The Mojo Sideshow
Poems From a Lost Chicago Notebook...
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| L.L. Brooklyn, photo by Beth Hommel |
We Don't Get Along Like We Used to
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Morning: a silence. I rise, eyes lightbulb wide.
You fall tall Icarus. You grab at me like a suicide with second thoughts grabs air.
Two Days in a Haze
We forgot the time some time ago. Amnesia struck a sudden blow. Kocked us back sharp as sun slapped across the face of morning. Without warning we just forgot the time.
Though the clock ticked days, though our eyes grew glazed, we continued unphased till all of our parts (including our hearts) were sore.
We grabbed for more. We fell on the floor. Bent, rent, spent; time came and went but we had forgotten the time some time ago.
We dropped, stopped, surprised realized it was well past five.
Knocked back, a sharp slap we remembered the time.
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| Circus skirt by Julie Schworm |
Concrete Concubine
I am a kept woman,
concubine to the Corporate King of Concrete. Do I amuse? Draw you in? Closer now, come in, come in. I am a collector of men. See how the land you pick through lies, I have been told that I surprise...
I have been told through flashed winks and smiles of anticipation in rooms where I am merely decoration that I unsettle.
Do you dare? Beware, I handmaiden of high-rise dwell in air and there lies a paradise many flatly strain to reach.
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| L.L. and Katelan Foisy, photo by Beth Hommel |
Eight Halsted
Passenger 3: Looks nervous, like he's got to drop some shit off to a real anxious guy.
Passenger 4: You know I heard this guy ankle break last night! This guy he kick him it went creeakkk! Snap! I gonna get me a gun.
Passenger 5: Gonna get me a gun real soon too, yep, gonna get me a gun
Passenger 1: They call it a depressed area.
Passenger 2: Make it hard to get outta here, hard to get anywhere.
Passenger 4: Gonna get me a gun for Christmas.
Passenger 6: Shhhh! Girl you better quiet down!
Passenger 4: I be as loud as I want. I scream if I want to. I gonna get me a gun. Gonna get me a gun for Christmas.
Passenger getting on: This ain't no bus that run on time.
Photos from Bellocq's Storyville...
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| Achilles |
One
Squelching Jab and I'm immobilized. You make me gape and gush; slice me open and unveil soft, squishy secrets.
The pain is quite extraordinary; a sweet release as if I had been eager to sustain you.
You promise a violent extraction to exceed this brutal joining. Still, I am quite unable to pluck or pry you out; to peer past blackening blood and find its cause.
The little eye you opened will not close nor ever cease to weep.
Yesterday
Kisses fell from your lips like proverbs. Cats stretched wanting to be fed; so did you. I gave you love for breakfast.
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The Kiss
Your kiss is as soft as a flower about to die; it's melting, like a popsicle in July.
Observations Made On Wednesday
The sun hits the blinds 7am wide. I anticipate; then compare 7am to a needle misdirected.
8am I anticipate; then compare you to my too hot coffee.
You're like a needle misdirected.
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A Casual Thing
We occur to one another
on inconsequential days, in inconsequential ways.
We wake to a painted on dawn. I produce a manditory grin. I begin again to pretend I'd like to see you again.
Blue Light
In the dim blue light of a smoke filled room I taste the sticky damp heat of you.
Your toes curl like burning paper till we feel the electric shock of time.
Last Night in June
Burning piercing flash back past torrid tangled fever flailing twisting you.
Midnight at the Underground
The sad, sad strangeness of you lingers. I feel your little fingers. They quieted this crevice of the sidewalk; quieted the din of spit out songs and the sinking clinking of our drinking.
Here's your unfinished drink and a cigarette you rolled looking like nothing so much as an angel lost in a Warhol film.
Lucky glass; how unfair something unaware kissed you goodbye.
The sad, sad strangeness of you lingers, returns though you do not.
Szzzzz
Sticky pink pucker I'm pulled into your heat. Your slow sizzle burn hisssssss is like water on neon.
Fragile light bulb shard, naughty grin, wax paper skin, I have you.
Thinking of You
I think of you
when there's nothing else to think of. You are the only person I could ever love if you were the last person on earth.
State Street in September
Perch on decaying eves. It's the time of the rotting of the eaves. Nothing breathes. Blackening trees. A streetlamp, expectant in the pale, frozen twilight.
Barfly
"He gone. He gone. He was all I had and he gone. I came to Chicago with $2 and a son and right now $2 and a son are all I need.
He died in a bathtub in Washington D.C.
He gone.
