They Might Be Poems By Paul Lojeski

THEY MIGHT BE POEMS By Paul Lojeski

Katrina Love

After days of muddy pandemonium, a group of young people dressed in black and wearing berets on their dirty heads moved down an empty highway. A tattooed and pierced with shiny metals young woman stepped to the microphone. “We don’t know where we’re going,” she said stunned from staggering past those rooftop voices crying out to Jesus. She took the cell offered by the reporter and dialed her father, who she’d condemned in bitter farewell a decade before. She cried in raindrop tears, “Daddy, come get me. Daddy, please.” The frail man held the phone, sobbing at the sound of her voice. He threw down the receiver and started driving to a place he’d only seen on the news, a place of snakes and suffering and his little baby girl.

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Manhattan Going

On a warm September afternoon a silver-haired businessman moved sharply down 34thtowards Fifth, chewing on a big deal gone south and a bad lease on a Lexus. His hurried stride was abruptly halted, though, at the Empire State by a bearded man holding a cardboard sign that read: Ninjas Killed My Family Need Money for Kung Fu Lessons. This really is too much, the executive thought, even for fucking New York. He grabbed his head, hobbled over to the skyscraper and leaned against the cool glass of a Hallmark window full of smiling Teddy Bears and closed his eyes. In the starry delusion he heard the whine of the metal machine crunching over red rocks on Mars and remembered dinosaurs dancing in his childhood. Jesus, it’s too hot for this time of year, he thought, feeling the sweat soiling his five hundred dollar monogrammed shirt. He needed a drink in a cool joint full of guys like him, grim guys sliding on gold’s sharp edge ready for the blade to the back. His daughter had written from college that Capitalism was self-destructing and he wondered why he still paid thirty-two five a year for that bullshit. But his wife on a face-lift sabbatical in St. Bart’s insisted their little girl was only walking in clouds, so he should shut off the merciless middle-aged bile, saying it was none of his damn business. They were both right, of course, but they sure were a pain-in–the-ass, all-day heartburn right that hurt him late at night alone in the living room with blues in the Bose and ice melting in the single malt headed for his hungry tongue. He missed their cynically scented sermons, though. He wanted to hold their bejeweled hands. Then he thought about

O’Hara’s with its silky roast beef, brawling bartenders and the booths in the back by the smoky kitchen’s stainless steel doors. Yeah, that’s where the safety was, that’s where the drunks would drop bombs on his secret disappointments. But the funniest thing was when he opened his eyes, he found himself flat out on the dirty sidewalk, staring at shoes and cigarette butts, blinking at his remarkable predicament. He recognized the event, the one he knew had been coming for years, slipping its way silently from under his terrified breath: the heart attack his pill-popping doctor had warned him about. He promised to slow down, to ease up and smell the roses but money’s bloody eye had had him in its sights. Now the Ninjas dropped from the shaking sky and there wasn’t any time to learn Kung Fu. He wanted to yell at the bearded man with the sign; it’s too late for that shit, brother.

Going To Santa Cruz

If you don’t know what a field full of brussels sprouts smells like drive down the coast highway from San Francisco till you’re a tad north of Santa Cruz. Peer out rolled down windows at migrants working black soil in clouds of manurescented dust settling now over your soggy, sleepy head. Even on foggy days, you’ll smile at fat cows loping over grassy hills beneath hawks gliding. There’s a tie-dyed woman laughing at children jumping up and down welcoming home a long-haired man getting out of a rusty red pickup. Hells Angels roar past and surfers rip across waves near seals barking on sharp rocks. Oh, man, take me down that curved articulation of highway suspending all things real in hazy veil. Rod Serling’s smoking in the rear view mirror, winking amidst the magnetic magic of internal engines spinning melting black tires on grooved asphalt. You are free, free in speeding space, whipped around the sun, gone from gravity, dreaming, dancing, free, just above Santa Cruz.

Frank’s Poem

Frank said he’d trade his life for being able to scream, just once, like James Brown. To hit it hard at the Apollo on a hot August night, to slide and shake in that cape, blasting soulful sequels through that sacred, quaking roof. He said all he’d ever want in this sorry, wilting world, all he’d ever need to light the light, would be those sacramental sounds blowing forth from his parted lips, soaring over that maddened crowd. You can have heaven and earth and everything stuck in between, he sighed. Put it all away and leave me in that bright white spot, dancing in front of those crazy horns and that cracking base. Just once,

baby, let me punch the night, let me hit it hard, just once, let me scream like James Brown

Leaving My mouth is parched even swallowing memory’s sweet rain. On this spit of sand I sleep where my father went before while silver bells sing my daughter’s name.

People Are Talking To Dogs

Wolves run down I 80 through wild winds towards New York City. A beat, bent car veers onto a rocky shoulder, skidding to a swirling stop. Bullet-riddled eighteen-wheelers pound past, birthing furies of rank atmospherics. He peers up at a sour sky and knows it’s too late for incantations, too late for eulogies. His long black beak is bloodied by its last kill. Only vexation remains now, lying low across six lanes of melting asphalt, hugging dead dirt, waiting to strike.

The Historian’s Last Moment

The vacation home on Lake Como was built by royalties from his best-selling tale of a Sultan’s son sunk low by lust and larceny, stuck through with antique steel by his mad mother. In a sandstorm on the banks of the Euphrates the bitterly bereaved father sobbed as the body burned on its pyre under a starless sky. A TV movie is in the works. Before this miraculous success, the scholar churned out desperately dry tomes about empires enveloped in war’s bloody symphony, a music he extolled at faculty dinners to squirming colleagues swallowing piles of steaming, overcooked dullness. “I tell you,” the historian often said, holding his cigarette imperially aloft with a soft-gloved hand, “War is the engine of our existence.” Through the years he loved more and more the sound of his own voice raised high in reedy pontification, pushing battle engaged in permanently as the path to eternal purity. Such he wrote in pamphlets published in steeple’s pointed shadow and read by rulers embracing his zealous machinations on the dispensing of force as the true essence of this exalted but sadly misguided species. Over cigars and cognac they swore oaths of flesh and faith and off he’d gone to preach the gospel on the electronic stage, which is how he’d come to be picked up at the Four Seasons in a bulletproof limousine and driven through dirty Manhattan snow to the network’s fancy digs at Columbus Circle. The commercial for the latest medical marvel whose main side affect was death wound down and a gaunt woman patted pancake on his narrow face. The surgically sculpted host shuffled papers and grinned big teeth at unseen bosses shouting orders into the silver speaker in his ear, while our historian glowed, monumentally self-obsessed with his achievements including now this television stardom. Not bad for a lad once tormented by rock of ages fire and brimstone glowing red in Oklahoma flatlands. A voice boomed out, “We’re on in three, two, one!” With eyes full of fake purpose the host scooted forward, getting nearer the camera like a friend leaning over to tell secrets. “We’re talking to an expert, who says escalating conflict should be triggered automatically by negative economic indicators. Have I got that right?” Glory hugged the historian’s heart as a brilliant answer hummed in his head. But while the words tumbled

into order, they never made it past his glossy lips. The second he opened his mouth to let loose another flurry of nasal-toned dementia the bomb dropped by the Sultan sitting at thirty-five thousand feet in a shiny jet he bought on sale detonated, de-molecularizing the great thinker into vaporous swirls above history’s invisible hills, topography he’d so blindly studied for decades. He couldn’t, of course, appreciate the irony but the Sultan seemed quite pleased with himself.

Basketball

Winter streaming, eyelashes fluttering, blue February sky dreaming, I feel the moment friends say I’m supposed to be living in. Now. Now. Now, I pass her the ball, cutting to the hoop. Nine year-old ponytail sway yells, “I’m open, Dad!” The sound electric hot sliding down the spine, heating the blood, warming the flesh releasing the ball arching in cold sky to her open sweet hands. My old heart weeps joy, a pilgrim in tears, I’m dancing, do you see? Circles in the vortex, unafraid of vanishing, uplifted in the instant, awakening to her laughing, watching the ball sail away. I try to hold the sound of her saving soul, the sound of eternity, I hope.

My Ambulance Is Coming

I left the health food store in Hoboken, carrying a sack-full of good-for-you veggie burgers, a giant jug of chocolate protein powder and a bottle of multivitamins the tiny Asian lady standing on a wobbly ladder had shoved into my hand, squeaking out choppy syllables like a panicked parrot high up in a jungle tree. I watched stooped over shop owners hosing cigarette butts and dog pee off sidewalks as homeless swayed in front of MacDonald’s and crisply suited men and women charged past towards gray Manhattan drudgeries. Undaunted by the leaden symphony of ligament to bone, I turned right on 3rd, walking past a bank advertising Free Checking in bold blue letters and a dentist bragging that he “Caters to Cowards”, thinking how delicate that spring sun feels on my skin, how fine that warm breeze skimming across the back of my neck is. At Hudson Street, though, police cars and fire trucks with lights flashing blocked the intersection, winching down my rhapsodic mood to the more mundane turf of daily urban catastrophe. I looked for fire clawing skyward from high-rise windows. I listened for the pop of police pistols battling gangsters, a disgruntled, had-all-he-could-take employee, or a woman who’d shot her husband dead in a fury of mistaken judgments. But nothing more threatening than hearty shouts from red-faced fireman and fat cops clustered about broke the day’s calm. I tunneled through the weight of their locally corrupted saviors’ power until I caught sight of Manhattan’s stony verticality. I was almost home but, half way down the block, the emergency, the reason for all that muscle and metal shot out of the Marineview Plaza Apartment Tower. An EMS crew rushed past me a still-conscious, frail man seated on a gurney with an oxygen mask strapped over his mouth and nose. His little eyes were wild with fear and wonder. Employing mechanical movements they shoved him into the dented ambulance and flew off in the roar of that old V8 and the siren’s soul-crunching scream. As the wail faded, joy swept over me for when the heart attack knocks me down, I knew I too would get the royal treatment of strong hands lifting me into the light of the last fast ride of my life. That man and I were brothers, connected to each other and everyone else in America where all are guaranteed speedy pick up and delivery to the hushed finality of the local Intensive Care Unit. I’m pretty sure that’s in the Constitution, baby.

Sentimental I wish we were all somewhere we wanted to be, eternally in warmth and welcome, rivers running slow along sentimental shores, smooth hands caressing craggy brows.

