AT THE FOLLIES
Life is a gum-chewing stripper,
a favorite honky-tonk act.
She wears any costume you want,
or a headdress of bananas.
Ms. Life plays all roles,
from shy schoolgirl
to Mistress Wanda cracking her whip.
But she peels it all off.
She milks each minute---a vaudeville smoothy---
while voyeurs in raincoats swoon
on broken-down chairs.
Comes the time
all secrets are finally exposed.
Behold,
a sweaty g-string tossed around a customer's neck.
Your neck, stupid.
The climax is a prancing, pimply, sagging butt.
End of show.
Well schmuck, what did you expect---
a golden ass?
If you don't like it---leave,
go drop your shorts in your bathroom,
turn your head,
and gawk in the mirror.
And if you liked it,
get the hell out anyway.
One show per customer.
There's a long ticket-holder's line outside.
Outta here---move.
CROSSROADS
Wasn't supposed to stray past route 9 but I did.
Risky, an icy stare and stay in my room if discovered,
no dessert for a week either.
Went past route 9 to where 12 crosses 5.
There I learned the truth about pock marks on stop signs.
Heard rumors before but never believed,
I a visiting city boy.
But from behind the bushes I saw
a pickup truck stop, a shotgun appear then fire.
The pellets became clappers, the sign a mournful bell.
The rifleman was too young to drive, a little older than me.
He saw me. Cold look in his eyes. I cried.
The double barrel pointed straight at me,
dark bores stared at frightened eyes.
Held my hands up like the bad guys on T.V..
He said he could blow my face away
so far my mom couldn't find it.
He smiled, then pointed his shotgun high and fired.
"Yahoo, Yahoo," and drove on.
The backfire of the truck merged with the gun smoke,
a white choking fog on a country road.
Soiled my underpants, snuck back to the house,
changed my shorts, threw the damning ones out
my bedroom window, but my cousins saw.
They giggled but didn't tell.
At dinner couldn't eat, even dessert.
Said my stomach hurt.
Stayed in bed all of next day.
Cousins blackmailed me out of three of my toys.
They all smiled, smiles like the smile
I saw at the crossroads
above the steel rimmed black eyes that drew a bead on me.
CYBERKIND CHAT
Sterile if the screen is scrupulously polished.
A surface of flickering phosphorescence.
We monitor only cold radiance.
Are you sipping coffee or downing whiskey?
Do you smile, sneer,
or are you utterly
expressionless?
Fingers trace a screen, smooth, so faultlessly smooth.
What lies beneath,
printed circuits, wispy wire meshworks,
and immutable sequences of programmed loops?
How hard do we pound the keyboard?
Is the I key worn to invisibility?
Are Freudian slips deleted before transmission?
Is what lights our faces only practiced perfection?
What is the character behind the characters
advancing like a hungry snake devouring the white of the screen?
And if we really were face to face,
would we still be as distant?
Would reality be only dead skin,
sloughed off cells, floating dust---
the same dust that clings like deluded moths
to the sealed, transparent, charged, and artificially lit screens?
RATIONALIZATION
Might as well say we broke even.
Can't change a blessed thing now.
What good was our prancing naked,
when we had no inkling of what was wicked or fun.
All those opportunities we missed
before He got the sense to give us the boot,
we seize them now eagerly
but in a much meaner ambience.
She had the original thought.
She was always ahead of me
for her part of that luscious apple was in her belly first,
which gave her more time to digest.
We put on leaves; we couldn't explain why.
But then she ripped her fig leaf off and said,
"Let's do it, we're not brother and sister."
Never thought of that,
I didn't even know what brother and sister were,
or even what this "it" was we were supposed to do.
But she taught me. Her soft hands showed me the way.
"It" was the first thing we did on our own,
right in front of the cherub.
His flaming sword gave her the idea.
So there we lay just outside of the skirts of Eden,
with paradise both behind and between us.
Was "it" worth it?
Might as well say yes.
Sounds better if we claim we swapped paradises
instead of losing one.
REVENGE OF A COMMON MAN
His grandmother taught manners, common courtesies:
please, may I, thank you, you're welcome, I'm sorry.
And she tried to drill proper diction
into this grandson of a workingman.
He never saw his grandfather, a common man
with no common courtesy, a lout, according to grandma.
Day laborer, longshoreman, hod carrier (whatever that was),
and ultimately a truck driver.
His grandfather's last job was a truck driver, horror of horrors.
"Don't speak like him," she said, "show that you're educated."
Since he had never heard his grandfather speak,
he didn't know what not to say.
He had heard that grandpa had some kind of accent spoken somewhere
by the lower classes of a generic Balkan country.
Grandma spoke like the Queen of England, learned how through 78 RPM
records.
"Don't be common, be like your dad not your grandpa.
Be a professional, learn elocution."
Occasionally he'd see his dad, and every so often he would hear him
"elocute."
Grandma would give him a tug on the ear for saying elocution is sissy
talk,
two tugs for saying thoity-thoid.
Grandma was serious, very serious.
Not a trace of grandfather could survive in her six-year-old charge.
Of course her son's son now drives a Daily News truck.
He took the Woodstock Nation and acid very seriously.
He dropped out, and kept dropping,
to hell's bottommost pit, according to grandma.
She died, maybe of old age, maybe of shame.
He was a truck driver, and his grandpa's grandson.
And after a morning rain, when feasible, usually by an Optimo cigar
store,
he'd aim his tires straight for a puddle,
and splash any little old lady passerby.
Afterwards there was always an, "I'm sorry,"
spoken with a British accent, the kind Shakespearean thespians mumble.
He was not common like his grandfather,
common courtesy was his cardinal rule, a revered family tradition.
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