Paid

My wok is for a salary,

but when I capture the right words,

then mine is the golden pay.

Ocean Springs

The plane touched the earth again in Orleans Parish
walking , I breathed in the heavy southern air
that spoke of river, and mud, and gulf, and heat,
and swamp lands, in one long-congested breath.

Then off barreling down the concrete highway 
toward Ocean Springs
and catfish and family I go.

The black clouds draped in curdled skin
eyed us, and the wind stirred them slow.
The thunderheads hung heavy and green, 
all hail-stone full.

Rolling across the sky's dark bowl,
blackened from edge to edge
with but a single shining slit lying low to the East.
A sleeping crescent moon lain to nap.

I drug the chair from my motel room
and resumed a seat not sat in years,
upon my soon-to-be stormed on porch.

The slow start of fat drops hitting
dust with a sloppy, full sound.
The rumbled humidity recedes for a few minutes.
My ears savored that old sweet song,
every word and verse.
Amen.

Lunch Lessons

It was just past Thanksgiving, 

Dallas, Texas, 1968.

She made my lunch and sent me off to school.
It was a short stroll away;
a few kids picked butter cups at the cross walk.

Then noontime neared and
I arrived in another new lunchroom.

A hawk-faced teacher named Fitzgerald watched
for talkers and horse-play, with remedies aplenty.

My seat was next to some now-forgotten
new chum from 6B,
in a stiff chair at a  long narrow cream-colored table.
Everything seemed familiar but the faces and names

A lesson lay offered to me, hidden,
in the simple phrase,
"Let's trade sandwiches"

With no understanding of bravery or foolhardiness,
I heard him say to me, "I've got bologna, how 'bout yours?"
"Cow tongue," jumped from my smiled reply,

But my words splattered him like epithets.

His eyes went wide
I went home wiser.

His seat stayed empty
for so many weeks to come.

Exhumation

As I read the pages

of a forgotten journal
each line becomes
an ax
     that grows
          and chops
the frozen world away from tight around me.

My thoughts had stayed
dormant for so long

in the ice of the past

Now one hand up over the other

rising to my wet feet
the numbing slush reluctantly lets go.
 
Thoughts and dreams
and monsters and
the long dead loved ones
all climb back out

from the forgotten abyss
 
No longer banished to that place beyond
and out of reach.
I stand there straining

and peering into that deep chasm.

There, a single wiggling light
at the bottom far below

drawn to that reflection and a me

that was then.

We lock eyes

and we're off.

Honyock's

Wo, to all you clever creepers,
That do not know my sleepless eyes
watch and lie in wait

Your steps across the floors are heard
And hidden goings-on surely seen

My enacted stories fill your ears,
Your curtain-climbing's told

Standing there upon legs full of bones,
My grasp can count them, every one

Think before you answer my riddles
giggling like mindless honyocks

for each you young kit's, I rassle and josh in play
are forever my dear smart-foxes.

Urban Body

These days I am
a traffic jam of stuff

Topside, somewhere under brown and silver hair, sits my brain
Inside it's own congruent bungalow, with a couple of windows for light
Dutifully manned by my own personal Lily Tomlin, 
sitting in a old wooden swivel chair, her legs hugging like twins.

Laboriously plugging and unplugging crisscrossed phone lines ,
playfully fidgeting with the neck of her blouse and batting her eyes.
Doing her utmost to keep up with the ever coming calls.

Nervy Autobahns are bumper to bumper with shocks of pain, panic 
cold  or hunger or elaborately planned or mere random thoughts

I see the hairs on my arm rise erect in the cold Autumn breeze, then
it's, "Cross legs; sweat lightly behind the knees; 
now salivate and chew.
Sneeze, sneeze again, now sigh"

Veins and arteries each run in their one-way directions
and see my pumping heart in an aged Grand Central Station
with groined vaults and corridors slathered in cream tinted subway tiles.

Inbound and outbound trains heralded
from old cone-shaped loudspeakers in crackly-muffled voices.

My departure signs buzz with flipping letters
spelling out new destinations after each burst of steam and departure.

Then dinner arrives, dumped right there on the freight platform, for all to see.
The firemen shovel and feed it towards the fire below, 
through caverns too dark to see a hand in front of your face.

Ah, yes. Someone needs to take out the trash. 

OK, let me get my slippers.

Missoula

Missoula makes Montana nervous.

the elk hunters are unsure 

of its motives or real dedication.

Folks in Red Lodge and Sydney

don't trust the people or the politics over there

or the proclivities found in that general locale

It's them ones, with their certain "loose and lewdness,"

those shaggy, rowdy kids filling up the town

that foster strong suspicion

They really can't belong to these rugged 

rocks and mines and mountains

nor the smelters, ranches and dusty ravines.

Some try to act scraggly and drive a truck on occasion

or even own a gun for varmints and such 

but tolerance is only barely possible.

If they'd float on downstream

towards Idaho or somewhere else

next week or tomorrow,
everybody would be much obliged.