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Darrell

I. He liked doughnuts so much he went to the doughnut shop every day. He’d rather have been there than on the beaches up Highway 1, even a nude one full of California bombshells. Of course, he weighed over 450 pounds then so, really, going to a nude beach was pretty much out of the question; besides, at the counter in Jimmy’s, he felt right at home, sliding down a half dozen jellies or chocolate glazed. His eyes were sad, though, anybody could see that. He lived in a beat-up house with his angry brother and mumbling father. None of them cleaned or did dishes so the place was a fierce mess full of blame and accusations and longing for the woman just dead and buried. Things weren’t going well, to say the least. So that sunny day, when the new waitress smiled, he almost went into cardiac arrest with a mouthful of custard and colorful sprinkles. His arms flew up and he wobbled on the stool, while other patrons watched in wonder with doughnut-full mouths his waging valiant war against gravity’s careless certainty. She called out, “Hang on” and ran around the counter to throw her slight weight against him, just enough, though, to steady his quivering bulk. Then she said he was just what she needed: “A big man to keep the dark away.” Naturally, after wiping the shiny icing off his lips, he offered his service and a few customers vigorously applauded the sweet scene. They got an apartment together above his locksmith shop, above his fuming brother and babbling father who hated his good fortune. Soon both disappeared in a cloud of hillbilly

Lojeski/DARRELL/same stanza

rage, accusing him of foregoing family for the favors of a “snotty whore.” He paid no mind, too lost in her slow touch to care about their jealousy. However, his mind drifted and business slipped as he spent days at the doughnut shop, watching her dance table to table, her singsong “May I help you?” now the symphony of his life. He ignored the dozens of doughnuts he ate daily in worship of her, in reverence rolling over 500 pounds in two months, reveling in sugar heaven’s hope. But the heroin dude showed up with his money grudge and waxy eyes blinking forgiveless ultimatums and she packed in a hurry, leaving him sinking, sailing towards 600 with all hands on deck. At night, he cursed his flesh burning in this cold place. II. He told me the story the day I sat next to him at Jimmy’s one blue Santa Cruz morning. His eyes were wet and sweat poured off his mad excess and he said the chest pain banged like a drum. What could I say? Honestly, I was seriously into a couple of whole wheat glazed and that hot Costa Rican coffee and my head hurt from days of decadent dissolution spurred on by my own lost howling and here I had a stranger crying his blues on my weak shaking shoulder. Wow, It was too much and a few stools down a white-haired couple shook their heads slowly in dismay, wishing they hadn’t heard what they’d heard either. But we shared tales of disappeared women and before long you’d call us friends, with me cooking the dinner shift at Denny’s and him at the counter every evening, eating his favorite deep fried chicken and a bucket of fries, shoveling in the grub with headlights rushing past in the misty California night. He always followed it with a giant double fudge ice cream sunday and, more often than not, he’d watch Johnny Carson in my moldy motel room later, sipping Colt 45. That’s when I noticed he was so big his face had vanished. . III. All this time later the look backwards becomes, as usual, a distorted thing, in and out of focus, there but not there, a questioning of memory’s detail, maybe just a concoction of soft tissue weirdly arranged by high

2.

Lojeski/DARRELL/same stanza

winds at the beginning of time, who knows, but whatever, I remember that fat man in the doughnut shop and I know he died of a massive heart attack soon after, walking to his Volkswagen Bug in the parking lot and somewhere in the molecular buzz of my waking I feel the guilt gnawing at my guts, guilt for not trying to save him, for not standing up, for sliding away into years of more disregard. I think about all the others I’ve let down in small and great ways and I’m left facing the who and what and why of me stripped of self-deceit and delusion and it’s not a pretty picture. I feel like eating doughnuts, a bunch of doughnuts, mounds of doughnuts, hell, a goddamn mountain of doughnuts.

3.

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

What Do I Talk About On The Way To Mars

It’ll take almost two years to get to Mars. They’re training now in a metal chamber. Scientists monitor the affects of isolation. but I think they’re missing the mark. Out there in crow black space what will astronauts talk about after they’ve said all they can about kids and sports and politics? What will they do in the silence? Only the deaf should fly in space.

X-Ray Shows Knife In Man’s Head

I wish I made that up but it was, in fact, a news headline on March 30, 2009 in the United States of America on the planet earth in my 62nd year. I smiled a little curl of a smile, one of those smiles that’s more of a scowl in the making because what I was thinking was so what, who doesn’t have a knife stuck in their head?

Hunting I look for clues to what caused the noise in this silence so I set pins in a bowling alley and sold condoms in a drugstore. I rode a wild river and drove Death Valley. I felt the steel of cell bars and the cold of Vermont. I walked hot beaches and worked in loud factories. I betrayed love and love betrayed me. But stars still say nothing when I look up. Will you continue the search when I am gone?

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Prt Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Extras

When I watch a movie I pay close attention to the extras, especially in, say, a New York street scene where the main character is walking up Broadway or 6th avenue and the sidewalks are crowded with the usual hustle and bustle (think Woody Allen’s Manhattan, for example). I like to scan the faces of the wannabe stars moving past the lead, pretending to be businessmen on the go or suburban women in town for some shopping at Macys etc. I strain to see them because I know this second of screen time is most likely it for them, that being so close to Clooney or Nicholson is the height of their acting career. And sooner or later hope will fade and they’ll face reality, face the odds and the despair of not getting the golden Oscar, and they’ll trudge off to Regularsville with the rest of us Joes. So one day I was walking down Broadway in the Broadway area on a bold blue morning with a hitch in my gitty-up because I was young

and I was going to an audition with every intention of nailing it to the wall. But coming toward me at that very moment and I swear on a stack of Readers Digests it’s true was Mick Jagger himself, pencil thin behind big sunglasses and long hair flowing in the sunlight. I wanted to stop and shake his hand, to touch his magic flesh and say something gushingly inane and he’d say it’s okay, man, I understand, I’m with you, brother. But I only managed a weak smile and in a blink he passed without nod or wink and it’s over, my moment in glory. Now, I tell my real estate clients the story, embellished, of course, and their eyes light up; You had coffee with Mick Jagger! Funny how dreams disappear but I hold no grudges. I have to admit, though, that in the dark of the Cineplex I get a little mopey sometimes seeing all those extras so earnest of intent and effort, sometimes even tears come.

Gaddzooks! (for Steve Singer) Gadd said he used four sticks to sound like two drummers and when he began to bang the beat, I swear I saw two drummers playing, brother. It was a fine vision, like the falls falling in Yosemite on a misty morning.

On Hearing A Politician

I’m one of those cats, baby, who saw wild tongues whip steamy summer afternoons and dreams dance in bright eyes sparking coast to coast. I remember juiced up, fevered roars reeling down smoky streets. I smelled the sour counterattack grinning in shiny black boots beating the fallen crawling for cover. So, please, save the thumping, toe-tapping bullshit for some other sad sack armadillo riding the rumble screaming to Bleaksville. Turn up Aretha, baby, and I’ll wait for the final fall under full moon tango without your money-suited friends selling God’s love because I’m sailing in a delusion of my own devious design and you ain’t in it, baby. Oh, hallelujah, you ain’t in it.

Rocket Launcher

Extras

In Early Morning With Van Morrison

It keeps turning in upon us, heads wobbling, disbelieving red dusk’s pulling down the child’s kiss but I remember it all nevertheless and I will hold dear every breath until the last smiles slip slowly into stardust and blessed booming silence.

Teeth

In the bathroom in my underwear, holding the toothbrush with a pile of paste on it, I got weary. Weary of years and years of brushing and brushing my teeth and I just didn’t want to do it anymore. And the more I resisted, the heavier my arm got until it felt like a bag of bricks. So I let it swing down by my side, brush in tow and then I gave up and let go. As the brush fell to the black and white-tiled floor, everything got better. I felt rejuvenated, like a great weight had been lifted off me. I thought of prisoners going over the wall. But when I checked myself in the mirror I saw my hair was a mess, sticking out And twisted. It needed its daily brushing and a Coat of high-fashion hairspray to hold it in place. I was fed up with that, too, and every other routine I’d been doing for fifty years. I just didn’t want to take another shower or wash the damn dishes or mow the lawn or eat another holiday turkey. Rebellion leads to hunger, so I went to the kitchen and made a tuna fish sandwich, perhaps my five thousandth. But, mid-chew, I realized all this repetition was, in fact, what made up a life and I felt helpless, again.

A Drinker’s Dream

He’s in his apartment on the third floor of a brick building built just after WWII, or so his lard-ass landlord bragged every month, as if the age of the crumbling shitbox justified sucking cash from the pocket of a down-on-his-luck, old soldier just trying to reap the whirlwind in peace and quiet. Sipping scotch he shoplifted yesterday, he watched a suit on TV hop around in front of a weather map, pointing dramatically at deadly dark red and purple swirls, yelling, “We’re going to take a direct hit!” He wanted to see for himself so he pushed up out of the ragged overstuffed chair and shuffled out onto the sagging porch. A ripping wind almost knocked him down. He grabbed the rickety railing and held on, watching the crazy ocean beating inland. They got it right this time, he thought. Hurricane’s’s gonna kick our ass. Back inside he checked the bottles, observing their levels, wondering if there was enough to weather the storm in his required sweaty comfort. But the power shut off and he heard glass break down on the street. He needed a plan fast because he’d seen the supply was low. He took a belt of cheap rum, deciding there was nothing for it but to hit the street and make a surgical strike on Jimmy’s Liquors a few blocks away. A tree branch flew past his head on its way to breaking the window of Landreaux’s Laundry, where, when he had the funds, he got his one suit cleaned and pressed for the funerals of drinking pals killed by exploding livers, smoking pistols, or hundred mile an hour launches into bridge abutments. Bent over with arms outstretched for balance, he turned on Magnolia Street, dodging airborne garbage cans. He could see Jimmy’s and salvation up ahead. He sat in his favorite orange plastic booth that faced the street, listening to the wind roar. He’d gotten to Jimmy’s first, knowing full well a pack of other drunks would soon pile in, clamoring for their fair share of eighty-proof shelter. So he took a blast of high end whiskey in that moment’s grace, smiling at the furious rain and raised the bottle like a suicide lifting a shotgun.

Memo To Ginsberg

steel-sculled nag America fades fast to dead last drowning in bloody beer, burns miracles at Fourth of July barbecues, pledging allegiance to the death of old fags like you. you nodding off in New York after a night of dancing crazy bullshit into the moonless sky, forcing Buddha to play cymbals under the CIA’s watchful crew cut eye. what the fuck were you thinking, brother? America’s whiney hollering about hope barely heard now above the yelling thugs owning every waking moment of every wretched sucker still staggering down beatnik street. say something you bearded freak chanting clown mantras for the camera as fat men cut off heat in dumps owned by fakers driving armored trucks past bus stations packed with deserters going nowhere. hey, man, the ride’s better than standing still in this stinking sewage, they say but you knew that, didn’t you, you dead hipster myth, dumb drunk on sake in stinging rain, watching wild dogs pee on dreams stuck in the muck and nature rises, slides, and melts into blind distortions misinterpreted by crack head scientists and porno preachers but revenge is brewing. the crushing excess

of imagination rushes forth in hot streams seething. of course there are explanations from weatherman, wizards, and rooftop dancers forging forward to redemption and salvation. hear love songs blaring from broken windows above drifters fucking in parked cars in front of bodegas bathed in blue neon. forgotten in the cold dense woods behind colonials rented by novelists, on the thawed glacier gone in the whisper of our presence, destruction masquerading as achievement, glorious ascendance grinding down on the flesh of our ancestors. you are missed. you are missed. you are missed.

