My Question For The Unabomber

 I asked the Unabomber

if he had ever been in love.

You know--before Montana--

before wandering the unforgiving winter woods

holding a frozen tulip

and a rolled-up poem

nestled inside a pipe as if you were a minstrel.

I asked him

if anyone had ever inhabited

the slow-cooking smoker

of his heart.

Was there ever the very emblem

of desirability

in the formula of anyone's eyes?

In your Harvard classes

full of second-week quitters

and callow

nattering plebes

was there never any elevated romantic

who might have solved for the

impossible equation

of your isolation and your need?

Oh Teddy, 

you coward,

you murderous nutjob,

if the one whose heart could have stopped you

were to speak at last to your wobbling soul,

could you still be fixed

even now,

or are you already damned? 

Perhaps my question itself

is like postage on a parcel

that can carry your remainder

softly out of shame

or suddenly into Hell?

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Ghost Eaters.

Music: The Fleetwoods Mister Blue

Greta and Ted, A Love Story

 

image by Corinne Geersten

Ghosts don't normally send fire through the mail, but they tend

to be a little bit muzzy-headed, the dead.

Water stamps temper these communications slightly

but flame is a Gypsy and wanders brightly,

making suggestions of passion on the carpets where they end.

Greta, not knowing she is dead, not knowing she's a shade,

sends these immolations postage-paid

and if such silly wooden houses go up, if roofs collapse,

then their occupants' lives, like hers, will lapse

and you can't fight infernos with a lemonade glass.

Poor Greta, sharing hell with the taciturn Unabomber,

who wishes all kinds of ill upon her,

who stinks and mumbles and never changes clothes or shaves

so that when one letter is returned to sender

she will blow and burn so that none can mend her.

Lonely Greta, sullen Ted

with a packed pipe and a black rose on their summer-dry graves.

_______

for Sunday Muse #214.

The Post Office of Souls

 

At the Post Office of Souls, there's a late letter

and the hand that wrote it is the hand that delayed it.

The sorting machines are made of jacaranda and white iris--

only the postmistress is fully automated, an Egypto-Mechan perfect fit.

Stamps roll out from dreams and are hard to remember.

Women hired to sleep them also catalog--they are pregnant with postage

and have your address on file, a complete roster of your life in miniature.

They deliver you, cradle you, sing you on through to your dotage.

The aisles are of indigo water mermaid clerks circulate under

estimate arrival times, currents, allowing for windage and mercurial local poohbahs.

Open an envelope, catch the scent of lilacs, bribe Anubis with a kiss

and receive safe passage, receipt of contents, S.W.A.K and certified, you cannot lose us.

________

for Dverse "Compound Me." I have used "underestimate."

Brenda Lee

Why is Brenda Lee so sad
crouching inside the juke box in her bullet bra? 
Does time fit together like black and white checkered flooring,
and is Brenda Lee blue over a past life she cannot alter?

I would kiss Brenda Lee if she were not imprisoned 
by the black edges
of phonograph records. 

I would kiss her, though I am not the boy she longs for,  
or a boy at all,
and I would give her the Coca-Cola clock
right off the wall as a cure for longing.

Why is Brenda Lee so sad?
If I could, I would gather photographs of fine days gone by,
arrange them in a photo mailer,
and address them to Brenda Lee,
inside the Wurlitzer,
Future, USA.
_______

for Camera FLASH! at Real Toads.

 
 

letter

A house
inhabited 
by blackbirds.
A window
where a woman stood
after losing her child.
A lawn
once anointed
with lemonade.
A fence 
repaired three times
by the same hands.
A porch
where a deaf dog
slept away his days. 
No car
with JUST MARRIED
and a suitcase in the back.
A letter saying
VACATE. UNSAFE.
THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED. 
______

for dverse poetics. photograph by sharon knight.

 

Post Card

I wonder if this is normal?
If you were here, you would not care that the sheets were plain.
You would hold up your finger,
gently, testing me for concussion
and you would find me to be the same as I ever was--

unable to name the date, the address of this hotel,
or the President of the United States, but I never could anyway.
Oh, love of my heart,
he can't close such unhurried lips around that finger--
let alone each one in turn as the windows turn coral, then azure.

Where did you go?
I must have fallen asleep, and when I was awakened
by the hotel doctor and the day shift desk clerk,
you had gone. "Who?" they ask. "Who?'
Beautiful One, I can't remember your name--forgive me!
But I remember your bare hip, the rise and dip that God Herself envies.

I was made to leave the hotel, and the emergency room as well.
I bought a post card with a dollar I found nested in mud
beside a building in an unfamiliar neighborhood.
My hand, the one you held, the one you kissed and guided
between your legs as you spoke my name,

stopped, palsied, when I tried to address the card for you.
Where do you live? What is the name of the street
where you watch, every morning, the windows turning coral, then saffron?
How much postage will carry my heart to you, immediately?
Why can't I remember anything, darling, except that moment when I was happy,

as you stretched out, soft-skinned on top of me
and I knew everything, and nothing, and loved you so much?
_________

for "Kerry Says: Let's Send A Post Card" at Real Toads.  

