November 2001 | back-issues, poetry
[b]Neither Here Nor There[/b]
Otis, in all his mercy, on some lost tablet,
etched for granite minds his stony commandments:
Elevator decorum demands agreement,
look forward, keep space within a space,
appendages shall never rise in gesture,
nor brush the flanks of erected riders,
and weathered souls?–the topic weather!
the irony of the getting off before got on.
And, so too, in a dusty corner of Metro’s chamber,
locked in a file without a key,
the rules of disengagement have a proper seal,
codified and passed by council,
(forgotten but by one forgotten civil servant)
for rider’s (with riders), the commuting clan.
Have proper change, expression changeless,
avert the gaze, less it acknowledge
the trip has no sure destination,
and always be an unspectacular specter
traveling in a tram stuffed with empty ghosts.
Oh, we’ve seen them before, while awaiting the call
at the dentist office, leafing National Geographic
of an unpeopled place, those imposing, inscrutable faces,
the blank eyed and stony forms, gray seaward facing,
expressionless, looking like wayward bicuspids
incisively needing bridgework to bring there to here:
those distant looks embracing distance
in the silence of an ethereal, blank stare.
But who among us does not wait
For one to twist upon his base and
falling to the ground with a heavy thud,
blink awake the heavy lids upon its face,
unsmack his frozen, muted lips,
unstick the ears and take in sea-sound,
and roll downhill upon the ground,
laughing and squealing with delightful spree,
plunge splashing into the unknown ocean.
[b]Insurance Man[/b]
He sat in our living room,
papers cluttered across the coffee table,
the computer print-outs of future fortune,
financial security, and an implied spiritual bliss.
The self-assured manner of one who knows:
Whole life, term, annuities–it was all there.
To hide chain-smoking cigarette breath,
he sucked Hall’s mentho-lyptus,
rolled each drop cheek to cheek, while tallying figures,
puzzling over “the possible.”
Puffing through his declamations,
he rolled side to side, cheek to cheek,
upon the straining springs of our worn sofa.
It was then, as I remember;
after nodding toward “the wife,”
his face grew flushed,
a cold sweat broke about his brow,
and he clutched his pounding chest.
Falling face forward upon our financial future,
his head smacked our prospectus hard-table center,
like a piece of the rock,
and he died,
no doubt,
with a tidy little portfolio of his own.
[b]Horizon Highway[/b]
When we were young
we rumbled down the freeway,
top down, cutting a rush breeze,
radio blasting over steamy asphalt.
Sidelong, I watched you,
a hair blown Medusa
in mirrored sunglasses,
burning the horizon.
Time’s collisions and
weathering circumstance
have faded the paint,
worn the upholstery,
and, now, the rag top seldom down.
On occasion we laugh recalling
the days when we chased a hot pink sky,
and did not notice
the fleeting images
receding in the rear-view mirror.
[b]The Highland Theater Lobby at the AIDS Fund-raiser[/b]
See her, over there,
it’s Solo Sandy,
The girl with a one-eyed Siamese cat
(Half-Mongolian, I’ve been told),
smoking a cig during intermission
at a “Surprisingly Sassy” show.
Standing in the theater lobby,
black hair and gown, dark eyes,
Mediterranean complexion, she
looks alone like a kidnapped Helen,
amidst soft and feathered barbarians
each extravagantly trying to outdo
the simple, classic elegance
of this quiet beauty, this
stranger in a strange land.
She, unaware of the corpse-littered battlefield,
never notices the vanquished,
the slain victims of her bloodless victory,
nor the suitor preparing the ship.
by Michael Carano
([email]michael_carano [at] hotmail [dot] com[/email])
November 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
[i]for John Sweet[/i]
God whirls around you
And you do not see him.
You are Heisenberg.
If God chose to
Appropriate your poems,
Your brittle images –
So lucid that they make
The back of my eyes ache –
Would be lost to me.
An entire universe would
Cease to exist.
You have prayers,
But God knows that
You are not yet ready for Him…
November 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
Her first words to me were, “NUH-uh!”
And my moniker, preceded by “Mister,”
And a self-assured presumption that
The little-sister idiom “NUH-uh!”
Would stock IMPORT in my universe,
And that the wily honorific, “Mister,”
Would warm my cockles
With conjectured, chaste
Reflections of scrubbed-cheek guile,
Me and my old fart,
Pot-belly, gen-gap ways…
Well, they did, eventually.
