Joyriding

My gal's beater
and us under the confluence
of booze
and the city ahead
rising-up in the sky
as we joyride
over this bridge
to the University.
My eyes spark-
out to this passenger's mirror
and its image of the Ohio River:
How that river recedes and then diminishes
in this darkness and filth
as tears of happiness suddenly begin to fall,
like beautiful and ancient stars,
from the cathedral
of my mystic ragamuffin's
wonderful,
green
eyes
onto our Jameson bottle
half-empty between her thighs.

A Vignette for Before Your College Sweetheart Leaves

You sit inside your café, and read and reread the early poetry of a dead poet. Your sweetheart sits across from you, clicking away on a laptop. You look from the computers in her tear-filled, occupied eyes out to the oranges and pink-oranges of the new-star-sky floating past the window. And this primitive twilight grandly soliloquizes the art of a heartache you cannot yet write about.

The Last Days

In such boorish stillness,
the wood-tipped
pull
again and again
pings
against the light
screwed
into the spinning ceiling fan.
I sit on a couch underneath this.
As if from a long ways away,
the peculiar movement of a thought
is paralyzed in the mouth.
And the hooker
in the apartment bathroom
closes the door,
runs the sink,
then quietly rifles
through my medicine cabinet.

The Lindner Center of Hope

While killing myself over this book on Greek mythology that I obtained from the inpatient's bookshelf, I glance up and notice a Miss Mundane sitting across from me. She is after an ECT treatment. She stares stonily at her feet; she stares as if pondering Medusa thoughts.

A Medusa turned on herself: Her two feet, now stone, quickly erode and chip-off in misery onto the soft carpet. Soon, stone dust floats into my reading light, floats sleepily into my papery gown, floats into my glasses, floats like a bedtime prayer.

A cleaning lady wakes me. I see, through unsure eyes, her closely studying the suicidal pieces of stone. She delicately picks up bits of face, an arm, a left leg, a stone heart. She places each body part in the trash bag hanging from her cleaning cart. Then, with her spray bottle, she refreshes the fake, rubber plants that bathe in this medicated, surgical light: fossilizing light which crawls into every sterile crevice of this mad void.

Driving Until the Car Hits E

The genesis of dawn's light
strikes
my car's windshield
and
ignites
floating mind-dust
or
the aftermath
of
my
hard
breakdown.
Morning
(a
gathering
of
bright,
bad
winter
illuminations)
mournfully bawls radiance
into the cold,
dead
bone
of my eye sockets
that stare ahead,
emptily,
in wait
for this car's gauge
to hit E.


Walkabout

My nomadic thoughts
run

with the dark magic
of this starry, black sky

hurrying overhead.
I follow my sneakers

down Nameless Street,
and, in curious silence,
turn up the cracked concrete

steps of a run-down church.
I stop, at its boarded-up door,

crucified from the histories of war,
and set my ear against

the forgotten hallelujah
of America.

Death, tonight, visits

Death, tonight, visits
as a warm spring sky
spread evenly
like earth over an April grave,
and these graceless dead heavens
have gone black for miles and miles
until my eyes
can no longer differentiate
sky from ground,
wide eyes which can only surrender
to this binding blackness
that fills my eyes with strange silence.

Life, tonight, rises from the dead
as a sparkling expanse speaking antiquated nostalgias
for the caveman's first dawn,
a bearded man muttering heathen prayers
amongst some kind of sleeping, faded light
until soft-noted songbirds
begin singing morning's serenade.
And as life grasps at such a melody,
at such an existence singing impossible youth,
there's the need to wander back into myself,
and search for the blinding, bright light
a newborn discovers as he is pulled from the womb.


Until Death Do Us Part

He woke up
and sleep-walked out of bed,
feeling like a drunken mutt,
muttering things.
As his habits were,
he turned on the radio,
then stumbled about
the rooms of the apartment;
he turned on the air conditioner;
he set the coffee to boil.

Peering out the blinds,
he sought morning glory.
Yet looking out at all the gold and green spring abundance:
He thought nothing.
Then, having finally lost all ambition,
he watched a stray dog
lift its leg
and urinate on a flowering bush.
"Until death," he said to the dog.
"Could this go on until death?"


