Funeral & Puncture Wound

It was neither stoic nor brave what you did holding your tongue while the parade of homicidal cells stomped pancreatically ever on

pan kreas. all flesh. 

I want the grocery store on a cloudy Sunday around 2.

that's all, you’d say and something like complaint rising up through the mass,

about the bad day you need more than I do

I thought it was huge chunks of torched bridge cinder protecting me

but you were the signal bloom that stopped tanks in their tracks

before they got close enough to fire.

you’re a heater full blast when the ice turns black,

 lipstick & smoke & juicy fruit gum 

cordovan leather trench coat belted at the waist 

belted in the face by Muhammad Ali

when you finally told me

you should have all my things

I’ll take the stone-washed bikini in the leatherette box

tiny kapow! accents. Tiered with bougainvillea powders and creams,

clip on things, plastic brooches and tangled chains.

I’ll croodle Conway Twitty with your girlfriends,

dressed like curtains for your casket,

(not the top model, but fancy)

I’ll have another Saturday with 

Fritz the Nite Owl, Flippo the Clown

Big Chuck and Lil’ John

flipping for triple features ‘til dawn. You’ll be high

and I: cranked on midnight Frostys.

Do you have that dirty green creek with the rope swing to give? 

Catfish and snapping turtle 

cleaned, salted, dredged and fried.

crispy drive thru chicken livers

with one proud and greasy heart we fuss over like a Cracker Jack prize?

Every bow-legged uncle who sprouts from Cuban heels,

suits not tight in the right way,

distended bellies blocking their view as they bow their heads in prayer?

I’ll take their dull misery and roll it up in that wall to wall cookie monster shag. 

Surely one of the cousins will help load the Zenith hi-fi stereo console into your truck 

which I will take too, thank you,  

and drive until the power steering goes out one day

on the way, 

having declared

fully justified--

sanctified even

that after 10 good years, it was time for a drink. 

I’m at the casket  but the tears won’t come

shouldn'ta grabbed you by the shoulders though, 

that was the wrong thing to do. It wasn’t you and

I wasn’t falling.

Are you for real dead?

was one dumb question 

Well. shit, mom came right out unrehearsed

your breath smells like coffee and train smoke most days

so you’re probably better off, right?

the operating surgeon thought so anyway. 

washing dishes, driving to work, walking the dogs forever

in my stomach something of you ignites and surges in strength 

spreads to my windpipe and chokes the air to live.

maybe the tide recedes

and the street names change,

asphalt upturned by new growth, semis stop singing, 

stop whining, stop drinking, stop dreaming of 

I-75 fractured by pine and deciduous trees flashing victory leaves,

the secret meadows within you don’t need you 

to survive.

On state routes that creep through

the shitty backwaters where you practiced manufacturing me 

men smile in their sleep

and each expectant mother receives a single white kitten from the mayor slash chief of police,

I pump and pump the pedals of my nephew’s baby blue 10 speed

 toward my sister’s porch light at the top of the hill where we have all re-gathered to say goodbye, take off the ties and shed the remnants of church. 

Riding at night on a borrowed bike to escape cut rate narrators getting sloppy on pills and past tense

behold the halogen wash and high pitch whine of a diesel downshifting 

edging me toward the shoulder so close to the deep ravine

I hold out my hand (even though I am spoken for)

having  just as much a chance of pulling the sky 

into the hollow below me, where I’m pitched when the truck clips my wheel. 

my descent is checked by bush-hogged saplings,

one of which punctures my thigh.I could think then, barely

(I would think later-- I was cruci-thighed!)

lying in winter stubble

blood blossom on my jeans, I thought for a good second before I passed out,

mom’s gonna light my ass up 

for riding after dark.

Strange Town, Familiar Smell

The sign on the door says
Believe in Jesus
Christ Be Saved.
By God,I knock and score
enough for me
and my friend Ben,
the suicidal Chihuahua,
to get tranquilized
alley-wise over by the Walgreens.
between dumpsters
lie wicked dreams:
deposit me in the passenger seat
of Didion's white Stingray
screaming down
early Sunday morning streets,
one of Flannery's peacocks
winging the wheel.
intimacy gone stale
an old box of cracker jacks
in an Aztec time machine.
piss on that smell, Ben.
George Carlin said
we should die first
spend our last nine months on earth
in a womb and
finish as an
orgasm.
I guess that'll be the safe word,
I says,
to a rat wearing a leather mask
who
is rumored to infect
her sexual partners
with a nasty streak of optimism

Me and Faranelli

 He was a celebrated Italian castrato singer of the 18th century.

I am a middle-aged-white dude-high school English teacher in full Hail Mary mode, going long on the MFA, seconds left in the game.