Old Man Dad

Every morning early we drove over suburban hills, steaming to the supermarket, together running the errands of life. Inside the A&P, Bonnie Raitt sang over the cereal and I squeezed fat oranges and picked through batches of lumpy apples. I must have turned the wrong way because a silver slice of grade A pain shot up my 55-year-old spine, rudely reminding me my geology had shifted, twisted into an irrevocable system failure: the L5 disc herniated. Smiling gamely down at you, my perfect little princess sitting on the shopping cart seat, I pushed past yellow bags of chips, red-bannered Coca Cola bottles, and jugs of spring water with outdoorsy names like Big Bear and Deer Park. Whooping it up, we flew into the bakery section, into the warm world of freshly made crumb cakes, banana muffins, and extra gooey, double chocolate, chocolate chip cookies. A plump bakery woman in a white smock smiled and gave you a soft brownie that crumbled apart in your happy, laughing mouth. I stuck my tongue in the gap of a missing tooth through which a fiery wind howled and, shocked by the turning, I touched your little pink cheek, my tears held back from your loving world of confectionary bliss.

A Boy And His Dog

In the park kids jumped in sprinklers and hung off jungle gyms. Sailboats cut across the river and a young Spanish couple made out on a bench like movie stars. On the ball field a game was getting together. I stopped to watch the boys fielding grounders and pop flies, laughing and trash talking. A lazy breeze caressed us all. Then I saw Evan standing down by the fence. He was with the young Asian nanny and his new puppy, a tiny white thing his parents had spent a pretty penny on. The dog barked and crapped and the boy laughed. The woman smiled a tight smile and bent and picked it up with a plastic baggy. When she straightened, our eyes met. Who are you to judge? her hard stare demanded. Then a kid slid into second. “Safe!”, the umpire yelled and parents screamed and the coach ran on the field, cursing, kicking dirt, and pulling his hair in bright sunlight. The commotion spooked the dog. It took off with Evan in hot pursuit and the nanny followed fast, calling his name in a high reedy voice, and history raised a sword fashioned of regret and capitulation.

My Miserable Childhood Poem

My parents wished each other horrific deaths over pot roast and potatoes on a soft spring evening near Cleveland. I saw the black Schwin on the sidewalk and I wanted to run out and ride to the edge of the world. “Eat the damn carrots,” mother snapped. Father was drinking scotch in ice. He looked beaten down, sweaty at the brow, balding and paunchy at the waist. Soon he’d be yelling he was “still a young man” who didn’t “deserve this shitty deal.” My sisters chewed fast with heads bowed, trying to finish quickly so they could bolt upstairs and hide from the fighting sure to bang the walls until the booze finally shut it down. Father said through yellowed teeth, “Son, you’ll never amount to a damn thing.” I took the shot silently. Ever since I’d seen a friend’s old man prance about naked one summer afternoon, I wasn’t sure madness and misery didn’t reign supreme everywhere. I shoveled in the carrots and said, “These are really good, Mom.” Then I remembered praise was nothing but a trick in her book practiced by deceivers like her failure-of-a-husband. The girls moaned, waiting for the whip crack of her broken heart. Rising she said, “You’re all traitors to my love and decency.” I saw Bobby ride by and he wasn’t smiling either. I wondered if parents in all the houses were screaming at the top of their lungs. That’s when growing up went bad for me. I began to drift away and voices became nothing but the muffled sounds of passengers on a sinking ship.

Photos I cry when I leaf through pages of an old photo album. That’s only natural, of course. Who wouldn’t bawl a bit seeing his baby girl crawling to her mother’s wide-open arms or the faces of dear ones dead and gone? Or that empty Barbados road in August rainbow where I stood transfixed? Let the tears come. I am not afraid.

Working It Out

At the gym I board a stationary bike and pedal like my life depends upon it, having read that consistent exercise adds years to living but I get afraid the moment of reckoning might be the very next moment, the very next breath the last breath. I go to the doctor for a physical and I’m impressed by his detailed description of my ailments, all slight and treatable but I keep staring at the guy, waiting for him to tell me I’m not going to drop dead the next instant or in the hall on the way out or on the ride home. I’m coming apart at the seams but what’s the medicine for that I want to ask but I don’t because I know there isn’t any besides, if there was, I’d probably die driving over to the pharmacy to pick it up. The following day, surprised to be back on the bike I remember dancing to the Temptations in youthful sway on a summer night and it feels like ten minutes ago I slid across the dance floor in soul swinging flight. So here is magic I think, the trick of memory saving desire and delight. Uplifted, I pedal harder and harder until I’m going faster than time, flying into what can never be taken away, into whatever was and always will be.

Murder The Weatherman

If I could slip my hands around the neck of the weatherman who said it was going to be sunny and warm today I’d do so fully confident a jury of my peers, all of whom had barbecues and weddings or camping trips ruined by his jackass prediction of a gloriously blue sky, would set me free in ten minutes.

Young Girls Play Softball

The pitcher winds up and delivers. The ball sails high over the batter’s head and the catcher misses it so she heaves herself up and walks back to the backstop and picks it up and tosses it back to the pitcher, who misses it and the ball rolls out to the second basegirl. But she doesn’t see it because she’s too busy spinning like a top so finally the shortstop grabs it and throws it to the pitcher, who again misses it and it rolls over to the first base line so, resigned, the pitcher trudges over and retrieves it, returning then to the mound. Ball one, the umpire yells. The pitcher winds up and delivers again. It’s a beauty of a pitch, waist high over the heart of the plate but the batter swings and misses and the ball bounces off the catcher’s chest protector and skids sideways towards third. The catcher leaps up and, apparently blinded by unseen forces, runs in circles trying to find the ball, which is only twenty feet away to her left but might as well be in Russia as far as she is concerned. Her teammates are screaming at her but she stillcan’t see it, so the umpire goes over and gets it and tosses it out to the pitcher, who misses it again and it rolls at the second basegirl who is now standing with her back to home plate, staring at something unknown beyond the outfield fence. Frustrated, the pitcher kicks the dirt and walks over and picks it up and goes back to the mound. Parents sitting in folding chairs are seen pulling their hair. Strike one, the ump hollers. Once more, the windup and delivery. Somehow, though, the batter makes contact and hits a sharp grounder to third. Her coaches jump up and shout in celebration and the girls on the bench go crazy, but the batter is frozen, looking about frantically for a clue as to what she should do, so her coach rushes over and shouts at her to run to first. But there’s really no hurry because the third basegirl has of course missed the ball (some say she never saw it) and it’s now traveling unimpeded down the third base line. The fielding team’s parents are shaking their heads and growling like mad dogs. Meanwhile, as the batter rounds second at one-mile-per-hour the third basegirl finally runs out and scoops up the ball and throws it back into the infield to, sadly, no one in particular. The ball eludes capture once again ending up at the fence on the first base side of the field but it doesn’t matter because the runner has fallen down half way between second and third and is now actually crawling towards the base. Sensing an opportunity, the first basegirl speeds over and picks up the ball and fires it to third. Unfortunately, the third basegirl is still in the outfield where she originally fielded the hit but evidently felt too comfortable out there to return to her position so there’s no one there to catch the incoming throw so the ball bounces around wildly and now everyone is shrieking

and running after it. But the base runner pursuing a Ripley’s Believe It or Not moment has slithered her way safely to third where she now lays exhausted, refusing to rise and go further. Parents on both sides Are speechless and the second basegirl is skipping in a circle. Batter up! the ump calls out. Rain clouds move over the field with the windup and pitch. Magically, the batter places bat on ball and hits a little tapper to the third base side of the pitcher. The runner starts toward home but the pitcher cleanly fields the ball and she has the runner trapped; however, some voodoo from far off strikes her young heart and instead of just going over and tagging her out, she turns and tosses it to the catcher, who has cleverly taken this moment to tie her shoe so she doesn’t notice the ball whizzing by her head or the runner scoring in front of her. Even her coach loses it, throwing down his clipboard and a fat man yells, “What the hell is going on here?” Undetected, the batter then rounds second as no one has bothered to get the ball. The catcher finally grasps the situation and runs over and picks up the ball but when she turns to throw it to third she gets caught in her feet and falls flat on her face. A parent is seen running towards his car, with arms flailing about. The umpire, well attuned to the vagaries of these events, casually brushes off home plate and commands another batter to step forward as raindrops begin to fall. The next two batters foolishly but earnestly swing away and strike out quickly, seemingly in a hurry to get home and download the latest Disney songs on their Ipods. With two outs the fielding team appears hopeful of closing out the inning and taking their turn at bat but the new hitter has other ideas, lofting a sky high pop-up directly above the second basegirl who’s tap dancing while chatting with the shortstop about the Jonas Brothers and they’re both squealing at the mere mention of their names so it was a bit difficult for the rest of the team, the coaches, and all the parents now standing to point out to her that a ball was falling towards her head, even though they were all yelling at the top of their lungs. At the last moment the shortstop caught their drift, gesturing upwards vigorously until her teammate saw the ball and immediately ran into right field frightened to death, allowing the runner to steam happily around the bases but then the thunder boomed and the rain poured down and everyone started hurriedly picking things up and racing to their cars. The coach was chasing after them, yelling that they had a Saturday 4 o’clock game and that the most important thing to remember was to play “smart softball”. “Do you hear me, girls?” And the second basegirl shouted excitedly, “Don’t worry, Coach, I’m really smart. I got all A’s on my report card!”

