Desecrations by Howie Good

Desecrations

  Howie Good

  goodh@newpaltz.edu

  155 Grand St.

  By

  Howie Good

  ©2012 by Howie Good

  Published by Fowlpox Press

  www.fowlpox.tk

  License Agreement

  This ebook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original

  purchaser and should not be copied, transferred, distributed, traded,

  or sold to third parties without the expressed written permission of

  the author. Please respect the copyright of the author by not sharing

  unauthorized copies.

  ISBN: 978-0-9881088-2-0

  Cover design and layout by Virgil Kay

  Table of Contents

  Quartet

  A cure for What Ails You

  The Suicide Project

  RSVP

  Blind Man’s Bluff

  And So On

  Here’s The Deal

  Ellipsis

  Prescription

  Marco Polo

  Love at Sixty

  Prosthetic Dreams

  The Predicament of Aftermath

  Strange Roads

  Desecrations

  Voyage to the First of December

  An American Dream

  Unfinished Furniture

  The Blue Hour

  Suspicion

  Waking Up in recovery

  Amygdala

  Apocalypse Tango

  Monkeys with Typewriters

  The Scream

  On the Anniversary of My Demise

  Children of Paradise

  Ode

  History is Made at Night

  Storm Coming

  --

  QUARTET

  1

  I had just turned six. The universal symbol for handicapped hadn’t been invented yet. Birds dragging broken wings left their black footprints on the stairs.

  2

  My parents made me take piano lessons. The piano hated me. I spent Hanukkah watching Christmas lights blink on and off on the house across the street.

  3

  My shadow walked ahead. It seemed odd that the stairs that went up were the same stairs that went down.

  4

  A man stood washing an apple at the sink. All the windows facing the other side of the world were open. Veiled women beckoned him into the Kasbah. The X on the sidewalk marks the spot where he landed.

 

  A CURE FOR WHAT AILS YOU1

  1

  My head has become an ungovernable city of murderers and thieves. I can only stare at something for so long before the police start coming around. After all this rain, a body hangs from a neighbor’s tree. Don’t listen to what the flies say. If nobody loves you, somebody can still fear you.

  2

  I didn’t discover that the ocean was dead until months after it died. Refugees from the pages of banned books ask directions to the future. All the things that might help should be indexed somewhere. I have begun a list in my head: plantain for colds, raspberry for stomachaches, red clover for nerves.

  THE SUICIDE PROJECT

  1

  Everyone

  who knew you

  knew you

  loved guns,

  & when

  you pressed

  the nickel-

  plated barrel

  of a favorite

  under your chin,

  the winos

  drinking

  in the shadows

  of the park

  stumbled,

  & a bee

  zoomed up

  from the depths

  of a flower,

  a striped

  spaceship

  escaping

  the monotonous

  gravity

  of Earth.

  2

  Death made

  a black wreath

  of its red

  & wrinkled hands,

  & you climbed through

  into a garden

  only moments away

  & lighted by rain.

  RSVP

  I looked for the house while also trying to watch the road. The slower I drove, the harder it became. Up since sunrise, the bride was still combing her thinning brown hair. A guest had left a dead bird on the porch as a gift, curiously without any blood or marks of violence on it – nothing, the groom thought, a war can’t fix. Everyone felt exiled from everyone else, but the minister after a few drinks greeted each of us familiarly. He seemed surprised that this was all my arms could hold.

  BLIND MAN’S BLUFF

  There are so many cute little blondes that sometimes I confuse their names. Caffeine withdrawal intensifies the effect. Only later was the true source of the buzzing I heard revealed. And I had thought it was a winged horse trapped behind the glass! It’s the kind of thing I like to ponder as I walk down to the corner mailbox, passing trees and windows and a dog chewing on a police whistle. I hardly even care if the mailbox isn’t there, or if it is, that I can’t see it.

 

 

  AND SO ON

  Mr. Death visited a hospital out of professional curiosity, searched unsuccessfully for Yeats’ grave throughout the south of France, walked on the beach in winter, when the ocean is flat and gray, the way he likes it. His interest now was in precise things – caliber, killing range, etc. – and as he considered whether to use a .22 on you or something poisonous, his face assumed the benign expression of a secret bomb factory.

 

 

  HERE’S THE DEAL

  Be a pale & lean earthquake,

  & I will be a heap of broken violins,

  be the circus girl resting

  atop a staircase in flames,

  & I will be a dynamite explosion

  in a foreign language,

  be a pair of six-foot pink lips

  painted by sheet lightning,

  & I will stop on my way home

  to pick up the milk & bread.

 

 

  ELLIPSIS

  An old young man in a stained T-shirt

  and with a bruise under one eye

  lunges out of the convenience store.

  A dog sniffs the rear end of another dog.

  Mister, got sixty cents?

  Once there was a great painter

  without money for paint and brushes.

  I reach into my pocket.

  Hey! a seagull cries. Hey!

  though I am miles from any sea.

  PRESCRIPTION

  A decrepit usherette in a man’s

  suit coat shone her light in my face.

  Nobody would tell me what I did,

  only that this never happened.

  The mind, the doctor said above the roar,

  is an unruly puppy. Why every morning

  I must swallow a pill with my juice,

  the road still climbing through a dark forest

  that loves the world just as it is.

