Amnesia

by David Spicer

This aquiline nose made me the perfect womanizer:

a billboard glamour rat, I lived to malign beauties

with handcuffs and blackmail them

at the local new wave health spa.

My favorite was the tuna queen,

who combed pubic curls with an airbrush.

I never possessed remorse for bloodbath sins,

kept agendas to shroud vendetta wishes,

I scratched my arm-stump and played Mozart

in the electric blue roadster I received

for a box of bombs years ago. The frost

numbs it further these days as I shudder

through luncheon after noble luncheon,

but babes keep reviving my gutter factor.

Make no mistake: I don’t live in this monk’s

cell by choice, my life is already cluttered.

I’m no eunuch, I spoil for a mate

who’ll elevate me to the status of cardinal,

forgive shy faults, applaud me in a gallery

of movie greats. When I begin to lecture

I’ll smoke dope in a pipe on a catfish farm,

and the etching of a stranger who is me

that peers above the mantle will survey the kingdom

and forget the aquiline nose and august betrayals.

Statement

by David Spicer

Punks with hundred dollar bills aren’t unique.

Anyone can be a parvenu. Me, I’m fickle

as an ad agent, so wealth attracts my big tip

sensibilities. I’ve prospered like a banker,

watched the hawk and heron nag each other

with byzantine anger in my Jaguar sedan.

Just call me the Pied Piper of the South Bronx.

Shit, I’d exploit an AIDS victim. Slam dunkers,

heavyweight chumps, choreographers, infatuated

with my feather boa wrongdoings—serve them all.

Just attend to the battery at my gas station hangout.

My protégé will feed you enough paranoia

to crumble your spine. And introduce you

to our terrier, Garbage Can. They both have

eternal stiff dicks and sallow complexions.

Pop balloons with a scowl on their faces.

So don’t offer me a white-collar scholarship,

and cram that mousse between your snobby binoculars.

I deserve your enmity, not promises of redemption.

I’ve produced more widows than gunshot whiplash.

I can’t sink any lower, but I don’t want your minister.

Just stick the needle in.

I’ve got an elephant’s skin.

HIROSHIMA IN THE MONA LISA

by David Spicer

The ponytailed waitress Hiroshima

with copper hair and a slow burn frown

offered me, the black sheep of a Brahmin

firebomb of a family, asylum on the red

marbled floor of the Mona Lisa.

My rumpled Armani suit the smallpox

of libertines who dined near Pissarro

landscapes under lemon yellow ceilings.

She slipped into badlands of my soul,

a rookie in love, I kissed her on the elbow,

ordered dessert another napkin, and she gave

me uranium. What am I, a lab rat?

Deaf for a moment, I drank sparkling water

and ate blueberry cake, rolled dice in a barrel.

Fog crept in with the flood before snow

fell on the tavern next door. My mojo

forgave me its burden: a lollipop leopard

with jawless cheeks, I needed a slingshot. I yelled

in the restaurant and whistled hello to Hiroshima

for a Band-Aid to cover my crocheted mouth.

TSUNAMI BLOOM

by David Spicer

The French femme fatale never betrayed me,

her bald hairdresser. A serial heartbreaker

with woozy Bardot eyes, she banished men

and caused more than one suicide with

a fountain pen to the neck of a metal guitarist

and that broken glass of burgundy sliced across

a foppish bishop’s flesh. To last weeks

with the tsunami bloom of swimsuit rants

made one bulletproof to her biblical prophecies.

I met that golden hair under aspens during

a counterfeit eclipse, when the tide over

banks rushed through my cove of hornets,

truffles, and Yiddish fear. She

went by FF, and declared her name

the password to the soul. Nobody saw

those memoirs except one hero, eating

prawns and rice with blackberries,

who died of the plague in flights of fancy.

She claimed to be a virgin in awe of men,

a martyr to mistakes. The passion

for an absent partner filled notebooks, and

photographs of fools she played jazz to

filled three mailbags. You’re a rumor

in that raspy voice, she said to me.

I don’t love you, we were never lovers,

here’s a razor blade, I’m bored.

I thrived, slept in a ditch and found

peace with her abstract beauty

under the sad moon and starless night.

Sweet Sixteen in Rapid City

by David Spicer

That year I blossomed with the sneer

of a hawk in paradise. Shipped to

my grandparents’ and their trailer

after I pulled the donkey’s tail, I escaped

bluffs and the patriot buffoon.

No more beat downs with

surfboards for this teenage rogue,

no more boot camp threats

or coffee shops with my guitarist

girlfriend Bogie. I hitched the last

fugitive bus to Rapid, debuted crime

sprees with a shotgun crotch. Mama Bogie

bingoed in later with a tequila bottle

and a grin bigger than a tennis ball. We

squatted in a Buddhist gangster’s mansion

next to a roadhouse, his entourage ours,

played tag in the lumberyard

and notched our ears with knives.

Drove golf carts and forklifts downtown

to rumba music and rode a maniac bison

in our underwear to check the mailbox.

Ignored vendettas from muggers,

dodged detectives with a million ploys.

Slim Bogie and I loved cowboy hats,

not about to wear socks and strait jackets.

So we closed the drapes, swooned

to applause, and blew the place.

THE FIGHT FOR MATILDA

by David Spicer

A grand hijinxer, the president of Krappa Tougha Alpha, created mischief like a painter flinging paint at a canvas. This year his fraternity fell short of pledges. Original in a crazy way, he decided he and his macho brothers would inform Tim Smith and Robert Hall, the two skinniest milksops on campus, that they could join Krappa Tougha Alpha. What’s the catch? Tim Smith asked. First, call me sir, maggot. The maggot did. The president said, You two sissy boys just have to fight each other.

Bullshit, Robert Hall said. It’s bullshit, SIR, the president corrected. In a few seconds, Smith and Hall circled in a mudpit behind the frat house. Smith socked Hall in the mouth before Hall grabbed Smith with a headlock, then turned round and round with Smith in his grip. Smith punched Hall in the kidney and Hall fell. Smith kicked Hall in his ribs and chest and continued to the cheers of the drunk frat brothers and their mascot, a beautiful midget named Matilda. Hall rallied, bounced up, threw mud in the other milksop’s face, and landed a left, then a right, then a left before he kicked Smith in the ass. Smith fell face down into the mud where he stayed, to the applause of the president, the drunk brothers, and Matilda.

Good show, Hall. Guess what happens tomorrow. What, Sir? Hall asked. You get to fight Matilda and if you win, you can fuck her!

Everybody cheered.

Blowhards in The Aubade

by David Spicer

After the art opening, six of us hiked to The Aubade, an artsy-fartsy classical bar, and sat at a mahogany moon of a table. Ralph, a boxer with alfalfa hair who picked fights with Marines fresh out of boot camp, and Mark, a classic sandbagging black belt with kicks, blocks, and a Hitler mustache, were the alpha males. They had never met, but the rest of us knew them.

Wren, a coy tease who flirted with fluffy hair, fluttering eyelashes, and a baby-girl voice, kidded both small men about drinking cognacs and beers in a classical bar and called the drinks “fruity boilermakers.” We chuckled, except Ralph and Mark.

We drank and laughed until the crowd thinned and we remained. Wren joked with us, and Mark and Ralph locked eyes when she asked them, So, Mark, Ralph, what do y’all think of the Zen of Sartre versus the Shinto of Camus? We laughed so loud that the ghosts of departed customers shuddered. Not Mark and Ralph.

I don’t care about that crap, Ralph answered. All I know is your buddy here is gonna be a horizontal Nazi punk when I get through with him.

I know you’re a boxer, Mark replied. That doesn’t matter. I’ll knock your asshole so hard between your eyeballs you’ll be shittin’ teeth for weeks.

Yeah, Wren cheered. That’s what we’re talkin’ about!

Fight! Fight! Fight! we chanted.

The two men danced with their insults for a few minutes until the bartender interjected, OK folks, time to hit the road.

We staggered to my old white Chevy wagon. Mark and Ralph collapsed into the back. We drove home silently, until Wren gazed back at the two passed-out blowhards and wisecracked, I think they’re in love.

The rest of us laughed until we cried, shaking our wobbly heads at the alpha female.

RONNIE

by David Spicer

Rock ‘n’ Roll had to happen

he mumbled, stoned on the couch.

Intense and obnoxious,

jabbering with raucous laughter,

he told us to roll another one.

He’d toured with Black Oak,

ZZ, the Allmans. It’s a beautiful night,

he proclaimed, taking a toke of a thin joint,

bogarting, oblivious.

What I would do to do Seconal,

even Paregoric or Dramamine,

he lamented. He yelled about

installing cable television.

He whispered love to divorcees.

You can count your friends

on one finger, he said, and I listened.

He’d rammed a cop car, he bragged,

and I believed him.

It rained outside, darker than black,

and the organ on the radio

reverberated in our smoky lungs.

Alive behind a mustache and cowboy boots,

he chattered insane, bullshit love:

Hanging in there is cool and

I got two kids I can’t have.

He snorted a rail

with a fifty-dollar bill,

petted a .45 behind his belt.

I’m a criminal, a fuckup, an outlaw,

but I’m blessed as the sun’s birth.

If you’d have written this three years

ago, I’d have shot you, but fuck,

I’ve done drugs with the biggies.

I’m Neal Cassady Junior the Third,

5'10", 130 pounds, 35 in two weeks,

a literary treasure, and about as bad

as the Roadrunner.

We nodded to rock all night,

asked each other about our Rock Heaven.

His cowboy shirt glistened under

a hundred-dollar diamond earring,

he smiled drunk, stoned, and vain

at the moonlight: a sweaty beer

bottle raised to the universe.

THE BEACH

by David Spicer

Jack was a friend for a year

when he told me at a party

he drove to Florida with a divorcee,

lounged in a lawn chair on the beach

and studied the swordfish and her.

They walked the shore for miles

until their eyes tired of the air.

They rested near rocks that blocked

the view of the lighthouse.

They slept the evening,

dreamed the same dream

and discussed it at midnight.

They made love and a wish beneath the stars.

Before dawn the teacher woke,

left his partner asleep,

with waves washing her painted toes

like tiny dishes. Her chest heaved

in and out, in time with the water

slapping the sand and the horizon.

Jack roamed for hours,

hands in pockets.

He reflected about Cuban students

and their souped-up trucks;

he thought of a failed marriage with arguments

borrowed from centuries of fighters in love.

Shaking his head, he listened to the sun rise

above the sea, and jogged back

to the sleeper he hardly knew.

