They Always Get Jesus In Prison

 

I see where David Berkowitz got Jesus in prison

like they always do.

Now he runs a ministry, adept as he always was

at delivering

succinct

sermonettes

delivering people to God.

He was a postal clerk, always involved

with the Message.

Such converts always have a carnival of explanations--

the Devil

the neighbor's dog

and other invented booshwah.

Susan Atkins got Jesus in prison too

and wrote a memoir

about her redemption, her will turned over

from Charlie

to Christ

but it could have been Moonies or Ekankar.

There is a rat who lives in my garage.

He hasn't heard the Good News

but he never

hurts anyone.

He has published no book, leads no prayers.

He likes to hang out behind a shovel

that has never dug a grave.

The authorities let Leslie Van Houton, Caril Ann Fugate,

and Nathan Leopold out.

Karla Homolka changed her name and might be anywhere,

at services maybe,

holding a bible and smiling.

________

Mister Barbenstock

 

Mr. Barbenstock had eaten one of his students--

a little girl who sat in the third desk, 

far right row, a tiny ladybug in a hand-me-down jar.

There was a flurry of shrill criticisms from yappy parents,

the kind who weep at every brown leaf

and drive their sissy-ass cars to carnivals on Sunday.

Mr. B (as he was known at Grimoire Elementary)

stood out like bloody steak atop a birthday cake--

this bearded, uber-correct male among the ewes.

How many had he done this to? demand school paper reporters,

caps askew in the rough and tumble of a performative press conference.

What evil lies unsuspected beneath blah blah yadda yadda.

Mr. B. hears hummingbirds in his head; they alone can understand

his infinite lovesickness, lugubrious as an engine leak

in his smoking, whirring, damaged heart, hurting him.

His life has become a kind of constant translation--

bathtub to oceanside, mini-Cooper to Graf Zeppelin,

vacant, fidgety students to roaring throng of weird cryptids!

Mr. Barbenstock blinks. The prosecutor is asking for a cardinal number

denoting his victims. Everyone has grown up in a matter of moments.

It's a math problem! He begins to instruct, his forte where he hides.

________________

for Word Garden Word List--Richard Blanco. 

Music: The Temptations I Can't Get Next To You

The Bogus Line

 

You crawl along the marrow in my long bones

and at the base of my skull, whispering in my ear.

You crawl between my legs 

and curl around my teeth and fingernails.

"Let's get fucked up." 

Even after all this time, 

there you are, my old frenemy

offering your false comfort.

I'm not the lonesome kid that I was anymore,

the one who skipped the day when they taught the language

that gets you in and gets you by.

I was with my almost-twin, the future suicide.

"Let's check out," 

The worst I'm gonna do is oversleep,

so save it, killer. 

I know you're lying cos your lips are moving.

You're the dark alley with roses at the way in.

You're the lover with zip ties in the pillowcase.

I'm the woman walking alone for miles and miles and miles. 

I'm the woman who knows your moves and bogus line.

I'm not the lonesome kid I was anymore

but never learned the language, so made up my own--

It's killer stuff and I'm

whistling past the graveyard on my way home. 

_______________-

I went looking for a poetry prompt and found one HERE. I used #3, to describe the sensation of listening to a favorite song in a language you don't understand. I chose Patricia's Mes Reves de Satin (Nights In White Satin.) I do know some French, but I'm not fluent. 

A Strange Place To Die

 

The Polo Grounds was a strange place for a man to die. 

Across the way at 515 Edgecombe Avenue,

14-year-old Robert Mario Peebles' enthusiasm

for the 4th of July hit just above Barney Doyle's eye,

killing him instantly as he watched infield practice.

He never got to see the game. 

Thirty years earlier, a fellow everyone considered to be

a mean bastard delivered a fatal pitch submarine-style.

Back on the farm, his daddy had taught Carl Mays never to back down.

Ray Chapman never got up.

No, wait, after being hit with a dirty, hard-to-see ball

with an impact so loud that Mays thought it was a hit,

Ray Chapman got up, fell, rose, and fell again on the baseline.

"Tell Mays I'm all right," were his last words.

Ray Chapman was a man with the world on a string.

Good-looking, friendly Ray, playing out one last season

at the sport he loved, was newly married and set up in a good job.

He even got on well with quarrelsome Ty Cobb

who was said to have killed a man in Detroit.

The world was his oyster.

In a New York hospital, Ray Chapman got better, then worse,

then was gone forever. His widow lived just eight more years herself.

Carl Mays never felt he had done anything wrong

on a dusty diamond July 4th, 1920 in Manhattan, New York City.

The Polo Grounds was a strange place for a man to die. 

_________

for What's Going On? An Historical Moment.  

Music: Jeff Buckley I Know It's Over

October

 

These early evenings, the sun sinks slowly,

like a 'do-ragged painter down spider-leg scaffolding.

We are all weary these days

as the world rolls beneath us and we logwalk,

our eventual fall following beside us like an unpredictable dog.