Catnipped

They caught a cat killer in California the other day, which got me thinking about my cat making a lot of noise in the kitchen right now, apparently not pleased with my serving her a can of chicken flavored cat food, even though she ate the very same stuff this morning without so much as a peep. This fickleness of hers is giving me heartburn and her screeching is causing my hands to twitch. For decades of war, hurricanes, famine, and general mayhem, I’ve dragged that damn animal around the country and for what? Really, what’s in it for me? I sure as hell don’t get any gratitude for my efforts. What’s worse, it was my wife who plucked her out of the pound as a kitten in the fiery air of Phoenix, promising on her life she’d take care of the animal. I wouldn’t have to lift a finger ever, so it’d be like there was no cat in the house at all. She swore this as truth, with tears aplenty. Naturally, I caved, running back to the air-conditioned car like a soldier fleeing battle. But I soon learned my wife was but a trickster who really wanted none of the responsibilities for sustaining the beast. I quickly faced the dreaded litter box’s odiferous horrors by myself. To say I became bitter would, of course, be taking understatement to a new level but many therapists later I thought I’d licked the problem (no pun intended) until a few minutes ago. That’s when the story of the feline serial killer crossed the TV and I began to consider the options of finally ridding myself of the sour creature. After all, I’m getting on in years and the idea that she’d actually outlive me had become an unacceptable possibility. I imagined her curled up in the very chair I sat in to write this with triumphant smugness stuck on her tiny face. Obviously, drastic action is required before I suffer a cat-induced breakdown and I’m sure my insurance won’t cover treatment, which would be exactly what, anyway? Group therapy with other victims of cat madness? So I’ve come up with a failsafe plan. Now, take it easy, friends. Before you dial 911, I’ve got a darling daughter who loves the fluffy fiend, so, don’t worry, I’m not going to commit first degree cat murder but the other day I was watching the Seinfeld episode in which Newman and Kramer kidnap a dog keeping Elaine up all night with its barking and I thought, why not just duplicate their clever

crime and spirit away the arrogant offender to some far off hamlet where a deranged, cat-loving family would tearfully take her in? Oh, for goodness sake, she’s now at my feet on her back with her legs sticking up, purring like a little toy engine, and I think she’s smiling, which reminds me I’ve got to go down in the basement and change the litter for the five thousandth time. But it occurs to me that, with my wife and daughter out of town, this would be the perfect time to scoop her up and drive rapidly across several state lines to end the injustice of my being so roughly handled by indifferent fate and human instability. Then, without thinking, as if I’d become another person entirely, one completely disconnected from the aforementioned sentiments, such as a veterinarian, for instance, I reach down and scratch her tummy like we’re best buddies, involuntarily betraying my courageous conspiratorial intentions to become my very own Benedict Arnold. Shocked and a bit sweaty, I sigh and sit back, resigned to man’s dual nature and my inability to act with the ruthless certainty required to alter history. I take deep Buddhalike breaths, trying to reconnect to the living force coursing through all things when suddenly the cat rolls over, goes to the couch, digs her front paw nails into the brand new custom slipcover, and rips away for all she’s worth. The evil fur ball is flat out taunting me now. She’s crossed a line even a weakling like me can no longer ignore. I hear the call to action heard by the oppressed for millennia and jump up with steely determination and militant commitment. Hurriedly and highly excited, I throw on a warm coat and search my pockets for the car keys, already planning my freedom ride out in my head. My goal is some bleak road in the Poconos with smoke curling out of a cabin’s chimney not far off, where I can toss the Devil’s Minion and be back within twelve hours. But the keys aren’t in my pockets and I can’t remember where I left them. I start opening drawers and running from room to room, getting more frantic because I can’t find them and I know I’ll never do this if I don’t do it now and the enemy cat is screeching again and I’ve got the twitches. Where the hell are those damn keys?

Moab I lived in Moab in a room at the Apache Motel. There’s a little pool and a restaurant where I cooked bacon and eggs for tourists and flirted with the waitress, a sharp tongued girl living in a silver trailer over by the park. She wasn’t much to look at but in that one horse town she was Marilyn Monroe. Hell, you could only buy booze at the state store which closed at five and any day a few stragglers would be going mad dog cosmic on the sidewalk at one minute after. Me too more than one once because I had demons making me jump and hop and howl back then. That winter I met Roger. I was edgy with red rock fever beaming down from those crimson cliffs lining the valley. I was no fun and drinking even more Jack than usual, so I was thinking about hitting the road again when he ordered a double cheeseburger and fries. We got to talking and he said he’d left LA for the very same reason. “It’s our nature to feel trapped wherever we are,” he said. That sounded pretty wise and I might have settled for it except he was blinking and twitching a lot as he spoke, giving me the distinct impression the red rock had him pretty good, too. Therefore, I had no confidence in his commentary on the human condition. Frankly, he seemed a goner, for sure, which got me even more scared because I realized everyone in that town was nuts from natural forces working them over and there was nothing around us for a thousand miles but lonely canyons, coyotes, and piles of mean rattlers. The only good thing going was it was still early and I had plenty of time to get over to the state store before the old bat behind the counter shut it down to watch us all dancing crazy on the sidewalk. She’d laugh her head

off at the sight. Roger said, “You got any pie?”

Unforgettable Lips

A raindrop landed on my high school arm hanging out of the car window on the way to get a burger. I was driving my mother’s Buick with the Greek girl chewing Juicy Fruit next to me. She giggled and played with her fine black hair, shaking slender hips to Do the Mashed Potato. A waitress roller-skated over and I saw kids I knew laughing and hollering and the girl touched my hand. With ketchup on her perfect lips she leaned over and pressed them lightly against mine. I held my breath. I still drive those streets, my arm hanging out in the rain, living in that first kiss, the coolest kiss of all.

Optimism

Took the car in for an oil change fanatic that I am about the every 2000 mile service and I felt, well, satisfied afterwards, like the car appreciated the care and concern, seemingly a bit peppier out on the open road, happier even. Drove it over to the car wash for the Silver Package featuring interior polishing and wheel dressing. I sat with other proud parents, I mean owners, waiting and watching swarms of dedicated cleaners shine and vacuum vigorously. In the driveway at home I relished her beauty, thinking everything’s better than before; the air sharper, the sky bluer. Perhaps death will be blinded by the sparkle and glimmer of those sharp lines, surely to spare me as just reward.

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Luck

I’d wake in the middle of the night to see Larry Rose doing chin ups off the cell bars. During the day we sat at a metal table, smoking and playing cards. Or he’d pace back and forth, swinging his heavy arms like a boxer warming up before a fight. Later, on a beach, a child touched my face and a choir Of gulls sang fabled songs.

What Do I Talk About On The Way To Mars

It’ll take almost two years to get to Mars. They’re training now in a metal chamber. Scientists monitor the affects of isolation, but I think they’re missing the mark. Out there in crow black space what will astronauts talk about after they’ve said all they can about kids and sports and politics? What will they do in the silence? Only the deaf I think should fly in space.

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Any Day USA

Neighbors told the reporter he’d lost his job, that he loved guns and beer, that he hated to lose. When he discovered the note, he went to their church and killed the preacher who’d married them. Then he went to his brother’s house where he found them fucking and he shot them both over and over. Afterwards, he went to a windowless bar and drank boilermakers until he was blurry and ready to ride. He pushed the old Ford hard and with cops everywhere, he put the gun in his mouth, cursing the day he was born.

Hunting I look for clues to what caused the noise in this silence so I set pins in a bowling alley and sold condoms in a drugstore. I rode a wild river and drove Death Valley. I felt the steel of cell bars and the cold of Vermont. I walked hot beaches and worked in loud factories. I betrayed love and love betrayed me. But stars still say nothing when I look up. Will you continue the search when I am gone?

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

On A Sunny Day

I was reading a book at the beach under a blue umbrella when a young beauty in a bikini passed before me. Be assured I stared not because she was half-naked as would normally be my want but because her skin was highly defamed by a swarm of swirling tattoos. There were black crosses, snarling red serpents, and a mushroom cloud on her muscular thigh. Also the words “bad bitch” scrolled across her tanned back. She carried the death of science and reason like a patriot wrapped in the flag. I felt stupid holding a book when

I should’ve been sharpening a blade.

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

A Nurse In Need

A handsome young man is bent over a bench, puking his guts out in bright sunlight. She’s on lunch from nursing the sick and wounded over at the local ER so she’s got no time for the wicked hitting the wailing wall. After hours of saving the undeserving, she wants to cry out, “Oh, mercy be mine.” She opens the paper bag, trying to fight off the memory of her sweet son blown to bits near a palm tree under the same stinking sun hurting her head right then by the blue Hudson. She’d like to reach up and rip the fucking thing out of the sky. But she hears the bench guy retching and choking and turns to see him fall. She drops the tuna sandwich and rushes to his side, pounding on his chest, thinking of her baby with each blow. If only she’d been there to stop his blood from bleeding all over that foreign road, if only this drunken, blacked-out boy was her boy, if only she’d had a second chance.

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected] Say So Long To The Sun

Sooner or later the sun is going to blow and we’re going bye-bye. Oddly, this fact elicits no comment from crowds at football games, rock concerts, gun shows or religious meetings. Newscasts ignore the doom crawling our way, instead showing fat people dieting with vampires and everything fifty percent off till Thursday. Sometimes a scientist points out the super nova facts to a small group of troublemakers who

write letters to Congress after but what can be done about the sun imploding ? politicians ask from big leather chairs. My Uncle John says it’d take unprecedented cooperation and fleets of spaceships sweeping the galaxies looking for suitable planets to settle on. I wonder what we’d take with us but then he says it’ll never happen because we’re idiots. It’s late August and I’m looking out the window at tall trees speckled in light. I’m glad I won’t be here that last day, the day the sun finally sleeps.

Show Business (for Prince) Old Prince touched fire to tongue and spit flames at the moon. He bent low to limbo under cities of stars. His days were numbered he told his grandmother, who remembered shackles and sugar cane fields. But what else could he do?

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Tears In The Sky They bombed the wedding in a mountain village. Pieces of children flew through burnt air. We regret this loss of innocent life, they said. But these things happen in war. I watched my daughter playing in the backyard And vengeance welled up in my broken heart.

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Last Wish

For decades I was a lounge act singing of self-congratulation. In this mirror, though, the flesh of time waits with truth spoiling for a fight. Memories get remembered over and over, repeating so often they become unknown things, uninvited strangers: dreams. In the night, a red moon reads the last rites. For years the leaving of loved ones caught me by surprise, becoming stories for friends. Did I tell you about my crazy Uncle? Have mercy then: let silence be my name.

Old Friends Visiting In August Eggs and potatoes with strong coffee at a sidewalk cafe. We watched young girls head home from dance class. Laughter like birds waking the day. Strawberry jam on toast. I took a photo of your white mustache full of crumbs. we told the same stories again. Manhattan holding us like a super hero. Down Broadway a bookstore. In the poetry section, in the last refuge of wandering men, we worshipped. Poet voices whispered like parents at bedtime. At zabars legs wobbled. Pain in my hips and back.

smiling, I said this used to be my favorite store. Strudel to die for. Pigeons hopped about, scrounging like busy bums. Night on a bench at 87th. Stuck in hot dirty air. loud traffic jerking past. You mentioned cancer and more suffering at the horizon. Then death for both of us. We laughed like children caught red-handed.

A Preacher’s Discourse: “The Stain of Socialism”

Rapacious enemies bred on the dark side of the Moon come hence to murder us and drink our blood. For our righteous holy hearts are but illness to them and theirs crawling sloth-like through a stench of lofty ideals. What horror do they bring but children thinking beyond measured prescription and riotous thoughts roiled by science and liberal urgings so demonic they burn flesh from our sacred unions. Countenance not these false angels! They are marked by the beast with red scorching upon their craven tongues. Beware their cry to care and make whole the broken for these are but the lies of fallen creatures Stained by Socialism, the false hope of weakness. I say, wake up! By visions and voices I command thee read but sacred script in candle light and hide all reactionary epiphanies until cowardly poets and dispensers of despicable art are torn asunder. Let Hell swallow the Stained and ignorance heal the believers. I decree: submit thy minds to emptiness and obedience unfettered.