With thirty knife wounds in her torso,

the nude body glared at the morning.

Jack saw tulips of blood on the flesh,

his mouth dropped a scream.

He ran to the police and repeated his story

a dozen times, the same way every time.

They softly said,

Now tell us what really happened.

They drove him to the county jail,

where he lived for a month

with wife beaters, child killers, butt fuckers.

They didn’t bother this man

bigger than their fantasies,

just watched his smiles and silence.

They told each other horrors:

how a man cut out his wife’s heart

with a broken whiskey bottle and ate it;

how a gang burned a church of children

and laughed until the flames died;

how brothers raped their sisters

and strangled them with barbed wire.

After the grand jury indicted him,

he waited for the writ.

Then the prosecutor dropped the charges.

Jack landed a job where I worked,

And proved his friendship by listening

without complaint to my groans.

I didn’t know about the charge

except from newspaper accounts about a teacher

who committed a Florida murder.

He was guilty of wandering

on the wrong end of the beach.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

by David Spicer

New Year’s Eve was in full swing at Ars Nova, a salon for artists and writers, owned by a kindly woman in her 70s named Kate Reynolds, who opened it because she felt the city needed such a refuge.

At eleven, the back door flung open to announce the arrival of Delia, who was with Bad Olaf, a giant, balding Swede. A boy of about nine stood with him.

The trio stomped into the room’s center, now absent of music and laughter.

OK, Tommy, who’s the bitch that grabbed you by the arm when you were in here?

The little boy pointed at Kate, who seemed dumbstruck.

What? she asked, what are—Delia slugged her in the face with a roundhouse blow, resulting in a knockdown. Before she could kick Kate’s ribs, Bad Olaf pulled her away.

I jumped in and yelled at Delia, Get out of here, you psychopath, before I call the cops. Delia smirked and Olaf grabbed Tommy into his huge arms to carry him down the stairs.

Kate, sporting a bruised lip, was on her feet and announced, Come on, folks, let’s not allow that hussy to ruin our party.

Too shocked to ask questions, we complied and sang until midnight, yelled Happy New Year!, hugged each other, and continued to have a blast.

I woke up on Kate’s littered floor, where five or six other revelers lay in various states of stupor. I took some aspirin, and trudged down the stairs to my old Impala. The windows were shattered, the tires flat, and the headlights were broken into small pieces. A sheet of notebook paper was duct taped to the rear view mirror. I opened the driver’s door and saw the crayoned smiley face.

NIGHTHAWKER STREETWALKER

by David Spicer

Flush with money, Harry Sears and I decided to tour Midtown bars, get smashed, pick up women, and be unable to perform later. Harry felt that women liked men to get so drunk that they couldn’t be ramrods.

We visited Mama Mia’s first, where we drank Margaritas. No action. We walked next door to Hellhole, a punk pit painted flat black on the exterior, where bands plastered posters and turned it into an off-white surface in about a month’s time. Perhaps the bar went broke because of painting costs, but I felt that the music was cruddy and drove away real money. Besides, I didn’t like the Wintergreens enough to hustle wild females. We trudged over to Milky Mulligan’s, a white building with a golf theme, and drank a couple of Woody Tigers. They tasted like, well, wooden tigers.

Minnie’s was a dank enclave of bikers and truckers. The dankness ended in fistfights each night and Minnie’s quickly went broke. We drank beer until I tired of Harry rambling about his dream woman. Next: The Nail Biter. It was a high-end meat market where women drank. We left when we didn’t like the Bloody Marys and Harriet Wallbangers.

Next: Twelfth Night. Artsy fartsy, along with The Aubade next door, another snooty-tooty place that catered to actors, poets, and artists. Both lasted a long time because many people deemed themselves actors, poets, and artists. The infamous poet Delia frequented these two watering holes, which late in their lives became arson victims.

We counted fifteen bars before the end of the tour. Harry and I knew we were done when we chose The Rails as our last call. Staggering into the darkest dive that neither one of us had visited, we ordered tequila and finished it when inspiration struck me. Nighthawker Streetwalker, swaggering from the drain, Nighthawker . . . I recited, when a greasy-haired hag with pockmarks yelled, Who you callin’ Nighthawka Steetwalka, Mothafucka? Nobody, ma’am, we slurred, and exited as fast as our drunk asses allowed.

The next morning Harry and I woke up in jail, our heads bigger than boxcars.

LUST SONG OF AMERICAN MANIAC

by David Spicer

Not one to bring roses before the wine-and-dine routine, I sing:

Let’s do it in a bathtub of spaghetti sauce, let’s do it on a bed

of hundred dollar bills, while Jimmy’s blaring.

I’ll try anything to see where your legs disappear.

I’ll be a gambler carrying a diamond cane.

I want to fuck you.

In the cherry orchards outside your daughter’s patio.

In the backseat of your ’57 Studebaker.

Everywoman, I want to drill life into you:

the only abortions I believe in are poems.

I want to find you some midnight wearing white.

You can be on top if we’re on a Big Apple elevator.

But no, this is Memphis, the city of dreamers and vampires,

where sex is a hunchback everybody hides.

Where sex whispers in our ears like a hoarse beggar.

Your garters shining under the moon.

While bookies collect on our most glorious act,

after we’ve climbed a hill of rusty steel.

I want to meet you in a supermarket, toss the lamb chops on the linoleum,

hump you burning in the freezer display.

I want to explore you in a Graceland bedroom under a velvet Elvis painting.

I want dogs to bark, babies to bawl, guns to shoot all over this ragdoll city.

I want to crank you on Queen of the Mississippi.

I want to caress you, not talk about the lasagna

you ate with Tony last night.

Not about the kid you killed with your Volvo.

I’d stop shaving for a year if you’d let me remove your slip with my nose.

My smiles would melt into your kisses if you’d let me slide your panties

down those sycamore legs.

I’d tell lies about the pyramids to sack you.

I have to share my sexist jokes while I school you.

You don’t know how I feel.

I dream of you every day, a bit boyish like my kid sister.

I want you to be my mother as I lick your mango tits.

You don’t have a face—only a farm of strawberries.

I want to lay you in the post office under WANTED posters.

I must have you in the name of lust.

Will you say Fuck off?

Can I follow you home to your hot tub, drink White Russians by lamplight,

and dance to the Tennessee Waltz?

Even if I read you poems by Marvell, Donne, Browning, Shakespeare,

and myself?

I need you in your 40-year-old Rapunzel-haired wonder.

I want to whisper into your sensitive ears the parables of Tolstoy, Dickens,

and Woody Allen.

I crave you after I eat oysters and vanilla custard.

In a Ferris wheel as it’s ascending.

The whole circle would crack like a giant egg.

The sun would grin, the sky would chuckle.

Can you be an immortal celebrity, with your twitters in spasms

when you’re wiggling to a bossa nova catechism?

I live for the moment I can drive into you, beautiful hussy.

At the muscle club, in a telephone booth, in the cargo belly of an airplane.

I know the color of your skin is an orange glow.

I dwell on whether your toes curl when you scream with disappointed ecstasy.

I’ll hitchhike a ride with a carload of drunk jocks to get to your house.

It doesn’t matter if sable is more expensive this time of year.

I want your blossomed body.

The challenge of the unattainable, the anathema of blemishes.

I know you won’t disappoint me.

Bite me in the balls.

I’ll pay anything for a look at those moon-crater nipples.

I’ll sing “How Sweet I Roamed from Field to Field” for a taste.

Don’t order me to climb a streetlight and blow the bulb.

That legendary fig of yours, pink, hot beauty,

folded in a sleepless dream.

You’re my last hope to be human.

I’ll let you whip me with your hickory switches.

I’ll let you sit on my aging Auden face.

In the stadium while the Giants are stomping the Cowboys 69-0.

In the boxing ring, with the hungry watching, we’ll be each other’s knockout.

We’ll rub ourselves raw in caves, listen to Beatles records, view the Olympics.

I want to gently scrape my teeth over every inch of your skin.

Let me comb my fingers through your sand-speckled hair.

Pretend I’m Picasso.

Pretend I’m a priest.

Say I’m Goliath, say I’m Dilbert.

Say Yes.

I want to hear angels applaud.

I want Elvis to resurrect.

I want the Lone Ranger’s silver bullet with your husband’s blessing.

Telephone me, telegraph me, e-mail me, rent a billboard.

Tell me I’m the greatest since Ali,

Lie to me, lie next to me,

Let me guide you to forty-one symphony screams,

Let me show you who the King really is, how big his prick is,

Close your eyes to the galaxies as I wildcat you,

Vanish in a flash of light

Before I die.

…THE TOWERS FELL…

by David Spicer

Where were you when the Towers fell?

I was dead drunk in a Philly diner

waiting for the bars to open.

A two thousand-dollar suit shook my shoulders

and I didn’t wake up for half an hour.

He asked me if I had heard.

I griped that I was passed out.

The TV blasted, smoke billowed so black

I thought everyone in the diner would choke.

Blacker than sins exorcists had purged.

People stampeded toward the camera as if for comfort.

It was the worst snuff film ever.

When the Towers fell, I wondered

if my girlfriend’s bed begged for another lover.

As the Towers fell, a sleepy summer ended.

We filed away Gary Condit

and he breathed a sigh of relief.

Dylan’s new album was a silent hiccup.

Oklahoma City was a prairie memory.

The towers fell and I couldn’t find my dice.

The towers fell and the stars somersaulted.

Cynics claimed 9-11 was karmic payback

for slave millions of the South,

interred Japanese in California,

displaced and murdered savages of the Plains,

innocent, executed prisoners in every state.

After the Towers fell, a preacher admonished

it was the penance for a faggot nation,

The Rocky Horror Picture Show magnified.

After the Towers fell, a network fired a comic

for mouthing off about America.

Everything changed. Or did it?

Airport goons felt my gummy bear and nuts more than once,

my phone was tapped, computer hacked, DNA swiped.

City brownouts popped my lights,

lone wolves tried to outdo the twin peaks’ collapse,

and I’m still sucking Washington’s tit.

Before the Towers fell, Y2K proved itself a hoax.

The dot com bubble burst like a bloated cookie.

Tiger Woods ruled as the boss of the fairway.

Baseball almost died of steroids.

We idolized celebrities and reality shows.

Since the Towers fell, no American

has won the Nobel Literature Prize.

After the Towers fell, Obama won

a Peace Prize he didn’t deserve.

