Featured Poet: January 1999

WET POEMS


Unlike the dry,
can lay out anywhere,
even in the sun
or under artificial light.
Wet poems remain true
to themselves.
There is a take-me-as-I-am
gritty arrogance about them
that makes poet & wet-poem reader
proud to take the walk,
to slosh through puddles
of simile,
to bear the metaphor tattoo
of pelting word rains,
wet snowflakes
falling in slow motion,
dotting freckled faces
of little children.

Unlike the dry,
wet poems take on even the sun,
even the sun
in all its single mindedness.

NEIGHBOR

wrinkled old Sidney Hellman
was majored upon
by experimental sadism
at Dachau Atrocity (alumnus: 1945)

Alone upstairs at night
sometimes every night
Sid screams in his dreams
about Rachael's long brown hair shining
in his lap about her black eyes

Thumbed cavernous
when brutes trapped her sun
and smashed the lightning bug to
darkness

alone upstairs
wrinkled old Sidney Hellman
devout catatonic
Stares wet-eyed into Berlin's
Chancellery Garden

smelling smoke
praying for the fires
to never burn out

ENDINGS

my last coffee
down to the grounds
which like tea leaves
I divine where I've been
never where I'm going

or that last cigarette
the night Doc Tilson said
Son, your lungs got holes
Quit or kiss your lungs goodbye

or last tears
wrung from hard faces
too cold to cry anymore

or the last goodbye
whistling through my teeth
blurring my eyes
saying I could be brave

on that last phone call
you were in Tulsa
you called collect
I'd been in the shower

pretending it was a storm
strong enough to drown me
in time pucker my heart and soul
pock-dry like raisins

or that last word
something about Once
or Remember or Someday
or maybe my name

a dream-time remembered
longings left like rubbish
the lover's oxymoron
someday never

or the last time I breathed
the scent of you
that caught the air
like a ballerina
fragrancing your presence

your absence your presence
your absence in a ferris wheel
of two spinning fools
untouching, apart, distant
losing ground forever

THEY ALSO SERVE

kitchen queen
lonely at the skillet
wagging raw veal cutlet come-ons
to blind Milton

Who only sits around and waits.
"Who knows!"
says Queen Lizzie
(breading veal now)

"The occasion
might arise when--"

"Stop me if
I'm wrong,"
interrupts Milt
who then reads the meat

Tactually misspelling
some old steer's bloody wounds:
"When I consider how my night is spent!"

Finally he gives up,
Groping towards the sink
to wash his hands
of heavy reading.

VICTIM

Emptied of viscera,
quartered, bloodlessly white & cold,
he hangs from the meat hook
in a breathless movement
that ticks a small arc
in crawl-time rhythm:
Blinking eye tricks can measure
the haphazard synchronization
of a corpse
to its shadow.

Behind the filmed glaze
of a dead man's staring eyes
are grave secrets.
A stillness everywhere,
unburdened by heartbeat & time,,
attends to his swift descent
into some dark neutrality.

There is a peace
about what he has become:

A yellow parchment of grin,
where his songs once rang,
contorts itself now
in a final bid for complacency.

ASCENT

scaffold
Sammy's quivering heart
strings support the dangling dais
Suspended high for purposes
of serenade or execution.
Lighthearted/headed Sam ascends
gasping, varicose bulge throbs blood
Still higher
Always one more elevation please
to prove love.
Any sign will do,
Painted long hours quickly
before night plucks eyes
And heart in hand
Sam stumbles deathwards.

SKIN DEEP

An acupuncturist fell in love
With a hemophiliac named Lynn
Despite all the good advice given him.

"We're in love," said the good doctor.
"Against all your odds we will win."
Then he put away his professional needles and pins.

"What good's a practice that brings me wealth
If it threatens the health of my darling Lynn.
To keep it and prosper? Wouldn't that be a sin?"

So he tried, how he struggled,
How his poor head would spin,
Keeping sharp things far from deathly pale Lynn.

Her fear that suddenly she'd get herself pricked
Was slowly but surely getting under his skin.
He found himself sitting on needles and pins.

"I love her, but, Lord, how I miss acupuncture!"
So each night he'd go down to the basement and grin
As he fondled his professional needles and pins.

"Are you done, Dear? Won't you come up to bed?"
"In a minute," he called, then called it again.
"Give me a minute. I'll be right up, Lynn."

The moral of this story is love's not enough.
A bleeder should never succumb to love's whims,
At least not with somebody into needles and pins.