girl
of nine or ten came to a grave with her dog at the end
of a long leash. She was right out of Rockwell print, red hair,
freckles, yellow sun dress and floppy hat to spare her neck.

I imagined she was here to see a dead grandparent. I didn’t
make a habit of watching people pass through.
There was something about the girl. Too reserved
for her age. Not banged up about the dead body
under the grass.

She was the loveliest thing I’d ever want to see from the shade
of a tall pine. I stopped thinking about all the rest I had to dig.
That’s when I remembered how you said never check the graves,
forget the dates, be content
with whoever it is you think is down there.

This one time I drew the nerve, waited until she and the dog
were gone then walked to the stone. Did the math
on someone named Margaret. “Loving Mom,” dead a year.
Figured God sometimes leaves the little ones here to work it out.

The following piece is a result of ReadWritePoem’s prompt #84, brought to us from the fantastical mind of Buckeye State poet, Nathan Moore (not to be confused with the Virginian songwriter, Nathan Moore). I can’t explain the prompt in complete detail here, other to say that it involves using a dictionary, and that it was great fun.

PEAS & DOPE

Remember when Tim aimed his peashooter
from the veranda at Sally with her D cups
sunbathing in the yard and launched?

We scattered like a post-traumatic waterfall,
twelve rug rats through the arborvitae
where her father, the self-made senior controller

of his Masonic village, stood from his poker game –
a royal flush at that – and whipped each of us
for castigating the one beautiful thing

his sperm ever made. Remember how the slash
burned the backs of our thighs? Bent over chairs
as the old man sang Yankee Doodle Dandy, we cried

Daddy whenever his belt cracked and belched.
Years later, after an unwarranted search
and seizure put me away for a long weekend,

the sheriff sized up my dreadlocks, said us hippies
had no clue about pain. So I dropped my pants,
let my scars correct him.

Walking to the light rail yesterday, a woman said into her phone, “That’s where I’m at in case I go dead”, which prompted the following poem.

BACKWARDS ON THE TRAIN

We hadn’t been having a good conversation.

The wind in my mouthpiece as I walked.

A sign read look both ways before crossing.

The things that kill us come fast.

That’s what I thought of cancer when you asked.

I hadn’t always thought that way.

Now I was on record.

It didn’t sit well with you.

I missed what you said next.

My battery was lulling.

Plus reception is bad near the tracks.

To much concrete.

It’s called a dead spot.

Where I stood as the train crossed the river.

Telling you you were losing me.

The following poem comes from Read Write Poem’s prompt #83 – a “wordle” that looks like this.

SEANCE

I’d like to burn intentions into a powder stump,
apply a pinky’s worth atop my tongue

for later when loitering souls stop in
to talk about the aftertaste of wasted meat and bones.

It’s too late to caution Thomas not to take
that river plunge, to yell, “Hold tight to the rope,”
instead of “Jump.”

“Grab the fallen log,” instead of, “Go with the flow.”

“Fight as if your life will end,” rather than

“Surrender, let go.

Come tell me what it’s like when you’re there.”

The following poem comes from Read Write Poem’s prompt #82 – an ode to homunculus, or “little man”. I blame myself for this prompt. As it stands, the poem is definitely a work in progress – and to think the original draft had to do with a man losing his toe in a lawn mowing incident.

LITTLE MAN OF HEART

What if this song never ends? If we stay long past
the DJ breaking his tables, the rest of the dancers
gone home, the lights turned out, the sky’s lights
done the same? Even the moon – full tonight –
clouded away so everything we know goes black?

I have my eyes closed in this moment. I don’t know
if these what ifs are true. The music still goes.
There are clod steps on the parquet floor.
A breeze through a window says there’s light left,
as if daytime breezes differ from those of night.

Between us, where no space slips through skin to skin,
there are at least three heartbeats – yours, mine,
and some other. I can’t say what it is. A thing borne
from our centers, borne of music and light that will
walk us home when we wake.

-

A stop-off on the ride home today with a view of Mt. Hood to the left, Portland to the right, the Willamette River in between. I wrote in in a small notebook under the initial title, “View of Hood”.

SOURCE

I drink the river,
secret source of water.

Drink the bridge,
secret source of the city.

Drink the heron,
secret source of ink.

Until I drink the mountain,
secret source of sky.

–