Now, Donald Trump’s hair is an orange joke,

while Republicans bite their own balls.

Men become women and women become men,

and the wing nuts suffer morality strokes.

In Colorado and Washington, it’s legal to take a toke.

A buddy complained the world is upside down and inside out.

Since the Towers fell, it’s getting hotter than Mercury.

Chicken Little was right because the sky is falling,

The Arctic is falling.

The mountains are falling.

Slave peddlers thrive.

Kingpins murder.

Mexico is glorious in blood and drugs.

The day the Towers fell, boredom died.

When the Towers fell, a teenager yelled, Awesome!

When the Towers fell, the millennial flashpoint floored us.

Our eternal albatross. It made us humble as ladybugs.

After the Towers fell, nihilists rejoiced.

Two thugs mugged a shopkeeper in Stockton.

Twenty Hell’s Angels gangbanged an orchid blooming in Maine.

It was just another day in the life of Infinity.

When the Towers fell, the country saw two airplanes

stab a building, smoke fluming outward.

The day the Towers fell was the real day the music died,

the music of you and me,

fucking to the beat of Satisfaction,

me and a stranger, you and your enemy,

ever in a neo-Whitmanesque dance.

I dreamed dragons ate the airplane.

I dreamed no virgins greeted the martyrs

and Dante met them near the nine circles.

I dreamed the sky that day was a Georgia O’Keefe canvas.

I was a Magritte Man, suspended in that painting.

I peered over the chaos.

I wept for the dying first responders.

Was the Hudson the River Styx that day?

Tragedians are brave men.

The Greeks and Shakespeare asked questions we keep asking.

We pay for our fathers’ sins,

for the lynchers, witch burners.

But are we innocent, with our sins

occupying fifty million infernos?

A child who steals his first

candy bar when he’s hungry?

A reptilian rapist?

A single father who robs a gas station?

A knocked-up girl who kills her fetus?

The Towers fell and they were just two more numbers.

The Towers fell and have we learned anything?

Do we think some entity loves us, whatever creed we follow?

After the Towers fell, strangers held hands

and sang America and Kumbaya.

Iraqis, Saudis, and Iranians chanted Down with Satan!

A militant cleric bragged that

when the Towers fell, America’s

cocks turned flaccid, forever impotent.

I’m American and hubris happy.

I mourn and celebrate with pride.

I mourn the Towers’ 3,000.

Without irony I mourn the deaths of that day.

I mourn soldiers like Pat Tillman

sent away and slaughtered

for a Texan king with a daddy problem who

waged a phony war against a perfect patsy’s country.

I mourn the unborn children as a thoughtless consequence.

I mourn Benazir Bhutto.

I mourn the Katrina victims and survivors.

I mourn Daniel Pearl and Elsa Cayat.

I mourn Angie Zapata and Sean Kennedy.

I mourn Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.

I celebrate Malala.

I celebrate the iPod and iPhone.

I celebrate the Grand Canyon.

I celebrate American Pharoah.

I celebrate Pussy Riot.

I celebrate the Internet and Google.

I celebrate the first woman President.

I celebrate her husband.

I celebrate you who are alive.

And I celebrate you who are dead.

I celebrate this miracle of a planet.

I mourn sodomized women.

I mourn children in their daddies’ bathrooms.

I cry for the Javan Rhino, the Vaquita, the South China Tiger,

I mourn the rise of Isis in its beheading infamy.

I mourn wives beaten to death by loving partners.

I mourn friends killed in churches by bigoted gunmen.

I mourn the Amur leopard, the African wild dog,

and the rest of the angels in their natural glory.

I mourn you who are dead.

I mourn you who are alive.

I mourn this miracle of a planet.

When the Towers fell, a nation cried like a child never wronged.

Nineteen lunatics wounded Goliath.

The day the Towers fell, a billionaire asked himself

How can I profit?

The day the Towers fell, a mosquito bit a baby to death.

A gambler won a million at craps in Macao

and bought a thangka to gloat.

Twenty hunters clubbed five hundred

baby seals to death with baseball bats.

Three thousand souls.

I think of that day, now,

and ask if we’ve learned anything.

We remember where but not why.

A month after the Towers fell, the diner where I upchucked

closed its black doors.

I imagined cobwebs and rats visited

the cracked leather stools, and the jukebox

played Like a Rolling Stone over

and over on lonesome Saturday nights.

Years after the Towers fell,

in a bar by the East River

I met a hazel-eyed woman

with brown curls past her belt:

that first night she lay on her stomach

I swept the hair above her head with my hands,

and on her back from ass to neck

the Towers loomed in steel-blue ink

with red flames at the top, bodies plummeting

toward the ground, where doves sat

in silence, moments after the Towers fell.

Where were you when the Towers fell?

AFTER THE FIRE

by David Spicer

A chimney and a corpse—all that remained

of the cabin in the newspaper photos.

No archway-inviting guests to wait

in the parlor, this roof protected

bones in a different way, its blanket

of burned wood their cover. I remember

you naked in hip-length blonde hair

the evening after you and two younger sisters

welcomed me into this home on the ridge

overlooking the river. You and I lay

on the bed for hours in the lantern-lit

upstairs bedroom, naming the stars

we knew in the night sky. I ask decades

later if you’re these soft black pipes melted

into the ghastly skull, or are they a squatter

who may have hidden upstairs to protect himself

from violent burglars stealing family heirlooms,

their canoe perched on the embankment?

Or did the three of you girls leave this cabin

even though I departed with a promise

to return? Why didn’t I? And I wonder,

the day after I viewed those pictures,

about the onyx necklace I squeezed

into your pale palm that April day.

Now I roam the mountains in a solitary

life, and when I learn it is or isn’t you

in these ashes, I may live and die

a wolf hearing leaves rustle and twigs

snap, deep in a tortured life, a drifter beast

lost in a landscape foreign and familiar.

A THUNDERSTORM’S SIDESHOW

by David Spicer

I’d offer this rose and its stem

from the mountain as rain smirks

outside this church where I beg

for your pardon. I accept that

I don’t deserve your forgiveness.

Fog lifted from the lighthouse

hours ago, the shoals an enemy

I never understood, and the shutters

are closed, but the white owl is still

my confidante. Our romance, I agree,

was a thunderstorm’s sideshow,

and, taming my horsewhip temper,

you were more patient than a snail.

The winner of our snowball fights

and a board game called Pagans,

you claimed territory with a runner’s

grace, collected rare shells, never asked

me to shine brighter than the promise

you praised. But when the sheriff arrested

me for sucker-punching your brother

on the chin because he sneered

once too often, I embarrassed you

the last time. Now, after my release,

will you welcome me with your black

hair that decorates the wind or suggest

I climb a cliff and imitate a suicidal

painter with his last splash of red gouache?

Oh, you’ll never arrive—it’s no longer

our season—for I’m uglier than the sky.

FRUITS, VEGETABLES, AND MINDY’S TOPAZ EYES

by David Spicer

That dusk in '99 we ate watermelon

and cantaloupe by the armory

canal, your topaz eyes glistened

behind borrowed sunglasses and I

scanned your thin, bikinied body as you

played a concertina. You caught me,

and I felt embarrassed but you didn’t,

threatened by no one, your slender hands

under the instrument’s straps, the tune

paradise’s music. Mindy, the spotlight

shined on you and you loved it.

I never tired of our swimming before

you appeared from the wall’s shadows,

holding the concertina and a bamboo purse

with a pellet gun inside. I wish I hadn’t been

a cokehead that summer night: when the police

chased us after watching me snort a line

with the last hundred I had, we ran like

greyhounds, harvesting onions the size

of baseballs. In the holding cell together you

joked about a couple lemons I could

squeeze, and I declined, afraid the officer

would appear and separate us or—

worse—strip us like the creep he was.

I’ll take a rain check, and I kissed you,

wondering what happened to your concertina,

not to mention those glistening topaz eyes.

FAREWELL, BIBI

by David Spicer

Cossack ghosts haunted Bibi.

Thinking about Russian blizzards,

he migrated to Manchester,

where we met in a bus terminal

and, after asking for a fix,

he recounted a story: an orphan

adopted by a Georgian count

and forced to make coffee, empty

chamber pots, and attend to beehives,

he wandered from the palace’s

tower and startled a girl. Anna,

with waist-length brunette hair

slept in a negligee on a beat-up

couch in a meadow. They soon

bathed in the local lake, lovers

clinching in tenderness who praised

the other under the soapbar moon. Bibi

stole a bag of golden coins from a local

miner who scowled in his sleep, and the

couple erased themselves from their mother

country and piled in a boxcar destined

for Europe. The speeding rectangle

seemed to melt without the wind.

He called Anna his bride and planned

a wedding when they found a judge

in London. Upon arrival, Anna died

from a virus, Bibi leaving her for the flies.

He shuffled to Manchester and paved roads.

When he finished, I lost my temper, insulting

him: You’re a scumbag. Farewell, Bibi.

ROLLING DOWN THE HIGHWAY IN A CADILLAC 30 MILES WEST OF BUTTE

by David Spicer

Your disgusting feet smell

like oysters! Coco erupted,

driving the ’54 Eldorado

convertible while I played

“Will O’ the Wisp” on the trumpet

in the back, my legs propped

up against the front passenger seat.

Do you know that if I eat a lemon

now, the lack of stink will

castrate me? I asked. Headed

for the west coast, the two of us,

afraid of boarding airplanes, eat

a bag of plums, bananas, and limes

all day. Think we’ll make it

to the Russian Roulette party tonight?

Coco inquired, her coils of brown hair

blowing underneath her cap. Don’t know.

I’d rather watch silent movies

about cannibals in the White House.

Yeah, me too, Coco said, or play

computer Scrabble, tossing the red

baseball cap that read Make America

Laugh Again onto the road.

Well, decide: we drive through the state

today in silence or I paint my nails

pomegranate before we hit the sack.

We could duct tape each other’s mouth,

I suggested. No, just cover

my nose or wrap your feet, dildo.

HE DUBBED HIMSELF GENERAL CUSTER

by David Spicer

I once knew an anarchist: droopy-eyed,

weak-chinned, and pony-tailed, he

dubbed himself General Custer, led

a band of fifty sycophants he named

slaves and soul mates, claimed he

killed his parents and buried them

near evergreens and frowned during

his sermons. He forbade photographs

or reporting of his activities but revealed

so much I began keeping a journal.

