The Poetry Marathon

The Brother Word Processor was my friend
my first year out of college.
It was a small beast that sat
on a chair in the corner of my room
when not in use,
which was seldom.

It printed, if not the first play
I wrote, the one I had most contention with
sharing and convincing anyone to produce.

“I don’t know how we’d stage it,” said a friend
who, at the time, hadn’t had his artistic directorship
minted, and was wasn’t about to take chances on an experimental
work inspired by Sam Shepard’s Tooth of Crime.

The Brother died many years ago,
but the play still has potential,
given the right attention
to casting and the enthusiasm
for set and sound design.

I hope I saved it to a flash drive.

You knew how to seduce me,
who before we met
called carrots and hummus dinner.

Our first meal
was at a Korean restaurant
and introduced me to your quietly competitive nature
when it came to declaring victories over flavors
and the tongue you would share them with.

We mutually agreed,
without telling the other,
to never take each other for granted.
Our pet names for each other
punctuate every meal, and, yes,
I always ask for salad
just to hear you say,
“Agitate your greens.”

You are my superstar.
All the photos I take of you
won’t even begin to explore
every facet of who you are,
but capturing you in various moments
is something you’ve accepted
even though you always pull the same
silly look when you see me pointing
my phone camera at you.

Tell me the spices you’ll use tomorrow,
Tell me how you created the sauce for the pasta,
Tell me which method of roasting you’ll defend

You have my ears and my mouth.

I’m listening to the Byrds
as I nurse my gin and tonic.
The airport din doesn’t
offer the best accoustics for McGuinn and Co,
but the bar I’m sitting in
could be extracted from here and plopped
down on a street in my town,
so I double-check my belongings
and close my eyes a minute
to relax my nerves.

Layovers just add a layer of anxiety that if I relax
too much, I’ll not hear my departure. My gate is within
a good sprint from the bar. I don’t start a tab.

By the time I touch down in Kansas City,
I know I’ll have to beseech a bleary-eyed airport
worker to conjure a taxi. Flyoverville’s hours aren’t
that of the coasts, and I can already see the
bored expression of the taxi driver that eventually will arrive
an hour after I’ve landed.

Now boarding, Denver to Kansas City.

I grab my bag, leave a ten for my drink
and make a jagged run to the gate,
my bag over my shoulder banging behind me.
I’ve just fished out my boarding pass
as the last person in line passes
the metal detector.

After being submitted to the body X-ray
and putting my shoes and watch back on, I
slip my earrings in my jeans pocket,
which I’m sure I’ll forget about and throw in the machine.

I have a mid-plane seat, and am
surprised to see how few passengers are
on the flight. I have a row to myself,
but am little inclined to take all three seats.
Sleeping in public spaces might be my phobia.
I tuck my purse between myself and the window
and turn off the overhead light.

No one looks at me
and I look at no one.

After we cross the river, past one of the electric company’s plants
and the tombstones of industry – rusted rail cars banked to disused tracks,
a morgue of old trailers in the lot of the Super Flea –
the winding road is walled on one side with lush overgrowth of different shapes
and heights of green.

Higher, on the hill over the road,
over which the depth offers no outlook,
the trees would be perfect to hide a
modern structure, a new tiny home truly
on the edge of the city.

The lower banks are covered
in tight clusters of short trees whose
tropical green leafage stands in relief
to the cement and corroded iron.

The scene is nothing spectacular.
The area invites no horticulturalists to explore
the divide between urban structures and the plants that will overtake them
one day.

One day, we may leave and come back.
Maybe the trees will have been allowed to
push out the machinery, turn the rail yards into green houses,
reconcile the residents with a part of living taken for granted
even while it flourishes without notice.

“Little pulses now. We have to start stronger before we can get faster.”

Every day, since everything, including my gym, closed down in the March to end all Marches,
I have moved my living room table, grabbed my three pound weights and
through an online mat barre routine, learned that my core was not as strong
as I once assumed by running to the Pixies on the treadmill.

For a few of those early days, I toyed with yoga – the introductory classes alone
made me sweat – but I wanted to feel like I was making up for my lost cardio.
Barre, though, satisfied my instinct for self-punishment, and made me suffer doubly
for my insolence toward classes when they were available on my gym membership.

I have wonky ankles. A small, but uncomfortable calcium build-up, thrills the masochist in me
with every sideways lunge, after which I’m asked to hold one foot to my knee and
reach my arms up.

“Can you stay high in that posture?”

At first, my online instructor was a benevolent angel – I had taken her online Pilates
and was thrilled at how easily I’d committed those moves to muscle memory –
but her cheerful speed grated on me with every added wince of my ankle.
No, I answered, I will not add a smile to that leg lift.

Now we’re in Phase II. So official, it sounds like an administrative vaccine.
My gym reopened; my membership dues are still drawn monthly, but
I’ve yet to step inside my erstwhile haunt. Every day, I think I’ll just go and take a look-see.
But, then, I can just work on my core here in my urban cave.

Sometimes, I even change out of my pajamas before doing the class.

