Poor Magdalena

Magdalena kept her quarters in a Crown Royal bag.

Oh how the pretty lamp lights shone like hard candies on a stick
Full of promises and twinkle
Like the look of so many men
That swallowed down only left her feeling sick.

”Christ if you want to know the truth of it,” as they say
She don’t got no boyfriends… just some guys that smile at her.

She don’t remember what the park is like in the daytime.

The lone star blinks and she don’t care that it’s just a satellite.

Sometimes she feels like she could flip a switch
Like finding the light at 2 a.m.
A sizzle, a flash as the world burns bright
Like sitting at God’s knee
She always thinks,
”Oh Lord. If this ain’t the rapture!”
Full of hope that it is and fear of the same
And wonder - boundless wonder
At where she would fall between heaven and earth
When the next second comes she’s sitting in the dark
Cause the bulb’s just gone bad.

Sometimes she feels like that too.
Like she’s a beautiful marquee full of lights that have all gone bad.
Like the one she’s looking at ‘cause it’s 2:04 a.m. and she’s tired
Of watching the laundromat toss her underwear around.

Sometimes she feels like the security man
Pacing the gas station next door
Arms swinging,
Waiting for no one…
Which is ok ‘cause ain’t no one ever going to come.

She listens to the clouds complain.

She thinks about how Teddy used to sound
Teddy the Gun they called him cause of that time
He tried to rob the old lady with the cane
Who couldn’t understand him on account of his speech problems
About how he kept waving his little ankle piece in her face
Until he figured out she was blind and he got so embarrassed
That he just ran away.
Except he still puffed up when they called him that.

She thinks about how she’d call him
Theobore
when she got tired of him talking
And about Mikey Hot Pants, about Sid
- The ones she’s known that don’t make no sense
And how they’d be great in her memoirs when she’s old

And the lights sizzle and flash and she thinks to herself
”Oh My God. If another bulb ain’t gone bad…”
And quick as you like she realizes she ain’t inside nowhere.
At 2:12 her britches stop spinning, but she ain’t there to get them
And she wonders, she just hopes the security man will check on her
Even if she ain’t there to know.

Fatherland

You hate the jews, you hate the jews
And the gays, and blacks too
You shot and snorted and smoked your life
For forty-two years, poor and white,
Until you said it all with a tattoo.

Übermensch, they have had to fire you.
You were excised before I had time—-
Mind-boggling, your treatise of bile,
Wrapped in, “pleases” and, “thank you’s”
Sweet as apfelkuchen pie

With your head shaved clean and helmet smooth
Where it houses logic black and blue
Twisted and bent as a triskelion’s shoe.
How I struggled to comprehend you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in this rainbow town
Made Fabulouuus by the beat
Of Oonsht, Oonsht, Oonsht!
Though the sounds of the clubs are common
My Gay friends

Say there are a dozen or two.
So I could never tell where you
Lost your mind, met your kind,
I could never talk to you.
The rage stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in your insect stare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every Bigot was you.
And your ideology obscene.

Bitter lumpenproletariat, 14/88 fool
Take your vile beliefs and go - you’re through.


(apologies to Sylvia Plath)

Wichita (a song for Edward Leedskalnin)

My father still hears you sing
He still needs that vacation
He still needs you more than wants you
I know that he does
I have sensed something of you in the tension of his shoulders
In the smell of the day’s sweat
When the world sleeps
And he is alone at last in his kitchen
A bulb for his company
And a drink for his meal

I have wondered
As he drives under that baking sun,
Tracing the cables with his eyes
Dark lines darting between the rays of the light

And in this city night of perpetual gloam
In the crash of storms brewing
Moisture kissing the skin of his arms
Working beneath his heavy gloves
Born upon cool air lashing out into the night
Like waves from an unseen sea
In which he is forever lost
…I have wondered

Did you ever exist?

At three-thirty-two a.m.
He says he heard you singing
A girl and a boy and a mother of three
Were pulled from a fire
By axe and frenzy
By men in heavy coats
He says they heard you too.
That he was there to keep the line clear.

I have never seen a photograph
I have never heard your name
Yet I think I know you
From the hollow, haunted emptiness in his eyes.
You live out there somewhere
Somewhere that can’t be touched by fingertip.

I have told him stories,
News of the world
Tales of satellites and radio towers
Tales of cold science fiction
And phones that talk to the sky
He dismisses me and my world of the now

I know
He will never come back.
He hears only you
In the soft whispered words
Of one tin can tied to the next.