Then quietly, as crickets guard the evening filigree,

your ghost comes to me

where I smoke in the Adirondack

under the weak-sister yellow moon of the outside light,

to portend a storm that's already passed and gone.

In a canning jar, under the basement stairs, 

I have kept your hoodoo,

that sacrifice chant-dance made of woodsmoke and razor grass

that you wove to your bones

to make me love you as if you were food, as if you were solid earth.

Whether in Butte or Chicago, Pushmataha County

or Devil's Hand, it makes no difference.

Even the ocean is not shatterproof, so my bags drowse in the attic,

with old costumes and dressmaker's dummies

that you went to while I slept off the soft poison of your words.

I know why you're here.

I know why yellowjacks have stingers

and I can't write these poems forever just to stave you off.

You'll use the knife I gave you as a pick

and play some stupid banjo breakdown at my funeral

as if it were spring, as if you were sane, as if I didn't matter.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Ric Masten.

I don't smoke. The poem lies!

Music: Gordon Lightfoot "Dreamland"

Hail! Assassin

Hail! Assassin in your golden robe,

you are farewell incarnate, cold as a stone tablet.

Your masters dole out a new Fahrenheit, warming nothing

while whispering to the Ferryman that there are no coins, only handshakes.

You are farewell incarnate, cold as a stone tablet,

a corporeal machinery producing fine dust

while whispering to the Ferryman that there are no coins, only handshakes.

You palm medicine from your keepers to those already dead.

A corporeal machinery producing fine dust

is your rubber stamp of onionskin love, a doublespeak of no return.

You palm medicine from your keepers to those already dead

as your masters cry, "Hail! Assassin, in your golden robe!"

_______

A pantoum for Skylover's word list.

La Famiglia

Mom would have done well as an underworld figure,
sticking the steel into some poor bastard
then doing the perp walk holding a Le Creuset enameled cast iron skillet in front of her face.

There is something to be said for always seething with petty resentments--
it keeps a girl from going lazy,
idling away the hours wandering the arboreal colonnade
with a peach in one hand and a bible in the other.

Better  to brood under a starved star and crescent moon
bad-tempered as a sick camel,
rooting out infidels from the shadows and making them bow to the east.
After all, what's family for?

Then again, we all have our foolish hour and faint notion,
stumbling along in silver slippers,
carrying the quilled bowling ball handed us by our elders and betters.

Mom, she never believed for one minute in butterball sunshine and rock candy mountains.
She harbored a crow scrabbling just beneath her heart,
telling her quite sensibly to kill that child and kill it quick,
just like she learned at her own mother's knee.

Grandma wore ice boots,
Grandpa had no tongue and a nail through his eye.
Into the world they sent their girl to birth a scapegoat upon an altar
built from fear and silence,
the perfect place to start a family of her own.
______

for Sunday Muse #93, using the word list below for Skylover Word List.

Image at top is Ruby Cruz as teenage Annie Wilkes in "Castelrock." 

And finally, some music to read poetry by.

Haint Blue

It is those with glass bones I fear,
bones full of empty
where the shot bird leaves its ashen song.

Night is a damply rotten blindfold
where the goblin-mother
stitches madness into nightmares.

I pay the wind to betray glass riders
who place black plumes
on the panicked heads of their Arab stallions.

I call for my blue sister who fell unborn
from the goblin-mother
in disguise of oleander and moonflower.

I paint my tongue haint blue
and call her here
to grow vines of sibling song,

In threads of peace, protection, 
and soft dawn light
braided on the morning glory bloom.
___________

For Sunday Muse #91, where I am hosting.

An American Girl In The IRA

If I had it to do over again,
I'd wear a stars and stripes bandana over my red hair
and a New York Yankees jacket
honeycomb stitched with dynamite sticks.

I don't really give a damn
about political ends, but I have an ax to grind
and would sharpen it on the queen's neck if I could.
Sean, or Jimmy, or whatever your name is,

show me the street or the face and I'll blast it good.

All I did was sit there and cry, like a Kleenex in a storm drain
last time I was in London.
I've never told anybody the full dig and degree
of your lesson in knifepoint humility.

So now here comes the limousine, 
or the Royals or whatever rat bastard shit the day serves up.
My hands are steady as the moment comes around,
then I'm a red white and blue runner, righteous high

on feet never touching the ground.
_______

for mag #300.

 
 

Scene Beneath A Quarter Moon

Appetite honors no fences,
senses trespass where they will;
killing the smaller, the weaker, and the rolling in my gut,
but attaching no moral reckoning.

Singing to the moon, because she, too, is alone,
bone and blood keep body and soul together
whether my mark or your boundary approve;
moving, always closer, as the moon reflects in my eyes and off the barrel of your rifle, tracking each other, unpitying and relentless. 
_________

A chained rhyme for Sunday Mini-Challenge at Real Toads, hosted this time by my dear friend Hedgewitch.