By Morning, Disaster; By Afternoon, Despair

What the fucking hell is this?
Another dunning, a fresh demand?
Passed like poison from the hand
of the postman, Satan's accomplice?

What's this annoying stupid shit?
Disguised to look as if it matters?
Faux certified, in official patterns
denoting nothing, largely writ?

Begone, hateful courier in blue!
With your clanking keys on a pocket chain!
With writhing form and crawling brain,
daring to stamp it "postage due!"

Sure as pestilence, slow as a snail!
Stuffing my slot with each babbling ad--
driving me nervous, driving me mad!
Curse you, eagle who bird-bombs the mail!
_____

Mailed in, for Susie's challenge at Real Toads. She asks us for the real thoughts behind the faces in John Millais's portraits.

Historical note: Up until the early 1950s, there were two mail deliveries each day, morning mail and afternoon mail, hence the title.

Bill's Railroad

Since taking up model railroading,
William receives a lot of parcels in the mail.
They contain little cars, little engines,
and a little plastic boy carrying a pole and pail.

To his face, the mail lady calls him Bill,
but behind his back she calls him "that old shithead."
She should be kinder; she doesn't know
that when his wife passed, he wished himself dead.

It was the Beverly Hills Express that saved him.

There are trees with lichen leaves,
and a mountain made from papier mache
with a tunnel going through it and
next to that a neatly painted little highway.

Muttering "more crap for this asshole,"
the mail lady arrives with an important addition.
She smiles, he thanks her, and he knows
it is his beautiful plastic lady, arriving in perfect condition.

Bill admires her kick pleat skirt
and her sunny smile which will never fade.
Carefully gluing her feet to the platform,
he offers her his devotion, and a tiny glass of lemonade.

Bless my hobby which has saved my life, he thinks, and bless consistency of scale.

Bill gives his '50s lady a cotton bubble
in which to say anything her heart desires.
What does she say? What do women ever say?
Anyway, they do seem happier talking, and now his town is entire.

She will always stay. Where would she go?
The tracks are circular and end where they began,
so even if she heeds the "all aboard!",
it will always be 1955, in Beverly Hills, and there she'll be again.
________

for mag 282.

CBU

Maude Millicent Rosevear, generally considered pleasant and quite the beauty,
sent her hopes off, by mail, in 1955.
Consider her surprise when they return to her in 2015. 

Maude, now aged seventy five,
nearly trips over the parcel while walking out of her door
on her way to the pharmacy for her numerous prescriptions.

"Non-standard surcharge," states one of the rubber stampings.
(That business with Alice, at college, in 1959?)
The postal system cares about her package. The plastic wrapping says so.
Nonetheless, they have returned it.

"Postage due", "Addressee Unknown", "Unclaimed" all on the side.
Bent, frail, living in a mother-in-law apartment attached to her son's house,
Maude supposes the return of her hopes was inevitable, 
but it didn't feel that way when she sent them. 

Maude goes back inside and sits down to compose a letter--
--an old fashioned paper letter--
to the Unabomber in prison. 

"Dear Teddy," she writes, "I finally understand."
Perhaps this one will get through, she thinks.
Perhaps he will even answer, and if he does, 
she must be sure to be the first one to the mailbox, and to not lose her key.
_______ 

for Get Listed at Real Toads. I used "prison", "mail", "inevitable", and "system".

CBU--Cluster Box Unit, a freestanding outdoor multiple delivery receptacle for mail.

CBU-55--cluster bomb fuel air explosive. 

Soul And The Postal System

In Her wisdom,
the Goddess wraps each Soul in flesh,
like a folded letter,

and then each letter into its envelope
to come aware by degrees and be delivered--
and loved--
if not by her bearer,
then certainly by the Deity.

This is why philatelists
are the true priests.
"Six pounds, nine ounces."
Care and Time are the postage which sends each mailing out
and into the World.

Touch my body,
My Love, my darling--
my skin, my face, my breasts are the characters
of the language which is both Common
and Mine alone.

Corrupt and change my usage, as I will yours,
until we say more together
than we ever did before.

As if in a mailbag,
here we are, for the moment,
enfolded.

Carriers are the new Angels,
and though the paper of us will be read--
will fade--
will go illegible and lose meaning,
thrown away--

In the same way that each thing and creature
dissolves, even while flowing forward,
we will return,
wirelessly,
two souls wrapped around each other,
couched in our own particular and hybrid tongue,

delivered back the Goddess, who says,
"Ah! You're back,
My brave and wandering Beauties."
_______