Do you believe in God? Are you afraid of dyin? He wasn't afraid of dyin. He died in a bathtub in Washington State.
Do you believe in God? Do you have $2?
He read his Bible. He believed in God. He gone and I'd go too if I could only understand it. All those words in the Bible don't make sense to me, just don't make sense to me at all.
He gone and I'm afraid.
Yes, I remember my address. I can't go there The man there, he won't let me be sad. Sad's ok here but I need $2 Do you have $2?
He gone. He gone. He was all I had and he gone. I came to Chicago with $2 and a son and right now $2 and a son are all I need. Do you have $2?"
Love and Other Problems...
The Morning After
The sun is up. I'm up before you.
Your skin reflects the sun. You snore. I laugh and drift back into unconciousness.
Tonight I will miss you like the sky will miss the sun.
Room For You Frigid, remote, unfeeling walls, without character or definition; so much like you.
Sorrow
The air hangs heavy like a sigh. Black sorrow moving you surround me.
Slow steeping chill you fall with night like memory.
The air hangs heavy like a sigh. Rooms whisper a soft goodbye.
Fragile
Sometimes we forget to mark the box 'fragile' or storm through warnings.
You run your tounge across your teeth. Your mouth full of doubt, you taste the twang of hunched disappointment.
Rememberance of Things Past
Strange to be with you now that love has passed. Sidelong glances cast mask tears. You cried once too as though you knew.
Strange to be with you now. that love has passed, still stranger.
Music
I remember you still, how I preferred the silence of you to any music. I think and wish in whispers to not know you half so well.
Night
Rain spatters like salt, pours from blue black night onto the abstract dramas of cats and children. The vain sun is gone. It's unforgiving orange and gregarious red are muffled music now. Children demand stars. The agressive shots of light spatter like salt.
Where You Were
Cold, soft, floating dream of you... You took the sun with you. There is stillness where you were and quiet falling across stillness.
White Things
In shut up drawers I keep memories of you; like some keep letters and other hidden things, they open rawly like bone and other white things.
Cigarettes, loose pearls an old kid glove, I browse through them when I feel most alone; feel raw like bone, like Christmas and snow in Virginia and other white things.
In shut up drawers I keep memories of you; like some keep letters and other hidden things. In every one it is Christmas with an enormous tree and a thousand lights like snow in Virginia lightly sprinkled over moss. I browse through them when I feel most alone; feel raw like bone, like Christmas and snow in Virginia and other white things.
Memory
You enter softly, like drizzle on a drain-pipe.
I feel the press of your hand on my wrist long after you're gone.
Goodbye I was just going to say goodbye. I suppose it has to be done. It's just as much my fault, I wanted to come. I knew it a long time ago looking at you but what happened?
Being with you was like being kept alive by a medicine dropper.
Now, the morning is in the midst of dawn and I knew it long ago I have to go. I was just going to say goodbye.
Upside Down
Now you dance on your head as if you wanted the world to take notice of you.
You've little more motive than exhebitionism.
You, moving like that, as though the world were your mirror.
The balance is thrown off.
You are so alone.
Gray Morning In the morning flung with gray sparrows kiss the puckering day.
You are gone.
I remember your eyes smiled too. The morning then was blue, when I kissed the puckering you.
Three am Love Song
I threw out all your letters, tossed them into might have been wind trying to forget that the only me left you kept when you left.
At 3am in Richmond rain you came. You weren't the same.
So I threw out all your letters. Tossed them into been wind trying to forget that the only me left you kept.
Moral: Never desire slippery fishes for their wishes.
Time Sucks in it's Breath I try to touch you. You disappear, slip into the end of summer air as though my fingers melted you.
Time sucks in it's breath slows it's measure from polka to waltz.
Rain echoes hollowly.
You & I
Time nails the dust of rusting sighs to the wall.
They fall in disappointed fits to sharred, fragmented bits of expectancy.
Rememberance skips a record broken to sharred, fragmented bits.
They fall like a rusting sighs; in disappointed fits.
Sorrow
I said goodbye to your sleepy face and you were gone.
Now memory crawls down the wall; with a slow-steeping chill.
It lands with a thud and leaves a sorrow-black bruise.
Anything I think and find I would't mind not doing anything at all if it were you I was not doing anything at all with.
A Miscellany of Misery and Wonder...
Top Ten Things You Don't Say to a Poet
10. Is that it? 9. Keep working on it. 8. Sorry, I thought you were finished. 7. Oh, I just now got that. 6. So this is only a draft, right? 5. Read it again, I didn't quite get all that. 4. When you're finished can I put some music on? 3. I don't get it. 2. Haven't I read that before? 1. Uh huh.
