Poetry Corner

SPOTLIGHT ON Alan Catlin

 

After the accident

 

everything vital

inside mostly healed

though she walked

with a limp due to

compound fractures

that never set right

& her face was

altered by hairline

plastic surgery scars

you could only see

up close and personal

She had the best body

no fault insurance

could provide to a speed

queen hooked on

the power thrust

of hot to overheating

engines, could not stop

wanting the thrill of

the chase, always checking

rear view mirrors to see

pale riders on pale horses

closing the gaps on

Interstate 90, highways

she tried to outrace

Death on

 

 

No longer the home

 

coming queen of

wild women on

parole, she could

still size up a full

house on a Saturday

night, sense the marks

and the shills through

the smoke, hollow

laughter and booze

filled glassware noise

& how much they

were willing to spend,

what it would take

to make her smile;

no matter how much

they were willing to

lay down, it would

never be enough

 

 

She was born on

 

the wrong side of

midnight during a

full phase of a Hunter's

Moon & she grew

up wild as mustangs

she rode in tops down,

engine cranked well

into the red zone,

flying high as American

eagles stoked on Crazy

Horse Malt Liquor

& Jose Cuervo Gold

wearing wraparound

sunglasses after dark,

windshield scattershot

with red clay dust,

dead insects, pin hole

cracks road gravel left

spreading broken seams

like varicose veins

in heat tempered glass,

the angel of death

riding shotgun, t-shirt

sleeves rolled up tight

James Dean style,

just the way he looked

when his Porsche hit

the ess curve & lost

the road

 

 

Once the bar girls

 

sense all the men have

lost their way  their arms

encircle necks made red

from riding range trails

& drinking too much

rotgut whiskey, then they

whisper where & how

much, breathing in sour

smells of sweat, draft

beers & roll-your-owns,

all part of the price to be

paid for an hour of some

thing like comfort, pleasures

of flesh made dry as leather

or scarred by misfortunes

of hard lives lived, all the bar

girls that is but one, the dark

eyed woman who remains

untouchable but available

waiting in the shadows in

the light cast by faded Chinese

lanterns and bar neon,

all the men fucking her in

their minds or in a bed with

someone else, their dreams

for weeks after tormented,

ecstatic at first but later,

later they become tortured,

empty as a ghost town saloon

layered with dust & doom

& silence just as it was

before a gunslinger's bullet

struck home

  

 

Her first man friend

 

looked as if he'd been

left in the desert to die

& had crawled back

into town with a thirst

of seven shipwrecked

sailors, spoke like

Hank Williams with

a hangover six-hairs-of

the-coyote beers couldn't

touch but they helped

him down the road toward

where he needed to be,

to what he did best,

howling at the moon

after all the bars had

closed until he passed

out cold which is how

she found him by the side

of the road waiting to be

nursed back to life with

Hamm's, Stroh's, Olympia,

anything in a can, called

her sweet thing, hot mama,

lover lips, so many times

they both almost believed it

 

Alan Catlin has recently retired from his unchosen profession as a barman in order to devote himself more fully to his writing.  He's neither rich nor famous but has published a number of chapbooks and full length books of poetry and prose including Death and Transfiguration Cocktail, Little Red Book #40, as part of his ongoing Killer Cocktail series.  His next full length book will be Self-Portrait of the Artist Afraid of His Self-Portrait from March Street Press. Alan lives in Shenectady, New York with his wife.

 

PASSING PAST

Gravel and dust at sunrise.

An ochre and rosy stretch in the street,

road-works, slices of tarmac scraped off.

I can smell naked earth -strange,

right here for the first time, on my way to work.

And I am at once that same child

feeling welcomed in his countryside

in years when tarmac was still rare,

only reserved to some far off highway.

“My heart under my feet”, mine were eager to taste

sun-baked earth, dry mud and roots cracking out,

the air filled with a barely heard hum,

the soil’s loom promising suns,

nothing planned, nothing known

but a world announced by sunrise

like eyes seeping inward.

And now this waft, just pebbles and dirt,

while I cross a patch of broken asphalt

and the past that on its passing

lands at my feet, with a fast grip and fast wings,

on what it has always been.

Davide Trame

Venice, Italy

 

TWO BY Doug Draime

 

      The Ego Jacking-Off The Dead


       if art does not
       tear the sham from
       all political thinking
       and lead to
       a truth to free the
       mortal-material soul
       if art does not
       lead to revelation
       or revolution
       or beauty
       or insight
       or hilarity
       over the pitiful
       human race
       if it does none
       of these
       art is only the ego
       jacking-off
       the dead



      Not Hip Enough To Read That Crap

       he writes poems in a bebop rhythm
       your could tap your foot
       or pound out a beat on a coffee table to them

       his poems let you know in no uncertain terms
       that he knew Ginsberg, Corso, and Kerouac
       pimped for Hunter S. when Hunter S. flew
       into NYC to appear on David Lettermen

       and Kerouac slept with his great aunt
       under the shadow of a red harvest moon
       between two 400 foot  redwoods
       in 1951 in a sleeping bag
       that smelled of hibernating possums

       it was Bill Burroughs who rocked him
       to sleep
       reading Uncle Remus
       as a storm ripped through a small Pennsylvania farm town
       where his mother lives now hiding
       under the witness protection program

       the poems he writes in bebop rhythm
       the kind you could tap your foot
       or pound out a beat on the coffee table to them,
       are full of so  many names of hipsters, movie stars,
       poets and gangster innuendo, that it all made me jittery
       and I realized I just wasn’t hip enough
       to read that crap

       and I put the book back in the envelope it came in
       and stuck it under a stack of jazz CD’s
       it was the hippest thing I could think of

        Doug Draime

 

 

widdershins 

highly flex a laundromat
exactly it subsides a love doll
put it firmly in the trunk
and drive it into the desert
now the sun expands its heat-filled atmosphere inside
the breeze catches it and it rolls end over end like tumbleweed back home

            Christopher Mulrooney