When the Ashes Settled

She was reading Plath
like a Pomeranian
barking at the trashman.
It was new to her, you see,
but when she reached, "Ach, du,"
the words grew like stalactites
on her lip.  "Excuse me," I said,
flicking them off.
I should have known better;
she was rising from the ashes,
twisting her wings, looking for air.
So I told her to fly:
it was a proposal, that's all.
When the ashes settled,
she was painted above the horizon,
and, brushing myself off,
I yelled after her,
"Thanks, Love!  Keep your head out of ovens!"


(Hot Springs News, 1982; Poems by Poets Roundtable of Arkansas, 1983)

The Jagalchi Fish Market

It's as if the Sea of Japan threw up
its entire bounty on the wharf
of the Jagalchi Fish Market,
the largest in Korea, in the world,
from what I've seen,
stall after stall,
alley after alley,
street after street
of fish,
long and shaped like spears fish,
those discus flounders,
mackerel, tuna, red fish, blue fish,
a pile of octopodes draped over cardboard boxes,
tentacles, suckers up, as long as my legs,
a woman, sitting on a bucket, opening oysters,
trays of them on the half-shell, ready to eat,
while another cooks tempura,
another offers sashimi,
while crabs push for space in tanks,
blow fish swim, and below them in shallow basins,
spiny urchins, clams, mussels, spitting anemones,
or something, sea cucumbers,
all smelling like the sea,
as fresh as a breaking wave.

We walked for hours,
looking, photographing, eating.

Three days later in Seoul,
our sneakers began to stink
like the seafood section at Winn-Dixie, Kroger's,
Safeway, Publix, Fred Myers, Piggly Wiggly...


SK/August 2014

Riding the Subway in Seoul

Each toenail a different color,
painted perfectly, some with sparkle,
her feet stand awkwardly on cork platforms,
rocking at stops: Seolleung, Yeoksam, Gangnam.
If those aren't hose, her legs are made of milk.
Except in crossing, the thighs will never meet;
they disappear behind a pleated skirt, beige and short,
into which she's tucked a crisp, white blouse
(there are insufficient adjectives for this),
the waist at best, twenty inches...nineteen?
Up the blouse's buttons, she stares into a phone;
Samsung, of course, as black and shiny as her hair.
Her other hand holds a subway strap, and...uh, oh.
Our eyes meet,
hers without a K-pop smile.


August 2014

Biker's Balls

For all those literary bikers,
airbrush artists, Rimbaud trikers,
who hop their hogs cross rolling hills
and drop them to save daffodils,
who have such scars across the belly,
on which they rest Wordsworth and Shelly,
and O that nose, that broken nose,
to suck in sent of yellow rose, it blows,

because some match the biker's yen
to have their art tattooed on them.
Jackson Pollock splashed his paint,
and Pablo painted cubes,
but once no bitch except their own
had spiders on her boobs.

Still, those fucking Harvard masters,
those gay prancing pre-meds,
those prissy Princeton pussies,
and M.I.T. shitheads,
could not but hold a pubic hair
of one dear biker's balls:
Their fathers cannot buy into
the highway's hallowed halls.


(1987, updated 2013)

The Straw Man

“Oh, bullshit.  This would be just one more example, a result of his dithering—he’s the original Mr. Dithers—but in this case, he got exactly what he wanted.”

“No, he tried to get a status of forces agreement, but the Iraqis wouldn’t give it to us, so what could he do?”

“He tried to get one?  This administration, that’s all about diplomacy, couldn’t get a status of forces agreement?  He didn’t want one, and that’s why we didn’t get one.”

“No, no, that’s a talking point from the Right.  You don’t know that.”

“Hell, I work on cars, and I could have got one.”

“And just how would you have done that, Mr. Goodwrench?”