 

 

  MARCO POLO

  I sat in a room of eager doctoral students who nodded sagely even as the professor drew pentagrams on the board. Women with scratch ‘n’ sniff skin would enter my thoughts, but avoid leaving their names. The moon appeared from somewhere behind me like the holed white hull of a dream. There’s a suspicion that Marco Polo did not tell half of what he saw. Birds of certain countries could sing in three languages and lie and grieve in none.

  LOVE AT SIXTY

  1

  The heart plucked

  from your chest still beating

  stumbles down the stairs

  in m
ud-caked boots,

  while I pause at the bottom

  to think of the word,

  what sounds like the killer hurricane

  they say God commissioned

  or, more likely, the noise

  of a gunshot in a silent film.

  2

  Old, I am old, & a paraplegic angel

  rides upon my back,

  somebody else’s yearning

  is growing in my chest

  & bristles like the black scales

  of a suit of Japanese armor

  & sparkles even more

  right after & when it rains.

 

  PROSTHETIC DREAMS

  A bird I can’t identify by its red markings visits me, holding a playing card in its beak. I feel elated to finally be remembered. But when I grab for the card, the bird darts away.

  Come back, I yell, and the bird does. I realize then that its markings are actually splashes of paint or maybe even blood. The shock wakes me up.

  I once took thirteen years to write a poem, if you count the mass of scar tissue that throbs in our dreams.

  THE PREDICAMENT OF AFTERMATH

  Your father mistook them for cold pills. You called Poison Control laughing so hard that the man on the other end became offended. “Lady,” he snapped, “it’s not funny!” This was back when we first began dating, a time before the time the shadows of branches could only communicate in thin, hopeless gestures, and if not played regularly, the piano would forget its sound.

 

 

  STRANGE ROADS

  1

  “Whose orange cat is that?”

  The landlord of hell

  maintains a blank face.

  Like the sign that says,

  No Parking Any Time,

  the austere logic of it.

  Just nod, and we’ll move

  to a city that doesn’t exist.

  And take the cat.

  2

  Seven people dead, the news said.

  I study the coolly swaying hips

  of the woman walking in front of me.

  This is all the music there is.

  Or maybe this music is all there is.

  See the difference? A lone baby shoe

  at the entrance to a dark alley.

  3

  You ask where we are.

  I stare straight ahead

  as if I haven’t heard you.

  There’s no good answer,

  or there can be more than one,

  just as you can choose

  to fall out of love with me,

  or you can choose

  to hit the “Send” button.

  In the abrupt days that follow,

  an insect-like buzz

  insinuates itself into everything.

  Nobody seems

  to know how to fix it,

  and some seem

  not to even want it fixed.

  DESECRATIONS

  I wonder how that can be. The recipe calls for a pinch of sorrow, the clouds beyond the rain-smeared kitchen window like the gloomy thoughts of stranded whales. I try to remember the last time honesty was the best policy. The autobiography of a lipstick-stained cigarette filter I consult is no help. So many people stumble out of their mothers with drought-stricken faces, all crooked lines and lumpy shadows, that I don’t know where to look first. Someone suggests the waiting area, slumped on a molded plastic chair.

  VOYAGE TO THE FIRST OF DECEMBER

  Many of them had the shaved heads of inmates or raw recruits. Others lived in dark, windowless rooms built from bales of human hair. Imagine you’re lying in the shade of beautiful trees, the meditation CD said. Objective conditions wouldn’t allow it. The mad shuffled down the street in shoes without laces. Every day ended in an ellipsis. . . and began with a midnight movie on TV about a failed plot to kill Hitler.

  AN AMERICAN DREAM

  All night I follow

  the same path

  the bullet traveled,

  & when I wake

  before light,

  there’s the heavy metal music

  of garbage men

  banging garbage cans.

 

 

  UNFINISHED FURNITURE

  You want to ask

  if there was

  a loud splash

  when that boy

  fell out of the sky.

  You want me

  to tell you

  where he kept

  the amphetamines

  that he used.

  Sorry. Don’t know.

  But I got paint

  on my shirt

  and pants,

  a color called

  Lighthouse Shadows.

 

  THE BLUE HOUR

  God Has a Big Eraser,

  the letters spelled out just before fading.

  The tender light of twilight was leaking away.

  There were people on the street,

  but they scrupulously avoided my eyes.

  Shadows invited everyone in.

  And such music! Like falling water

  or the roundness of a woman’s breast.

  SUSPICION

  Plainclothesmen prowled the train station all night. Everyone arriving on the 8:10 looked like a fugitive. An old junky who made his living stealing overcoats was followed by a parade of children chanting his name. The cops must have been waiting for someone else. In those days, a suspect sat on a stool with a hot spotlight on him, and no matter how much I begged, my parents wouldn’t let me keep the motherless babies, slimy and blind, born in a dark corner of the garden.

  WAKING UP IN RECOVERY

  It was late at night inside me. The nurse on duty believed in the therapeutic properties of art. Bullet-riddled bodies stood around my bed making small talk. Ethics was discussed back then, when it was discussed at all, as what you shouldn’t do rather than what you should. A bird might just as well have been pecking out my conscience. At the edge of my vision was a clock without hands. No one I met considered it hypocrisy to dream in fragments, but bleed in full sentences.