The Poetry Marathon

It’s going to get harder to stay this way.
It’s going to get harder to explain why I’m this way.
It’s going to get harder to say I’m fine with it.

I’m not fine.
I say this unparenthetically.
If I were onstage, I’d say it differently.
I’d have it marked – on paper – just as I said it.
I’d even probably stand up and say it as I stood up.

As though standing is the problem.
I can walk and talk – just not feeling up to the latter.

I like sitting and talking, but I like sitting
and doing nothing.

I like it in the way I have time to wait for something
but just for a few minutes and for something that is beyond my control
in a pleasant way.

Like falling right to sleep after taking a pill
Or getting a buzz from a spliff.
Or a very well done martini.
Or an orgasm.

Don’t talk to me about sex.

Let’s just get through this day.
We’ll have dinner and some small talk and
maybe hug tonight.

But I’m scared of tomorrow
I’m bored by tomorrow.

I want to edit my responses
so they laugh in Minnetonka.

No one in hell knows that there’s a man holding an empty glass on a stage in Hennepin County
looking for the Host.

Someday this will all be funny to me.

Record collecting belongs to obsessives.
No basement dweller or salty statistician
I meet the criteria’s main missive
By holding my spot through attrition.

My main connection, with his bins,
Delivers his fix to all in the market square.
He plays music that drown out the din
Of passersby who escape the lair –

Mainly ‘60s rock – I admit is my first love.
But I also found a lone Jimmie Rodgers
Whose Train Whistle Blues shines above
For its songs of hard times soft lodged

The sellers’s wife probably enjoys her quiet Sundays
But, with new vinyl, they’re my own special day

At various points in our REM sleep,
I am the toasty one.
Or so says Ron, who’s turned into me and is so warm himself,
I allow myself to be cocooned for another luxurious hour.
Sleep is the night cream against the grizzled, soldierly grimace
I know will be on his face when he opens his eyes and
remembers: “Fuck, I locked my keys in my car last night.”

I watch him like a cat, sometimes.
His habits are familiar, and his gimlet eyed morning expression
is, to me, more catlike in its disregard for caprice and
unpredictability than any cat meme.

His morning cigarette, the first one of the day,
is spent on the sidewalk in front of our building.
It’s a good day, regardless of a passerby stopping to “buy”
a cigarette off him, and usually not even having the requisite light
to ignite it once given.

If my first response to bad news is less than sanguine, also not good,
I defend myself,
is his timing.

My better self is on hiatus until a solution arrives.

We’ll kiss each other good morning,
but we both remember words said the night before.

If I could pack up my insecurities
and let them sit in a warehouse,
I would.
It would be the gift that, having it taken from me,
would certainly make me more productive.

Money might not make you happier, but knowing
you have the right to social interaction without dread
is priceless.
I once wondered what it would be like to have the ability
to see myself as others see me.
It wouldn’t have made Margo Channing happy,
and I know I wouldn’t like to hear it, either.

I don’t want to wish for a wire to know what
my friends think of me.
I want to know I’m the best person I can be, and accept
my flaws and not be concerned with whether others do or not.

How much longer through this life do I have to
carry this invisible weight that serves no purpose
but to remind me I’m not living in the moment?

I could be happier. I want to be happier.
The face I see in the mirror looks tired
of holding in her breath.

We’ve been planning on getting a dog.
As though we consulted a book of baby puppy names,
one of us came up with one that would be perfect for a little scrunch-faced bulldog: Armour.

We have routines like the young couple from John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger,
minus the class animosity, that we’ve built around this dog, who will be the most
anticipated pet of any household.

Little Armour will be pleased to know Ron has already developed his voice.
That he’s a got an extemporaneous flair for creating dialogue is a perk. Poor Armour
may wonder, though, if he’s being spoken to or if his owner is deranged.

Every time we see a bulldog, we think of Armour, but we know our Armour will be our own.
We’re not dog nappers, thank you.

Armour is less imaginary than he is a bullprint of the dog we hope
we’ll find waiting for us one day. If androids did dream “of electric sheep,”
it’s possible to imagine a little bulldog dreaming of the owners ready to devote to him slavishly.

Or, so my sleepy mind considers it this morning.

This used to be a street with a bakery.
He had a vaudeville memory, it embarassed him to keep hunting
when he knew he’d only have to turn around and
wait for transport, defeated again.