Climb not Mt. Curiosity but journey long to conformity’s earnest embrace and breathe but the harsh air of redemption’s shrill call. I bring down hideous death upon traitors to my instruction! For whence have we come but from the One Way lighted by flames of forever truth revealed holy by God’s vile and just temper? Therefore, resist mightily the thrust of compassion and empathy, Satan’s twin vipers of eternal castigation! We are, then, in a caldron of misery and mischief only escaped by guile and violence aimed deadly at our slack-hearted foes. Listen never to their feckless song sung to steal are rightful heritage. We are the chosen, the golden ones, the rulers of all things! .

A Virtual Dictatorship Virtually (for Karen)

Spirits gone flat like the screens we watch relentlessly. Conformity twittered into souls. No Mussolini needed here.

A Moment In Woodstock Breakfast on a mountainside porch with friends and family: delicious! A sunny blue sky for good measure. Soft, smooth, tender voices. Laughter skipping across warm air like stones jumping over water. The child’s eyes shining led us forward. The Rugelach was spectacular! In a light breeze we danced, holding the spirit.

Bad Weather Ahead The other day I was a thunderstorm beating across Grand Cayman towards Cuba. It’s a bit embarrassing and self-centered, I know, but I was obsessing about my own death and I just fell apart. Fortunately, the drapes were drawn so the public was spared the spectacle. Please, forgive me my weakness, but I’d never really faced my finality before. It knocked me stiff (no pun intended), I can tell you. I thought I’d put the waterworks behind me but, then, yesterday, I became a hurricane steaming hard over the Gulf towards Key West. The concept of not seeing my family again didn’t compute and I felt faint and far away. Luckily, the meltdown happened in the morning so by the time my daughter got home from school and my wife arrived from work, I looked like I always did but inside, I assure you, I was rusting from all that rain. And right now? Well, right now I’m a squall churning up old Port Jeff Harbor, tossing boats about in my wailing wake. So don’t tell me I’ll never see friends and stars again after I’m gone. Don’t you dare.

No More Shooting This country of mine has been killing people in far off lands my whole life. I know all the flag-dressed excuses and hard hatreds driving down cemetery roads. You’d think, though, those mighty arms would tire from holding aim so long and the crooked fingers would freeze from all that firing. You’d think that, wouldn’t you?

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Late For Dad

I saw my father fifteen minutes before he died. Death and I sat by the bed, listening to his last wheezing breaths. His legs were drawn up so the sheet looked like a white mountain. We’d never gotten along. We fought and went silent over the decades, never talking about the connection binding us together on this hanging thread. I remember the gash of those dying yellow teeth. I went down to the cafeteria for a burger and when I returned the bed was freshly made. Death hadn’t had the decency to wait. Now the flat sheets were the desert I lived in. The empty space forever without him.

Magic In the Mist: Philippe Petit Man on a wire walking between real, feet sliding across death’s smile. A gasp fills the universe. A cheer grabs the heart. We are here, he cries. We are here!

The Hawk Is Here

Some people actually like winter. They like skiing, making a snowman, or watching heavy snow fall from a warm room full of kids drinking cocoa. I’m not one of those people. If I could wrestle winter to the ground and beat the living daylights out of it, I would. Winter and me aren’t pals, never will be. I’ve shoveled one too many driveways, slipped and fallen on my ass one too many times, and gotten utterly depressed forever in its grayness to give a damn about it. If science could do one thing beyond curing cancer and finding us a new home in space, it should vanquish winter so its cold kiss could never tarry upon my cheek again.

Better Late Than Never When I got old and my back became a slag heap of busted discs, poetry slipped into my life. It whispered in my sleep. It woke me in a wail of words wanting. It pinned me down in a swelter of swinging sentences. What a surprise!

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Those Funny Birds

I sat on the bench in the little park at the harbor’s edge. It was early morning and some gulls were standing around on the pier, some over at the water’s edge, and one but a few feet from me and my hot Starbucks. Poets are always going on about birds; birds as metaphors for spirits, the universe, god, the past, death, evil, and on and on. You get the idea, so I narrowed my eyes and examined those birds intently, searching hard for something other than feathers and flesh hiding under a wing or just beyond a beak. I saw nothing unusual but then I noticed the gull closest to me had moved nearer and it was staring at me just as I was staring at it. We were locked in each other’s gazes and I wondered what on earth it was looking at. Then I thought the gull might be giving me the once over for the same reason I’d given it the once over. Maybe it was trying to understand why bird poets used humans as metaphors for everything under the sun. Maybe it was as tired of human metaphors as I was of bird metaphors.

Long Johns

I ordered two pair of navy blue long underwear from LLBean today and I never felt happier. After I hung up I looked out the window at a mean fall sky and the hard wind abusing my favorite spruce and I thought, I’ve got you now, winter, I’m ready for you and your rude friends.

Dangerous Talk

I watch HGTV all the time. I hang on every word about finding that first home, closing the deal, remodeling a seventies kitchen or dropping fifty grand into a backyard do over. The hosts are so helpful and kind and the people so grateful for their capably confident assistance. Every episode brims with goodwill. The surprise of a secret living room makeover tugs at the heart. The world is bright and comforting there. No bombs drop, no bodies litter the street, no bankers cheat, and no homeless beg. Everyone gets what they want, everyone is bubbly and happy. I love HGTV. It’s home.

Power

There’s a girl when I was twenty, kneeling before a mirror. I can’t recall her face or the smell of her hair. Her touch, though, is still close, soothing these last days.

Torched

No English Sammy picked up Frank and me in a green Impala at the bottom of Fort Hill in Roxbury every morning at seven that summer of 1971. He charged us and the two Central American boys a few bucks each for the ride across Boston To Burtman Iron Works, a metal box next to railroad tracks in an industrial wasteland baking in the sun. We joined the Third World stream of already sweating men shuffling into the dark heat of another hard day’s work. In our section we welded together giant garbage dumpsters, the kind behind supermarkets or in front of construction sites, those that when full get winched up on eighteen wheel flatbeds and driven far away for dumping into a piece of America the Beautiful already given up for dead. We did lunch in an empty boxcar out back, sandwiches pulled from brown bags. Next to us sat Columbus, who’d been wrestling dumpsters and eating sparks since we were in junior high. He lit a joint and told us the woman of his dreams left for greener pastures and he wanted to know how a good man like him got trapped in an ungrateful place like this. Good men always get screwed, I said. Back on the floor, the afternoon dragged on in smoke and dust and unbearable heat. Men yelled and cursed, some getting cut in carelessness by the razor sharp steel, blood and bandages everywhere.

Grudges boiled over into pushing and shoving until the foreman stepped in with threats and shouts. I steered clear of a Cuban looking to bash me for whatever, and Frank cried about his lost love. Quitting time came just in time because it was Friday and everyone was dog tired but still mean enough to fight. We made it to no English Manny’s Impala without incident, though, and on the way home the radio was off and no one laughed or chattered, each lost in the daze of another day burned away in a place unexplained in fairy tales or school books Or in the grand myths about mankind ascending to glory and greatness.

“Om” On A Roof

A rich son fled the family business for the gurus of India and when he came back glorified, he got fat and wore robes. He built a house on a hill in the forest and rode his motorcycle through the village, scaring townsfolk with a smoky racket and his barely concealed girth. However, he soon tired of winter’s yowl and flew to Maui and a career in real estate, which brings us to our roofer fixing the roof for the new owners, who were in their city place, enjoying a fine meal when the phone rang. He told them there was a message on the roof. He said the word “Om” had been fashioned into the roof, the darker shingles having been arranged to spell it out in Sanskrit. “Do you want to keep it?” The next day the new owners stood with the roofer and big bees laboring from flower to flower. He said, “See what I mean?” Sure enough, “Om” was plain as day in shingled Sanskrit. The new owners recognized the script from traveling

over ancient plains. “It’s beautiful,” they said. Thus “Om” found a home above infamous Woodstock. And, yes, the new owners tried later to ask our roofer how he learned the language but he’d vanished without a trace. Rumor is he’s doing roofs in Maui now.

This Is Victory

Descendants of slaves and torture whoring the streets of Rio, helping mom and pop pay the bills. Life is a crime, a little girl said. On the beaches between sea and skyscrapers thousands celebrated its Olympic hosting. Rio! they screamed. During the night death squads slaughtered the poor and preachers prayed to stone stuck on mountains. Justice, they cried. While in the losing city of Chicago children were murdered on the way to school or going to the store. Help, everyone pleaded. Winning and losing sang with fear and failure. The future whimpered deep in shadow. Here we come, the beasts roared.

My Friend Van In early morning, when the house is still, and outside the street is quiet, I listen to him sing, “This must be what it’s all about.” For decades his music has slipped along the road with me. Refrains of Avalon Sunset and crowds cheering. Songs by the droves riding the clouds. “In the years before rock and roll” swings through my head. He stayed true to his gift, a comfort to travelers, our Common One.

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Peace

A prize for peace? Can you grasp the absurdity of it? Instead of the real thing, a bogus contest that pays a million bucks to the winner, who did what, exactly? But more to the point, what is this delusion we call peace? A state of existence never extant upon this smoking orb, a self-propagated

propaganda to sooth troubled souls and help make our mythology, our earnest belief that we are good creatures who one day will work it out, will quiet the beast seem real reeling in our holy butchery which is what there really should be a prize for, a prize for butchery, The Nobel Butchery Prize. Lojeski/Peace

Or how bout the Death Maker Award? Or the Slaughter Honor? Or the Best Human Killer on The Planet? Anything but the Peace Prize. Peace in this buzz saw of blood? In this death house screaming through space? Please, there are children here.

2.

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Long Journey Losing

A giant is chewing something shrieking in the purple dusk. His name is Oldness and all meet him one day, squeezing bones dry down by a cold sea. I was walking amidst brown grasses, admiring the moonlight swimming along when he snatched me up with a frightening growl. He lifted me high into the gleam of his ragged teeth and I began to shriek.

On Stephen Dunn’s Bourgeois I had to laugh at the neat little paragraph he put those barking volcanoes in, so everlastingly polite his irony slant-eyed at the horizon smiling at sunrise. But, sometimes, his even, tied-up tone seemed more a prison built to house lost hope like a wild man bound and gagged, groaning through the night.

A List Of First Lines

The doctor bandaged my left wrist without pity. It should be illegal to paint anything yellow. Wars are perfect lies. Politicians are best eaten cold. Don’t ever go to Flagstaff, Arizona. Lying is only natural. Bora Bora is more than beauty. Travel cures nothing. If you get a friend, don’t let go. Don’t be fooled, books are everything. Manhattan seems somehow less. Hit the stage hard. Abandon America as it has abandoned you. Change the oil every three thousand miles. Sobriety is the key to good parenting. Love is there for a reason. Sanity requires cynicism. The Universe is still waiting. What are you looking at?

