Archive for August, 2007

On a tense and muggy darkening evening
You stand below leafy branches
And warily eye a massive windowless red building,
And wonder what evil goes on inside.

Plainclothes security thugs patrol weedy cracked streets
While block-shaped men in wrinkled overalls
Hover in the shadows.
When night falls a convoy of carnival rides
Clatters into town, Tilt-A-Whirl,
Scrambler, Octopus and Paratrooper,
Alive in neon lights, under their own volition,
Spinning headlong toward the red fortress.
Everyone scatters and you run for cover
Beneath a candy-colored vehicle
Like a big toy firetruck. Then
You’re driving it down a ruined avenue,
Chasing a little man with a buzz cut and baggy shorts,
Gleefully trying to run him down, until
He disappears and you find yourself alone,
Trapped in the crumbling basement of the red cellblock,
Waiting for something very bad to happen.

Well, that isn’t very much fun, is it? Nosiree, you’re plenty glad that business comes to a sudden halt. But what’s next?

While carving the meat
You lose your seat
At the table.

You lose your office in the movie house,
So there’s no place for a tryst with the starlet.

At a friend’s vacation rental you awake to a house full of strangers, a family reunion and a troupe of actors on tour. “We always do this, every year,” says the handsome inamorato. Prima donnas are arguing in vicious tones over the use of a downstairs bathroom. “Ficking ectrisses,” one venerable matron spits at another, while the men of the company rehearse a murder scene in the courtyard. The victim is a dark hollow-eyed boy whose eyebrows rise with every breath. The killer, Fred Gwynne—Car 54, Herman Munster—solemnly enrobes himself in a cloak that creates the effect of a headless giant. He holds a dagger with a handle carved in the shape of a circus clown, and drives it into the wall beside the boy, as a sign.

And if you happened to be on the scene, you’d know how that played out, wouldn’t you? The rest of us went down to the beach, because it had finally stopped raining.

Oh where have you been, evil twin, evil twin?
Oh where have been, Mister Evil?
You’ve swept out the sauna
The way you used to for the old men.
You bought a bright bakelite necklace
At an old junk shop.
It was meant for a buyer who owned it before.
You told the clerk it was like one that you once wore.

Bake a cherry pie
and leave it out in the rain.

What else did you do, evil twin, evil twin,
What else did you do, Mister Evil?
Summer in the city, and you’re doing a brisk business
Selling facsimiles of famous documents,
(Get yer Magna Cartas while they’re hot!)
At the flea market behind the school.
But bike up to the park
And you find that the youth are unhappy,
Half-naked and demonstrating against injustice.
Their new anthem is entitled “Total Milwaukee,”
Which could be the name of a new malt liquor but isn’t,
and starts like this: “Is this total Milwaukee
Or is this total U.S.A.?”

With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain.

What will you do now, evil twin, evil twin,
What will you do now, Mister Evil?
You’ll wander through the crumbling masonry
Of a half-destroyed cellar
And grow more frightened with every wooden door
That you have to break open
Until you must cry out, Hey!
In a strangled voice that barely rises
Above a whisper.

For the rain it raineth every day, kids.
The rain it raineth every day.

His face caked with mud, a cold-eyed officer who affects the Nazi sartorial style (peaked cap, long coat) berates you for bringing a woman onto your team in the silver mine. At least you think that’s what pissed him off. He sneers at you and barks, “Jobs, jobs, jobs!” You’re wondering if you’re in Argentina.

Like in an outdoor restaurant where you sit on bleachers facing a row of brownstones and watch the colorful young residents come and go while you wait forever for your waiter, you’re feeling, well, a little impatient and overlooked. You’re craning around to find the manager and get a proper table when the woman you’re with—is she an old friend from school?—asks to swap raincoats with a stranger, since the broad geometric prints are so similar. My, aren’t we having fun now? What have you gotta do to get service in this joint?

In a car, you’re arguing with your younger sister about where she hid the money. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but that’s not where the money is. Spill it, Sis.

You are shoveling snow from a sailboat deck when an Old Salt says it’s better to leave the snow where it is, since ice protects the wood. He makes sense in the moment, but what’s he really trying to tell you? You’re a sucker for greybeard loons until they make you mad.

See which direction the money is going
And put yourself in the way,
Your dear dead grandpappy used to say.
That’s a lie; he said no such thing.
He’d recognize that as utterly useless advice,
As your so-called friend should have, and apologized.

You’re sick with a terrible chest cold, coughing up nasty green phlegm. Distasteful image, but there you are, taking two medications; one is a Prozac-type mood regulator and the other is for you don’t know what. You’re waiting in a high school nurse’s office for your physician, an attractive young woman, to prescribe a third drug that will solve all your problems. But the place is super busy with the comings and goings of students, faculty and impatient doctors. One of them, a pointy-headed guy with a bad haircut, says flatly that there’s nothing he can give you for your ailments. Frankly, you aren’t surprised, coming from such a sour-faced sonofabitch.

Not to say that everything you bump into these days disappoints you. From the highway you see experimental airplanes, constructed like hollow frames, that link wing-to-wing in flying chains. They hang from the sky low enough to nearly collide with a yellow cab that goes speeding by.

You won’t remember this summer
As one of your personal favorites,
But you will remember it.
Hey, who ever said morbid
Introspection is a laugh
Riot, more fun than
A barrel of monkeys?

Those would be very unhappy primates.
A steady diet of facing down your fears
Is nobody’s idea of good nutrition.
How great you’ll feel, though,
When your (possibly blind) sense
Of optimism and self-confidence
Rebounds and you prevail
Over adversity! That will be
Just peachy. Any time now,
Lord. Any time … Hello?
The network must be down.
You’ll try again tomorrow.

You are riding your bike to school over the cushiony rubber surface of a playground when you discover that the handlebars have disappeared. Luckily, you make your way to a small party where a friend gives you a set of handpainted cards with delicately watercolored cartoon faces. As you look them over, the tension in your chest eases and you are filled with pure joy.