March 2024
Bio Note: I’m a mostly-retired contractor. I’m noticing how I begin first drafts of poems in the past tense, written as history. Next day I switch to present tense, and something magical happens. They enter the poetry zone, and I enter with them. They take on new life, new details, new truth. Ah, God, how I love to write.
Lion Dreams
Harvey lurches, never walks.
His body is a puppet strung loose.
Can’t hit a baseball to save his life.
Roger the bully calls him Special Spaz.
I like Harvey, like his questions
that teachers won’t answer.
Questions like “If a lion eats you,
do you enter the lion’s soul? And then
when the lion dreams, do you dream?”
Next time Roger calls him Special Spaz,
Harvey says “We’re each special in our
own weird way. You’re special, too.”
“You calling me weird? Huh? You—”
That’s when I get grade-school famous
for kicking Roger in the nuts. Which
makes me special in that weird way.
A few decades pass to now,
this grassy park overlooking the Pacific
a continent’s width from Atlantic grade school.
I’m sitting on a black metal bench
eating a KFC drumstick. A man
beside me with short white beard,
white hair in a ponytail, tosses popcorn to
strutting doves and says “If you eat chicken,
do you swallow chicken soul?”
I gape, we laugh, we marvel at the meeting,
shake hands. His arm jerks at the elbow,
loose-jointed. Grip firm.
He says “I teach Theology at Long Beach.”
I say “I fix houses. Rehab and restore.”
“You remove the rot. Funny,” he says, “how
we are what we are before we ever know.
All of us, from conception, we are
swallowed by lions.”
Originally published in Red Wolf Journal
Three Tons
On pallets at roadside, a drop-load of
dead elephants with pink stuffing.
Gray gypsum: 120 sheets.
Pink fiberglass: 30 rolls.
Me, alone: to heft 6000 pounds
in my gloved hands, to carry
down the hillside, then up the front steps
into the house of stud walls, no doors.
To become a new home. For us. Together.
A half hour drive returning
to the cottage of our imminent eviction.
Muscles burn, mist begins. Kids in bed, asleep.
You rub my back and we soak together,
crowded but no complaints,
in the one-person tub.
Gentle rain drips.
Through sleep comes the sound,
smack of water on windows, howl of wind.
My every joint aches. Three tons moved,
stacked under tarps. Safe? Wild storm.
Roof, no doors. I’m up, dressed, drive
in blackness through fire-hose gales
to add more tarps, more bricks, then back
to the cottage where at dawn you lift
the covers as I slide in. Warm, soft.
Snuggle. Kids wake. Ah, God.
Three tons of love.
Originally published in MOON Magazine
Bust and Boom
Oscar hears voices. That, plus a home
in a shopping cart, plus frequent fist-fights
get Oscar committed to a ward for the incurable
where he hears devils but never speaks
except to say "Money talks; I listen."
His clothes rot on his flesh
as his shoulders grow short
while his nose hair grows long.
They call him Oscar the Grouch.
I solicit clothes from Elmer the retired banker
who is just Oscar's size. To my surprise
Elmer donates a three piece suit.
"Call it a bad loan," says Elmer with a wink.
I call it a magic wand.
Bedecked in Elmer's bad loan, Oscar speaks:
"It is high time we refuted Keynesian capitalism."
He speaks for hours, days, for a week and since
no one can tell if he is right or wrong,
we release him. One week later he makes
three hundred dollars on pork belly futures;
two weeks later, six million on soybeans.
Oscar now has an office
in Washington DC, a city of incurables
where he is a star on TV news.
Senators seek his advice.
Nobody can refute him
or stoop his shoulders because
money talks, and we listen.
Originally published in MOON Magazine
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