Funny/Sad A cat racing across the road on a rainy day, mothers marching to yoga, changing to pray. A fat bride cutting the cake, drunk on beer. friends praise an un-published poet, year after year.

A Bad Movie I Starred In

I lived in motel rooms off California highways. I cooked the graveyard for the walking dead. The world is different at 3 a.m., let me tell you, pal. There are things moving then that hunger for daylight. They hunt guys like you, friend. Mercy is their joke. I fed’em and made murder wait. I saved your life, buddy boy.

Something Still Bad

I had to get chicken cutlets for dinner, and don’t forget the mashed potatoes, dad! my daughter yelled. It doesn’t get better than that, a child’s voice commanding the day, so I almost forgot how I’d lived the other way, curled up on the floor, holding the shakes for all I was worth. My lover, my life lay beside me almost empty. Finish me fast, big boy, every last drop, then go to Billy’s for a beautifully full new me. Never be without, it cooed. But I was on the way to get chicken now, whistling a free and easy tune, though that sultry voice still sang my name. I heard it and held my breath.

If I Was A Dog

I’d be even more depressed than I am as a human and that’s saying something, what with all the hell always breaking loose all over the place, but a dog stopped by the other day and it had to roll over and sit and lay down before master gave it a damn biscuit. Jesus, what a spectacle of humiliation. That dog should be playing

Vegas with comedians, singers, and jugglers. Then master started talking baby gibberish like it’s a human infant who knew a word or two and the dog was up on its hind legs, its front paws windmilling the air and it’s whimpering back like it understands because master’s got a doggy treat in hand and she’s growling and so the dog started growling, doing whatever it took and she jumped and the dog’s hopping and I’m sitting there swearing I’m in a goddamn asylum. Jesus!

But I knew better than to say anything because I used to live in Hoboken which should be called Dog Shit City because everyone there owns one and they’re constantly bringing them outside to crap and pee which they do everywhere even right under signs reading No Dogs on the Grass so I’d get into beefs with them saying, can’t you read, asshole! and things would get rough especially with women who you may not know can curse like motherfuckers. Finally, master dropped the cookie and the dog leapt and snapped it out of the air like it’d like to snap her neck

which it would have done a few thousand years ago out in the windy wild, back when animals were animals and humans were just dirty things crouching with pointed sticks. But I was being too hard on the dog really because I remembered me working Jack’n The Box with that stupid hat on my head all sweaty at the forehead and the lumberyard gig and the blazing factory, so who was I to slam another sad creature only trying to get by. I mean, who doesn’t humiliate themselves all the time just for a little treat

falling from the sky?

The Saints Of Sleep

The truly blessed get eight hours of solid sleep every night of their lucky lives. They don’t wake up at 4:00 a.m. red-eyed with a train from hell rumbling down their screaming spines or pace cracked linoleum all night because they couldn’t get to sleep in the first place, which is no place but a hateful land full of dark things beating the air with sharp wings. No, the saints of sleep walk around all day with satisfied smiles on their pink faces without a clue as to what suffering really is, unaware of the monsters there in the crease of that shadow, reaching out for them.

A Question Of Reality

And you put the TV on and you think, shit, there’s got to be something on, something about the guts of life with a message of meaning and hope but all there is is the Price Is Right with the fat guy and news bimbos lying about something that happened out in Indiana. And it’s the same no matter what time it is or what day it is, it’s always the usual noise hitting you in the head, humming in the cold dots. And you wonder if this is the best we’ve got, if all those slaughtered souls and all that science adds up to nothing but Midas Muffler and skinny whores hawking weight loss gizmos to the deaf and dumb. And don’t forget the blind. Us, the blind. I’m just asking because winter’s coming and nobody has any jobs and spirits are sinking but if you turn on the TV those big, beautiful heads are smiling ear to ear, and everyone’s winning prizes, and those new, shiny cars sure do look nice.

for bukowski women love big cocks. they love famous cocks even more. so if a woman finds a cock both famous and big cock, oh, man, just lean back and watch those cloudy eyes roll back forever into that forever flaming moonlight.

Flu Season

A sick woman coughing one of those lung-flying coughs was sitting across from me in the little waiting room at the gym. I was watching my daughter work out but the woman’s hacking was getting louder and more deadly, sounding like something you’d hear in the ER and you’d think that old gal ain’t going to make it. And if I was bundled up on one of those plastic chairs, waiting for some high and mighty intern to listen to my thudding heart and save my life I might have some compassion. You know, being in the same boat and all but right then she was just pissing me off. I mean, where did she get off even leaving her house in the first place, loaded down with alien killers on the hunt like that? Don’t people give a damn about anyone but themselves?

Going Nowhere

For years she talked about Italy; sipping coffee at a café in Florence, riding in a gondola in Venice, gazing at Rome from her five star hotel room. But the going there somehow got kidnapped out in that blast furnace called Arizona. There were no witnesses to the crime. When asked how it happened she’d rush off to her bedroom and bang the door shut. She’d pour a double whiskey, light a smoke, and sit on the edge of the bed staring at the big travel poster, with tears raining hard.

Three Words

I don’t know is the thought in my mind I describe with those syllables forming sounds that mean what, this vacant straining to define the condition of existence facing me right now? So let’s see if that leads anywhere, to a poem specifically, since I’m trying to write a poem after all and before the words I don’t know I had nothing for a poem, nothing. I don’t know is still there waiting, wondering, wild in its own odd way, I suppose. Those three astonishing words hijacking everything, demanding no ransom, giving no directions, leaving me in baffled stasis. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with I don’t know though my whole life is full of it and I’m sick and tired of it, know what I mean?

Bald Man Gone Boring Larry’s ultra famous and mega rich. He’s made me howl for decades and I love him for it, so I don’t begrudge him the trinkets and attention like I do, say, the ceo of a thieving bank or a loudmouth motivational speaker or an ex-juicer jock talking trash. But lately his bits are becoming embarrassingly overused and in some cases downright boring. For instance, as you know, he’s bald and his baldness has been the source of great comic moments; George conspiring to meet Marisa Tomei because little bald guys turn her on comes immediately to mind and when he ordered the hair growing cream from China is another. Larry even accepted an Emmy, complaining about his baldness. You get the point and on it goes in Curb with many other tried and true David riffs (fighting over tips, insulting everybody on the planet followed by excruciatingly hollow apologies) that now shine a harsh light on the fact he’s run out of material. No big deal, after two decades of creating schtick, who wouldn’t? But enough is enough. Cut the crap, man. You’re worth millions and live in mansions. You’re petty sufferings are meaningless and insult the audience. You’ve got nothing left to say. Get off the stage, man. You’re like an old fighter who won’t quit. Get out of the ring, you bum! I can’t watch the slaughter. Don’t be an asshole like all the rest! Sorry. I got a little heated. Kind of like you. Yeah, I’m just like you (minus the money and success, of course) so stop the bullshit and beat it. No, really, I’m sorry. Really, I am. Did that sound sincere? Genuine enough? I thought it was pretty, pretty, pretty good!

Check Out 1. I was in the express lane at the supermarket, obeying the law: ten items or less. See, I’m a good citizen. I go the speed limit, open doors for people etc. Not always, of course. There were years of, you know, excess. But now I expect compliance from myself and others. Follow the rules for the good of all, for peace and quiet, for a smooth sailing ship. So why was that old woman unloading an illegal load of groceries right in front of me? This is why history’s nothing but a pile of junk, I thought. It’s not the horrors dooming it to its present condition but the trillions of inconsideratenesses hanging there in time, wretched bile

boiling the heart of humanity and here was one more scab to add to the wound, this shaky crab’s inconsideration on a rainy October morning. Indignant, I stared at the clerk, who shrugged her shoulders in surrender so, defeated, I jammed my fists deep into my pockets, down into my hopeless, hapless rage ready to swallow me whole. 2. I was in the express lane at the supermarket, breaking the law: ten items or less. I was nervous. See, I usually go by the rules, obey the law. But I was in a hurry and heading to checkout, I don’t know what came over me. I just didn’t give a damn. So I’ve got sixteen on the belt, including a giant 24-pack of two-ply toilet paper. The place was crowded and the line behind me was getting longer and longer by the minute. I felt a wave of disapproval hit me like one of those sandstorms out in Phoenix. I turned and looked down

at the old bird right behind me and she gave me a dirty look and a little chicken cluck. I caught a few ray gun glares from some others, including a bald-headed dude with the usual cache of clichéd bloody tattoos all over him, who looked close to busting me up so I turned back only to face the clerk’s ragged disdain. Okay, I’d been caught red-handed, I wanted to say and sure, I shouldn’t have done it but, please, have mercy and let us rise above our sorry history. Embrace in healing this fracture too long rendering these valleys dry and dead. I gave her a beseeching, guiltloaded look lacking nothing but honesty and she caved and counted me up and I beat it out of there fast, hoping only for forgiveness in our mutually fragile, fleeting breaths.

Long Hair Concerto

Our enemies are everywhere, hear their raven’s call. They disparage everything we ever did or said, our dancing on windswept cliffs. To those coming, listen: You can twirl in starlight and love the one you’re with, you are free and easy, we found out if but for a second. The legends are true; any road can be taken even the wrong one, there’s plenty of time for dying, so run backwards quick, your enemies are coming, too.

Memory Is A Traitor

The doctor bandaged my wrist without pity.

Nothing like the ER on a blustery Boston night, cold eating everything with a mad grin, the girlfriend angry about the whole thing, pacing in the hall, cursing me hard. What was I thinking, I thought, recalling it in dotage: the razor and the tepid bath water, that East Cambridge dump back when immortality was a given with her screaming every bleak night, holding on for dear life. There was blood riding the water, tears everywhere, and that pearl of self-hatred bred over generations like a champion racehorse running strong to the finish, trying to finish me off before the Calvary showed up. I hadn’t thought about it for forty years, too embarrassed, I guess, by it and all the other self-destruction but my little girl said, “What are those marks on your wrist, dad?” Then I heard that siren cut the night.

Yellow

It should be illegal to paint anything yellow I said to my wife in the museum. We were in front of Van Gogh but it was nothing

personal. Yellow just seemed a color best left to nature, whatever it’s real name.

Wars Are Perfect Lies

packed in a child’s perfect smile. Who are we kidding? we love the stuff, blood blowing across the screen, holding hands, trying not to cry. Even real we don’t care if it ever stops. It’s all we have left, all we’ve made of this heaven, this shy glance looking at love.

Bad News On A Beautiful Day Lying is only natural, she said, laying next to him in the Ohio countryside. An old dog walked down the middle of the road. He moved to the window, and watched it waddle away amidst fall colors and a blue sky. Her betrayal made it all look gray and flat. Worse, it’d been his best friend. Now he had no one. Good thing he was young.