What progress was this? What ribbon cutting?
For whose benefit were these gleaming facades
that no one was ever seen entering?
The more things cost, the fewer people actually had right to enjoy them,
or so it seemed.

He was alone now.

He used to work in an office. Not one of these metal and steel monoliths,
but some things never changed. All offices have the usual temptations,
and he’d been caught indulging in his. First his wife left him, then his bosses
found fault with him.

That corner office was to blame for everything that followed.

He lived in a closet-sized apartment over what used to be a music store.
The store had been vacant for a year. Earlier that week, two younger men showed up –
the new owners – making notes and measurements, introduced themselves.
Shook his hand. He grimaced as he shut his door. It was written
all over their faces their intention was to turn him out
as soon as they began work in earnest on whatever they planned
for the building.

He knew what he had saved. He wouldn’t be sleeping in the park with Soapy.
If you were frugal, you buy the paper and a coffee on Sunday.
His kids didn’t call, but, if he had to ask for a room, he’d frame it as temporary.
Which it would be. The suburbs were a slow death. Faster for him.

He shrugged. He didn’t make plans past mid-year, anyway.

I might brew a cup of tea,
if I can remember to pull the kettle off the fire
before its hissing wakes up my sleeping boyfriend.

Or, I might nurse this glass of wine
as I listen to the new Bob Dylan
and try to resist the urge to catnap.

All the times I hit snooze on a Monday morning
tells me only disappointment that way lies.

So I stay seated, at attention, as I have at this desk
all day, and the two lights – desk and kitchen counter – I’ll finally switch off
in four hours to crawl into bed.

Morning was dark and rainy and I brewed
a pot meant to rouse words from my mind,
and the first lines came from a Covid-weird
summons we had been served and forced us to find
one light saber-welding agent of good –
they had to exist; not all were damn fiends –
and so our days were feverishly fueled
between tears and calm, neither a relief.
The legal clouds broke just a day ago,
when our legal Skywalker sent the word
the case had been dropped. Ron’s sudden whoa!
was as an actor, reverberated.
Life is back to the quarantine surreal.
And there’s nothing others won’t try to steal.

(I had a different take on use of light as a theme, but we’re still ecstatic about our luck.)

That Siphonophore Apolemia looks like a wall
pulled down from a saloon
to make room for the sea urchin school –
they don’t have recess, but they swim
in algebraic equations.

A scientist told me that.

That Siphonophore Apolemia
shook itself loose from a candelabra in outer space
that no one had time to ship back to Macy’s
and now Santa can’t wrap Rudolph in anything
but a dimestore cheetah coat.

You don’t shuck an ear next to Siphonophore Apolemia
unless you know where the Algae Choir gets their husks.
They dance on ’em. Better than sand.
A cook’s tour guide said that,
but he’s anonymous for now.

Don’t forget to ask for Siphonophore Apolemia
at your ice cream and gadgets counter.
They’ll fill your dish and repress your refrigerator.

Let me have a light from that cig, will ya?
Is that a Siphonphore Apolemia lighter?
Those are keepsakes. [Pockets lighter.]
I have two cousins who married Apolemia’s sisters.
I don’t know what that makes us,
but they’re welcome to my neighbor’s guest room.

Christmas Eves were spent at my grandmother’s little house
on Lawndale, and then, later, an A-frame on 16th.
The dining table was set with festive tablecloth, and
even though she still had her old electric keyboard,
she never turned it on to play.

Anyway, the grown-ups – my parents, aunts and uncles –
never stopped talking long enough for there to be a lull
in the laughing and joking.
Flossie, my mom’s sister, gone longer than it seems possible,
was the cut-up.
The only thing she retained
after the undiagnosed Alzheimer’s that later carved her memories
was her smile and a startled laugh like
she was just realizing the joke.

With each year, fewer of the family came and
when they did, they arrived later and left earlier.

Because we wouldn’t see the extended families
on Christmas morning, we all opened each other’s gifts
that night. I want to say it was Flossie who gave me a tribute album
artists performing songs of Yoko One
and John Lennon songs. It was the year Lennon was shot, and I do remember
opening it that night, and my cousin
being impressed
that Roseanne Cash, who sang
“Walking on Thin Ice,”
was on the record.

My heart aches still at the thought that my aunt
knew what Lennon meant to me,
and that she knew I would love that album.

The next morning,
I opened Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write.
My mom has always given me the best books.