The Shell Gas Station in
Germantown, Ohio

The fan by the cash register
rotates, then hits its limit,
rotates, then hits its limit.
The woman working the cash register is cross-eyed.
One eye follows me
and the other goes to a father and daughter
having chocolate malts.
The father has a large Adam's apple.
My own father and I
are not on speaking terms,
while my mother is with her new husband in Spain.
It just stopped raining.
Sun comes through the clouds
spilling onto father and daughter.
A man outside watches his gas pump change meter
switch over.
Someone departs, ringing the bell.
The father stirs his malt.
His daughter, in polka dotted galoshes,
Is hugging herself.


Laff's Bar (W arm Beer, Lousy Food)

Halfheartedly nursing a beer,
I listen to the dulcet tones
of a faraway thought excommunicating
youth's careless exuberance,
gone now,
the lost sound
of a lost cause
vomiting spiced rum and insults in a deserted alleyway,
a rotted disease of the past
past-ripe with bar-stool stories of glory and green rage
that continually morph and change
like philosophies
found in the bottom of an empty beer-bottle
then spoken by me, the patron,
to the keeper of this hollowed-out bar
who stares at the muted television
bolted into the wall.
Halfheartedly nursing another beer,

I listen to the yellowed team photographs,
row upon row of Valley View football players
framed and stuck in tough, adolescent gestures
above the liquor bottles,
stuck here onto these walls, listening,
stuck here until this bar burns down to the floor
from the uncontrollable flames of self-revelry,
or is taken up by a tornado, and even then,
with this bar floating upside-down in the sky,
with this bar floating aflame
and spinning inside natural disaster,
I'd still be sitting here, relying on my disability check,
stuck to this same hard stool, sipping this same beer,
a stiff-upper-lip-of-a-man
waiting for a movie star to slide in next to him,
in the eye of the storm,
and the woman, hair wet from tornado rain, would ask:
"Darling, can you buy me a drink?"


A Walk in the Park

Under such a silver-lined sky I hurry,
small under it,
head bent in deep concern for this park's walk,
hellish and pulled ahead by my hell-bent beagle Sergeant.

With my wind-filled black collar blown back,
with a brown-and-white Sergeant ear wind-turned inside out,
the pup pulls me on by
empty park bench after empty park bench,
empty benches without an old man to catch his hat from blowing off,
empty benches without an old woman to rest her inflamed feet,
empty benches into which lovers' names remain engraved.

We rush past
the melancholic burnt oranges and rusts and deep purples
of the fall trees along this walk

only to overhear our vanquished futures spoken
by the river's dark water trickling over black rocks.

And so we travel from the depths of this night
into the buzzing of Main Street's haloed streetlights

to become infused with
the few townspeople who congregate tonight outside Laff's Bar
with cigarettes lighted and matches shaking
and smoke which hangs purposeful in the chilled autumn air:
life contemplating other life.

But this puppy's
tail works on an absurd mystery

as we make way to our apartment,
to the studio apartment I cannot afford,
to our apartment stricken
with tragedy and with comedy and with my fledgling dreams.


A Midwestern Told around the Campfire

Germantown, Ohio circa 1700

It has been said
Chief Strongstalk's scalp
was ax-sawed from his head, then taken,
like a passion in the moon's night,
by Chief Littlebean
who fled away on horseback
from the buffalo-hide shelter,
Littlebean grasping the scalp,
and its brain and rusted-blade insane jealousies
in his bloody hands
while galloping back down
the valley toward his wife
Dances with Light's
wigwam.

It has been said
Chief Littlebean
leaps off his mare
and stumbles into
Dances with Light's
wigwam
and his Shawnee wife
draws in her breath
and clutches her heart when the bleeding ho we se
of Chief Strongstalk,
her dead lover,
is flung
before her naked feet.


An End: A Dream in which I Die

Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
Ernest Hemingway, "A Clean Well Lighted Place"

Black blood soaks and stains my castle towers.
My midnight watchmen's faces are cracked with footprint in mud.
The Jester chuckles while sitting on my throne,
And I hang,
With both my wife and son,
And rant and rave with a tongue
Throttled out,
And listen to the Jester's punchline with two deaf ears dead —
Above the usurped throne of The Kingdom of Come.