Days become years,
Little sister blooms into big sister,
And then into the flows of womanhood:
Forms and echoes and gestures
So sweet they remind us old farts
Of what never really goes away…
The caroms of the very young
Submit to the antics of youth;
The misery of her first hangover
Etched into her face a gray portrait
Of how she will look when she is eighty.
Never again, never again…
But the young never stay old for long,
And they never master a theme
On the first pass. Party brute!
Careful examination of any person
Reveals the form of their development.
Knowledge knobs and deficiency-wells
Jut and maw.
Spires, passions, ridges, hard-won lessons,
Furrows of ignorance…
The warp of their gestalt
Is quite unique, quite real.
Rare in the young gestalt,
Amongst the bumps and curves
And skids of knowledge
(That us old farts
Took in stride ages ago,
That the young can’t get the hang of,
Like baby monkeys fishing for termites
With a stick)
One observes a sense of purpose.
She has found one: Sports Therapy!
(Whatever that is)
It fits inside her existence like a skeleton,
Defining shape, imparting form,
Setting healthy limits to frenetic motion.
All is delineated by this passion,
From the jockness of her boyfriend
To the opalescence of her eyes,
From her chipper disposition
To the firmness of her butt…
The young are clandestine
And do not share their commerce
With old farts, who watch rheumy
From a distance, now and again sage,
Often yearning for what
they once were,
But no longer understand.
The young are inaccessible.
Two generations cannot occupy
The same path at the same time;
Gen-gap is a natural law,
Like gravity and pathos.
The bumps and seams of experience
That defines a generation’s wisdom
Must be as unique as the atoms of its metal,
Or all would cease for lack of purpose.
Some young early attain the age of reason
And meld with us old farts in that
Venn coincidence of acuity
Vital to all generations,
A mutual denial of the inscrutable,
An affirmation of the mutual.
No proof is possible, but it is nevertheless
True that the wisdom of each contributing
Generation is perfectly, splendidly equal,
Precisely proportional, flawlessly apposite.
This is a matter of profound disbelief
In the older generation,
And hapless frustration in the younger.
At times her wisdom is so marvelously vulgar
That she blushes to her breasts
And hides her face in a towel.
But manifest innocence is a perfect breastplate,
And a pure heart washes a dirty mouth.
She refers to me as a “MOM,” which means “Mean Old Man.”
That is her real gift,
A fabulous facility for slicing through
The bullshit and cobwebs that
jaundice the terrain of this ol’ fart
To intermittently afflict those about me.
She don’t play those games. She calls me
MOM when I’m a MOM so I know I’m
Being a MOM.
But she sometimes shares a soft hugging breast
(As some women do)
In celebration of the occasional warmth
I manage to display.
Sagacity in the young
Should be heralded abroad,
Like a royal birth…
So, in the mirror of her leaving
My heart turns once, a rolling pang,
And an amused tear climbs from one eye,
Left for right, and flees into my shave,
A diffusing balm for a sweet loss.
We share a common bonfire, she and I,
Me out here, an ol’ fart,
She over there, a quick squirrel
Cavorting without a cage
For rapturous young purposes,
And I smile, even as I pray
That she does not set her brush afire.
October 2001 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
your child is dying
in some version of america
i never wanted to know
the poem slips into my blood
at five in the morning
without a sound
we were closer to
something beautiful at one point
i think
were alive in a different way
that couldn’t last
and my voice gets too loud here
my son is asleep in the next room
the kitten curled up on his pillow
and the edges of this day
have begun to drag themselves
out of the darkness
what i wanted
wasn’t to be someone else
but maybe someone
better
not a priest
but a conquistador
a phoenix
and i am tired of feeling
gravity’s pull and i am crawling
towards the year of
crucifixion
belief in nothing is still
belief
but april refuses to see this
what grows between us
becomes something more complex
than war
October 2001 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
this will be my year
blood and famine
and small crucifixions
and there is nothing i can do
to stop any of it
the shadows of birds
across
the walls of this room
the names of the dead
written on tiny scraps of paper
buried by the water’s edge
but nothing grows and
nothing grows and
nothing grows
and it’s october
and the wind cries all night
tears your face from my mind
and then it’s november
the missing girl turns
seventeen
her parents walk away
from their religion
let the flowers
fall from their hands and
gather up whatever bones
they can and i have no
words of comfort
i have prayers
but no god
that the sounds are made
at all
is the important thing