He was one of the greatest singers in the history of opera.
Large gospel choirs make me cry. I stopped listening to opera when I quit drinking.

He studied in Naples under Nicola Porpora.
I studied in Athens, (Ohio) under Dr. Bartolomeo Martello. You got a good heart Antonio, but you got nothing going on up here, he said, poking me in the forehead.

At age 15 he made his debut at Rome in Porpora’s Serenata Angelica.
At age 15 I made my theatrical debut running the spotlight for a community theater production of Guys and Dolls.

He formed a lifelong friendship with the poet/librettist Pietro Metastasio.
I formed a lifelong friendship with a guy who played frisbee with Steve Hicks. Jeffrey Dhamer's first victim.

His reputation spread throughout Italy and to Vienna and London.
My reputation spread enough to where I had to go out of town to find a bar I wasn't banned from.

He was admired for his pure, powerful voice, his technical proficiency, his skill in florid embellishment.
I have a recurring dream where I am the most envied of auctioneers selling bullets, Rothko's and steer.

In 1737 he went to Spain, where his singing alleviated the deep-seated melancholia of Philip V,  nightly for nearly 10 years.
In 2003 I moved to Montreal, where my unemployment aggravated the blossoming romantic indifference of my girlfriend, daily for a about a year.

He was dismissed from his post at court by Charles III for political differences.
I defended myself in court once and had the charges dismissed. My attorney friend who I couldn't afford said a free thing: know the answers beforehand.

He accumulated great wealth and spent the rest of his life peacefully in Italy.

At the bottom of my psyche, I regenerated the remains, great clanking its chains and gnashing its incisors, of an 8 year old singing "Tiny Bubble" for his daily ration of cold beans and tortillas. 

After Years of Turning, Tables in Texas are Finally Speaking Out

    My memory is faulty; cocky to arrange a civilized narrative out of bliss, spit, and tape. We were mer-people who bonded under the influence, staggered by each other’s fresh gaze, Maker’s Mark, and John Waters: “If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!” We both had books and we both barely fit around my feeble kitchen table where she stared at the magic wand she had just pissed on, terrified. Because how can you really know someone? I mean, how long has it been? Three weeks? A month?
    “Wait,” I said, “Is it OK that I’m happy about this?”
    We carried on in erratic patterns, reproducing once again, high on the fumes of impunity: We were for sure getting away with something. Our first dinner table was the heaviest thing we owned. 250 pounds of pine and a pool hall lamp displays  the aftermath of our fertile prolificacy: Reaching, passing, pouring, sounds of silver on ceramic, a momentary restoration of faith crippled by the glacial grinding of shitty jobs and shittier people. We're laughing now as little C, barely out of her booster seat, lands the punch line to a primo beaver joke: “I gotta go to the dam bathroom!” she says, and takes her exit, bolstered by this scandalous transgression. Our table has eyes and legs and feet yet remains with us due to some architectural fiat embedded in its grain.
    Over time, erosion--spills, eraser crumbs, brushed and blown, expose raw blonde wood and dazzling veins of glitter gone by. It bears dinner born in the morning, nursed all afternoon. It abides meals prepared together, thrown together with improvisational abandon, as well as solo shows served by the book, from the box, an additional verse to last night’s fight, still unresolved in D minor. Time lapse: Each minute a season of coffee cups, bills and backpacks. Dull pencils and papers to sign, exhausted bottles of wine--bulldozed every night to make way for the main event.
    Plate the corn bread, the pinto beans; mustard greens, mac and cheese, steam rising.
    Cue the Pentecostal jazz.
    We thank the cook with trembling hands but the humble cook demurs. Don’t thank me, I just applied the heat. So we thank the rain, the farmers, and my son, newly-minted kindergarten grad, asks, “What about the fuckin’ truck drivers?”
    I can barely conceal my pride but manage to say, “There are better ways.”
    He says, “What about the fuckin’ truck drivers, please?”
    I can’t wait for the day he gulps the last thin air on which the tenuous contract between parent and child exists. He’ll never ask my permission then, ever again.
    So we invoke the truck driver and her truck, unleashing a litany of every natural phenomena even vaguely connected to the food on our table: Subatomic elemental mechanics of evolution; the reproductive zeal of our horny ancestors; durable seeds and delicious animals so capably domesticated.

Mr. Saturday says, please, call me Mandatory

rising runnels of

scorched coffee smelling bullshit.

my Cuban heels besmirched on a 

Saturday morning at school.

