FoodTown, late
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Those harmonies explode lost thoughts
Thoughts that were in hardened capsules, lost
They were always there in time’s clay, but lost
But can only a musician experience this?
They see things before cheese and triteness,
things perhaps pretty, maybe beautiful
You were in aisle eight and that 1988 harmony hit you with the force of a slap
It opened lost days: a dash of wispy Norwegian perfume
Laced across a field of dandelions from some road trip at noon
Maybe a jaunt through that same field with cabin 6
They all shot through your existence
All of this exploded in April
Your days were full of azaleas, staying up for “Dharma,”
and painting your carport.
Every hour became the electric past, ‘these are
the days’ began to resonate.
And then an ordinary night at FoodTown, late
Precious flakes flitted down,
flirting, dancing, sprinkling
There for maybe a cosmo-parsec
It exceeded absolutely everything.
Those harmonies open lost thoughts
And maybe anyone can experience this:
Try the pastry aisle at that dated FoodLion out on 91, say
Two-thirty-a.m-ish
Just don’t be too aware of it.
Where I learned Spanish
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What happened to that old cast?
Better opportunities? Some didn’t last
Some didn’t make it to intermission during their first shift. Did they drop too many plates?
I know that turnover is a constant in this neon stickiness.
But where is that old cast? Do they come in for breakfast?
Sure, newer faces become recognizable, maybe even friendly
after a little time, but no, that memory
of your first impression here returns to you,
you were learning Spanish poetry, weren’t you?
Some of the dishwashers used to wear those hip, bright, green t-shirts, the ones
with the diner logo on the front. Most don’t remember those.
I live that night, never a night already gone.
I’m eating that key lime pie,
talking to a waitress who thinks that I
am too odd for her to go out with.
At least she snagged me one of those shirts. Those have now vanished, dispersed throughout one of the great corridors of secondhand fabric. Probably in Manopli, Maryland.
One day I’ll find that old cast, assembled somewhere for the last act.
The curtain will rise and I will see key lime pie again.
Merle will wave at me, my older waitress friend.
Plates clangor beautifully for the encore, curtain.
I sip my coffee and look up. Did someone just drop some of that thick diner china?
Here, use my notebook as a dustpan. Were you part of that old cast?
Mexico and Bart
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You used to anticipate asking
and then you got excited upon asking
but then you realized that asking
became futile
Your colleagues never could summon realities swept away
years ago. Fourteen minutes ago.
They never could extract
the precious blurred amethysts of ago, melded in with et cetera
Those same amethysts were always in you: your recollections were wound within a wintry, bewitching kaleidoscope: that faint, forgotten lipstick became that firefly of a lightning strike off that black coast to one of the beaches of Mexico (was that Tampico or Vallarta?) to that conversation with Bart in the dorm lobby.
And then there were those colorful butcher paper signs.
It was late > > gigantic light bulbs diminishing
up high, giving little light to those
signs. Maybe “Go Tigers” or something.
There were big, sweaty people there were just here.
No, your colleagues usually let you down.
How do you remember all that? becomes “Brown
Eyed Girl,” a standard, rewound
is all of this.
But maybe it works out. Just:
never forget that sometimes the most dangerous thing you can do is to remember.
Especially when nobody else remembers.
She-Warrior and Tuxes
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Powder blue was the color of the cover
of issue two-hundred and one, a tux
from a 1978 prom would have matched
I didn’t like Wonder Woman, She-Warrior,
a splashy Saturday purchase, Deluxe
Comics was open and empty I gambled
and I was twelve and it was raining
slicker, lunch, mom, bags all jux-
taposed in the mall, I read in the car
Thirty years would bring two -hundred more
issues, but I would happen upon grad school, aw shucks,
where did Stacie put that flashlight?
These days I’m all highbrow, I teach history,
ignoring golden lassos, Donald and ducks.
These days I see my old books at garage sales
Neckties and starch and monthly staff meetings,
my wife – damn - does not use Electrolux,
cause – damn - in this dark I need it for this dust
I vacationed from animation, eventually,
but reading powder blue in my youth, no flux
a little dream just told me I still have said powder
Neckties and copier and meetings gave way
today to a Maglite and mice, the crux
of yon rafter under me, as I read my She-Warrior.
There Again
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Hit angle, my partner said. I usually say “cut.”
The sand is simply inescapable. ‘Wet, clingy, and disgusting,’ well, these only help to beckon my exit. Age has also brought other inevitable avenues.
True, the soul of beach volleyball is in the cut shot. But why are we doing this?
I even thought of walking away, say,
from all of this, away, from those nets, say
maybe gradually play, every, what, Memorial Day?
But I finally turned in a remarkable performance.
I felt there again. Hit angle, my partner said, and I did. Even had a small crowd watching. Thunk: a jump serve never felt so good. All of those granules, though, still find their way home with you, no matter how many times you climb into Pensacola’s oasis. And well, there’s just too much else going on.
So . . . but, no, what am I thinking? Memorial Day only comes once a year.
