Young Love

When you were five
And I was six,
We would hold hands
Just like this.

When you were nine
And I was ten,
We made a pact
To never tell, and then:

You began to tell me every word
That escaped from your lips, with cold secret stares.
A look or a glance through long
Fingertips. Your beautiful face.

I see you sitting by the stair, your body
Tight in hot sun, a sad lamb
On stage. And when I have passed you
Flushed red raw, I want to remember

How young we were.
Splayed out across the pitch
Like baby starfish, pink and pinched
As tongue’s blood.

Our father and mother are in silent reverie,
With knotted wrists and electric hair,
Nodding and clapping, as dumb waiters do
To our games. When we are together we are together.

Today we are family as the ill
Walk in lines, with shaken smiles that marry us.
Mother, to me you are a figure of fun.
Father, you are a child when you wake up each morning.

 

Hello, I’ve been absent for a while. I had right shoulder replacement surgery, got home from the hospital, sat around for about twenty minutes, got up to get something from the kitchen, stepped on my left leg and broke it at the ankle. I went down, my shoulder experienced paroxysms of pain, and my foot flopped about awkwardly as I struggled to get back in my chair and phone for help. Meanwhile I tried to get my foot to pop back in. Nothing doing. I waited with sideways foot, excruciating pain, shoulder sutures bleeding and a regal bearing. Apparently physical pain I can handle; it’s mental pain that slays me. Even the ambulance driver said I was a tough guy.

 

I’m in an in my home convalescence period now and the problem is I’m having problems concentrating and for thirteen days I didn’t write. But now that’s changing, until the pain and a general don’t move and only watch TV hopeless sort of impulse comes over me again, and I disengage from even reading activity. I can barely play guitar. I tried and though my jam partner said it sounded good, I couldn’t go on. The home health care worker asked me if I was depressed and I said yes. I’m in a wheelchair, my shoulder is infected and draining, I’m eating antibiotics and on Monday at 8:00 AM I go back for an emergency appointment with the doctor if I don’t go to ER sooner. What’s more, I ran out of weed. I’m trying for brutal honesty here. If it’s too much for you, hey stay anyhow! Yee-haw!

 

I read some poetry. For me it was good poetry, but of course they published one of mine at Mad Swirl so I go there to read it and make me mistake of reading the other contributors works. They all were so good! And I’m wonderin’ “am I worthy?”

 

Stellar cats those other contributors. If I read too much really good poetry I start getting emotional inside. I start thinking so much so good out there. And I in no way do I want to push it to try to stack up and lose my poetry ubiquity. I must go beyond, below, and above, but not exactly too much with the general flow.

 

Now watch me heal, get even better than I was – more knowing of pain, injury and disability challenge – and head off into the Philippines to find a mate. As for you-all continue writing and sending poems. We’re addicted. Thank you all, lovingly.

 

Dr. Randall Rogers

7/23/2016

Rapid City, South Dakota, USA.

when an abortion doesn’t take

 

 

I never asked to be born.

 

So Pa,

you should have

shot me into

the sheets,

 

and Ma,

you never should

have received

the seed

 

of me,

 

because

afterbirth

was just a mess.

 

 

Previously published by The Camel Saloon.

 

We are still in search across the open plains for the best words to feature in The Best Of The Beatnik Cowboy Volume #2. All contributors selected and subscribers will also receive an additional book, the reincarnate of the “Black Tits” poems by Dr. Randall Rogers and Chris Butler.

Keep the Good Word cumming!

Imprisoned Skin

 

We’re all prisoners to the skin we inherited. The most gargantuan organ of the human body is the first and only everyone sees, unless you get slit open with a scalpel. We all bleed red. We all shit brown. We all piss yellow. But we are all judged by the first impression. That’s beyond this greatest depression.

Psycho killers look at all of us based on that first impression. No more time to ask if you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, American, European, African, Asian, etc. in the age of instant gratification and angry masturbation. They just grab their semi-automatics, their homemade pressure cookers, pipe bombs, and whatever vehicle of genocide to snuff out human live.

The most important thing about life is being alive. It’s the one and only thing the dead envy of us. Despite the pain, despite the anxiety, despite the everyday ennui, we are better off alive than dead. That’s the only thing the dead know.

The suit covering the skin is of no matter. It can be blue, brown, camouflaged, or a stained wife beater. We are all born naked and frightened, especially after the doctor’s spanking, but we all will die the same way. In a suit six feet under the world we once knew, or as a John Doe with an unmarked grave, absent of well-wishers’ and family members’ rotting plastic flowers.