 

the halls are forked with effluvia,

we erect battlements around

our shitty disciplinary tributaries

 

that meet briefly

to renounce the sin of throwing

grips of cash at

carpetbaggers

who arrange what they do into digestible units

who mistake  loving the Houston Astros for

foreplay

 they

tag team

brain fuck

us all by powerpoint,

 

from the comfort of their home offices.

 

they want our shoes back

but i guess If we have one weakness

its they just love too much

 

exciting new solutions

a cure  for test scores,

neck lines, and expectations.

 

the district is smitten.

my inbox is wet.

 

the real challenge here is

how to navigate

embarrassing public displays

of explicit personal/political animosity

from a disgruntled faculty

when you’ve got a piss stain on your khakis

confession of a shitty kid

I used to wish Ben Miracle was my dad.

He looked like a JC Penney ad, with a woman who died

and left him my friend Justin as a backstory.

he wouldn’t look at you but when he did

after a couple of beers (because we were young

he’d rather have

us drink with him)

when he did look you in the eye, you felt discovered

because he could barely believe that

a couple of middle school burnouts

was all he had to talk to

 

coming off the road to wash up

scrub down

and fuck off again,

my dad hogged the

wild flowers on our pink couch

and drilled me to catch him up

on General Hospital

 

at the perfume counter I told her it was a mix of old spice

cigarettes, sweat and cut grass,

hint of yeast,

twist off spritz from a freshly cracked Blatz,

a puff of gasoline and

catfish bait

that i was looking for

 

Larry got to know the neighborhood so good

before he was shot blind.

if ya’ll were drunk

you’d slide over and let him drive.

at a stop sign you'd tell him left,

but watch out for this one crossing the street, Larry,

you wouldn’t believe it. They don't look the same

as when you could see

 

you left your extra teeth in a glass on the sink.

Just for Men,

Alberto Vo5 hair oil. that’s one

area where you

spoiled yourself.

 

brother randy slipped me a bill

at the bus station in exchange for a

mercifully short conversation

about my drinking.

my last hundred

you took from me.

Ok, you won.

with a shit hand.

which I described to your little sister when

the lights burnt out

in her chandelier.

she sent me home with a box of Little Debbie's

and tried to pay me for the bulbs.

the sadness is a permanent fixture.

Aside the constant pain 

that 

is the thing she notices

most about getting old.

Icebreakers at Speed Dating Night Under the I-35 Bridge

I burglarized a van last night

it was unlocked.

I suppose it was asking for it, right

forgive me, his words, not mine,

but,

did you “fuck” her? 

yes, but I saved them

so much on car insurance

by leaving the window intact. 

a pair of mockingbirds dive on a

gray stray hauling 

substantial testicular heft,

one of their own in his mouth.

his, the unbroken stride of  

a former senator going in for a handshake

with BB King during the Clinton Administration.

outraged at this senseless routine

they bang their beaks on kitty’s rib cage

over and over again

I curse relative comfort

upon the cardboard that protects my skin but sucks for fucking.

survey the land underneath the bridge

offer my wrists 

to the patrolman in exchange for help locating his mind.

he declines and proposes,

without walls,

I don’t exist

So. order of business #1 

since time is either what I’m doing wrong 

or not doing enough of, I propose 

Gods,

judge me not as a God.

who could even pass this test:

Stand up if you’ve never touched an uncircumsized penis. 

Stay seated if not. If so, 

Turn 7 degrees until your left is east if you’ve ever “tongued” anything:

envelope, Jello Pudding Pop,  et al.

slap your knee until standing still if you give and receive in wrong ratios. 

from the squatting position, slow trot 

and sheepshank your neighbor’s chukka

if and only if you’ve never, ever,

stuck your finger up your own ass.

Now turn again

say amen.

time’s up,

you’re done.

don’t forget to rate your date

(and follow us on Instagram)

I miss you Betty Sue

on the state route connecting

the shitty little towns

where all my loved ones live

I pump and pump the pedals of my baby blue

10 speed

towards the light

at the top of the hill

 

by day

I’m the only lefty on the team,

fat with good arms

so coach Larry puts me in for the king,

Mark Bing, who meets me after practice

dragging monkeys,

one of whom has a harelip and the last name, Yunk.

this is not an abdication

or a coronation but a declaration

of my fate should

I pretend to the mound

 

at night

I wear black to distract the eyes of the law

and old men

under porch lights

begging to be vandalized

as I work that bike uphill

 

behold! on my ass

the halogen lights

of a diesel downshifting,

grinding in for a kiss

i hold out my hand (as I am spoken for)

and go tumbling down a ravine

dotted

with bush hogged saplings.

one of which goes through my knee.

the only thing

I could think 

before the knee dawned on me

was,

mom’s gonna fucking kill me

for riding after dark.