Robert Knox Verse-Virtual 2019 June

June 2019

Bionote: I'm the author of two chapbooks. "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty" was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award for poetry. "Cocktails in the Wild" was published last year by Unsolicited Press. I'm also the author of "Suosso's Lane," a novel of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. If you're interested in any of these, email me at rc.knox2@gmail.com. The first two poems below are 'dream poems' in response to this month's optional theme. The third one combines a recent fascination with British weather slang and one of those 'somethings that happened in the gym.'

He Dreams He Burns His Book

A very large man emerges from the toilet
It's not his fault, we say
We all must give something up.
Not my chocolate, I protest,
huddling in the corner, the blanket pulled over my head
Thus I appear to strangers as a slumped mountain
covered with coarse, brown grass, begging
for somebody to take me down
As for the others
They survive on ants and mud-covered
acorns, unearthed by leased squirrels
Times were hard too, when I was a child,
Gramps says
You think this is bad?
We ate the toes of plague victims
Our pens skipped
And we coated our fingers in icicles
to have something to drink

The old will go first
turning into birds at first light
and vanishing with the stars
as if called to duty
in different timelines
My time will come
We shall not live so long
as to grow wings
and fly like the Angels of
Spoiled Expectations,
harbingers of endless leisure, unearned income,
Or see so much
of the deadness that men do

Point of Origin

Emotionally speaking
I am hanging from a tree,
after the rebellion, as widely predicted,
failed miserably
I am seen from camera angles that bear into
the shooter's profile as he locks onto a target
Some uniformed vampire, with blood
in his eyes, who will pay,
I vow, for all his kind
It is worth it, I tell myself,
emotionally speaking,
this moment, regardless of what happens later
Why do the apostles of organized hatred
Draw from me, and perhaps the others
standing below, waiting their turn
to go out on a limb,
so much hatred from saps like me?

I begin in the gas flares
from old volcanoes
after the shouting, after the rodeo
after the liberation of the camps
And the round-up of the collaborators
those snakes with camouflage
on their backs
that slip into law offices, ordinary
places of worship or employment
social clubs for the washed-up demographic

I begin in the mud slides
spawned by the wild fires of the shattered heart,
veins of private grief and video revolution
I begin with the itchy finger,
the taste for vengeance, the look of finality,
the liking for the lone assassin

When I mount that tree
I want notches on my belt

Just Gray

Not 'raining stair rods' or 'a bit black over Bill's mother,'
as the Brits say (or some of them)
Just gray as Grandma's hair
after the beauty parlor gave her a perm
(I misunderstood the 'beauty' part)
Today is not a beautiful day: it's color-free,
pale as the guy running beside me on the treadmill
at the YMCA
I took him, for the thirty-five minutes we spent
silently huffing beside one another
in the parallel universe of running in place
(getting nowhere: the fable for our times),
as a youngish fellow half my age
with the washed-out fair hair of the middling tribe,
largely secreted within a tightly fitted cap --
they do wear them -- these sporty guys...
given his long limbs, evident muscles,
and strong, fit-fellow's stride

As we engaged in our separate studios of
tacit competition
All the young ones run a swifter pace than I do,
as is only fitting
Ah, I say, but I outlast them --
Not "tipping it down" or "slinging it down"
Not really, but raining steady clod-hopping
footfalls, with a light swing to echo
my truly trendy West African world music
The capped athlete beside me keeps it steady up
-- until the phone sounds, or signals (whatever we say they do) --
and, of course, his kind would,
he responds at once, slows to bare nothing,
speaks not too loud, a consideration I silently approve
and acknowledge with an assessing silence of my own;
then paces still more slowly till he plain gets off the 'mill,'
on which I continue to go roundly nowhere,
to attend to some errand

and -- lo and behold, from my perspective --
the shock of hair emerging from under his bonnie cap
is gray as New England sky in the messy month of May
not fair as I had misconstrued, one of those far too common
forecast failures...

The fellow must be nearing my own class,
and with so strong a pace, a tribute to a fitness
I can only imagine, not remember, never having achieved it
... but when he leaves, I go on and on,
and on,
in a manner of my own
A graying ghost with a steeplechase inside

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