
There once was a MAGA from Dallas
that had Trump tattooed on his phallus.
Whenever he pumped,
he’d choke Donald Trump
who eventually became quite callous.
The I Ain’t Got No Health Insurance Blues
Too bad I ain’t got no
self-help-guru instincts
as far as
copping a livable income
is concerned.
I should be able to come up with
seven
or nine
or
ten
or so
steps
that lead to Psychological Salvation!
Potential titles of bestsellers:
How to Dismantle Your Ego
Slow Down, You’re Thinking Too Fast
We Are They and They Are We
The problem is that I don’t follow
them steps myself.
I think to write a book like that
that you need credentials of super-duper success.
Why buy a book from someone
who claims to know the wayful path
but who lives in a tiny two-bedroom duplex house
on the border of a bad neighborhood?
So I live on a tree-lined street where doors slam,
car alarms blare
children squeal
leaf blowers roar
keyboards quietly click.
A Little Madness in the Spring
I recently ran across a balding fellow, probably in his early forties, wearing a grey too-snug tee-shirt that read “Every Day Is a Good Day.” Of course, I get the subtext: life is miraculous on the cosmic impersonal plane – the nighttime sky, as Hamlet put it, a “brave o’erhanging firmament, [a] majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” not to mention down below “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.” We should be thankful for the chain of events that gave rise to a consciousness that allows us to appreciate and contemplate these wonders around us. The subtext of the subtext is that this wonderfulness is the handiwork of a benevolent deity. Every day is a good day because it’s a colorful shard in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of a creator god’s abracadabra.
But, as we all know, a day’s goodness or badness depends on an individual’s experience during that 24-hour period. For example, at Chico Feo I just heard a horrific account of a traffic fatality that happened on Folly Beach last night. A car crammed with six drunks doing 65 in a 25-zone barreled into a golf cart driven, as the story was told to me, by a woman who had just gotten married that very day on the island.[1]
So, I might suggest, that the tee shirt’s message be edited: “For me, every day is a good day” instead.
And print this on the back.
A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —
Who ponders this tremendous scene —
This whole Experiment of Green —
As if it were his own!
Emily Dickinson
[1] The fellow who related the story said she was in her bridal gown.
image via The Beat who copped it from Shotgun Stories
The Hyper Southern Gothic Murdaugh Saga coming soon to a drive-in theater near you Boating under the influence, involuntary manslaughter way down south in the godforsaken backwater of Colleton Country, South Carolina, we have, in addition to addiction, a double homicide – alleged filicide – mother and son dispatched via assault weapon and shotgun, a botched faux murder/staged suicide, and earlier, in the abode of the accused, a housekeeper tumbling down steps to her death. . Did I mention insurance theft, crystal meth, financial skullduggery, abandoned mills, prescription pills? It's as if William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor joined forces with Harold Robbins. Add an ebon dash of E.A. Poe and presto: you got the hyper Southern Gothic Murdaugh saga.
George Fox, impresario extraordinare, has made Mondays on Folly Beach a day not to dread but one to look forward to. His open mic Singer/Songwriter Soapbox, which features original works, is attracting nationally known artists such Sierra Hull, Joel Timmons, Sally George, and the poet Chuck Sullivan, who published in Esquire Magazine in the Seventies when Gordon Lish ruled that literary roost and introduced readers to the likes of Raymond Carver, Cynthia Ozick, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Richard Ford.
Here’s a clip of Chuck reading his poem “Juggler on the Radio” at the Soapbox on 8 November 2022.
[Hat tip to Catherine Coulter for the video]
And, best of all, it’s free!
The Hoodoo Honkey Tonk
for Stev Jam*
Taking the backroads from Allendale
to Statesboro, I spotted
a hand painted road sign that read
“Hoodoo Honky Tonk two miles ahead.”
Beneath it, nailed to the same post,
a smaller sign, with two words:
Cold Beer.
It was just now getting dark.
I was about halfway there.
Hey, why not? A couple of beers
might do me good, so I
slowed down so not to hurtle
past and have to turn back around.
There it was, just ahead,
on the right, a tar paper
shack with a rolling sign up front,
a couple of letters missing:
Ho Doo Honk Tonk.
The door was propped open
with a brick and a window
with a lit-up Bud Lite sign.
Dark inside, a roughhewn bar
in the back. Against a wall sat
a conked-out jukebox you could tell
quit working a good whiles back.
One customer on a stool.
A fat boy behind the bar.
The customer a woman
facing out. Couldn’t
of weighed more than eighty pounds.
Something bad wrong
with her, late-stage cancer
I would guess.
“Hello, stranger,” she said.
Her voice – how to describe
her voice? – imagine two sheets
of sandpaper soaked in ‘shine
scarping against one another
rasping raspier than a rasp.
She wore an Atlanta Braves cap,
her stringy grey hair pulled back
into a ponytail, a fashion faux pas
cause you could see her jug ears
sticking out like a satellite dish.
“Good evening, Ma’am,” I said.
“All we gots is beer.
Pabst, Bud Lite, Miller, Miller Lite,
and Schlitz Malt Liquor in a can.”
“A Bud,” I said, “that sounds alright.”
“Lonnie” she rasped, “get this gentleman a Bud.”
“I ain’t deaf.” he snarled.
“You own the place?’ I asked.
“Yep, but not for long. Doc says I got days left,
a week or two at the longest.”
Damn, what do you say to that?
“Damn, sorry to hear,” I said.
“Look, Mister. I need a favor, a huge one.
