Benefit
Twenty-five bucks to get in
and not one person’s naked.
The socialite at the door is Cathy,
and she clings like a Georgia tick
to anyone whose wallet leather
she can smell. She raffles off one of her
original paintings for five bucks a ticket.
I think it’s the Pope in New Orleans,
or it could be the summer
she took a good handful of the gardener
because she’d listened to those Spanish tapes.
Everyone looks at everyone else. We bump
and pass the way ants move in a line.
It seems the people in the streets outside,
might wonder if we speak at all.
They watch our strange parade through a window
as if the building were burning around us,
and I believe I could just follow
Cathy’s topaz-covered cadaver in silence
forever, the great Mayan godhead
dropping cacao beans into the tip jar.
I’m Just Gonna Put These Cuffs On You, And I Want You To Sit Right There
When I’ve written all the poetry
I can, and whatever I had lumbering
around the wood paneled walls
of my heart has been typed
and deleted until it loses grip
on the sledge it swings, I watch COPS.
Even at three in the morning
there’s sun in the trailer park.
The light from the television
warms my face, and the dark circles
under my eyes that miss home.
The officers move like combat regiments
through the mobile homes clustered
there, the shirtless villagers marching
behind push mowers, or huddled
on pine porches nailed to blocks.
The grass grows the same here:
crawling green along the bottom
of a chain-linked fence, just enough
to keep the neighbors out, until it’s not.
That’s where I come in,
mouth full of pistachios,
searching desperately for beauty.
Look at the asp in the hands
of Officer Murphy or McCallister.
See the villager in blue jean shorts
fighting for my right to consume
nothing but caramel corn
and Wild Turkey until I swell up,
until I burst into the yellow daisies
that prance around a plastic flamingo.
To be a man of the law in that world,
and strut to the soundtrack of jar-flies.
Or to be in that single-wide,
flushing homemade dope and
waiting on the cavalry, where the sun
never sets, and I never feel the torment
of typing the word cicada, or deleting it.
I can just hold the sledge,
and think about where to swing next.