Every Sunday, in a church between

a river and a lake, with a medical

skeleton in the corner behind him,

he taught a manifesto of misanthropy

to lackeys, followed by a screening

of his favorite film, Wild Strawberries.

Every other movie is trash, he

announced. He wore a perfume,

Immortal, and began donning pink

robes, trained the women to box,

and preferred watercolors over oils.

The guns arrived later, and target

practice commenced. To kill

is an honor humans have embraced

since Cain and Abel, he preached

in his last speech I heard. A puddle

of blood is a holy sacrament, a wild

strawberry. I left a week before the feds

raided his growing compound: General

Custer would have to fight without me.

ROXYANNA

by David Spicer

A former Mafia wife from Milan who

collected gargoyles nailed to Bolivian

crucifixes, she demanded boyfriends

suck her elbows and cling to those

skinny ribs like exhausted chain saws.

I met redheaded Roxyanna two weeks

after she kissed her hippo-belly

husband for ten minutes,

and he later died when doctors

couldn’t transplant a teenager’s heart

to his chest. A waitress in a surfer bar,

Roxyanna wore green flannel shirts

and jeans with holes in their knees,

musing one morning, I wonder

what it’s like when a traffic cop

gives a track star an enema.

Don’t know, I said, might as well

wish Bono greets you at an airport

posing as your butler after you win

a Hollywood lottery fantasy. Roxyanna

frowned, Gimme a Kleenex, Pudgy,

or I’ll shave your melon head.

I complied and then lumbered

to the cypress trees in the backyard forest,

tired of lovers’ combat, tired of being

another lame horse in Roxyanna’s stable.

“WANTED”

by David Spicer

My blonde friends, identical twins

Eskimo and Mohawk, called each

other Charlatan as a joke:

they confused everyone but me,

for Eskimo wore cufflinks,

and Mohawk sported permanent

goosebumps after we asked together,

Wanna be lovebirds? Eskimo shook

her head, sneered, You can’t have

Mohawk—we’re one person

with the same DNA, and you’re

nothing but a human blowjob.

I laughed. It’s our karma to fuck

forever, I said. Waiting in a post

office line, we pretended

I was worthy of one

of its WANTED posters.

Wanted by you, Eskimo,

I teased. Go deliver that line

to some catfish, Eskimo said.

You Pollyanna bitch, Eskimo,

I love this medicine man.

We connect so much I faint

like a pregnant rabbit when

I kiss him, said Mohawk.

Here’s an idea, I suggested.

What? the twins asked in unison.

Let’s take a bus to Sturgis,

throw a tailgate party,

and chug beer with the Invaders.

Hell, Eskimo dared, not

until you commit a felony

and earn that WANTED poster.

WHATAYA SAY?

by David Spicer

Thanks for answering the ad.

If you want a spot on my delivery

truck, arrive prepared to follow me.

If you’re a convicted criminal or

another kind of parasite, don’t try

to smuggle your affection

through the open gate of my heart.

I’m a recluse who’s survived for a reason,

and if I don’t appreciate the kindness

of spaghetti dinners or potatoes au gratin,

it means I need a jumper cable for my love,

and you can try right now to snuggle.

Hey, nobody can fix a warped boomerang,

a tale with too many holes, or a promise

that conceals lies. If you want to fight

a revolution, enlist in the people’s army

and carry the loudest flag to the border.

Surprise me, brag on me, buy a pink

kitchen sink. I could use a scolding now

and then. Plant a peck on my cheek,

peel a few Romas from my farm.

A bottle of muscatel couldn’t hurt.

So, give to my favorite charity,

or crawl back to your hellbox of a trailer.

DELTA LEO REMEMBERS HER NEPHEW

by David Spicer

The rain pattered on the Winnebago

like blue jay droppings.

Driving through the Black Hills,

Delta Leo and I aggravated

each other, intercepted non-sequiturs.

A Thunderbird flew ahead of us.

Drink that cider, Peppermint Boy!

I ignored her.

Let’s climb up Lincoln’s nose, Delta Leo said.

Oh, Delta, pretend you’re a mermaid

and eat that eel.

She asked, You got any Queen?

a second before “Fat Bottomed Girls” thumped

from the speaker.

Can we go . . .

Ice fishing? No, I interrupted.

Hey nephew, get out here,

Delta yelled above the music.

Nothing from the back.

Hey boy, you gotta navigate us to Texas!

Delta, I said, don’t you remember?

He ran off with the widow wearing

that velvet jacket. What was her name? I asked.

Preen, Delta Leo said.

Her jacket had a polar bear on the back.

Up ahead four faces loomed.

Delta Leo ate some cottage cheese, saying,

Well, I got tired of him bummin’

my cherry sours all the time, anyways.

I hope their tongues meet and meld forever.

ROSA AND THE CREEP

by David Spicer

Humans disgust me,

except for the Italian widow

Rosa, who, in her farmhouse,

killed the creep surveilling

her chicken-wired property

from his ferry. Wearing a blue jumpsuit

stolen from a hangar’s maw,

she told me, He thought the law

was beneath him. That skinny rhino

asked Dody to lick his fingers.

I told her to stay put.

A trooper, I assured her he was dead.

I know that, Royce. I didn’t tremble—

he did. I cussed him, grabbed

my steel-blue Python and cocked

its hammer, yelling in my drawl,

“Didn’t do your homework,

huh, perv? I know the statutes

and got you dead to rights.”

Then I colored his head

a hundred shades of red.

She lit her cigarillo

with the last match,

flicked the empty advertisement

for Mick’s Bar & Grill

out the window and blew

a smoke ring so big it circled

the moon like a giant monocle.

TRIBE OF TWO

by David Spicer

You knew how I felt about you.

We understood that and laughed

at private jokes about frowned-upon words.

On our journey through the Midwest

daylight, we discovered the no-no

of roadkill on a blacktop: a fox wearing

a pink onesie with its picture of Elvis,

patchouli in the frigid air. I’d protected you

in your cascaded blonde mane,

and we huddled like two tourists

in a phone booth. But lingering

at the best hotel in Chicago, we stole

a carton of Lucky Strikes

because nothing scared us: not the burning

chapel outside Knockemstiff, Ohio,

not the dwarf riding a hog on the freeway,

nor eating French fries at McDonald’s.

We lip synched to the Stones singing

“You Can’t Always Get What You Want,”

took turns reading Ariel.

No, even though we gently crushed

each other’s heart with love

and rode on the same bus

in matching maroon corduroy outfits—

me in my greased-back redheaded pompadour

and you slurping on a slushie’s straw—

we got what we needed,

just you and me, a tribe of two.

THE BITCHERS

by David Spicer

They lived next door, all four of them: Buck Bitcher,

Betty Bitch Bitcher, Bucky Bug Bitcher, and Bonnie

Baby Bitcher. Their real surname Macintosh—

after the computer, not the apple. I don’t know who

pegged them with that moniker: neighborhood legend

claims it was Jim Tank, the blubber-butted dj

with a beer belly bigger than the full moon.

He had a way with words, in the words

of one of his friends. One Jersey day Jim

staggered onto his lawn and heard

the whole family bitching: The damn sun

is shining today, I wanted it to rain, Buck

Bitcher complained. I’m hungry,

where are my bugs? Bug Bitcher wondered.

Baby Bitcher—called that because she was the baby

of the family even if she was 30— griped,

Oh, you’d bitch if your nuts were chocolate.

Bitch Bitcher moaned, groaned, and bellowed

through the walls, Aw, none of you sad cartoons

are happy unless you’re miserable. Jim Tank

Screamed louder than a crooked politician

in an aircraft hangar, SHUTUP! YOU FUCKING BITCHERS!

After that day everybody referred to them

as the Bitchers. Talk of a reality show surfaced,

but Bug Bitcher demanded more money

than Buck or Betty—I mean Bitch—Bitcher.

Rumor was they were the model family

for Fear Thy Neighbor, an award-winning show

about dysfunction and murder. But they were just nonviolent

bitchers with no friends. They didn’t work, collected

disability and bitched it wasn’t enough money,

though Jim Tank told me they threw parties

Friday nights, just the four of them, holding bitching contests:

I don’t eat in restaurants anymore because every time

I do, I find a long black hair in my chili, Buck Bitcher bitched,

swigging a hot Bud down his gullet. Well, you’re too damn tight

for anything else, it serves you right, you dirty old man-bitch,

Baby Bitcher yelled. I’m depressed, Bug Bitcher cried,

all forty years of him, I don’t have my favorite food.

Bitch Bitcher snarled, Bug, how did I ever give birth

to such an ugly kid Robert Crumb wouldn’t draw him.

Year in, year out, Jim Tank recorded the family

and their repertoire of bitchograms, he called them.

Said he was going to collect them in a book titled

Four Decades of the Bitchers. That was nasty

if you ask me. He was an awful person

despite the fact he kept me ten years after I ran away

from my family, The Macintoshes—

I mean the Bitchers—when I was 16. The whole town

searched for months. I had to skedaddle: I tired

of the bitching about burnt pancakes, horny nuns,

and the governor they called The Walking, Talking

Cheeseburger. The fattest bull in Texas is skinnier

than him, they bitched in unison. I was afraid I’d grow

up a bitching Bitcher. I’m grateful to Jim Tank

for hiding me so well, though. We had fun recording

the Bitchers and laughed at them. I don’t think

the Bitchers ever had fun when I lived with them.

But I do. I’ve overcome my first sixteen years,

and didn’t even mind—much— Jim Tank making a pass

at me. After I kicked his ass, he didn’t try any of that crap.

Oh, my moon hurts, he cackled. I cackled, too. I lived

in his basement, where I used to cream him at Texas Hold’em

every night until I decided to go to the World Series of Poker

and finished third in a field of 5,219. I won six million bucks,

bought the house on the other side of the Bitchers, built

soundproof rooms for the obvious reason. The Bitchers

never caught on I was their long-lost son because all they

could do was bitch, bitch, bitch. Why’d ya do that?

Haven’tcha had enough of ’em? Jim Tank asked. I said,

Naw, man, I’m lucky, I have two families: The Bitchers,

who’ve never smiled, and you, who can’t keep

from smiling. Now I call that a sonofabitchin’ delight.

VOLTAIRE AND THE LITERARY GUERRILLAS

by David Spicer

The other night I dug up Voltaire, tossed him

in my El Camino, started mowing down people.

Well-preserved, he began talking: Nice pickup

ya got there, lady, ya wanna fight

some smarmy poetasters and stupid academics?