Times Square at Midnight
One Electric Spit Of time.
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| Portrait of Tio, Goya |
On Goya's Paintings
"The dream of reason brings forth monsters." - Goya
Pinpointed moments your reason caught up in dreams, catches the screams twisting inside the silent.
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| Witches Sabbath, Goya |
On Mussorgsky's Music
You sound like you found death smiling. You tell us what it looked like in rising surges, sunless songs, subterranean dins of immemorial sorrow. They rise from within then strike from without.
When it hits my ears I do not doubt you saw death smile.
Loose cannon do you still cry
when someone doubts there's a monster in your closet or claw beneath your bed? Is your head still stuffed with muffled screams and toy soldiers? What smolders in your corner of rusting sighs?
Your eyes are canyons sometimes when light is right. They frighten me the way that monster in your closet frightens you.
Stuffed gargoyle smile while you grew I remembered.
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| Pappa Legba |
The Basement
In the household of the odd god there is a basment for lost fathers. Inside it smells dark and green; like pipes and crackling leather.
The heat defeats. It is bare, like a lightbulb. Iron rails stare at creaking fans.
Six
Brown leaves cling tenatively as the hedge sneezes sidewalk chalk.
Red bycicle and lamplight wait. I, six years tenative take little note.
My tounge sticks out... Snowflakes twirl in twilight
Chesapeake
The sun teases the waves like a matador teases a bull with a red that registers slow, violent reaction.
Dreams...
Photos from Lonesome Liz's Mojo Sideshow
Baba Yaga Sings the Bones
She's not a crone with a chicken bone home.
Not this time.
She's a virgin, with skin like the moon, a Geisha's inky silk hair, with eyes like canyons.
A cauldron bubbles above a low fire A skeleton stretches out on a table.
She lifts her arms, opens her mouth and sings the bones.
I imagine it's the sort of noise angels make. As impossible to describe as infinity.
I picked your dream last night. It's a dark kitchen filled with chairs and old women. A dream of violets and ticking clocks, of fuzz that grows on apricots. You, a giantess, stir dew stew with your mouth full of stars and chunks of the moon. In night air where swans flew there grew magnolias and an apple tree.
Damp fingers press wishes to walls in dark kitchens.
Dream of Aunt Bessie's Cats
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| Banjo the Spider by James Robertson |
Cuckoo clock stuffed attic full of old things toc erratic wool the mold sings toc with tic thick, heedless echoes cuckoo toc.
Aunt Bessie's cats close evening cautiously.
There are goblins at the gate crouched under late forsythia.
Aunt Bessie's cats creep quietly Aunt Bessie's cats sweep by, meet me repeatedly in cobwebbled corners of a dark and purple kitchen where steam screams peel back vegetable walls.
The halls are not safe There are elves in the cupboard.
Drown the sound of my why sighs cuckoo clock stuffed attic full of old things toc
Misshapen hands scratch at evenings latch evening that Aunt Bessie's cats close cautiously rings now with tic thick heedless echoes of cuckoo toc.
Genisis
Standing on sand I watch the ocean. It is somehow drying up and covering the earth at the same time.
Animals, straight out of Dali or Bosch, scuttle up from the deep. Their leader walks across the sand on his hands. He's part human, part fish with zebra stripes.
A host of hybrids follow, they're coming up for air for good.
Two lions, looking very pleased, try to outrun the waves.
Revelation
Lulled by Congressional debates over the Middle East, I fall asleep on a rainy afternoon.
I suppose I'm still listening.
I dream I'm floating above the UN still hearing the hearings.
Beneath me an army of millions, wearing bishops caps and red and white move in a kaleidoscopic shift.
They make a sound like stars might make if we could hear them.
Mother Nature
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Art by Wes Freed
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Beneath her pudgy feet flowers sprout. She tells me she does it so she'll feel more at home. "Where is home?", I ask. "Barbados", she laughs, her soft belly quivering above a blue sarong.
There's something ominous about her, something hard to pin down.
I tell her I understand about the spirits. She says she knows, that's why she's here.
The room becomes a primeval hum. A circle of shadowy megaliths appear. They're like what the statues on Easter Island hoped to capture. Not so much gods as ancestors not so much spirits as source.
There's something ominous about them. Something hard to pin down.
They disappear.
Mother Nature sits surrounded by flowers and talks about Barbados.