“Little pulses now. Small. Behind you. But, they’re working.”

That way,
concluded the Interviewer,
you can tell if a buyer is a buyer.

And, what if he’s not a buyer?

This question came from two rows behind me.
I had seen the guy changing his tie to one
he’d bought in the lobby.

The Interviewer’s part crinkled
while his face remained flat.

Without speaking, he walked past me to the guy who’d asked the question.

What do we say about our inner skeptic?

I turned partly around to see the Interviewer standing above the guy, crotch to face. It was an unsettling thing to see. The guy wanted to back away, but the table behind him was too close, and he was big. I guessed a former high school wrestler.

The moment lasted forever. The guy composed himself and remembered the script. This wouldn’t be a replay of the last call-out.

I had almost turned around when I noticed, at their feet, a tiny recorder sticking out of the bag on the floor between the guy and the next participant. I couldn’t tell if the machine was recording, but I hoped if he were, that he had enough tape to last the entire session. It would plague me for the next 20 minutes if the machine clicked while the class, or audition, or whatever this terrible situation I was held hostage to completion, did end.

Somewhere, a radio began to play. It was down the hall, but the Interviewer turned his tiny, slicked-back head to the music.

Wordlessly, he stepped into the hallway and clicks of his loafers were heard. Then the Platters song went silent, and the clicks returned down the hall.

————————————————————
My line was the end of Stephen King’s Hearts in Atlantis.
“They sat that way without speaking, and from the radio at their feet, The Platters began to play.”

Like Old Faithful, which I have never visited,
I get notifications of new sites to explore via Atlas Obscura, a wondrous travel page
for eccentric treasures and places over the world,
each one tantalizingly more far away and remote,
suggesting a reality outside the realm of quarantine and paper towel counts.

Currently awaiting my rueful inattention in my clogged in-box:
Visiting the Brooklyn Trail Mining Ruins of Fayetteville, WV;
A Vietnam Culinary trip;
the Hobbit Houses of Culver City, CA;
a Gargoyle and Grotesque tour in Newcastle, England;
and a cemetery tour of Doodletown, NY, a town with no living residents but three cemeteries.

Flush in time as I am at the moment, and willing and able to go to anyplace in the world,
I find it ironic we’re suddenly grounded for the sins of the overgrown child
who resides in the Oval Office.
Could the ineptitude have been part of a larger plan? Is that even possible?
First, prohibit visa applications, then bungle our response to a pandemic to the extent that
no European countries will accept us, and probably Asia and Africa don’t want to smile at us
if we were to walk through their airports, either.

Where’s left? What’s remains to compare to the hidden nooks and crannies shown me
by Atlas Obscura?
My own state? In my mental state, do I want to cross into other counties, and be perforce
to how they do or do not respond to a changed world?

I wish it were possible to go so far in that we were on the outside again.
If we woke up and pretended we were in a different place – a prison –
would we be more willing to comply with the simplest of precautions?

Maybe I should just pick up any number of the books waiting for me to turn off the news.
There’s a lot of travel in Jude, the Obscure, the hapless family leaving behind addresses
as soon as their matrimonial secret is revealed, all leading to the tragic death of Father Time.

The unfairness of faith being the cause of its own demise is a tough lesson to share,
but maybe the unsilent minority needs to listen to what they’re actually being told.
There’s not just a whiff of sulfur at the rallies they attend…

You’re so strange
You’re so strange
You’re so strange

They say that. We see them mouth that on the other
side of the glass.

We call back:

You’re so mean to each other
We’re all kind to one another
All we have is each other,
why don’t you come over?

They don’t stop making
ugly faces on the other
side of the glass.

We have so much to say to one another.
What can they be thinking, we wonder,
to be so angry?

One future dream, the one that doesn’t die
at booted feet:
You tell us why your right to others’ misery
makes you so angry.

If that makes sense to you,
how am I the strange one?

I scrape my plate – Ron’s yam and salmon hash –
And read about Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Reckoning, in this strange time that a brash
Assertion of fragility would sail,
Nay, zoom, over the unfettered charmless
Who take for granted their unguarded selves
And pretend their every laugh is harmless –
Their lethargy of reason I wish delved
Past their own pleasures long enough to see
Greater hearts and minds have failed to endure.
The firefly and the heat easily
Gravitate, per Darwin, to each other.
Youth is wasted on the – oh never mind.
Let’s open a bottle and toast the blind.

(As in this prompt was timestaking.)
🤷🚍🃏🃏🃏🃏🃏🃏🃏

🎥🎬🤡🤡😢🐱‍🏍🌭🥧🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

👽👽🌍🌎🌏⚡🤷👽👽👽👽

————-

🎪🍨🧞‍♂️🧞‍♀️

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

🎥☎🎬 🌭🥧

I get off the bus, and I’m surrounded by jokers

It’s like a bad action film took over the nation,
being directed by clowns
And now I have to search for the right emojs to
match my feeling like an alien from another world
so surreal is the country I live in, and am not sure
I want to die in.
Once this circus is over,
maybe we can return to civility, and leave the disaster movies
to Hollywood.