I wouldn’t ask if
I wasn’t desperate.”
“Oh shit,” I thought, “stopping here was a mistake.”
I could see now she was all drugged out
or drunk or both.
“I need you to make love to me,
a man to make love to me
one last time, to remember
what it feels like. Ain’t no one
come in here no more. I ain’t got
to kin, no friends, just Lonnie
over there who is as sick and tired of me
as I am of him.”
Damn, what do you say to that?
“Um, I wish I could, could accommodate you,
but I have this fiancée. (A better lie
would have been that I was gay,
but I’ve never been too good
at thinking on my feet).
She sort of snarled a smile.
“It would be a saintly act,
but I understand.”
In the long silence,
a couple of trucks swooshed past.
“How much do I owe you,” I asked.
“On the house, baby doll. Money don’t
mean nothing to me no more.
Nothing means nothing
to me no more. No friends,
no kin. In a year my memory
will disappear, nobody will
remember that once I was a pretty
good looking redheaded gal.
No trace of me left.
Nobody will remember me.”
“Wait, a minute,” I said.
“I’m a writer who sometimes
gets shit published. I could write
this story, and in the story
make love to you, pick you up
and carry you like a child
to that trailer across the road.
People would read the story
for years maybe. You’d be
remembered.”
She looked at me long and hard.
“Fuck you,” she said.
“It’s time for you to run along.”
So, I left but halfway wished
I’d given it a try.
“A saintly act” she had said.
When you get to be my age, i.e., the ol’ “three score and ten” of Psalm 90, the years can seem like a blur, so when I opened Facebook this morning, I was surprised that already nine years have passed since the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s death at 74. Although it is commonplace now to hear somebody call 70-something sort young for death, Heaney’s mortal dress was more than a little tattered – he looked frail, every bit of three score and fourteen – and it appears that a mere fall did him in.
I first became enamored with Heaney in 1978. Ashley Brown, a former professor, invited me to dinner at his house on Barnwell Street not long after he had garnered a bit of fame for appearing frequently in The Habit of Being, a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s letters. It was a memorable evening with Dr. Brown as he hauled out personal photographs of him and O’Connor and also of his dear friend Elizabeth Bishop, whom he had brought to South Carolina for a reading when I was still in graduate school.[1] During the evening, he asked me if I had heard of Heaney, and when I admitted I hadn’t, he whipped out a couple of poems, so as soon as I returned to Charleston, I purchased Heaney’s second collection, A Door into the Dark.
Of course, the 60’s were the decade of confessional poets like Plath and Lowell, poets whom my teacher James Dickey once referred to in class as “scab pickers,” poets who more often than not wrote in free verse and who demanded from the reader – at least in Lowell’s case – the patience to unravel seemingly random associations, many of which pertained to his private life.[2]
Heaney’s verse was different – musical, earthy – its subject matter a mixture of the mundane and the political strife of Northern Ireland. Here he is in “The Outlaw” describing in loose iambic couplets a bull mating with a cow:
Unhurried as an old steam engine shunting.
He circled, snored, and nosed. No hectic panting,
Just the unfussy ease of a good tradesman;
Then an awkward unexpected jump, and
His knobbled forelegs straddling her flank,
He slammed life home, impassive as a tank.
Dropping off like a tipped-up load of sand.
“She‟ll do,‟ said Kelly and tapped his ash-plant
Across her hindquarters. “If not, bring her back.‟
I walked ahead of her, the rope now slack
While Kelly whooped and prodded his outlaw
Who, in his own time, resumed the dark, the straw.
Many of his poems deal with childhood experiences on the family farm right outside of Castledawson in County Londonderry. Here’s a segment from the title poem of his first collection, “The Death of a Naturalist”:
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
Of course, Yeats is the standard for any Irish poet and an impossible one at that, but it’s certain that Heaney was the greatest Irish poet since Yeats and one who belongs in the same pantheon with the postwar English master Philip Larkin. Heaney is one of the four Irishmen to receive a Nobel prize in literature along with Yeats, Shaw, and Beckett – rare company indeed. His loss is a great one for poetry and for Ireland – for all of us really – but old men are destined to die as Yeats reminds us on his very tombstone.
Nevertheless, like his hero Beowulf, Heaney will live on in his verse.
Personal Helicon
for Michael Longley
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
***
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
***
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
***
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
***
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
[1] Brown had also in his youth visited Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, so being in Brown’s presence put me a mere two degrees of separation from my heroes Joyce, Eliot, and Hemingway. You can read about Elizabeth Bishop’s visit to USC HERE.
[2] I witnessed a dual reading featuring Dickey and Lowell in 1974. Afterwards, I learned that Lowell detested Dickey, so there’s that.
A aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, so what shall I do with this absurdity, O Heart, O Troubled heart, decrepit age that has been tied to me as to a dog’s tail? What am I gonna do? Make a fool out of myself, that’s what. Here’s exhibit A. The Old Scarecrow Boogie.
Ain’t Got You
I’m sixty-five, got cataracts,
Hump-forming on my back,
A candidate for a heart attack,
But I ain’t got you . . .
Got nurses to the left of me,
Nurses to the right of me,
Nurses all around me,
But I ain’t got you.
Got a wheelchair, a walk-in tub,
Teeth ground down into little nubs,
Got a membership to the Rotary Club
And you lookin’ good in your hot pink scrubs!
Got a closet full of robes,
And no matter where I go
Got hair in my nose.
But I ain’t got you.
But I ain’t got you.
No, I ain’t got you.