 

Heaven

 

In my mid-twenties, when everything went sideways,

It seemed I ended up in Elkins West Virginia,

for no other reason than it was the last town before those old mother mountains

took over, wrapping addled heads in gauze, putting spinning thoughts to sleep.

 

Outside Elkins, heaven was a hole in a rock,

seen clear from the highway, cars and microbuses parked on the berm in neat lines.

If you jumped the fence, skinny down the gulley, back up the other side,

there would be greetings from private property waterfalls,

forty foot drops, open cavern doubling as shallow lake.

 

Summertime,

hippie girls and boys passed joints,

kids played in the falls

old people sat on canvas chairs

beautifulandillegalandfree.

 

Fall and winter, alone at the pulpit

respite found and passed in silent congregation.

Eventually those mother mountains couldn’t hold me.

 

In return, years later, heaven desolate, heaven gone.

Water dammed above empty holes in rocks

sun seated on interstate clouds

nofallsnohippiesnojointsnokids

Lake nothing, a series of dried muddy stones.

 

I wonder to an empty cliff face whether stories of

travelsandbedsandbarsandwomenanddrunks,

are enough to keep you, to insulate you when

whatever nest you build starts to come down.

I wonder what is man without heaven?

 

jason baldinger

 

 

The Hymn to Grease

 

10:30 am

the breakfast McDonalds smell

changes

to the lunch McDonalds smell

The ear infection no better

it took over with an upper repertory infection

a few weeks ago

I barely function

I’ve been out of work a few months

shit hasn’t gotten serious yet

it’s coming,

lungs rattle regular now

 

I had a panic attack the other night

seated

edge of the bed

short gulps at air

almost an hour

my girlfriend insisting on a hospital

declining

it takes full minutes to explain

aversions to hospital bills

forged

by a six thousand dollar ER visit

ten years

I get bills for paper hats

send a ten spot check every time

this is reality

with no insurance

 

today I’m talking to the McDonald’s manager

about the management program

sipping a small coke

hand over my mouth

to keep dry heaves down

every question answered behind my eyes

“Do Not Vomit”

deep breathe answers

 

He asks another question

grease smell attack

I think about a girl I dated

about the time of the hospital bill

she worked burger king

we’d race her home

race out of clothes

into a shower

so we didn’t breathe that smell

 

done with questions

he never took note of what I said

I’ll get the job

everybody does

if you show up

you weed yourself out

unless

you’re desperate enough to stay

 

I won’t show for the shift

fingers crossed

I find better work

a silver lining

I

never

vomited

once

 

jason baldinger

 

Last Call

 

Ohio is forever

variable roadways eat speed.

and it’s the perfect night for speed,

the perfect night for Adderall

the perfect night for Ephedrine

but I never could handle speed.

It makes my heart into a hummingbird dying in my chest.

I already see thing too clearly, too loud,

speed makes all that vision hurt.

Instead, I eat miniature candy bars, Altoids

chase a sugar rush, crash and repeat

 

Tonight, Orion’s belt is guide.

If unbuckled the sky open

would rain corn stalks and bibles.

 

Corn stalks and bibles

it’s twenty years ago,

racing interstates after a sixteen hour work day.

Crazy Mike and a bag of Doritos as passengers.

Frozen solid Ohio

the night proves

all highways have ghosts

it’s only a matter of how tired you are,

how split open you are.

 

We hit Dayton 5 am,

our buddy Brian said we’re twelve hours late.

Payphone calls, convenience stores, below zero nights,

he was at his girls place

He shook his roommate up with telephones

his addled roommate who tried to kill himself a month before,

standing at dorm entrances late night disheveled

holding open doors  so we could crash,

kill some sleep

nervous paranoid sleep.

 

We skated around Dayton less than twelve hours

before parting with a snowstorm.

On the other side of that front

I found my grandfather had a heart attack.

I drove three hours caught and re-caught a storm

crashed the floor of an imaginary trailer park.

dead.

 

rattled nights

all these years

dead.

 

My grandfather was dead in months.

Brian tossed a bullet in his head in ‘02

a failing marriage and no job were too much,

unless you believe

that his wife’s parents knocked him off to avoid a messy divorce.

 

Crazy Mike blurted out his suicide to me

Christmas eve that year.

I was busy holding down a record shop,

he was stalling, waiting, finally blurting

I excused myself, went to catch a cigarette

Indianapolis seemed so far away.

 

Crazy Mike is still crazy

we haven’t talked much since the night

he clocked me in the face with a guitar.