Democracy

Politicians are best eaten cold, The Senator joked at the fundraiser. The puffy faces laughed and got out their wallets as the collectors came. He wiped the sweat from his tanned brow. Seriously, though, there’s no truth to the allegations. I never took a penny that didn’t belong to me. His wife laughed so hard she choked on the prime rib. Everyone rushed to her side and pounded on her and gave her the Heimlich but she went blue and died on the spot, anyway. Photos later showed a tearful Senator in the arms of a young woman, captioned, a staffer’s consolation.

Strategy

There are two hospitals within minutes of our house. I drive past them everyday, but I see them not. Instead, I look at the fire of fall leaves, the smart Lexus speeding past, or maybe a road crew fruitlessly filling in another pothole; anything but those brick boxes where the game plays out in the final hush of fluttering sheets.

A Father’s Lament

My baby girl, baby girl, girl baby, baby no more, don’t go. Every step you take is one away from me, my breaking heart, heart breaking, broken heart. Tears falling, falling tears, father of tears, tears of the father, falling for you.

Halloween

Vampires have passed ufo mania, ghost hunting, and miracle sightings of the virgin mary on screen doors and pizza crusts as the benchmark of human lunacy in the early 21st century. . My daughter will again be dracula this year, sweet and oddly scary with those long fangs and shiny black cape and when she says in a weird Transylvanian accent she wants to drink my blood I know I should speak up. I know I should tell her what a crock it all is, how pathetic and fear-based, how darkly reactionary, how anti-girl, how anti-science and everything else it isn’t but I just fake some horror and say please don’t drink my blood, drac, not today, okay? And she laughs and runs off, leaving me sunk in my lame enabler’s costume, the costume of fakery worn by parents everywhere to trick their children into growing up as they did, unwarned and unable to bolt headlong for the nearest exit.

At The Light

Waiting for green in fall’s dusk, she’s talking, “And I’m really good at it…” I said, “Yes, dear. And if we but lived by self-praise alone, oh, what glory would shine upon each face.” “Dad,” she laughed.

My Cineplex

Out the window a backyard of trees with leaves in fall’s full revolt, a touch of blue above, a neighbor’s white fence, a cat washes, a cardinal watches, and two rabbits chew the garden’s last new lettuce and that’s only the preview. Here comes another: rambunctious clouds roll in, rain sheets the air, the cat, the cardinal, and the rabbits vanish. The grass dances, a neighbor runs to her car, holding a newspaper over her head. Here’s another: the sky goes black but for star spots and moon sliver, wind rustles trees, an owl hoots it up, with a train whistle far away. Here’s another…

In the World

I’ve slept in fire, bear said. Crow said, I’ve flown with stars. I made life, bee said. Man said, I invented mirrors. The bear, the crow, and the bee were baffled. Man said, you know, to see yourself. Bear growled. Crow flapped its wings. Bee buzzed. They didn’t have a clue what man meant. Who’s your…self? asked crow.

Standing Up In Flagstaff

Never ever go to Flagstaff, Arizona if you’re a stand up and you’ve got a gig in a bar with eight drunks and your material is falling into that black abyss of bombing and you have to dive in after it because what else can you do? And you hear your voice on the river death bending in slow loud syllables while some bum curses and gives you the finger and there’s nothing for it but the long slog to the last so-called joke and your brain is burning and you need an ambulance. Finally it thuds to an end so you rush to the bar you gulp four shots like a man rescued from the desert. Then you drive back to the motel with the other comic, who’d rocked the house and he’s giving you the phony sympathy of the triumphant because you’re nothing but competition to him so, down deep, he’s glad you tanked and you’d feel the same if the shoe was on the other foot because you, like him, are an insufferably insecure egomaniac. Which is why you’re not really upset by his insincerity and it’s all forgotten by the time you get back to the room, anyway. And you keep drinking, getting warmer by the sip, remembering Catch the night Seinfeld got up, back when you almost got there, but here you are; now drunk and the other comic is on the phone, yelling, I killed. I killed! Beyond his bragging, you hear the

wind wailing through the pines of Flagstaff, a million miles from the promised land or in the promised land for all you know because you can’t tell where the promised land is anymore.

Life and Death

We live in blindness, deafness, numbness, and ignorance. Wild flowers wait, mountains sing, clouds cares,. stars shimmer, Hold on!

Before The Storm

The prisoner took umbrage to counting the blessings sent by me before I became him. Before I lost sight in the storm, denying love and refusing to know, when I was but a child jumping in this dream, a little thing laughing, a baby held in mother’s hands. I saw all that needed seeing had I but opened my eyes.

Familiar Music

Killed on the way to killing. News about bodies, blood needed for the wounded. We hope tomorrow it won’t be us or ours stacked like cord wood in the makeshift morgue out on the misty river. Either way, weeping will be heard under murder’s wings beating hard the dead night.

this time together

valleys of fire decades deep in flight, lightning connecting sky to ground, the journey of you and me here stepping further than ever thought possible.

Song For A Lonely Day

Oh, Cup, pour forth thy life, Thy clear waters, all thee have Within thy vessel so sweet Breath may be ours. Oh, Smile, move across the sky And brighten all who see thee Sliding perchance, too, upon Night’s glistening grace. Oh, Tree, sway freely in golden Breezes, blessing travelers Moving shyly under thy Blazing arch. Oh, Earth, hold us close In thy glory shielding us so Long from cold darkness Running deeply away. Oh, Miraculous Moment bursting forth now, now, leading us endlessly to the next, now. So, Sadness, leave us reclaim Our rightful throne. Behold Joy upon our blessed creation. Behold the dawn.

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Poetry Market

Okay, I scribbled some pretty good poems (Who am I kidding? They’re brilliant!), so I decided to fire them out. I bought Poetry Market and began the search for journals deserving of my genius. Here’s what happened (I only report the facts). First up, an editor shunning elite-sounding free verse with obscure meanings and petty-sounding formal verse with obvious meanings. Whew, I was okay there. I’m not deep enough to be obscure, although “elite-sounding free verse” sounded really sexy and I wondered where I could find some. What else? Nothing pretentious, didactic, or overly sentimental. I guess I won’t send him the one about the dog limping eighty miles through hail and fire to fetch little Jimmy’s mum and dad to bring them back to the well he fell in. What’s next? Does not want light verse, doggerel, or greeting card style poetry. Also, nothing racist, sexist, pornographic, or blasphemous. I was okay until the blasphemous, goddamnit. Turning the page, Poetry does not express emotion, it evokes emotion. Oh, that just pisses me off. I was going to e-mail the one about my rage ripping

apart the cosmos on a red night in hell but now I’m stuck Lojeski/POETRY MARKET/same stanza

with the thing. Jesus! Alright, what’s this? We want anti-literature and its literature, style of the non-style, poems without poems, non-words and non-sentence poems. Huh? I’m just a guy form Cleveland, man, defrost the Universe! Onward. No bag ladies, lovesthat-never-were, please! I get the love angle thing but “no bag ladies?” Do they not want work about bag ladies or poems written by bag ladies? Because I’m trying to remember the last great bag lady poet and I just can’t come up with anything. I need a bath. What’s this? Wants poetry with themes related to pipes and pipe smoking. What planet is this? A poem about a pipe? Certainly. In trundled hope, Harry lit a happy pipe while thunder gnarled smoke upon a coughing horizon. Continuing. Wants poems dealing with bizarre: fantasy, death, morbidity, etc. Etc.? Slashed to pieces, bits of body/ crawled into bloody woods. Next. Contributors should keep in mind there are mentally ill people who submit work to this journal. Eureka!

2.

What Goes Around Skeletons with hallow eyes the size of moons held him in their pearl-handled hands.

On A Beautiful Day in the Ohio countryside, she said, Lying is only natural. He moved to the window and watched a mangy dog waddle down the empty road. Nature never lies, he said.

Rent’s No Musical

The rent is due is the mantra of life. But I’m not talking about the cash I slipped the landlord so I could scurry around this wretched square footage like a cockroach on acid for thirty years, or the pesos I forked over to the car cat so I could drive to that nightmare job in my murder machine or the green I gave the finance guy so I could sit my widening rear end down on the couch I bought from bob’s discount, the very same emotionless couch found in every living room of every shack from here to the borders of hell. No, I’m not talking about that petty-ass rent, I’m talking about the real rent, the rent I didn’t even know existed, the rent death is coming for. I can hear it singing, the rent is due, baby. And the rent is my life and I don’t want to pay it. I won’t.

And you can’t make me! Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Progress

I’m at the dentist’s and he’s really boring in with that screaming drill. I’m holding the chair arms tight, my forehead’s furrowed, I’m sweating and I’m thinking this can’t be the best we can do, for god’s sake. There’s actually smoke coming out of my mouth so he stops and tells me to rinse and I do, drooling spittle everywhere but in the little, white bowl. He asks, How’re you doing? Is he kidding? You’re lucky I’m unarmed, I say. He grins and says, You know, a hundred years ago a man your age wouldn’t have any teeth left. You’d be toothless, my friend. Open. And he revs her up and resumes the onslaught. I see myself on a porch in spring, giving roses to a lovely young woman and we’re both smiling big, happy, toothless smiles.

Camping Out

I sat on the dunes outside Provincetown. As darkness rolled in the sound of the ocean making landfall changed from easy touching to something hard and hostile. Then the wind picked up, tossing sand in my face, and grasses whooshed a foreign tune like horror movie music and I got nervous. I slipped into the sleeping bag and lay Staring up at the stars, trying to calm myself, doing everything I could not to panic. There’s nothing to fear, I told myself. I strained to hear something familiar in the noise of time moving but there was nothing, nothing but the great sounds of emptiness. I realized then I’d never been alone, truly without human company in this place we call home. I’d simply never heard this symphony before. Imagine that.

The Cough i) My nine-year-old daughter has the flu. She’s been coughing for days but she refuses to take any cough medicine. Absolutely refuses, face going stone blank, shaking her head side-to-side, her mouth in the circle made by the sound of no boring once more into my brain. Refusing like some rebel fighter blindfolded at the wall, silent to the end, morally committed to the cause and the secret identity of the others, giving her life for something other than herself. That kind of profound stubbornness. As if the logic of my argument (it will make you feel better!) is a trick, just another subterfuge of evil rulers trying to pry loose her consent to bring her down into the tragedy of irreversible compromise. And no amount of reason or threat works. She won’t do it. ii) My wife and I are burning in the hell of parenting, counting our failures, lining up blame: of course it’s her

fault, I tell myself storming from room to room, trying to find the reason hiding somewhere in a closet or under a pillow, the explanation for this mad delusion threatening to tear asunder all that is good and decent about the nuclear family settled upon a quiet tree-lined street in the dream now gone bad, hanging from the cliff above dissolution and depravity, anarchy singing loud the anthem of our fall. We argue and rage and whisper, frantically hoping for an answer to pop out of the woodwork, some magic code to dance down the hall, a phone call from a stranger casually revealing a miraculous strategy. But there’s nothing but the intractable will of our prepubescent little girl blocking the sun like an iron gate. She won’t do it!

