Living

Three Poems, Tom Waits, and The Milwaukee Road

Another Snow Day

Snowflakes are falling like my

thoughts.

One wanders here, and there, tumbling from sky to earth against a background of many unresolved

The moon rose the other night like a flashlight

Shone on the world like it was some trainset that I had started to build when I was nine

And only half-painted the plaster mountains, and left jagged streaks of tempera paint where the earth

might be. (someday)

But now the clouds cover the moon

(and the sun)

The horse watches me across the way.

Every ecosystem has an old lady to ask

what’s that boy doing?

An Imagined Conversation With Phil

“Oh, I’ll make him into a Brunswick stew!” I steam

“Greasy grimy gopher guts for six more weeks of winter.”

Somehow my back doesn’t hurt from the other day

When I forgot that the snow had turned to ice and then to concrete and ran to get something from the car right quick

Ended up sideways, two feet in the air

Then Newton was right, and so was Einstein

Proved gravity in an instant

My balance, lost

but so did the ice

I cracked it with my lower back and elbow

Put a big ol’ dent in it like big time wrestling

“And then Phil comes along and says six more weeks of this nonsense” I gnash to the lady in the hall and we laugh.

But if I blustered myself all the way up to Punxsutawney

With my stew pot ready

I imagine that Phill would reemerge with a hand on his furry hip

and say “what? I can’t hear you over this jackhammer I’m using to chip out of my borrow. What do you expect, Malibu?”

And I’d retreat from his sound Pennsylvania logic (and slight Jersey accent, somehow like Adam Sandler)

To mutter vague threats into

an empty stewpot.

Aluminum grumbling to call up summer thunder

Someday.

Battleship

They never told me that being a DJ

is playing Battleship all day

You guess and you guess

Throwing records and scanning lists

Sometimes you sink ‘em on the floor

But the other day

I got to lob depth charges in the Alzheimer’s ward

until

they all woke up, at least a little bit

From somewhere in that fog that purple walks and medication can’t clear

Lips moved

Bye bye Miss American Pie.

Ancestry .Con

Have you heard this Tom Waits song? This is how family trees really are. Forget Ancestry.com.

Uncle Vernon, Uncle Vernon, independent as a hog on ice

He’s a bigshot down at the slaughterhouse, plays accordion for Mr. Weiss.

Something else that’s strangely artistic in its obscurity and abstraction:

–Josh