v is for vicissitudes
and venom
vile
and vicious dudes
and vaults where wait ill-gotten gains
and vectored illness
vapored veins
..
but v is not for victory
not with this veiled vainglorious line
the varlets scheme predictably
to let the poor die on the vine
2 minutes is enough
To tell you life is rough
To wish you well to urge you 2B strong
And hope you get your sleep
Your sanity to keep
Your loved ones make U right when else is wrong.
When you are a worker you give yourself over
To tellers-of-you-what-to-do,
Repetitive labor makes thought a Mars Rover
While memorized muscle slams through,
With each passing hour your laborer’s tower
Gets storey’d with stories unmeek,
Through Monday past Hump Day as your superpower
Assembles a Full-Time-Paid-Week.
..
Afterword: for two and a half years I’ve earned money as a prep cook with physical labor, slicing tomatoes and chicken and carne asada, making Bloody Mary mix eight gallons at a time, portioning ranchero sauce (messy until you learn how) and carnitas (greasy no matter how well you know how) and refried beans and Spanish rice and precise weights of lunchmeats wrapped in “day bags” labeled with the day of the week by which they must be either used or discarded, usually done fifty at a time. And there’s a lot of other stuff like that, all depending on the orders of the day. It is satisfying and exhausting work for this septuagenarian and I’m grateful to be capable of doing it, but I do SO look forward to my days off.
i. non-denial isle
i was talking to my good friend lyle/who was walking his chihuahua kyle/in the midafternoon/when an ICE-y hot goon/pepper-sprayed away my charming smile
after that my recollection’s misty/but i must’ve got a little fisty/what with ICE-man on the ground/and a wannabee hound/yapping that there were yet more fascisti
so we beat it to the subway tunnel/where the thug squad wasn’t apt to funnel/and we got to my place/and I washed off my face/but my left eye wept a salty runnel
manhattan is a ravaged isle/often wonderful and often vile/but the new mayor’s cool/and he’ll take us to school/to learn how to practice non-denial
ii. hot hand
ace of diamonds
ace of spades
sweet mariah’s mons
three queenly maids
iii. got it get it got it get it good
my mom like so many a scold on a tear
claimed if she told me once
she told me a thousand times. au contraire:
’twas only nineteen (said the dunce).
lucky 13
i keep my notions in a cache
of digitalization
three thousand such or so i stash
right here in Gary Nation
and if you read this i am glad
and if you like it i rejoice
we share the journey i have had
and you have heard my online voice.
..
it was a different life i led
way back in twenty twelve
a night clerk in a red-rocked stead
with passions yet to delve
flash forward through this decade-plus
new friends and venues, loves and loss,
and constancy with some of us
and cherishing beneath the gloss.
..
Friends, my soul swells with the warmth you radiate. The most important part of my journey is the heart-to-heart interaction with those I admire and laugh with and love. May we all cherish each other whole-heartedly!
you, tensile
your tensile strength [resistance to being pulled apart]
is measurable [we used to draw and quarter]
spoon breadth and length [height variable with tilt]
is pleasurable [tactilely, tastefully, visually]
be you a sketcher [recommended: ticonderoga black]
or a glutton [feeding your face with pleasuring spoon]
or arrow fletcher [a half-lost profession]
shredding mutton [for a spoonable soup]
..
[so much goes on without a trace this dusk that dawn at seasoned pace yet be you other woman man your brain is like a garbage can and fills with substance miscellaneous nacreous spacious subcutaneous and “that reminds me” is a riff that gives a skunk an air of spliff so pluckable our mem’ry’s strings and plucked we are as on we soldier and rhyme comes lordly from the rings a character named fatty bolger]
thoughts about how fragmented all our personalities must be to navigate our roles
led to a memory of latin class at glendale high school in the late 60s
miss nelson discussing the commentaries of the gallic wars by gaius julius cæsar
and that they began with “all of gaul is divided into three arts”
going to google translate and typing english to latin “all humanity is divided into four parts” yielded a sentence-cased version of this poem’s title
chosen because the evils of the world are divided into four parts in the revelation of saint john the divine
as famine, pestilence, war and death, called “the four horsemen of the apocalypse”
and it may be argued that our personalities are faceted by our response to these four phenomena:
when we seek sustenance we hunt and/or gather
when we are sick we shun our kith and kin and seek medical help
when we contend with rivals and other challenges we alter our blood chemistries as if arming ourselves
and when we face doom we cloud up, deny, negotiate, grieve and accept
..
all of these mindsets will be flavored by love or the absence of love
the big challenge is to integrate them all well before your last meal
summoning the four non-horsefolk kindness, awareness, reason and truth
for a wealthy shift of focus and a well-finished race
a tomato-slicing employee dumped
eighty-eight point eight pounds, forty kilos, of tomatoes into a large container
and filled the container with anti-bacterial “veggie wash” near the veggie-washing sink
and let the tomatoes soak for more than a minute
then dumped out the wash into the sink,
slid the container onto his pushcart,
wheeled the cart back to the workstation,
and began using a mechanical tomato slicer
to slice tomatoes into five-pound heat-sealing bags
one tomato at a time. it is a job
well suited to one with a long-distance runner’s
or afghan-crocheter’s mentality,
someone who drives satisfaction from repetition
and precision.
but even runners and crocheters need some distraction
from repetition that may grow more tedious
with each passing hour. the tomato-slicing employee
found he had just such a need, so he broke up the tedium
by plucking out tomatoes in one specific area of the container
so that a cavity was formed
in the volume of tomatoes, and the cavity became a cave
as the tomato-plucker reached the container’s floor
and additional tomatoes were plucked
from the floor level while the tomato walls,
kept from collapsing by weight-pressure
from the top layers, were pluck-eaten away.
as far as the plucker could tell, this handiwork
did not slow his production, and may in fact
have increased his focus and efficiency.
..
eventually, of course, a wall collapsed, and when it did
the tomato-plucker suddenly realized
that he was unwittingly modeled a form of erosion
that bore a slight similarity
to the process by which structures
like the Grand Canyon
were formed.
he was elated and chagrined to find
that his working time had also eroded away
and he would have to hustle to clean up his station
by clock-out time.
..
as he clocked out he felt regret
that he was no longer in high school
and was this unable to convert his discovery
into a Science Fair project, but he still
felt ridiculously good.
my sweetheart is cold in toledo ohio
o my how i wish i were there
and singing a tropical song me-o my-o
and running my hands through her hair
but pulling up southwestern roots has proved tricky
and doing it right will take months
with phone calls and flights we slip troubles a mickey
and damn the torpedoes for once
..
december the first flips the calendar’s page and
brings her and me closer to fine
with help from an ember as off-broadway stagehand
and membership not quite divine
in thirty-one days we’ll be in ’26
the year we will always remember
for getting our glow with cohabitant kicks
igniting our flame with an ember
above grant street near 16th street flies
a bucket brigade of airplanes
zooming shadows across the long building
on the north side of the street
one by one
..
the landing gears lower
for the runway to the east
..
every two minutes a noise of jetwash
..
the shadows shift by time of day and time of year
..
tubes full of flyers
looking like winged lipsticks
going going going
landing taxiing emptying
moving life along
One with Clay, Image and Text 