Due north from the manicured office complexes on Kansas City Road is a finger nail-bitten drinking establishment called Bar. Not The Bar or Bar North. Just Bar. And I love it for that. Inside, the walls are covered with wood paneling. The tile, the pool table and the dart board are what you might find in your neighbor’s basement. In the summer, you can sit out on a wooden deck that looks like it was crafted on a long working Saturday by a weekend handyman, probably the owner – or the owner and his best friend. Someone who owes him a favor. You can sit at the wrought iron tables and look over the edge at a blue brick auto repair shop or the trains that drag past just gaining there steam, pulling long cars tagged by grafittists. And the engineers go by watching for pretty women and maybe to tug on the whistle if you acknowlege them. I’ve seen it happen. This seems a strange place to write poetry, but it’s as good as any. Better probably.
BLUES FROM BAR
I hadn’t planned on it.
An open night
with no plans
that happened to be payday,
so I took what money was left
from the week before,
just a few singles,
and sank them into wheat. (more…)
Posted in Piece of Mind | No Comments »
Tags: Poetry
Six bucks on a vodka tonic – and pleased to get it so cheap. Anything but writing tonight. The sky is draped with clouds, pavement pocked with holes and rain drops. Me wanting to walk out on myself so I mosey to the car, parking lot, bar ledge, pink drink with two black straws and crystal ice cubes. Across the street lives Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy, Nikolai Gogol, E.M. Forster, Tolstoy, Freud, and Shelley. Bald men and babies in the book racks, both completely confident and asleep to the world. Women in casts and tennis skirts – the same woman, actually. I walk to the window on the second floor and look down on the neon trim where I was before, the revolving door, people crossing just right of the crosswalk and people still stop. No Rimbaud in the store, bare is his place on the poetry shelf. Most – the best – writers dead. I see the local interest books for identifying the birds of Missorui for the people who don’t notice them. God books, fat books, new age books written in the 1970s. Books on bi-polar disorder jump out at me as a man with a cane coughs himself up on the escalator. The stairs fold under themselves like applause, the down set on the other side, across a broad opening, so the entire upper level must be walked through before departing. What words are these people looking for? Can they be found here? Have they been written or can I write them for them? I have no need for an audience tonight – except for the Japanese girl in the cards (I haven’t seen her face but can tell her nationality from behind). So selective and yet she carries a pink purse that matches her lips. Back outside on the sidewalks, mist, the jewelry stores closed and no more engagement rings to be sold tonight, love closed until 10 AM Thursday.
Posted in Piece of Mind | No Comments »
Tags: Poetry
In the same vein as Allen Ginsberg, I offer this poem … in the guise of a Yahoo! personals ad. Ginsberg’s piece is as honest as anything I’ve ever read. When I was first putting words together, I thought I held the license to deeply personal writing – complete openness to readers – and words that were spontaneous and flowed like music. I didn’t realize the beats had beaten me to it some 30 or 40 years earlier. The times have changed since the original members were writing poetry, which was well into the 1990s. Newspaper classifieds today or the tabloids you pick up in the vending machines downtown are more likely to contain ads for erotic services than ones from innocent hearts hoping to make connections. The following advertisement is fictional. It hasn’t been posted anywhere. Given its themes and proximity to recent changes in my life, it should not be regarded as accurate or as a serious post for what I hope to find from a friend or lover. This site is not about me making a connection (that would be a side benefit.) I am merely playing around with the medium – playing the field, if you will – as a creative writing exercise. I couldn’t tell you what I want now. Probably not for another few months. But it’s fun to imagine that true love can be found through a well-worded sales approach, which is what personal ads are, in the end.
In a few hundred words, it’s almost impossible to condense a person into an accurate portrait while also making them sound appealing. So this is my attempt to make a few broad brushstrokes with a nervous hand – at least turning the sky the right shade and showing the flow in the hills. The landscape is me and you are the audience filling in lovely details from a general description I’ve presented. This metaphor may have something to do with my background as a writer. Or it could just be optimism. (more…)
Posted in Piece of Mind | No Comments »
Tags: Poetry
Toward the party lights and the muffled music that comes clear when a bar door is pushed open, the gathering places are full with warm bodies and cold faces. I walk down the dark sidewalks and at intervals the neon signs hung in bars scorch my face red, the sting as sharp as the cold wind’s burn in the fading night. I am going to count sidewalk cracks and watch where I step, study faces studying me, pretend not to notice, pause at crosswalks, look one way and step into traffic, let the beams flash on my belt metal and my coat buttons. I am searching for something in the night and don’t know what it is, but it’s lovely, and it’s in the fresh-air privacy that is easily found late Saturday into Sunday. (more…)
Posted in Piece of Mind | No Comments »
Tags: Poetry
Wine Bottles
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
More passion can be found in the wine than in the bodies, swallowed down, red or white, the results artificial and inferior to real love. Red wine is best from the bottle, when the cork has been pulled cleanly and the label peeled away imperfectly. The lips run across the rough edges and picks out the metal taste. Then the tug follows, a full-throated glug rises from bottom through to top, and the happiness with it. White wine is for happier times when the vision is clearer, when the glasses are ready and it’s drunk as soon as the bottle’s opened. For its association with more light-hearted moments, it is the least favorite among reasonable people. The dizziness that comes is the alcohol, a contrast to the indifference in the moments before. The enthusiasm that was felt when things were new between you is so far gone, you wonder about its existence, but you’re sure it was fleeting. Lying on their sides, the corked bottles are pushed back into so many racks in kitchens and dining rooms, in walls between corridors, all gathering dust, symbolically, the happiness encapsulated in the bottle, as neatly captured and framed as the smiling faces in family photos.
Posted in Piece of Mind | No Comments »
Tags: Poetry, Wine
