Ten New Poems, Vol. I

by Christopher Watkins, (p)2005 preachsongsmusic/bmi, admin. by kobalt music

You Couldn't Pay Me Enough To Be That Age Again

Morning, hardly spring,
barely anything dynamic,
just the longings of the birds.

From between the shadowed brick
of two worn Chicago buildings,
comes the oafish tensed-up gangle

of a boy with a backpack
slung over one shoulder.
Face lit by the sear

of acne across his forehead,
sheened by gel and hormone sweats,
he glares down at his boots,

angry they won't lead him
to some lustful satiation,
but instead to a pale wood desk,

under which his angry hormones
will rise and fall like cranes
through his fidget-ridden day,

hung on each appearance
of his ugly teacher's calves.
Ugly, yes,

"but you don't fuck the face,"
crowed a buddy,
who'd fucked nothing but his hand.

Twice while still in bed,
and once
in the janitor's closet.

Last night, he rubbed a girl's breast
(not breasts, but breast)
through her blouse and bulky bra

for over half-an-hour,
before he had to leave for dinner.
Later, at the bus stop,

he'll brag about how wet she was
when he put it in her. The boy,
mute as a bone,

will shift his pack across his shoulders,
scowl at his boots, feel a little sick,
and, true to form,
long for a dog to kick.

Time On A Line, And How to Know Where To Land

Dirty clothes piled up behind me,
all these suits that can't be washed,
socks as stiff as petals
pressed into a yearbook.

My reflection in the mesh
of the window in the room
shows a face no longer pretty
wan with jokes no longer funny.

Like a land gone pixellated
in a time before computers,
where a Zen monk saw the cells
when Christians only saw small mirrors.

Now the wind, forced to squeeze
into an alley it can't conquer,
winces soft as summer grass blades
split to turn young spit to whistles.

-

And somehow now,
as I sit in my small Chicago room
clamped on a sodden cigar

drinking Applejack and rice milk,
the whistle of a train
threads the night.

I hang beneath its line
netless,
just a belt over a wire.

Across Wyoming and Nebraska,
finally reaching California,
sliding down, and there it is...

-

Point Richmond,
the train yard,
and the three-fourths rim of churches
round that wasteland of a home

that I used to call home.
From where I'd walk
down to the tracks
to sit by the break in the bushes

and drink Gato Negro.
Writing poor Kerouac impersonations
on a yellow pad of paper,
and wishing I was brave.

The Last Day Of Art School

The duck-billed wind
briefly shovels
candy bar wrappers
up from off the sidewalks,
where they hover
like tiny magic carpets
over bowling alley
finger-dryers.

A withered fig of a man
crouches against a wall
across from a library-for-sale;
a lilting, thin-lipped grimace
unbalancing his used-up saddle face.
An earth-bound gargoyle,
perchless in the mid-morning sun.

My missus wears a faded cream coat
that hangs to her knees.
She wears a black scarf around her neck,
blue jeans, and cowboy boots.
She slips into the morning crowd
like paper cutting skin,
then disappears into the maw
of the subway stairwell,
same as water down a drain.
The spinning tail of her coat
like soap among the hairs.

Sailor's Moon

My quick kiss-and-two-clicks call
does nothing to grab the dog's attention.
She is riveted my some scent provoking her
from under an enormous sun-cooked rock.
She digs one-pawed, two-pawed, even bites the rock itself.

I wonder if I should stop her
before she butchers her paw pads into shreds.
I holler at her, but she gives no sign of recognition.
Later, being the good pack dog she is,
she includes me in the rove of her rounds.

Beneath the great, towering dominance of Gunsight Butte,
this dark chocolate Labrador snuffles her way across
the jagged plants and rocks of the dusky salmon clay-scape,
and I think she must be the shadow of a crooked falling star
projected on the surface of a glowing sailor's moon.

I look up and wonder if, somehow,
my life's work now is being called upon
to fulfill the wish of someone on some other world
who is gazing this way,
and wishing on the star the dog is trailing.

I want to tell them not to bother,
for the star they think they're seeing
has been dead ten thousand years,
as has the soul of the stranger
whose wish we are currently fulfilling.