What the hell? I thought, might as well,

I could have more fun than I did with the beats

and hippies. Sure, old man, I replied, and he said,

OK, but let's get Genet, Oscar, Homer,

Charlie Dick, Byron, Rimbaud, Amira, Fyodor,

Eddie Allan, Walter, and maybe one more.

Oh yeah, Emily, let’s not forget Billy Shakes,

the Volt added, nothing literary is complete

without him. The Volt and I spent the next few days

gathering the fellows, driving my old truck pulling

an Airstream, where the guys argued, talked shop,

drank, played chess, smoked weed. Nobody argued

who was the best writer, for they knew it was a matter

of avocados and papayas. But they did have egos.

Immortal before and after the Volt and I resurrected

them. After my biographer resuscitated me,

I gained his power to jumpstart great writers.

I had slept decades, dull scholars haunting

me, forging careers analyzing my poems.

I woke up, appalled by the world I saw:

dictators, famine, wars, cities sinking,

billionaires competing to be the richest man

alive, mothers separated from their children,

millions watching cartoons, gobbling Big Macs,

blimping into rippled zeppelins or Moby Dicks,

journalists jailed for writing books, and poets

vying for the title of most famous minor major

writer, confessing to a few readers of their boring

books. I found an angel who said, Go find Voltaire,

he’s the perfect leader. So I snapped my fingers,

and stood at his grave, digging him up,

kissing him. Oh, the muse awakes me! he yelled

under the lunatic moon that first graveyard night.

Then he suggested we rounded up our motley crew

of immortal writers, forgotten by some people,

idolized by few readers. At times academic

power punks have ignored us, he commented.

Let’s show these slackers how great words sing.

The Volt and I took turns driving the Airstream

to Arizona, parked by the biggest butte

none of us had ever seen. Hell, Walt, you’ve travelled

this beautiful country, tell us about it, the Volt said,

and the bearded benevolence hopped out of the trailer,

rapped Song of Myself as Genet riffed on a guitar

like a Clapton-Hendrix crazy man. Both bowed

when they finished and the literary guerrilla gang

cheered, yelled, More, more, Wallie, encore.
I’m tired, Walt said, and trudged to the trailer.

I’m sorry to say that Genet didn’t follow him.

We partied a few days, and nobody seduced me—

they desired me, but my reputation precluded that:

they honored my poems as if they were their children.

Instead, some of them, even Rimbaud and Billy Shakes,

hiked in different directions, saying in unison, Hey, lady,

pick us up Sunday in the Big Banana or whatever they

call that crotch of the universe. Eddie Allan wanted

to go with the Volt and me, saying, Teach me how to drive,

lady, and I’ll dedicate my new poem to you. All right,

I replied, as long as you don’t scare my immortality,

but first I need to stop outside Chicago and visit

my goddaughter. We stopped at her farm, fixed

it up for her with our immortal power of words:

Farm, be new! we ordered, and it was new.

Dog, be a puppy! and the puppy began riding a Vespa.

My goddaughter, a poet, wanted us to observe

a new subject, a gangbanger who didn’t know

a poem from a shaking muscle car, but we

never made it, wandering to a festival

where a harmonica-playing poet sang poems

and introduced the Volt and me as her immortal buds:

These two have made history and they’re gonna

do it again to a wave of cheers that flooded Chicago.

You’re poets and writers, the Volt megaphoned,

every one of you, whether you write drivel

or masterpieces of majesty and magnificence. I may

not like it, but I want you to write, whether a limerick

about crockpot people eating broccoli and beef

or a fifty-volume History of the Cosmos in pentameter

that you all understand. Be the writer you are!

I then recited to the crowd—over a million—a poem

I wrote about being nobody and asked if they

were nobody. No! No! Hell no! They shined,

their eyes celestial bodies, swooning over our words.

The Volt and I dropped off my goddaughter and now his.

I like you, Illinois, he said, never surrender, keep

writing, keep plugging. After our goodbyes,

the Volt, Eddie Allan, and I sang “Kumbaya,” and drove

through the Pennsylvania hills to the Big Banana,

where we parked the Airstream by elms

in Washington Square. Suddenly we heard banging

from the inside, and Amira, Oscar, and Walt scampered

out, Amira yelling, You old maids—don’t tell me I

shouldn’t write about toilets and suicide. I’ll write

what the fuck I wanna write. Hmmm, Oscar said sarcastically,

quit being so earnest, it’s not like what we write is important.

Fuck you in your tweed, why don’tcha both go back to jail,

Amira retorted. Now, now, boys, I said, you can write anything

you want, right, Volt? Right on, the Volt said. Write a lizard

cookbook for all I care. I wonder where the others are?

he asked the sky. A cloud replied, There, pointing to a table

outside a Hard Rock Café. We turned, watching Byron,

Charlie Dick, Fyodor, Rimbaud, Homer, Billy Shakes

and Genet pontificate, drinking rounds that a crowd

of NYU MFAers lavished on them. They couldn’t believe

these guys in antique clothes were literary giants.

What nuthouse didjiall escape? a dandy, a cross

between Capote and Tom Wolfe, asked. Ya’ll sure

you’re real writers, you look like clowns, his girlfriend,

a transgender named Eternity, snarked. I’ll show you real,

Fyodor bellowed as she grabbed his beard and ate it.

Choke on it, he said, and Eternity did. Come on, Fyodor,

unless you want to write more underground notes.

The rest of you, too, the Volt ordered. The Airstream’s

over there. They swigged their Black Russians,

and Homer said, Let’s take an odyssey to the library.

We strolled to the El Camino and Airstream. Rimbaud yelled,

I got shotgun, and Charlie Dick said, Hey boy, don’t give

me a hard time, let me have shotgun. Rimbaud answered,

Over my dead body, I said. Who cares? We gotta leave

before police arrive. Amen, Oscar said, off to the Two Lions!

The Volt suggested we enter separately to escape notice.

Well, they’d think we’re imposters, Billy Shakes said,

twisting the triangle of hair on his head. But, whether we are

or we aren’t, that’s not the question. Inside, we surveyed

the volumes, pointing fingers at our temples, and Voilà!

we read every word in the place within twenty minutes.

Man, ain’t it fun being immortal? Homer and the Volt

said. It sure is, Eddie Allan interrupted. They didn’t

care any more than two bears minded a chipmunk.

They liked Eddie Allan and his horror stories.

We all did, thinking the literati fed him raw fish

with criticism. Anyway, none of us cared

what those snobs wrote—they weren’t writers,

just vampires feeding off us in mahogany rooms

of colleges. Recharging in the Airstream, we took

a vote, decided to drive to my goddaughter’s farm.

In Ohio we picked up a willow of a woman named

Helena, whom we all called Hel, for she

wrote songs, poems, novels, beautiful as our

heroines, lovely as Annabel Lee, powerful

as Billy Shake’s queens. We knew it the second

we saw her, but didn’t say it. She liked us,

even when we revealed our identities. Nodding,

she said, I’ve read all your books. You’re my idols.

Byron sat enthralled, Eddie Allan started

a new poem, and Billy Shakes said, I’ve met you

in another lifetime, Hel. Flattery, she said, will get

you somewhere, Billy. You just don’t know where.

Back so soon? my goddaughter asked. Yep, Fyodor

said, I’m hungrier than Raskolnikov. You got grub,

girlie? Watch it, mister, she said. I’ll rip your heart

out and feed it to the dog. Whoa, honey, Fyodor said,

don’t you know who I am? Who you were, you mean?

she asked. I said, We don’t have much time, so go

to the barn! Write masterpieces! After we do

we sleep. Each of us staggered to a separate stall,

where racehorses dreamed of the Derby, and wrote—

I finished 1700 more poems—until time collapsed

and I said Time! Pencils down! Fountain pens up!

Everybody shouted Bravo!, our personalities one,

work crowding the ceiling: stacks of manuscripts

bound in leather, linen, vellum, the fruits of our labors

for two days with lunch breaks of salami, Brie, Merlot,

rib eyes, anchovy pizzas. A hundred masterpieces—

essays, epics, the Great American and Russian Novel,

forty new folios of Billy Shakes’ plays, twelve chronicles

of Ulysses and Aeneas—we couldn’t believe it. Time’s

running out, I said, OK, we got a plane to catch

in Chicago. I’ll be back, Hel, Penelope, quicker than you

can say Nobel. In each city I left the plane, drove a writer

in a rental to his grave, buried him before he imploded,

shuffled to the plane, to the next grave. Twelve times,

fainting once, until the Volt was last. Lady, you sorry

you dug me up? No way. I loved you guys when I read

you and I love you now, I replied. How could you

read Amira and Genet? Didn’t they write after you?

the Volt asked. Well, I’ve come back before. I’d better go,

I said. Let’s do this again when the world needs our words,

when nobody’s writing about the planet’s screams. Sure

thing, lady. I buried him, flew my pickup over the Atlantic,

landing on a Kentucky highway right before dawn.

The pickup died near Pen’s farm, and I stumbled

to her door, exhausted. She and Hel smiled,

knowing I’d be there, walking to the table. I took

my goddaughter aside, saying, You know where I

want to rest, now, Pen? Yes, she said. Well, it’s time

to talk to her. Fixing us a cup of Earl Grey, Hel sat

down with us, and I told her, Those manuscripts

are yours, Hel. Don’t argue. The guys wanted

that, too. They wrote them because they had

to, knowing you’re an immortal who’ll transcend

those self-serving careerists. Pen will guide you.

With that, the manuscripts in their piles, Pen and I

strolled to the poplar, where I sat on the ground,

wrote this, and watched Helena, wordless, weep.

for Joan Colby

HIDEAWAY

by David Spicer

Foreigners in Italy,

you a Spanish flamenco

dancer and I a professional

clown from Brooklyn,

we revealed too much

to each other, decided

to run to the first country

on the globe you touched

blindfolded. We moaned

and sighed in that mountain

cabin, loved liked mutants

with malaria. Our jackets

tattered, we ate steak and shared

bottles of Scotch, heard lambs

bleat outside. You’re a beast,

you said. Yes, Delta Leo,

I’m a cheetah, not a dog, I said.

Ride me like the Appaloosa I am

then, you said. You weren’t my

sister, so I did. We groaned

and cried, listened to Puccini

backed by a symphony

on the radio, each day a new day

of love, the other’s guardian,

forgetting about the two-inch copy

of War and Peace on the night table,

sleeping away our great escape.

