ode on fried chicken

1


Sitting in the Safeway parking lot
munching fried chicken

I hunch my shoulders
and try not to be seen,

savoring each
grease-smeared morsel.

I'm afraid of being spotted
by friends and in-laws,

my wife, colleagues and onlookers,
the foodies of Seattle, Washington.

I don't want to be taken for a heathen
or as a brethren of the fat-folks

whom share my name
and history. Those gun-toting rednecks,

purveyors of big trucks and mysterious chickens,
whom I know and somehow

love. Yet still I know I would rather be here,
here in Seattle, Washington,

where I feel like the proverbial
kid-with-hand-in-cookie-jar,

hunching down and eating fried chicken,
waiting for judgment to come.


2

Eating animals, parts of animals,
parts from which part of the animal

I cannot tell you, dipped
in batter made from an unknown frozen

delicatessen, in grease that has been frying
for years

because pleasure, pure pleasure
is better than the constant thinking

of how I will die.
I will die someday too soon

I know, and to my death-moon I'll say,
You're early, goddamnit. Until then:

what of the joys that are here:
fried chicken, late nights, peanuts, pizza and beer?

Hunker down, chicken-eater!
Get out that egg beater,

set the skillet to flame on the stove, fry drumsticks
without fear:

the last day comes too soon
no matter what you do.

gone to the sea, oh empty belly

Dreamt a plane spectre
crashed into the sea: come out the sky to drown
so many bodies in the blackgreen
Puget Sound.
Shoes, ineffably, flew into the air,
legs and arms and things untellable
on impact. I cracked ribs and coughed blood
with throwing up, bent over
against a park bench
in a pink vaporous evening's end.
Rat-ah-tat went my teeth
at the rail. I imagined your face
in a window pressed
against the heavy glass,
peanuts still salty
in your mouth, and I thought
how life barely fits
barely fits
in those little plastic cups.
The sun came up to prove against
your ending;
I woke with your nibbling
and was glad to know you again.

dear john

Toothless and hoofless, I defer
to the republic.
The Third World
swirls beneath the stumps
where once were my ankles.

Mine is a cash register
holiday, following the decorum
of the sanitarium, of the moments
next to John.

John? Come in John.

How are you.
Sing some more
to me now, sing ever. Register
with bridgeless jumpers and
leave the drinkers.
I need you here.

Beard me not, unfaithful Beagle Phelps!
Scatter not the ravens and the craven
jaw-drop bridges, the ilk of the flavors
that make up my black skillet cornbread day.
Pittance my earlobes and raise up
the long-drowned Piltdown kite.


Say! I have found a nice brownstone beach,
floored with the two or three michelangelo
squeaks, which I found in the grotto with
them women! they won't to; they won't fro,
though Elliot threaten to fuck them so.

18, free

1


For the long slow funeral

with open parachute
failed

you recognize the fall won't take long.

No pallbearers
needed
necessary
or wanted.



2

From here the fields are yellow circles

trapped in squares, yellow

and clay-red,
made of corn
and rimmed with broccoli
coming up at full-tilt,

transmogrifying into trees.
Strands of wheat
in hot, vacant wind
turn the earth's teeth
into a roaring, boiling greeting.

Up above, your folks wave
from the plane--your father, his binoculars,
his victory cigar--and hope upon hope
upon hope

you'll pull your chord

and stop up short
like a coat hanger's hooked your collar,
halted above the wide mouth of stones, alone
in the free air
above the much-spattered ground.



3

As you fall you wait
you scream for a full stop,
and you look:
you can see your whole world, your mama
up there, waving.
The sea wheat is waving, too.
The view is good
but your ears are bursting open


and your chute,
the one you hoped would catch you
is already out
already failing, painted
by the blood from your ears. 

"For a second he became a door, unhinged: he was flying through his mind, through the air around himself and Harold, like a malevolent magic carpet, a door become a blade cutting through the air: a dull razor for the severing - hacking - of veins and arteries and anything blood flows through."

presidential portrait

I see Bush back in 2003

wearing that childlike grin:

he's thinking

--If me and Donald and Dick

drop a cuppla nukes on Iraq and shit

I can build a slip-n-slide in the backyard

and fill it with beer!

Hooray!