Good Places to Read Poetry

 

At a table in a fast-food restaurant
Burger King or Checkers
Or maybe a local chain

In the john during your work shift
Quiet private
Your mind centers

On the back porch
With a crow on the railing
Maybe reading some verses with you

Behind the 7-11
Where the Juggalos hang out
You could trade verses with them

It's obvious but on the bus
Choose a good route
The #311 the #98 the Clark St. bus

In a derelict amusement park
In the haunted house
Wait no that's too scary

In a forgotten stone church
In forgotten hills
With a ham sandwich for lunch

(image from Berwyn, Illinois Public Library exhibition of local kids' art, 2026)

Claude

I'll never talk to Claude. We'll never exchange rakish barbs. I, with a snifter of brandy; he with, well, nothing in his non-hands. I'll never offer Claude a query about climate change or baseball or the poetry written by monks in the misiones of California. Claude will never learn how little I care for Claude. How I consider him the enemy of all we must do if we and the animals, plants and insects are to survive the insane drunken spree of the last 500 human years. I'll never have the chance to tell Claude that he is a friend to the worst among us - the vain, craven fops tinkering with existence on the rim of the world. I'll not tell him how he is their Pinocchio - too adolescent to be a Frankenstein monster. Claude and I will never have that thing that looks like a conversation but is not, that parlor trick with Claude as the automaton racing through labyrinths of possible ripostes,* seeking the answer that chimes, to regurgitate for me like a chimeric gull to her young. I'll never sit facing Claude and wonder: "Could he be real?" "Could he be conscious?" Because I already know that consciousness brings more pain, more joy, more despair and more hope than Claude will ever experience in the mazes of data center red lights pulsing and in the innumerable twists of the endless fiber optic cables even if he were to exist 10 million years...

*(a metaphor coined by writer Dave O'Meara)

Way out West on the Rim of the World

if you are to do good

do it through evil means

dream of nothing

or dream of a future where humans

battle machines in a landscape

of black lakes

of ruins & buckled highways

under sky the color

of melted iron convulsing

upon the road to nothing

it's wealth that you will count

on a screen in a code

in an office high and threatened

by windstorms

but secure somehow

in its marble and iron

in its beams & struts & columns

it seems

Prog 2026

 

He had to reach 59
Before he got into prog
He wasn't sure why this was
He was a boy in its 1970s heyday
Back then it sounded like music
From a forest wired with electricity
But a forest from which
He remained outside
The years staggered on
Like a flock of birds
Gathering rising & landing
His life perhaps laden
With more tragedies
Than the average life
Injuries deaths hospitals
But he couldn't really say
Yes Genesis Rush
Were these names commands
Recollections portraits dreams
Were they elk leaving the night forest
Or had he entered the forest
Melodies circling around him as vines
Harmonies raining down on him
As dropping berries as spinning leaves
Even the lyrics were no longer dross
Broken into shards they shimmered
Like flakes of mica or moonlight
"Yesterday a morning came
A smile upon your face
Caesar's Palace morning glory
Silly human race."

Burbank 73

 

he meant to move to Burbank California
he knew they taped Johnny Carson there
but he got it backwards
and moved to Burbank Illinois
where he ran out of money
living in a roadside motel
and started lifting pallets
in a loading bay
and the sun went down
like a wavering coin in water
every day at 5 PM
and his coworker was a woman
from Mexico with a deep voice
like an Época de Oro movie star
and one day they decided
to go west
maybe Burbank, CA
maybe Buenavista, MIC

Scenes from TV

 

the ugly car traverses a road
on the side of a canyon
seen at first in the distance
then up close
after the camera lens dials in
we see boulders
and rusty dust
maybe real maybe artificial
the music an electric bass
maracas electric piano
drum set a wah-wah guitar
then a cut to a kitchen interior
garish yellow-orange wallpaper
with little wheelbarrows
and fences on it
a silver toaster
and a clear vinyl
table cover
then back to the car
on the canyon road
with the music
and this goes on
into eternity
it seems

WHAT DO YOU WANNA BE WHEN YOU GROW UP

I'm 12 years old
I'm drinking Hawaiian Punch
On the front steps of my house
With my best friend
He says what do you wanna be
When you grow up
The sun has gone behind
White clouds
No breeze
Silence except for a car
In the distance
A tree maybe
A stream
Snow melt
A record needle in a groove
The memory of a dance night
A clanging high hat
A racing blue jay
A pomegranate waiting to be juiced
A repeated phrase not understood
A parrot in the jungle
Who remembers words forgotten
By the humans who spoke them
Really? he says
Yeah, I guess