AFTER YOU SLEPT

by David Spicer

You recounted your dream, Delta Leo:

a prince named Pasha, I drifted

down the Nile trying to persuade you,

a slave, to forsake the deity of empires,

revolutions, and generals. You loved

the fabric of that lie, interested in

our withdrawal, our advances,

our disgraces, retreats to deserts

and islands. You said I told you

I’d destroy my rivals in order to travel

through the river in your body, its marble

columns feeling my flowing invasions.

You were a barbarian, you said,

presented me with roses at the steps

of your villa called Jupiter, ravaging

me with gentle thrusts, smiling like the last

soldier from a massacred cavalry battalion.

No historian, I listened to your narrative

in the kitchen overlooking the Gulf

of Mexico. Us in a different time,

almost another world. Too bad, Delta Leo,

we’re not in a dream now, but I want you

any way I can have you. We can live our

own romance, and never dream again.

WAYS MY CALICO GETS HER WAY

by David Spicer

Watching Carmen get her way is like watching a two-month-old smile

at a redwood on fire. Yes, her ways of getting her way are sublime, sublime

as paying a dime for a 45 of “Don’t Be Cruel.” Sublime as an Art-Deco Lady

Lamp deciding to talk, sublime as a last bottle of fine wine at midnight.

When guests arrive, she’s a mousy wallflower, retreats to my manhole of books,

chess sets, and CDs. Then, when she sneaks back to guests—her grin

a moon of teeth and tongue—she pushes my hands away, a diva pulling at my

jeans, a winner in our denim tug of war, twirling her tail like a furry pom-pom.

She’s my Cleopatra and I’m her Antony and Caesar. Hell, I’m her Anyman.

I’m her baboon bum, I’m her unslacky lackey. She can read my mind

before I blink, knows my secrets with her amber eyes, my fortune teller

who gave me a lottery number winning a hundred bucks worth of Seafood Stew.

When I don’t errand-boy respond like an eager butler, a yes man to her

thousand stares, she gets her way by running away like a rotten teenager

sick from coconut-crème chocolate bars, returns like a prodigal bindle stiff,

like a virginal Jezebel, like Amelia Earhart elected President in 2020.

Getting her way by lying on our table where the Mean Girls Salon paints,

she enters like Liberace, pouts, a millennial Scarlett O’Hara. Nightmaring

about rottweilers, pit bulls, mad macaws, snakes in the sick grass, she gets

her way by sprinting like a Marvel comics superhero across the bedspread,

leaping five feet up the doorjamb, LeBron on his best night. She gets

her way by clawing my knees as she sings a song from her favorite opera

Carmen, and hurls the litter full of candied apples and Tootsie Rolls, purrs,

a four-legged Ferrari. She’s cooler than any cougar licking his feet, cooler

than a Sahara fridge, cooler than Amarosa playing her tapes. She’s a pair

of flamenco dancers kissing in a dental office, a thousand-dollar beer

that tastes like gold weed. A planet of muses and handsome men-frogs.

She gets her way, meowing Meh Maw for her eighth meal of the day.

Knocks her glass of stale water into the sink, that’s how she gets her way.

Fiddles with a cockatiel feather, bringing it to me when she wants to play.

She gets her way when she won’t let the vet weigh her: she’s skinny and fat,

she’s Laurel and Hardy, pirouettes prettier than Nijinsky, smarter than Spock,

any think tank, any scholar pontificating on cat poems of Katmandu.

Yes, Carmen, my calico cupcake, gets her way. Her way of getting her way?

She dances the bossa nova, demands in her cat language of Meh Mahs,

Give me my way ten more times, I’m so charming you can’t resist me.

THE LADDERITES

by David Spicer

The public ignored them, but they persevered,

their ladders capturing fancies of aspiring ladderites:

The Laddament, viewed as an ornament,

existed for art’s sake and nothing more.

The Laddie allowed children to employ

toy workers who fixed the roofs of dollhouses.

The Lider, wide as it was long,

leaned against a structure’s width.

The Laddessional depicted stark images

of loss, sadness, and love on its rails.

The Laddonnet, with fourteen rungs,

challenged builders with possibilities.

The Laddatina, thirty-nine rungs, possessed

six different colors in various sequences.

The Laddallest breached the highest

tower to reach the Ladder Muse.

In schools, workshops were the rage.

Gifted teachers taught brilliant students

to apply craft, stylize, and photograph

their work for countless Internet journals.

Those with nagging egos strived for accolades

from gurus who awarded monetary prizes.

Clever ones networked with fellow ladderites

whose backs, humped from climbing ladders,

they scratched. Acolytes, journeymen, and masters

labored lifetimes, built them for the tallest tower,

where Emily, their muse, golden hair braided

into a ladder flowing out the window they tried

to enter, admonished from an endowed chair,

Go before I knock off the tops of your heads!

I wonder if you’ll ever build anything worthy

of me if you don’t shed ambition and greed!

Yet ladderites without protégés or mentors

continued to build and store them in garages,

survived while they labored as farriers, waiters,

clerks. They built unique artifacts in shops

behind their houses, and listened to echoes

of Emily’s voice singing ideas to them.

wanderer

by David Spicer

Full of Shakespearean insults, Band-aids, rags, and a plate of redware,

my black backpack is light as the parachuting blue butterfly I’ve drawn

on my tanned bicep. Some days, I wish I could buy new clothes to renew

the same day I live every day, and my early years as a big valley earner

are as much history as highways I’ve hitchhiked, but roads have waned,

too. It’s tougher to get a ride than to find a head-popping poem to read,

so now I hop on freights looking for both the wildflower and the weed.

And when I see something on the horizon of the purple-feathered dawn,

I’m the dean of the road, the fastest walker alive, knowing I’ll renew

my ragtag life one more time, and then I’ll find the wildflower and rare

golden reed, sticking both into my pocket of holes as a just reward.

raconteur

by David Spicer

My mother, an Elizabethan actress, and father, a centaur,

created me near an Arctic ocean iceberg. This bloody canoe

won’t do, my mother yelled, leaving him in an orgasmic trance

from her lightning eyes, yellow and blue as an insane toucan.

Say something, anything, or I’ll make you blow your cornet.

My father, a gentle beast-man, answered, Shut up, hussy, I outearn

you every day of every year, you blasphemous, bitchy crone.

Before my painful birth, and after that night, I sang stories in a tenor

voice, vowing not to marry after witnessing truce after truce.

I disappeared at eleven, never to see them again, nor to taste the nectar

of their bitter love, but I won’t forget them or their mythic rancor.

desperado

by David Spicer

If anybody ever asked me what days of my life I’d want erased,

it be those two I watched Mona screaming as pushers raped

her, the woman I adored when we embraced our lives as dopers.

They lived to regret that and then didn’t live, after I took a rope,

strangled the pair as we listened to La bohème and other operas,

broke their bodies with a rainbow-colored spade and then soared

high as falcons who didn’t know the meaning of time nor speed.

Yes, we stole their drugs and money after slitting their throats, spread

gasoline over them, Mona lighting the match so they could reap

what they had sown, yes, I regret that first night of our killing spree,

the night we still run from, the night that will never lie in repose.

ELEGY FOR FRANK

by David Spicer

F.R., 1951-2008

I’m not surprised the way you split.

Your friends’ souls now weigh less.

You’re the latest in the pantheon of gone lunatics, Frank.

You gave too much.

You didn’t care.

A month after we met, you brought loot from alleged illegal activities:

a crocodile belt, a 24-karat gold flask, a bootlegged Tarantula,

a new sport coat in cellophane wrap.

That was the beginning.

Over the years you sent 400 albums, 50 movies,

a box of art books you wanted returned,

and your book of poems,

Dinner with Dr. Rocksteady.

Your abandon louder than your laugh,

you recalled the wild woman who warned

your girlfriend to keep her attack dog on a leash.

Who were you, Frank?

My craziest brother?

Keith Richards’ cousin, Neal Cassady’s idol?

No. The Master of More.

You revealed few secrets and machinated

your mysterious male ego.

You told me you were a runaway,

your father’s shotgun more than a myth.

A week after your brother broke your leg

you swore you’d kill him,

kick his ass into next week’s rainbow.

I knew then you’d fuck a pumpkin on a dare

or scale the Mississippi Bridge on a foggy dawn.

You’d rail against the White House thugs,

threaten to move to an island, a city,

a country with no name if those bastards won again.

You didn’t.

I couldn’t get rid of you, Frank.

You wore out my patience like blue jeans:

when holes appeared, you’d patch them

with your brand of needle and thread.

I guess I’m glad you did.

One car wreck too many, Frank.

Why not the seat belt, compadre?

I know:

You’re not telling, you mad fucker.

I want to deny your corpse—

the proof of life,

hurled through the windshield,

forever asleep beside the midnight cedar.

Where did you hide the catharsis?

You took it with you, I’m sure.

Things are unfinished between you and me.

I’m waiting for you to reappear, Frank.

Another phone call.

Your lug nut laugh.

A broken Cuban in your big maw.

You won’t, though.

But keep laughing, my craziest brother.

I’m on my way and can hear you.

SCHMOOZY WOOZY

by David Spicer

poured on Dears & Darlins

thicker than raspberry syrup

over pancakes. I liked Schmoozy:

charming as a walking cocktail waiter

at a literati-snotty pawty, he'd cuddle

up to a neck of pearls & whisper

yum-yums into its dry ears. Of course,

all the femmes frowned inside,

cooed like drunk bambinas,

Schmoozy wiseless. That’s what his Daddy

taught him, peeps, that was Daddy’s lingo

toward the babes. My heart flopped

its ventricles when I listened & sneers

leered like Manpower filing clerks.

I wanted to say, Schmoozy, don’t do this

to yourself, but he’d just say, Works for me,

Bubby Boy, works for me. Once or twice, too,

it did: I watched one babe follow him

to his ’Vette: he'd feel her titties for a popsicle

second, & then she'd bite him on his oily lips.

Another lady bird let him tongue her collarbone

sinkhole & she moaned, No, honey

bunny, you can’t have any, not now, not ever,

not in your pussy-pawing dreams. Ole Schmoozy,

he crawled off, dickless dick between his thighs,

cried all night long until I sang him

his favorite song, I Can’t Get No Nookie,

& ole Schmoozy Woozy'd swing back into action

the next night at the latest literati-snotty pawty.

BANJO BOB AND CASSY

by David Spicer

Banjo Bob lived in a caboose

behind his plantation, a woman

I love told me. He dabbled

in weights, saved more money

than Ebenezer Scrooge. She said

he thought she was fabulous

at 17, wanted to marry her,

gambled she’d stay with him.