I know that I still enjoy watching that girl in the green bikini. Drinking a banana malt on the way home, languidly coasting over that long bridge, watching the last of the day’s remnants tiptoe behind far-off purple. Maybe a sore shoulder.
What was I thinking? That other stuff can wait a little longer. Hit angle, my partner says, and I will. I’ll bounce that ball so high that . . .well . . .
I was there again.
Fox and the Juke
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Wasn’t it a beautiful, cool evening, with a severe storm on the way? It was the kind of night that compelled you to drive the convertible up to a distant plateau off in some dark, empty county. The wind was rigorous but friendly as you held her hand and slowly elicited sugary kisses from her. You then drive back off into the blackness until you came up on one of those forgotten all-night diners, with glowing neon and rain-splattered windows. You sipped coffee and looked at her as the corner juke played that long lost ballad from the 1950’s, And it hit you that this was all magical, dreamy, and sensual, poetic and dark, something akin to that lavender amoeba in the late horizon that you’ve always yearned for. This was what all of those poets prepared you for. Her teeth were glorious when she smiled at you.
But caramaba, you’re left sitting in an IHOP in Plainview, Texas, staring out the window at three in the morning. Hopefully, it is possible that imaginative experience is superior to reality, to what you would actually experience if you actually drove that big sled up to that hill and drank coffee with that little fox. Maybe imagining an experience helps to savor the beauty that you will one day feel when you really kiss that girl amidst the cold, black wind, engulfed by nothing and yet everything.
No. No, it really should have been “we should learn to know what we imagine.” Get it right, Shelley.
Brushes under Nixon
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Listen to the silver crisping of my brushes
Can you hear them-lisping-on the edge of my snare?
Orchestras can wait. I
like
the ride and the upright.
That silver flitting is crisper
and tighter
than that old clothesline wrapped
around that old pecan tree
in grandmother’s backyard.
My cousin marveled
at how tight that clothesline remained
but my cousin
never made it to one of my jazz gigs.
And when there is Tchaikovsky,
I don’t make it to one of my jazz gigs.
Those grey wiry wands sometimes yield
to shiny green xylophone mallets.
But that clothesline-torque tight-creeps into vision.
They tell you to keep your fingers loose
on those brushes,
and with sticks,
to spray rolls across those toms
as lightly as napalm over Nixon. (Oops)
There’s at least one jazz drummer that votes conservative
I really don’t always know how to choose between the two.
The Old House
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Horror stories, well, sometimes do not work. A woman desires real intimacy, and I am sometimes too frivolous.
Yet in the beginning, lightning from those far-off fields showed me her lovely silhouette. I knew of her charm. I kissed her on the ride home but knew better.
I wonder if there are people that do not know of the numbing magic of such passion and its superiority to banal carnality. Your breath is both poetic and exquisite and I become boyish at your very touch.
One thousand flames flicker in the depth of your eyes. That lightning at three a.m. off the interstate pales weakly in comparison.
Maybe one day I will be able to take her to the haunted house at the carnival.
Macy’s and Fort Mims
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I stared at the blue steel of the M,
and then the A.
And then I realized how jaded
I had become to Macy’s.
In less than a parsec
Mobile became Manhattan
and I had stopped wondering
where to find Archie Bunker’s apartment.
I lost perspective
but in the distance Fort Mims wanted to play catch
so I pounded the mitt of my mind and saw things
and there was return to said perspective in lower Alabama
on a quick trip home.
I saw that crayola-red
war paint clearer
than any fourth-grader on a field trip ever could.
After the massacre Red Eagle even beckoned me to lunch.
Would bacteria from his roasted deer settle well in my postmodern stomach?
But I had a date
just thirty miles away in Mobtown
with a chipped baseball orchard
that had leased out its soil
to a gardener named Hammerin’ Hank.
These places telegraph things to me.
No, I had not lost it all.
So allow me to telegraph a thought of my own,
to my little nephew, amidst his blocks: suggestion:
When bro pays your Greyhound bus fare,
and Maggie helps you pack that chartreuse wooden suitcase,
for that audition for that viola position with the Brooklyn Symphony,
keep what Proust called the “first color and notion of newness . . . with everything that you experience”
Or whoever it was that said that.
If they said that.
You’ll probably fly up to Brooklyn. Sleek, black suitcase, on wheels.
Even in paved Dallas
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How did Byron elude me?
Perhaps it was the fault of the stars.
I gazed long through thru mist
Yeah, my poetry was afar.
But, still a delicious night of hippie-glow and enchantment! My upstairs apartment was glowing with incandescent chartreuse and a little debutante from Fort Worth, Texas. George and Ira played on, and there was a quietness. I had not danced to that stillness in some time. Such magic was possible even in paved Dallas.
How did Byron elude me? Maybe it was the martinis. I took my pen.
But, wait…
A moment of luminescence
In the cocktail loft
It enhanced our embrace
And her chin so soft.
And what of Byron?
Wait, there, he eluded me not!
For, “she walks in beauty,”
A line I forgot not!
Indeed, I had forgotten. But she helped me pull those words out of time’s mist.
Though Byron did not elude me, I know not where she is now.