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for a moment there last thursday |
having spent the whole afternoon
in the park reading poetry,
under palm trees that forgave me
my desire for beat sainthood,
where i might wander dizzy from hunger,
picking up lost pens &
sanctifying scraps of paper,
pausing to let the rain dissolve me like litter,
using my empty cranium as a beggar’s rice bowl,
wrapped in thrift store holy robes,
excusing myself from the meal table of my mid-life
...having spent the whole afternoon
in the park reading poetry,
with nothing more urgent in my ears than
the clack of the old men's dominoes,
where even the siren's sounds entwined
w/the mourning dove's gentle call &
the crow's welcome shriek,
where my focus narrowed down to the poet's
cross-eyed stare thru owl glasses,
above walrus moustache &
under yellow hippie hair, i
had come back down to earth,
landing in glendale...&
passing a corporate coffee shop, i
was stopped short by the barbecue-smoke voice &
mash-whiskey-in-a-mason-jar guitar of robert johnson,
dripping like honey out of a beehive stereo speaker
mounted above the coffee shop's entrance
...so i lit a cigarette, &
tried to tune out the passing traffic noise,
the hip-hop car stereos, &
the conversation of the 2 teenage armenian girls
sitting nearby at the plastic tables, &
strained my ears upward,
to hear the man who had sold his soul to the devil
to learn to play the blues...&
the bees buzzed, &
the cigarette burned, &
the reflection off the coffee shop window,
cut thru my shadow on the sidewalk
like a sunlight butcher knife...& i
was full of nothing, & i
was ready for anything
copyright 2004
Stosh
Machek |
