Poetry

There was a classroom, and concrete steps

Far too massive for the standing

Of someone as small as I would ever be,

Posing unsuspicious forever

With my powder-blue jacket

In a photograph of frozen trust.

And there was a window in a door,

Ruining my Mother’s clean getaway,

Allowing us the cruel mercy

Of seeing each other’s tears.

We blazed bright green and crimson

Through timeless dirt-road summers,

Daring school to ever come again.

Flinging our bicycle-selves headlong

Down rutted Earthen scars,

Caterpillar tread-marks rattling laughter out of us

As Life picked the world up by its feet

And shook coins of sapphire and gold

Out of its surely bottomless pockets.

Cornsilk cigarettes, surf guitar

And the giddy taste of forbidden words

Punctuated our shimmering innocence,

While trees that could not ever be that big again

Conspired to hide and urge us on,

Singing the sad and beautiful

Whispered witness of change.

The Huffy lawnmower factory smelled

Of oil, acid and vending machine coffee,

Re-writing day and night

In strange fluorescent amber

And alive with the cicada sound

Of drill-presses and assembly lines.

Sleep-walking in from a rust-bucket Vega

At seven in the morning to stare

Into the emptiness of my own hands,

Doing the death-defying dance

Of what needed to be done.

A kid clocking in...

A father clocking out

I am forever there,

With my family on a Sunday

In the country outside a Tasty Freeze

Staring still in stunned fascination

At the unimaginable novelty of life

As my sweet Kentucky-Grandma

Hollers, “Do something Ray!”

And wrestles the chimpanzee

Who has grabbed her pocketbook,

Leaving me to hold the terrible responsibility

That anything is possible.

“Harmful or Fatal if absorbed”,

Ralph didn’t give a damn what it said on a Dyanap can.

His arms were by-god proud to be workin-man orange

From the elbows down all summer long.

Dallas chain-smoked teeth-held Salems

And when it came time to clean the Co-op augers

He didn’t need no dumbass gas-mask

Just to stop puking from the methane.

Karl just wanted to be left alone,

Preserving in alcohol some ancient grievance

So deep and heavy that his eyes

Couldn’t leave his dragging feet.

I…preferring a more subtle poison,

Was dreaming of the music business.

One of thirty

In military perfect rows,

I sat by the door, always first

Back when things were alphabetical.

Another teacher came in...Miss Gale?

She and Mrs Bozworth spoke in strange whispers

That moved across their faces

Like gathering crows.

A television was squeakily wheeled in.

President Kennedy had been shot.

We could feel the slow unnameable turning

Of something deep beneath our understanding.

Three teachers stood together talking in the corner.

One of them laughed.

What does a kid do with that?

The world was surrealistic Rockwell.

At the Coliseum I’d seen Hendrix

Bloom alien and florescent

Out of the new familiarity of Chicago

While high-heeled mothers in June Cleaver print

Sat behind wild-haired whirling dervishes

Dancing barefoot in orange robed delirium.

On TV, Viet Nam was peaking out,

Apollo 10 was peeking back,

Gunsmoke and Gomer Pyle

Were whistling past the graveyards

Of Manson, Martin and Bobby.

Woodstock would be over,

Kent State would come.

All I knew was, Junior High was ending

And Summer would never be the same

I had lived in Denver for 24 hours

now I was back in Indiana with 25 cents.

There had been a good bye party.

I had told my too-young wife that

I would “get things going”

then send for her and the kids.

I didn’t even know if I was lying.

I only knew I didn’t know anything.

Right off the plane I’d rehearsed with the band

and realized that work was wishing weeks away...

more long hours spent between void and vortex.

Then, in a dark Colorado bbq joint,

as I sat pretending to talk, an actual family

with two children walked in laughing

and it was all i could do not to let out the

endless scream that lay below smiling.

I could have crawled weeping east out the door

and kept on going until Indiana saved me

or mercy killed me.

My last and borrowed money bought a ticket home.

Now I was back, with a guilty stetson i wouldn’t wear,

a job I shouldn’t have, children I didn’t deserve,

a marriage I couldn’t keep, and a future

beyond my poor imagining.

A fingerless fool trying to fold midwestern morals,

shapeless dreaming and words I had not written

into something that made sense.