A Stack Of Pancakes

Sweet music in my mouth, sugar singing in my ear, I saw the world righting itself, then the waitress brought the bill.

Revely

Another screwing of the left by the democrats, Obama the fake, the fraud forging change in magic dollar tricks. Wall Street dancing, giving everyone the finger, eternal profit making ripping the shit out of life’s possibilities, allowing these pricks to steal everything and it’s our fault, young and old, bought, hypnotized cowardly lions clamoring for bread begging, humiliating even on sunny days. I will never vote again, never ever to buy into the side show carnival barkers hawking free speech theirs and votes theirs to keep us free for them to rule and pummel forever and, oh yeah, fuck Obama.

The Slow March

A sharp, fall light bounced off the silver casket. Black-draped mourners followed behind in the cemetery adjacent to the road. At a stop sign, I watched the white-robed priest lead the procession. On the radio a guy said things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. I smiled at death moving past, the “better” he must have meant, then the old woman in back of me hit her horn.

Sex on your West New York balcony, thunderstorm pounding the Hudson, black clouds marching on Manhattan. Fantastic!

The Way

When I am gone the places I went will still be there, whether seaside or mountain town others will hear their sound.

Mercedes Benz

In 1962 my father bought a used Mercedes Benz. I was too young to understand but the extended family, being Polish and having experienced German largesse eighteen years previous (my uncle spent the duration in a camp, hardly speaking thereafter), condemned the acquisition vehemently. Thanksgivings became booze-laden slugfests with my aunt bitterly railing against my father between mouthfuls of turkey and stuffing, cursing his “collaboration with that mass murdering bastard!” My father kept earnestly at the vodka, finally standing to order her and the rest of the “fucking clodhoppers” out of his “sacred house!” Bellowing like stampeding elephants, they exited, ripping the holiday air with violent vows of never to return, abandoning my baby sisters and me, little eyes wet; our baptism in history’s bloody vision complete.

An Old Man’s Lament What happened to my cock? he crowed in dawn’s early light. What dark angel stole its purchase so long steady below? At the window he spied purple horizon gleaming with first sun, wondering why nature thus betrayed

a loyal servant like him. But he knew there was nothing for it but sorrow and excuses singing in indifferent sheets and difficult trips to yon pharmacia.

Clear Each human is 99.99999…% the same as every other human; past, present, and future, biologists say. DNA locked in so much so that in an odd way we actually are reincarnated through an endless repetition, we actually are the same human, one human, really,

forever dancing this crazy jig.

Ideologies

All hail the Kool-Aid. Drink deep to sleep soon in shallow graves,

but hastily dug. Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

One Thing Led To Another

A thousand battalions of the poor driven north to here like tigers forced from burning forests attacked the lawns of the lazy. Late November dusk broken by the whine of their leaf blowers, cats hiding under cars, dogs barking behind locked doors. A slice of moon crept above Generals stuck on couches, embroiled in gluttony and great discussions of democracy. I was reminded of soldiers in old black and white footage with flamethrowers strapped on, firing a stream of fire into a cave or tunnel. Minutes later, a man ablaze would run out, his life lit up, ending in a smoldering heap, melting. Good thing there wasn’t any sound.

Paul Lojeski 27 Hillcrest Ave. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (631)-828-5524 [email protected]

Realism

Sanity requires cynicism, I thought, folding shirts all day long in the upscale, Upper West Side clothier. Spring in Manhattan and the movie stars were jovial; Sigourney, Bill, and Robert all smiled at my jokes. They were so close I could smell their scent, a fragrance called Magic, a desire I couldn’t afford.

Misunderstanding

The Universe is still waiting for an explanation: Who are we and where did we come from? We’ve had it backwards all along, then, trying to figure out its origin, scope, and intent, while it’s been studying us, looking for clues to our emergence, hoping since day one we’d just get the hell out of here.

On Shore Overwhelmed by the shirtless and oddly proud obese feeding at the buffet, I disembarked in blue Bermuda summer. By a palm, I watched homeless punch the bougainvillea air. Friends had told me a cruise would do me a world of good but, as far as I could tell, the world of good had already left town.

The Wharf Winter on the Boston waterfront I ran a parking lot for little Scottie in his Cadillac next to a brick building being demolished by the future. The big wrecking ball swung slowly above me, casting a brief shadow upon my upturned face and, then, when it reached the end of its arc it hung for a split second in the gray sky like a tiny moon before flying on return straight into the second story wall and boom! the air was rendered and bricks exploded, blown to bits, a shower of stone just missing the shiny sedans I was responsible for. And the neighborhood birds got thoroughly spooked, flapping madly, crying out like frightened children and the ground rumbled under my feet. A reddish cloud of brick dust spread out over me and my cars like cremated bone thrown into ocean spray and I knew I’d have some explaining to do, especially to Mr. Tommy Carlin who owned the fine men’s apparel shop up the street and that spiffy black Jaguar

now getting a thin coat of dead brick. But I couldn’t help thinking about the men on scaffolds, laughing Irish laughs about wives and fights and South End crooked cops laying them brand new a hundred years before and I felt connected to everything for a moment; a parking lot attendant sailing in the cold morning of old Boston, ready for the wrecking ball.

Hammer And Nail

Astride the roof’s crown he pulled shingles in a bone chilling wind blowing off Lake Champlain. Hungover and dizzy from vertigo and seeing as the boss was off at the lumberyard he sat down and lit a smoke. He looked out at the Adirondacks and the icecovered water and wondered how it had happened. Not how the mountains and lake happened, that whole mess was out of his league, but how he happened to be freezing his ass off for ten bucks an hour in the prime of his manhood. He just couldn’t figure it, he couldn’t figure the motion of his life or the why of its mechanics. It was like he’d been thrown in a raging river without a shore and all he could do was keep head above water.

Extras

When I watch a movie I pay close attention to the extras, especially in, say, a New York street scene where the main character is walking up Broadway or 6th avenue and the sidewalks are crowded with the usual hustle and bustle (think Woody Allen’s Manhattan, for example). I like to scan the faces of the wannabe stars moving past the lead, pretending to be businessmen on the go or suburban women in town for some shopping at Macys etc. I strain to see them because I know this second of screen time is most likely it for them, that being so close to Clooney or Nicholson is the height of their acting career. And sooner or later hope will fade and they’ll face reality, face the odds and the despair of not getting the golden Oscar, and they’ll trudge off to Regularsville with the rest of us Joes. So one day I was walking down Broadway in the Broadway area on a bold blue morning with a hitch in my gitty-up because I was young and I was going to an audition with every intention of nailing it to the wall. But coming toward me at that very moment and I swear on a stack of Readers Digests it’s true was Mick Jagger himself, pencil thin behind big sunglasses and long hair flowing in the sunlight. I wanted to stop and shake his hand, to touch his magic flesh and say something gushingly inane and he’d say it’s

okay, man, I understand, I’m with you, brother. But I only managed a weak smile and in a blink he passed without nod or wink and it’s over, my moment in glory. Now, I tell my real estate clients the story, embellished, of course, and their eyes light up; You had coffee with Mick Jagger! Funny how dreams disappear but I hold no grudges. I have to admit, though, that in the dark of the Cineplex I get a little mopey sometimes seeing all those extras so earnest of intent and effort, sometimes even tears come.

Just Another Day On The Job

I was cooking the dinner shift at Cindy’s in Santa Cruz with black Bob on the grill. He was tending to a bunch of steaks and burgers while I sliced off a few slabs of prime rib from the roast beef just pulled out of the oven. The place was crowded with regulars, working guys and gals, and a few stoners and bikers. In all that sizzle and smoke, it’s easy to fall behind, which was why we were jacked on uppers, which made us work faster, for sure, but also got us edgy and loud and righteously indignant when the waitresses shouted for their orders, sounding to us so high like bleating sheep and we’d bark back like Dobermans. This raucous noise rolled on for a couple of hours until the rush slacked off. Then Bob opened the leather briefcase on the counter, the one he brought his egg pans to work in, so if you saw him on the street you’d think he was a banker or real estate broker instead of a speed freak frycook, and showed me the 357 magnum. Of course, I was shocked but not shocked shocked because everyone seemed to be armed in California, everyone starring in their own action movie or dealing drugs for real or terrified of every stranger on the street or whatever but, I had to admit, that was one big mother of a pistol. Bob said he had it with him all the time because his white girlfriend’s,

redneck ex just got out of the joint and he was more than displeased she was seeing a black guy and, even though they’d broken up well before he got sent up, he still called her in the middle of the night to express his negative feelings about the situation, lacing his invectives with threats of lethal violence against both of them. Bob nodded toward the dining room and told me the guy was sitting there staring at him right then so I might want to get out of the line of fire. I looked out and saw a skinny, mean-faced, guy in a black tee shirt standing up, apparently intending to come back into the kitchen because he took a few steps in our direction but Bob held up the gun for an instant, so he stopped and froze in his tracks, then he turned and walked out fast. Bob immediately went out the back door and watched the guy jump in a beat Chevy Impala He sped off crazy like, bouncing over curbs, squealing tires, and swerving wildly across the road, all the time Bob’s got the 357 aimed at the ex’s head. His waitress girlfriend joined him and they hugged and laughed and we all went back inside because there were more orders up. Bob put the pistol back in the briefcase and then he threw a steak on and I made mashed potatoes. Bob said, It’s going to be a long night.

DNA Reckoning

In the flesh is that feeling of being my father’s boy, of being here before, of being my father, being. In the mind is that memory of being my father’s drunk, of being here before, of being my father, drunk. In that record is the report of being my father’s violence of being here before, of being my father, violent. In the coming dawn is the light of being my father’s hope, of being here before of being my father, hoping.

An Elmore Leonard Character

I stood all day in that grimy factory smoothing the welds of just made pizza oven doors with a heavy grinder spitting sparks and roaring like some pissed-off little space bug. It was another ass-freezing winter of me being dead broke working minimum wage, this time helping build ovens you’ve probably seen behind the counter of your local pie parlor. Me, I just whistled I don’t care until quitting time because I was going home to a dump the roaches didn’t even visit and I was beginning to suspect a major flaw in my character because an able bodied man like me absolutely shouldn’t be living this life. I felt like I was in one of those B science fiction flicks with phony looking special effects and an over-the-hill leading lady who had a serious coke problem. Which I had too on top of everything else, so maybe I was in the right movie, after all. Anyway, back at my place, I sat in the old wing back I took from my father’s place after he died not because I wanted to be reminded of him because, honestly, I was too much like him in a lot of negative ways, what with the booze and rage and violence but because I was too poor to afford furniture

so I pretty much cleaned the bastard out. I was sipping rum and smoking and listening to Van Morrison on the boom box, trying to get a handle on it. Outside, the wind was mad, slamming everything around, behaving like I did sometimes and I had to laugh at that, the idea of me and the wind being similar, like brothers maybe, twin brothers, actually.