1) Pickled Eggs
Every town needs a
gas station, a diner, a
used bookstore and an
old man bar with pickled eggs
and the game on. Any game.
2) He Said a Poem Should Be…
part journal entry
and classifieds ad, Sunday
obituary,
hostage letter and tattered
travel log of a lonesome
highway man in hobo code.
3) It’s Funny, the Things You Think About, When a Cop Puts a Gun to Your Head
The wings of jungle birds
and butterflies the size of catcher’s mitts,
fluttering and flapping all around me
in this dream I once had where
I’m standing in a clearing in the middle
of some jungle, somewhere, beneath a sky
like a giant cut glass punch bowl
or classically Ptolemaic crystal sphere,
the sun, the clouds, the stars and moon,
each fixed in their proper place
in the grand arrangement of things,
all rolling, mechanically, over me,
down and under, back up and over,
again and again.
The wind like summer’s own breath smelling faintly
of cut grass, chlorine and coconut oil (no other
collusion of smells so mutually and perfectly
complementary for pulling up so many memories,
so much of that deep down, body and soul type ache
from so far down in the well).
Or, that time Tato and I drove a load
of antique furniture to Neah Bay, WA
and it’s storming, off and on,
all the way along this winding two-lane coastal road,
and the wind is beating the crap out of the truck,
and the rain is beading on the windshield
like Diamels or broken strings of costume jewelry,
refracting the headlights of oncoming cars
into a million tiny rays, the preacher on the radio
shouting for I am the light, I am the way!
The dark, silent guestroom
of your compounding absence
collapsing ever-inwards upon its
no-thing-ness, its just-not-there-ness
ever since you skipped town that day.
Jesus, has it been two summers, already?
Where were you, when I needed you, baby?
What are you doing these days and is he or she
(whoever they are) keeping you happy?
And, for some reason … stones
(somehow like the skulls of sad, hobo clowns
who dreamed, foolishly, of being poets,
of all things) sleeping underground,
now and forevermore, through the slow
rotation of the seasons.
Do they still dream down there and if so,
what do they dream of (now and forevermore,
or, until some supreme being (or next closest thing)
finally decides to stop the whole show,
in much the same way, maybe, that someone
might put a gun to someone else’s head)?
Down there beneath a thick blanket of snow
and a sheet of leaves, down there beneath the soles
of my and this cop’s shoes and the cold, unfeeling glare
of a phosphorescent moon, tangled up among
the roots of Winter’s bony, bloodless trees
where their mothers will never find them.