The Ramada Inn floor

flashed and throbbed like a blister

on the finger of I-40

pointing east toward Dayton

where the Ohio Players were

trying to hang the flesh of funk

on the empty skeleton of disco.

The world was dancing backwards

from the stolen paisley promise of the 60s

in bad hair, clown clothes and platform shoes.

The hallucinogen of hope had worn off

And I...

I had awakened with a shag, a moustache,

a wife and two beautiful children.

As clueless as the radio

about what comes next.

On Pleasant View Lane

Rabies was a word of dark power

It crackled and sparked

In our parent’s worst warnings

With the deadly certainty that

Somewhere in the black cracks

Of any blue-sky Summer day

Lived long tomorrows filled

With stomach-shots and I told you so’s.

So when, in the weeds near Steve’s house,

A nameless white dog appeared

Growling and snapping at nothing at all

We ran in screaming-scatter home,

Swearing to the painted truth of foam and fangs,

Trying on a fear that didn’t fit.

The ceremony went on forever.

Seven hundred and thirty names read,

Pictures taken, walks made, hands shaken.

And always being alphabetically first,

I was finished and waiting through it all.

Free to sit frightened and frozen

In the amber between endings and beginnings.

Uncertain what had just happened

In a moment thirteen years long.

Staring with almost curiosity into the empty place

Where wondering what was coming next should have been,

I sat...long after...

While Life, being impatient with emptiness,

Filled in the blanks.

How was I alone in that waiting room,

standing only a wall and too few years away from

my own first frightened breath?

Now four months married and younger than I’d ever been,

unprepared for the navigation of even a single life,

yet a moment from becoming someone’s father.

Half-husband to a girl who should have been

finding her path between classes in the kinder light

of a more patient and forgiving world,

stumbling instead through the dark

with a fool still a stranger to himself.

How did two so innocent and lost walk home

carrying the infinite trust of a newborn soul

and somehow stay uncrushed

by the sudden weight of all they did not know?

An album-side away,

Through a hundred fields of corn,

Down a road so ten-mile straight

That you could turn off your headlights

And drive highschool-blind

Into the promise of an Ohio night,

Through a one-light, two-state town

Where the train-track line legislated space

And turned time into a difference of opinion,

Oxford sang the siren song of

Three-two beer, bar bands, and college girls

Shimmering with impossible mystery

And smiling the “Please God” mirage

Of somewhere better.

Oh the places you’ll go!.....

So you’ve just graduated, you’re chock full of knowledge!

you’re eager and ready and heading to college!

A lawyer, a dentist, the next astronaut!

You can be anything with that big brain you’ve got!

Wait...you say you’re not going? Not thinking of it?

You say school is done and you don’t know jack shit?

Well...this isn’t so bad, no this isn’t the end.

You’re in for a BIGGER adventure my friend!

So fasten your seatbelt! hang on to the wheel

It’s the Harmless-O’Clueless-McDumbass-mobile!

You’ll Zing through a marriage and Zang through divorce!

(with two passengers who deserve better of course)

You’ll have lots of jobs, why they’d fill up the page!

Mostly maximum effort for minimum wage.

You’ll almost be a rock star, almost be a poet,

a contractor, stock-broker, before you know it

you’ll “almost have been” ‘til you’re just about blue!

You’ll have half-done more things than you dreamed you’d half-do!

But you’ll make some good friends, you might write a good song!

(and you know, when you write it you can’t sing it wrong).

Then way out when you’re gray, plus a minor bald-spot,

and you’re moping about who you are and are not,

remember this secret I’m telling to you...

... Every day of your life’s 1972

Scrappy was messing with me,

leaving our machine at the end of his day shift

set wrong so I’d wreck, or at least wouldn’t make time.

But that wasn’t why I put the grinder halfway through my arm.

Lucky to know I should loosen the tourniquet

and half-awake enough to grab the mustang’s wheel

when the night-Super rushing me to emergency

dropped his cigar in his lap and went for the Whitewater.

I don’t remember worrying about the money.

I don’t remember wondering how I’d use such incapable hands

to fold a too-soon family, innocent ignorance,

shapeless dreaming, and words I hadn’t written

into something that made sense.

I only recall joking with the doc as the stitches went in,

too well-trained at good manners to know

I was allowed to hurt.