Miss Mary Mack, All Dressed In Black

Inch by inch
And row by row
Body after body
In building after building
Old, and even older
Wearing cornerstones and flats
Withering away
In the harshest drain and draw
Of a pitiless Chicago heatwave.

No money left over from the rent
Meant
No more air conditioning
Meant the cool air stayed off
Until the sweat turned to dust
Until the dust turned to ink
Until the ink on page thirty
Of the Chicago Sun-Times
Said she, and all the others
Died ten years ago.

She was found in her apartment
With her lifeless yellow limbs
Running black, and black with ink;
The city buried her
In a freshly dug trench
One-hundred-sixty-two-feet long
Alongside all the other
Fallow stories.

A library shelf
Full of books
No one ever checks out,
Whose spines
Tell us names
And nothing more.

Iowa And Western

No match for the wind,
I try to outpace the coming storm.
The same foolishness

that keeps me trusting
the beauty of crows.
The lights change

like the tumbler in a Russian gun,
but still no bus,
and the clouds come hard and fast.

Behind the bus stop
is a playground like none I've known.
A child-size toucan to ride,

atop a sea of broken glass
that waits to once again
become a sandy beach.

Or maybe I'm remembering
all the warm vacations
we said that we would take,

but never did.
Sometimes it's good
to stare at the wind,

then no one can tell
if you're crying for real.

Heart Murmur

What does it mean
to say I once had a heart murmur
and now have none?

That my heart has lost
the ability to carry on
two conversations at once?

That the subconscious
of my heart
no longer gossips?

When there's many people talking,
no one voice standing out,
we describe it as a murmur.

And what I want to know is,
how is this the same
as the irregular past of my heart?

Carnival Sin

Days of breaking pottery, sitting
zazen in the yard, watching
children come to caskets, made to
weep over their fathers. Of
scraping skin to find out if the
soul surrounds the heart, like a
bag full of water
wrapped around a fish.

Blister To A Callus

Here's to every hour
that we don't spend
drafting wills,
inspecting bed pans,
or re-learning
how to walk.

Or tearing lashes
from our eyes,
crazed with anguish,
wondering how
we're to get past
the death of a child.

A child who,
for the moment,
still hovers in the halls
of our crazed imaginations,
waiting,
like an orchid under care,
for the chance
to rescue or destroy
our feral lives.

A Very Long Sabbatical

The Flower Pot.
Every street named for a flower.
Annie and I lived
on opposite sides of Marigold.
Billy was on Lilac.
We walked Narcissus to school.
There was even a girl
with a flower's name
who lived on Daisy,
though her name
wasn't Daisy.
What it was,
I can't remember now,
it's been more than twenty years.

We moved there from Cherry Lane.
I went to Red Cedar Elementary School,
named for the river
that ran nearby.
It passed under Narcissus,
through a corrugated metal tunnel.
We thought a two-headed snake
lived in its throat.
I was so proud when,
on a dare,
I finally crawled the length of it
and emerged
with muddied cuffs
on the other side.

All my friends
had older brothers or sisters.
We tried to emulate
every vice the older boys
lorded over us:
pornography,
shop-lifting,
chewing tobacco,
climbing up on the roof
of the church.

One time,
we stole Billy's brother's dope,
wrapped it in typing paper
and tried to smoke it,
choked on the acrid chemicals,
and pretended we were high.

We cased the sisters like spies
hoping for a glance down a shirt
or up a dress.

When the older kids locked us in the garage,
and the girls
did naked cartwheels
across a makeshift stage,
and then told us we'd have to get naked too,
I started crying,
screaming that I was late,
that I had to get home.
Not because I was afraid to be naked,
but because I was ashamed
of the state of my underpants,
having messed them in my nervousness.

We moved to Italy from there
when I was nine years old,
and my orbit
was never so small and strange as that
again.

My last hour in The Flower Pot
I spent in the closet
in my room,
where I'd found,
the day before,
my mother sobbing.

I wasn't crying,
only trying to imagine
what it was
she thought
she was leaving.

When I returned after twenty-three years,
the sight of the house didn't move me,
nor the garage or the streets.
But I wept
at the sight
of the river.