He still chases demons that have already gotten away.

Last time we spoke he used words like schizophrenia

 

It should be no surprise that that time escapes

rattles, drifts, evaporates, years seem so far away.

I drive, a nauseous dizzy feeling

that would be speed except its sugar.

I wind the engine damn near 100

bleary, I should pull over

but I’m too deep in my head

I can’t stop.

 

I barely notice the deer

drop off accelerator, swerve

I expect the red and blue splash in the rearview

The officer, one am aviators,

“son, what’s your hurry?”

my eyes dilated diamonds

smile wide as stars says

“baby, I’m just trying

to make Pittsburgh for last call

 

 

 

Fuck Her (Not Literally!)

 

Onwards, forwards,
in that
‘Away From The Nonsense’
direction.
‘No Ball Games Here’
that’s a good sign,
take notice of that one,
no, don’t stop to look at it,
she’s still following.
She hasn’t ended it… yet,
trust me on this
just kicking off preliminaries.
Don’t listen to what she’s saying,
look behind that
at what she’s actually doing.
Christ, but it does make sense,
it makes nothing but sense,
she’s out to take you down
and you’re just too ‘In It’ to see it.
Pack a bag… run,
get in the motor and drive
over to those good people
who care about you.
Stop thinking of her for now,
think about yourself for a change.
Take that blindfold off
and get yourself
out of that nettle patch
before she comes and sets fire to it.

 

© Paul Tristram 2016

Math-Rock Existentialism  

 
The other day, I was in Grog-Shop to see the “Battles”

math-rock and math; they both suit my type

And I adored John Stainer,

probably the realest alternative drummer of our times

and I hung out with an Ukrainian PhD student

from Case Western, and his doll-like  Asian girlfriend

we mixed the weird and recurring rhythm of Battles

with some cheap cans of Pabst Blue,

and talked soccer and existentialism of

Graduate School during the break.

 

Things got awkward, when I was in the restroom;

all walls painted with glaring graffiti blue

there was John Stainer standing on the aisle next to me;

he had a beer-bottle in his hand

and he was drunk like a pagan priest.

Indeed a moment to treasure when your

favorite drummer is peeing right next to you.

and I said “Damn John! is that you”?

and he got into a laughter-riot, in a drunk sort of way

we both laughed, talked a while and did not shake hands.

 

The Metropolis

 

The metropolis lives, like a war-veteran.

over-head bridges of pre-cast concrete slabs

bear the weight of piss and alien dreams

degenerate electric-poles are bent

like cabinet-ministers, and the roads

tell the untold stories of cocktail-waitresses

who just wanted a clean job, so they  can send

some money back home. Buy books

for their  kid brothers may be, make

a little dream-theater  for their

worn-out mothers. But are we defeated?

 

I have stopped counting temples in my

God-stoned city.  The specters of

dreams cloud her sky, and they keep coming back

through our own vertigos. In my Metropolis

dreams are reborn, before the devil knows they are dead.

 

Debie

everyone

thought she

would end

up with

Eddie

but even

she called

him old

farmer Ed

and she

laughed at

the train

conductors hat

he wore

 

when ever

we would

walk up

Capp road

if there

was a

dead animal

she’d punch

me in

the arm

and yell

hold your

breath

and run

 

so death

can’t get

inside.

 

Laura

grew up

in a

trailer

on a

farm her

daddy worked

 

she joined

the Army

and learned

Russian

worked as

a code

breaker

before coming

home to

attend the

local college

 

she loved

to tell

me that

the problem

with the

men in

this town

is that

there are

no men

in this

town.

 

Acting Vs. Living

 

 

They say life is a stage

 

Is that why

we’re not supposed to

really live it?

 

Who determines

what living is anyway?

 

Why is it bad if I feel sad

today, tomorrow, eternally?

Where is it written

that certain emotions

should be denied?

 

What’s your deal?

Do I have to pull

your face card

from the deck

or else I”m sure to fail?

 

How come you act like

being an optimist

is the only way

to stay pain free?

 

“Be like me; be like me!”

 

Every second

the pressure

keeps building,

whatever way

you choose,

win or lose

 

That’s because

you don’t have

the answers,

do you?

 

Jack and Jill

went up the hill

to fetch what?

 

Please do not write me

a ten page essay

on the meaning of life,

as if you know you’re right

 

Go ahead, spin the gun,

take your turn,

or get out of the game

The rest of us are not

the ones who are lame

We don’t just take our chances;

we accept the consequences

 

So stop the damn show,

and get off the stage!

 

It’s time to live.