“I’ll tell you how.  I would have called in the Secretary of State, the ambassador, the defense chiefs, and told them, ‘I want you people to stop playing around with that clown Maliki and get me a goddamn agreement. I want you to tell that son-of-a-bitch that the President of the United States wants an agreement, and, by God, he will have one.  We want thirty thousand troops to remain in Iraq for twenty years, and they will not be subject to any law but that of the United States. That might, just might be enough time for them to shake off the Middle Ages.  If not, by then the Kurds will be an invincible bulwark. We'll see to it.  You tell that son-of-a-bitch if he doesn’t immediately approve a status of forces agreement, we will not leave him with the billion dollars’ worth of military hardware as promised, but will pull out of his fucked up country, not leave one goddamn bullet, and that he can expect his government to survive no longer than a year, and we will not come back in to save his ass.  You tell him, he can fill our embassy with pig shit for all I care, because we will not be there risking the lives of our diplomatic staff without an agreement.  Better yet, you tell him I will give all that military hardware to the Kurds, because they are the only people in that country worth a fuck, and we will set up a no-fly zone around the Kurdish region, and he had better not test it.  We did not invest trillions of dollars and five thousand Americans in that shit hole just to sit back and watch Maliki fuck it all up.  Now, get out of here, get over there, and get me a goddamn agreement, and don’t come back until you have one. And Hillary, for Christ’s sake, quit flitting around the world playing patty-cake.  Get something accomplished, will you? And stop telling me what Bill thinks. Defense hasn't trusted our party since he ran from Somalia and let that Ranger blood dry in the dirt without an answer, and then he was so frightened he sat with his mouth open during the genocide in Rwanda. He has the blood of a million on his hands, and that will never dry.’  I got off track, but that, my friend, is diplomacy.” 

"God, you sound like W's Cheney on steroids."

"Hey, it's Pax Americana, baby.  It's that or darkness."

"With bandy-legged Picts bounding over Hadrian's Wall?"

"Absolutely."

"Ah, man..."

"To them, I'm just a run-of-the-mill infidel deserving death, but your side is truly abhorrent.  How would you like to see your gay friend's head on a pike with a cock hanging from his mouth, the pretty faces of your Hollywood royalty disfigured by acid, toothless because their perfect, gleaming teeth have been cut out and made into necklaces?  That's coming."

"Not if we leave them alone."

"Especially if we leave them alone."

"Not if we stop backing the Zionists."

"You would stop supporting Israel?"

"They've caused us nothing but trouble since Truman blessed them in 1948."

"Wow."

"Absolutely."

"Okay.  Let's say that doesn't stop them.  Would you convert?"

"Better a living Muslim than a dead atheist.  I mean, of course, I would lie about it, go through the motions and hope for change."

"Now, that is the audacity of hope."

"Perhaps, but how about you, my Christian brother?"

"Well, while I was raised a Christian, I'm a horrible example.  Still, I would give an adamant, 'Hell no!' and say I'd go down swinging, but I don't suppose you can really know how you'd react when faced with decapitation."

"So to speak."

"Funny.  You want another beer?"

"Sure."

"A beer for my godless friend!  What would you do if they decided to test your faith, gave you a knife, and ordered you to cut off a child's head?"

"The child's head or mine?  I'm going to need that beer."

Sunrise on a Partly Cloudy Day in Pink and Blue with Jesus Christ Standing between the Israelites and Palestinians

Sun rays fanned above the clouds
like the crown of Christ rising.



SKJ--8/1/14

Eastern Indigo

Not quite comfortable but having grown familiar with the blue racer that lives in bushes on the west side of the house as well as the green striped and much longer grass snake that prefers the front and east side, my wife and I were shocked to see, after being alerted by serious barking from Gertie, a new arrival  that would make three of those other snakes. Indeed, looking through the safety of the lanai screen, we guessed its length to be in excess of five feet and closer to six with girth to match my forearm.  At first, we imagined it must be a water moccasin, but the wife, who is now most reluctant to return to weeding and trimming our many flowering bushes, a task that requires wading into that greenery, conducted an Internet search and concluded the monster to be an Eastern indigo snake (Drymarchon couperi, i.e., "Lord of the Forest"), sometimes called a blue bull snake, that, according to the article, is the longest snake native to the U.S., growing to nine feet, dines on other snakes, including rattlesnakes (a plus there), and has been known to "kill its prey by wildly beating it against nearby objects."  Now, Gertie is fearless and weighs in at 42 pounds, but even so, she had better be careful--sound advice, too, for the blue racer and grass snake. The Eastern indigo is listed as a threatened species, nonvenomous, and not prone to bite if picked up, so I doubt I'll go after it with a shovel, but rather hope it eats whatever rats, toads and lizards it wants and then moves on. I am reminded of a rather bad poem I wrote as a young man, but can't recall whether or not I was talking about snakes.

He a winding motion makes,
routine of Eden's garden breaks,
strong men's breath he often takes.

He reposes wound in coil,
the self-same color of the soil,
then, "Pow!" some chick blows his head off.