No Begging
She said:
Well, aren’t you going to
beg me to stay?
He said:
Well, if you want to stay
I suppose I can continue
to put up with you,
but if you don’t want to stay,
I sure as shit don’t want you
around here.
When the shit hits the fan,
or, if you prefer a rural
locution,
when the effluent comes in
contact with the tiller,
more people than you have ever
met
are going to die.
That’s die.
They’re not going to pass away.
They’re going to drown in
storms.
They’re going to incinerate in
wildfires.
They’re going to starve slowly
to death in droughts.
They’re going to freeze to
death in the open
because they have no homes.
Men in uniforms are going to
shoot and bomb them.
Hundreds of millions of us,
as complex and real and capable
of sensual joy and pain
as you are,
their souls overflowing
with desperation and terror and
agony and helplessness,
dying in agony and killing to
survive
and being slaughtered
themselves by others just like them,
anonymously, because so many.
They’re not going to pass away.
They’re going to die,
and although some units with
human DNA
will probably survive,
what we think of as human
is going to die along with them.
Okay, well, maybe humanity,
then,
is just going to pass away.
Domestic
Protocol
Dog food and toilet paper
have more in common
than either does with wine,
for example, or paper towels,
in that they’re the two items
it’s always advisable to get more of
before you run completely out of them
and they’re totally, absolutely gone.
Like Scrap
Iron
Sure I feel it.
Sure it hurts
when the blows land heavy
on my skull-top and shoulders,
I still come forward,
head down, chin in,
tight punches firing
with my bunched-muscle arms
when I can,
like Scrap
Iron.
Sure it’s painful
Sure it burns,
but pain is only pain, baby;
the danger’s in going numb,
so I shrug the shots off
and keep coming forward,
no matter how tiring
it gets in the late rounds,
doing body work
like Scrap
Iron.
Sure it’s pointless
Sure it’s bullshit,
but still I wade forward,
a distraction for booze-fuzzy eyes;
just keeping my head down
to keep my vision free from sweat
for a clear view of my whole environ,
which is always the wrong size,
too big and too small,
like Scrap Iron.
Crystal Balls
Jeane
Dixon was the number-one
She
had a crystal ball and everything,
including
a real-estate company in DC,
of
which her husband, F.W.,
was
the nominal owner,
but
he’d devoted himself
to
some John Philip Sousa appreciation society,
so
the famous fortune teller
also
ran the business,
which
rented me two different apartments
when I was an
undergraduate.
I
didn’t deal directly with Mrs Dixon, of course;
my
contact was one of her underlings,
a
crisp, youngish, bobbed-blond-haired, business-suited
Becky
from Indiana
who
once, with an aura of repressed excitement and awe,
led
me with some ceremony
into the exalted
presence of the Great Lady.
The
renowned psychic looked up at me from her desk,
smiled,
and said, “You know,
you’d
be a nice-looking young man
if
you’d shave off that beard.”
And that was
about it.
So
much for my fortune.
Not Burns
He was tall and blond and
neither fat nor thin,
and in his mid-twenties, and
neither handsome nor ugly,
although he did have that
confident way about him,
as if his every whim were
sacred
and his every opinion a
universal natural law,
and his name was Ed
Something-long-ending-in-‘ski’
and he played guitar in a covers bar
band,
and he’d learnt trigonometry in high school,
and he’d got himself a trigonometry job
as the head of a land-survey party
back in the pre-computer, pre-GPS early seventies,
and he was aggressively misogynistic,
pretending to gag when he sneered pronouncements
about Helen Reddy and ‘I Am Woman’ and such,
and he played guitar in a covers bar
band,
and of course he was violently homophobic,
ranting sneeringly about what he knew was semen
on David Bowie’s shoulder on that album cover,
and it had made him gag every time he’d seen it,
and he played guitar in a covers bar
band.
And one time we were surveying
a line through a field
and disturbed a nest of field
mice,
and Ed had pinned one of the
mice to the ground with his pencil,
and had called to Don, the
instrument operator, his sidekick,
to roll our van slowly up to
the mouse
in order to squash it beneath
one of its tyres,
and I watched the pulse in the
mouse’s neck beat rapidly
as Don eased the tyre just to where Ed’s pencil was pointing,
and I wanted to stop it but I couldn’t,
and the mouse’s eyes bulged and darted with terror,
and Ed was giggling almost hysterically,
and I turned and walked away.
Ed played guitar in a covers bar band.
Soul Sisters
Ronnie & Phil; Tina &
Ike.
What was it about these
charismatic
woman soul singers of the
sixties
that brought them under the
abusive control
of talented but psychopathic
svengalis?
Was it cocaine and fame?
Was it a strutting need for
dominance?
Was it the music’s hormonal
intensity?
Was it business-as-usual in the
music business?
Or was it the same-old-shit
sexism and deeply-rooted
misogyny
that linger on in human cultures today?
Baby, I love you.
What’s love got to do with it?’
Marie
Laveau & the Consigliere Legale
She wasn’t the only person I’ve
known
whose life seemed incomplete
without some feud with a
neighbour,
but she was my wife and I loved
her
and it was New Orleans
The neighbour’s name was Ollie
and she worked as a checkout
chick.
The feud ratcheted up
when Ollie made some Voodoo
marks
on our front door.
For most of the New Orleans
Voodoo was no laughing matter.
My wife responded by stretching
some black thread
across Ollie’s door at night
so that she’d walk into the
symbolic spider web
when she left the house.
Ollie responded in kind, and
the next night
I sat outside St Louis
Graveyard Number One
parked at midnight in my wife’s
Opel GT
while she scraped some brick
dust
from Marie Laveau’s tomb.
Powerful gris-gris indeed!
Ollie eventually assaulted me
in front of witnesses in the
checkout line.
The only social force in New Orleans
more powerful than the Voodoos
being the Mafia,
at my urging my wife got her
boss to refer us
to a Mafia lawyer whose
services he employed,
and who kept one-third
of what Ollie’s bosses paid
for an out-of-court settlement,
which settled the dispute for
good.
Mantra for Clueless Postadolescents in
the Developed World
Drink to get drunk.
Love to get laid.
Sink or be sunk.
Work to get paid.