Didn’t happen: she hobbled away

after one too many love sessions,

called his ballsy barnacle impossibly

thick. He tried to appease her

with jambalaya and then some

kabbalah but she left him in limbo,

split for Penn State, where she

danced the mambo while he built

pearl-inlaid banjos in his caboose.

Oh, Cassy, he wrote, come back,

little Sheba, my nubile babe.

She never saw Obermeister Bob again,

but loved his banjos, a problem

for players because cheap they weren’t.

Cassy bought one named Bouquet:

sweeter than a basket of raspberries

on the Sabbath. Now, Cassy thumb picks

her Banjo Bob banjo, thinks of his thumb

playing that instrument and unbuttoning

the buttons to her hot, damp place,

her vulnerable vulva she valued.

She said, I wish I’d seen Banjo Bob

one last time before that woebegone

caboose burned down with his

mansion, and him, too, favorite

beaux of my youth, my yellowbird,

my lost zombie of banjo heaven.

n e u r o t i c

by David Spicer

i worry all the time I’m outré and unerotic

as a crone blowing a trounced-on, rusty cornet,

i worry i can no longer sing like the tenor

i am. i can’t help it, i want to be cute, erotic

as those studs from Norway and the Orient,

but all i do is take these pills to regulate my urine.

why am i this way, why can’t i just watch film noir

films with a woman as neurotic as i am? i could unite

with her: maybe she’d notice she’s just another cretin

like i am and we’d accept it: we’d neck and count

each other’s flaws, embark on a flesh riot.

—after Terrance Hayes

I IMAGINE IT’S GOODBYE

by David Spicer

Anytime you want me to listen,

believe I’ll be next to you any dawn,

carrying a coffee to your bed, or anything you

desire me to present you with my hands of love.

Elephants could roar and I wouldn’t hear them,

fleeting as they are. I hope I deserve your duende,

grace that mesmerizes me under the morning moon.

Hear me, elusive woman who lives in her interior,

inside you are cities I’ve never seen.

Join me when I ask you to view

kaleidoscopic worlds only we see,

listen to my breath, breathe with me as I

murmur into your ear’s whorl,

near the center of the cosmos. Maybe a city

or some luscious countryside

pasture, or the tenements where we met and enjoyed

Queen on the stereo, my lover I’ve loved forever, ever my

reserved enigma I’ve never platonically penetrated.

Silent woman of this dark century,

tell me one of your legendary stories, help me

understand the reason you’re here but gone. I’ll remember you,

Vivian, your name you gave yourself, a name

women have owned through time. But before you go, let’s visit

Xanadu’s small shops and I’ll guess what you’re yearning to tell me:

you bought a farm close by, where you’ll grow

zucchini, melons, avocados, where you’ll need only yourself.

Harry the Hippie

by David Spicer

Sometimes I wish I lived in Michigan.

I think of it as the land of lakes and smoke,

of Honey Crisp apples and exotic incense.

My one visit there is less than vivid:

In fact, it was of no consequence,

because it happened before bombs,

before I met Harry, a hippie, a walking bomb.

He drove to New Jersey from Michigan—

after that he lived in Truth or Consequences,

where the law busted him for smoking

peyote. He told me later of vivid

visions he enhanced with incense.

In Jersey, he grew angry and incensed

at the Vietnam War, joined a few bombers

who called themselves Warriors for the Livid

and hijacked a Trailways to Michigan.

Its engine died of thirst, too much smoke,

in Detroit, and the hippies consequentially

scattered everywhere. One consequence

followed another. Harry, incensed

again at his arrest because of smoke,

escaped to construct crude bombs,

exploding one in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

My memory isn’t that vivid

but Harry told me something vivid:

I don’t give a fuck about consequences,

but I’m getting the hell out of Michigan.

Harry left for Cuba, the cops trailed the incense

that followed him, but he and his infamous bombs

disappeared in a whirlwind of fire and smoke.

When Harry returned, when he thought the smoke

had scattered and his life changed, it became vivid

once again: sentenced to prison for making bombs,

he served time, learned about consequences,

learned about life’s value in dollars and in cents.

After the iron gates opened, he thumbed to Michigan,

bought a head shop called Smoky Consequences

with his wife, Vivian, who knew he adored incense,

and forgot about bombs because they loved Michigan.

Michelangelo’s Handshakes

by David Spicer

We’re all fond of different gestures:

men, upon meeting, trade handshakes.

Teenagers might make a point

when angry by flashing middle fingers,

while some women exchange letters

to discuss the great Michelangelo.

One person—Michelangelo,

my misanthropic uncle—refused gestures

of goodwill, thought writing letters

worthless, and when exchanging handshakes

he’d squeeze other men’s fingers

so hard they’d say, You trying to prove a point,

asshole, and just what is your point?

Everybody knew him as Michelangelo,

but now they didn’t have strong fingers,

now that he made this gesture.

I told my uncle his handshakes

had the effect of letter

bombs, and he should write letters

of apology to explain the point

that nothing made less sense than handshakes

between men, who despised Michelangelo.

You’re so full of it, boy. I love my gesture

of squeezing the hell out of fingers,

and here’s a middle finger

to writing wimpy letters.

I saw in my uncle’s eyes a small gesture

that more than proved his point

many men see themselves as Michelangelo,

a man with a marble-cold handshake.

What was in his eyes? Not handshakes.

Something I can’t begin to finger,

any more than my uncle Michelangelo

figured why I thought letters

could verify the vapid point

that one gesture’s superior to another gesture.

A handshake means no more, no less than a letter.

Fingers aren’t meant to squeeze, but to point.

And Uncle Michelangelo’s name was a gesture.

Strangers Keep Friending Me

by David Spicer

on Facebook. Sometimes they’re women

wanting boyfriends. Because I’m a cynic,

I delete some requests, mark them as spam.

They wouldn’t date an old man with a cat,

even if it’s a calico. And people who share

mutual friends with me—friends I barely know—

friend me. I don’t have the heart to click No,

write, I can’t be your friend, even if you’re a woman

with blonde hair, green eyes and stories to share,

not to mention big dreams that’d cure a cynic

like me. And what if you discover I own ten cats

whose favorite foods are pepperoni and Spam?

Plus, my favorite Broadway show is “Spam-

alot”? I’ve thought about Facebook and know

scam artists target me, my calico cat,

even my wife, because she’s a generous woman:

somebody posed as a Marine—a cynic,

I’m sure—and friended her, claimed he wanted to share

his life with her, maybe because she called herself Sherri,

writing, Hi, I’m Sherri from Cincinnati and love Spam.

The soldier—I’d guess a Nigerian and a clumsy cynic—

unfriended Sherri without a word, didn’t know

she lied a little when she wrote, Whoa, man,

I’m just an old lover of long-haired calico cats.

Many amazing, awesome, cool cats

use Facebook—I’m friends with 4,000 I share

nothing with, though some are women

who swig Cutty Sark with their Spam—

and all of them can say words like No

because they choose the path of cynics

who’ve survived by acting cynical.

They want friendship like cats

that approach people who can’t say No,

that choose animal lovers willing to share

their food, whether pepperoni or Spam.

Strangers who think men tougher marks than women.

Call me a cynic, though you know I share

pictures of my cat drinking milk with her Spam.

But do you know whether I’m a man or a woman?

True Love

by David Spicer

I met my wife Manuka in a Kinko’s

between a flower shop and a pool hall.

Her parents, Harem and Aquarium,

named Manuka after their country’s

raw honey, and she wore a beehive hairdo

combed with pollen. You’re my corncob

babe, my sweet Joe Palooka, my lit cigar,

she sang that first night after I played Abba’s

Honey, Honey on the crooked wooden piano,

and then we watched a comedy with a cop

named Honeyromus Bosch. Is that guy a joke?

Manuka asked. Before we slept in our separate ways,

she swapped her handcuffs for my earmuffs,

and we watched two giants on Colbert play

Honey Pie on a ukulele and a marimba.

The morning after that first date, we traded

dreams: she sold my beard’s stubble to a man

in a unicorn uniform, and in mine, a wolf

in a Volkswagen told her I was still her corncob

cigar and she my Hanuka Palooka Tupelo Money.

Rita Hayworth and Me

by David Spicer

Arizona: I’d never visited that blue furnace of hell

before 1990, but I met a redhead in Memphis,

chased her to Mesa, where she lived with a husband who

deserted her body that seethed with happy heat. Her hazel

eyes told me she needed another man, whether lover,

friend, or a fellow film noir fan to watch a favorite,

Gilda, starring Glenn Ford. I teased her, nicknamed her Rita

Hayworth. She loved that, asked me to visit.

I decided later to fly west like a falcon, like the crazy

Joe I was. When I arrived, she dubbed me

Kenny Rogers because I gambled on her, so I

let her call me Kenny, though I never liked his

music. I said, Well, Rita, should we fuck

now that I’m here? Will you leave your husband for me?

Oh, sure, Kenny, she said. Before I do, though,

Patti and her boyfriend’ll take care of you, no

question. They showed me Mesa, treated me to spaghetti.

Rita and I never saw each other again. Call me

stupid, a hopeless romantic, call me a cactus-loving idiot playing

tag with a woman who wouldn’t let me catch her.

Useless, I felt—useless as a Mormon on Mars.

Visiting Arizona again hasn’t entered my mind in thirty years.

Why not? Well, Patti, one of my best friends, listed Rita’s husbands:

Xavier, who sold Xeroxes and had my deep voice,

Yank, a quarterback who dropped dead from a headache, and then

Zeke, a cross between Glenn Ford and Kenny Rogers.

REGRETS

By David Spicer

I regret not writing this sooner.

I regret not applying better parental skills toward my eleven cats.

I regret I didn’t travel to the Galapagos and their 200-year old

headless shells,

to Ireland to hear a barmaid’s lilt singing Danny Boy,

to temples of chanting Buddhists in Thailand, to cracking icebergs

of the Arctic.

I regret my shy nature, its reluctance to engage with train station
strangers.

My regrets could fill an Earth-sized bowl. My regrets could be yours:

Did you steal a candy bar and get caught? Did you French kiss

dates and regret it because they bit you? I did and I don’t.

I don’t regret slugging my father in the mouth the last time he pushed
me.

I don’t regret catching my mother telling yet another lie.

I don’t regret showing my twelve-year old brother a Playboy.

