On entering school in Eugene, Oregon, Edmund realized how radically different our
family was compared to most American families, and he got increasingly embarrassed
about all our traditions, customs and my nonconformist quirks, like playing music in
public spaces. For a while I didn’t go anywhere without my pennywhistle (and sundry
noisemakers) tucked inside my jacket pocket, which I would whisk out at any time when
I felt the urge, which happened whenever I walked under a bridge, through a tunnel or
any place that had inviting acoustics – or just because. With an immediate “Aw,
Daaaad,” he’d distance himself, and squirm. I always dreamed of busking with the entire
family. That never happened, but I did, somehow, get all three of my sons to tag along
with me, at least once.…
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– From Rude Awakenings
The Lower East Side is a place of energetic life. It has none of the rigidity of a sterile rich
neighborhood, or the envy of the middle income areas. Poverty and want make all slum
dwellers kin, despite their outward unawareness; for since they are poor in possessions,
they must be rich in dreams. The slums of a great American city are the mixing pots of
humanity. The Lower East Side, Breugal like, is the great canvas of man, showing the
range of human types. There is no fusion here; the Negro, Puerto Rican, Italian, Jew,
Russian, Irishman and Pole are separate and distinct from each other, but alike in
undernourishment and deprivation.
A city is a hive of dreams and in the greatest city in the land, dreams are still being
struggled for.…
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The Graves We Dig
Are filled with syringes. Our lips are torn, blood smears the four walls. Someone took a match to letters etched by our teeth. The scent of charcoal. We have been digging for years. The stars are suddenly closer. Some have even exploded, drifting onto us with the soil of the sky. We must be digging up. Above we find another blood moon, settled in the sky like a blot on someone’s burned tissue. Remember lighters hot on our backs, the burn of a tattoo. Remember meth days, the sun in our veins. Or the sky is a doily, wounded, ripped at the edges. Once elegant, now buried in an antique chest, or stuck beneath an old lamp. We dig because our hands need calluses.…
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When my time comes
may solitude be my company.
May the room’s only shadows
move beneath the clock hands.
May I not be stained by tears
nor deafened by the deep moans
of weeping that arrive before the hour.
If I need water, give me a hard
nurse to bring it quickly and go.
My will is left to you who loves
me most: Please celebrate
the comforts we gave to each other,
the peak where we look back
down our lives.
When the clock strikes
and they cover my face,
see me as chrysalis
about to butterfly.
– Robert S. King…
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Painting by Marianne von Werefkin
Who or what holds strings over us,
lifts our arms, crashes
our bodies together?
We move as we must, enjoy
the dance even as we resent
doing it. Perhaps the “real”
marionettes on stage enjoy theirs too—
they come alive, blood circulates,
ideas birth where there had been
only wood. My lover will be
famous, perhaps remembered
like Wateau. When he’s dead,
no one will know what moved his hand
when he would have preferred
to rest. I can’t say what moves
my own hand or why a dark
blue light can wound or delight me–
we keep trying to break
whatever holds us against
our will. Color, a scissors,
almost cutting us free.
– Kenneth Pobo
Author’s Note:
“Marionette Theatre” is from an ekphrastic collection of poems that I’m currently working on. …
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Hands
We weave our fingers together before we fall to sleep
and I notice yours, nearly slender, your infancy thinning.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////I did not notice the shape of those hands
————————————/////////–that gave you to me, that still hold so much of your story.
Your life line, your love line, both too small for me to get
a good read in fading November light.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////It is the back of my own that concerns me—now
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////more my mother’s, her mother’s.
You tap my palm in drowsy patty cake—mark it
with a G!
/////////////////////////////////////////////You will have no memory of what yours will become.
Connective Tissue
I might be smothered by
////////////////////////////////the love she causes.
Mornings I struggle out from under, our heavy sleep
breaths pull it down, down, and down overnight.…
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My mother is afraid for me, but my stepfather says, “If he wants to go, let him.”
So I’m on the plane alone. A stewardess with white skin and orange hair keeps leaning around her work station to smile and wink at me.
The man in the middle seat has gas and smells bad, like cow manure. He wears a smudged ring and I wonder if he’s someone’s father.
Where I’m flying to is flat farmland. Acres of wheat. Tractors and combines. In the winter the snows get so deep that locals drive snowmobiles on the streets instead of cars. I’ve never been, but I know because my blood father wrote me long letters that I’d find torn up in my parent’s trash.
When I tell the stewardess I’ll be nine in June, her smile lifts like it’s a hard trick she’s doing.…
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