Your regrets? Did you ever sneak a peek at a nude sunbather?

I regret not watching I Love Lucy when my sisters giggled.

Maybe my humor would be more raucous.

Maybe I’d possess a Shih-Tzu’s impatience with his human.

Then I could tolerate shrill voices that haunt my sleepwalks.

I regret disliking rap music—except for Ton Loc jiving Wild Thing,

I regret selling my off-the-wall record collection to a dealer,

I don’t regret buying double that number of cd’s because I’m

an audiophile who hears the silence between a country singer’s notes.

I don’t regret blasting the Byrds’ Turn, Turn, Turn in the dorm.

I regret I didn’t study as diligently as many students—

not reading more Milton, Yeats, Dante, and Shakespeare.

Now I regret not reading younger poets—their insights may surpass
mine.

One night I pointed a gun at my brain because my father hated me.

The gun called me a coward. I didn’t pull the trigger: I don’t regret
that.

I don’t regret avoiding the draft and dodging a Cong bullet.

I don’t regret shooting a rifle when forced to in the Air Farce.

I don’t regret eating too much junk food in the barracks.

I regret not hiking up the Sandias bordering Albuquerque.

I regret my life was a black hole when I transmitted pilots the weather.

I regret I didn’t walk to the off-base bookstore often and read more
Ellen Bass.

I regret not tattooing a raccoon howling at the moon on my left butt.

I regret getting cut from the tenth grade baseball team.

The coach said I had the most heart but the least talent.

He appointed me team flunky but I quit, which I don’t regret.

I don’t regret fronting a guitar player $35 a week after I met him.

He repaid me after I nagged him for weeks.

I learned not to loan money to friends or acquaintances.

Or books, or records, or movies. Or to borrow from relatives.

I regret a coworker borrowed my copy of Atlas Shrugged.

She returned it with her dog’s puke stain on it, a testament

to the pup’s critical talent. I’m glad it wasn’t a first edition.

I regret she apologized for her pet’s taste. I don’t regret I laughed.

I don’t regret never apologizing for transgressions.

One time I fantasized garroting an adversary. I won’t apologize
for that.

I didn’t apologize for yelling, Spit it out, Scates, when he stuttered

after pulling down a map, and there she was, Naked Miss June.

I regret farting in college: more than 20 roommates disowned me.

I plugged up the poots like a dam-fingering Dutch boy.

My grandmother told me, There’s more room out than in.

My grandfather said, Pull my finger and make a wish.

I regret harassing a woman by saying, Show me your tits.

I regret not knowing better. I regret I wasn’t taught well.

I regret not learning quicker. I did, finally.

I regret my narcissism, regret not seeing all people are narcissistic.

Do you regret reading this? Will I regret writing it? I don’t regret

writing anything. I have boxes and boxes of regrets and non-regrets.

I don’t regret writing love notes to women I’ve loved.

I regret not writing them to women I could have loved.

I regret never having a mentor as a young man,

my old man useless in that role. No older brother.

I regret gravitating to males I saw as fathers.

I don’t regret my own counsel. I don’t regret despising lawyers.

I regret buying encyclopedias from a door-to-door salesman.

I didn’t need those books, don’t regret giving them to my brother,

who shelved them in his dark, melancholy den. I don’t regret

never visiting him, because I’m dead to him anyway.

Regrets are cotton balls with bloodstains.

Regrets are wounds that don’t heal. Do you scratch your regrets?

Regrets are lonely shadows that lurk in my loony brain.

Regrets are grey clouds that reappear with moody weather.

Regrets, do I ever approach you like a scruffy panhandler?

Tell me when you don’t want attention like a doting aunt.

Regrets, do you think people mean it when they send a Regrets card?

Can you tell me the last time you felt compassion for a victim,
Regrets?

Should I regret not looting a house or pissing on a midnight golf
lawn—

not feeling the rush through my body like a wheelbarrow of berserk
smiles,

not running naked through a mansion with a pillowcase full of stolen
jewelry,

not pissing in the 18th green hole—ah, adrenalin, chock full of maniac
energy!

I don’t regret heckling a comic, stealing a laugh from him.

He called me an asshole and I told him he could lick me
where the moon

didn’t moan. I don’t regret telling a professor she broke a promise

by assigning A students a term paper. She frowned like Medusa

but I didn’t turn to stone. I don’t regret murmurations, darkening
skies,

I regret the sea rising, I regret my old girlfriend doesn’t call me,

but we haven’t slept together in decades so she isn’t my girlfriend.

I regret I haven’t seen her. But I don’t regret marrying the One.

There must be a god of Regret. Give me a second. I’ll Google that.

Hades! Imagine that. I don’t regret Google. I regret Facebook
and Twitter:

deluded parrot ranches. Imagine the gods of Twitterers and Frienders,

calling everything and everybody amazing and awesome in Greek
or Latin.

I do and don’t regret flunking Trig three times, I don’t regret not
getting an MFA.

I love my lack of an MFA. But sometimes I do eat a regret morsel
like a cracker

crumb off the floor. I regret my lousy study habits. I don’t regret
the lack

of discipline to snag a degree that means I’m a sellout. I do regret
my sour grapes.

I played air guitar one night alongside Bloomfield at the Fillmore
East, regret

not strolling to a Village hotel with a streetwalker who said, Hey
Babe, want some fun?

I regret not losing my cherry to that pro I didn’t know. I regret losing
it to my uncle’s

woman after he egged me on to fuck her. I did and he dropped her
like a dead cat.

I regret never sailing on a boat. I could have imagined Ahab pursuing
Moby Dick,

his men scurrying like fish, like manic clouds after they boarded their
ship helmed

by a captain who loved the sea but hated the whale more. I don’t
regret

hating continent-sized oceans and the thought of drowning. Have you
ever sailed?

I regret not telling my father he was a redneck Buddha slob with
spaghetti gobs in his gut,

not standing toe-to-toe to him the minute I grew taller than him.
I regret I had no finesse

as a child, lived inside my body wishing I could escape. But I wasn’t
Houdini, was I?

I’m a prisoner in my body but have no regrets. Regrets are fools
I no longer love.

I regret endings must happen. I regret I’ll die some day. I regret
I don’t know

what Death is. Do you regret that? Will you and I meet in the heaven
or hell of regrets

and guzzle boilermakers trading regrets like kids with boxes
of blemished baseball cards?

Or will we suck black air after the alleged white light and regret
having believed anything?

I regret I ignored my dying sister, a force of nature, the wind refusing
a cowboy’s rope. I wish

I had visited her, but I was a sad owl lingering on a lonely limb.
Do you regret reading this?

Are you a sad owl? Do you regret dark sins? Like that tree swaying
with the breeze that’s

the ghost of your vanished lover? Is there something you don’t regret?
Are you human, too?

SLICK

by David Spicer

My father called me clumsy, so I never

grabbed the concept of smooth, silky, suave—

in a word, slick. Slick as a bald wrestler’s

pate, slick as an auctioneer, slick as a plate,

slick as an erect pecker. My father wasn’t slick.

Once he tripped over a cracked sidewalk

and I laughed. He said I’d have to work hard

to be a slick dill pickle, insouciant as a savant.

I thought I could learn shiny, sleek: just attend

a slick school teaching glib as a tool, just study,

use my cauliflower to whiz through life

like a wizard smoking a spliff breezing

down the road without a care in the clear air.

One day, driving my rusty twenty-year-old

Caddy in the rain, I hit an oil slick. My tires

keeled through the slick day. So slick

no cars broadsided the Caddy. The car kissed

a concrete wall. I gashed my eyebrow

when my head hit the steering wheel, the wound

slick after it healed. Slick as the paramedics’

raincoats, so slick, I lied later, I won

it in a knife fight outside a St. Louis jazz

club where slick Miles played: some punk said,

Hey Slick, cut the schtick, before I cut you

another proud scar. Today, I long for slick:

a slick poem in a slick rag with glossy paper

full of slick poets. I read them and wish

my poems were slick—slick as a black Bic,

slick as magic tricks of words, slick

like a licked cue ball, slick yelling in the theatre,

Hey, Slick, sit down. Slick like the Brylcreem

I wore in the eighth grade, an Elvis cool cat

that slicked his hair into a duck’s ass,

slick as an embezzling accountant,

slick as sour grapes that betray me, as a slick

walrus grabbing the slick magazine from my

greasy hands and eating it: slick print, slick ink,

slick words slicked out like slicorice the walrus

loves, bitterslick, sickslick, clicketyslick, suckslick,

clacketyslick, snakeslick, slick, slick, slick, slick.

WORD CRUNCHER

By David Spicer

I’m thinking outside the bowl.

No more strawberries, cereal and cream

for this word cruncher. They’re not so super

anymore, plus the other day I told

myself a word braved is a word burned,

and a curd in the hand is worth two in the mush.

Suddenly you’re telling me to hush

hush, tweet starlet, that I can’t bowl

tonight? Is it something earned,

like dancing at the last concert by Cream

(or any other power-group, truth be cold),

as long as I can stop by the super-

market before I scream Super! Super!

while I listen to Breaking in the Wind?

I think I’ll drop acid just to take a hold

of myself and get a bowl

haircut without shaving cream:

it’ll look good if the barber turns

my head just right, so it resembles an urn—

better yet, a Warhol can of soup, or

a plate of tacos, nachos and sour cream

with The Old Man Takes a Pee

nearby, that, for the tenth time today, bowls

me over more than To Whom the Mole Told.

But, one to eat crow and tell,

I admit I have a lesson to learn:

whenever I choose to write, my vowels

slay the lice, pretend they’re superior

to consonants that leak secrets from tushes,

though they can’t digest ice cream.

And I, their hungry owner, can only scream

when I blow my nose and not tell

you that a tart is a baloney hunter.

I might as well drink a smoothie of ferns

for breakfast, lunch, snacks and supper,

slurping it slowly, and from a bowl.

I love cream if it’s dour, if it’s burned.

That tells me it’s no longer bold or super,

but I covet crushed words crunched outside a bowl.

David Spicer has published poems in The American Poetry Review, CircleStreet, Gargoyle, Moria, Oyster River Pages, Ploughshares, Remington Review, Santa Clara Review, The Sheepshead Review, Steam Ticket, Synaeresis, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere. Nominated for a Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart twice, he is author of six chapbooks and four full-length collections, the latest two being American Maniac (Hekate Publishing) and Confessional (Cyberwit.net). His fifth, Mad Sestina King, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press.

In Association with Fossil Publications