Heart of Hearts
You know that saying “too mean to die”? Well, it’s not true. Dad is dying. I try to make myself feel appropriately sad, but a heart isn’t like a bud that unfolds on schedule. “Gangster of Love” is an old hit record by the Steve Miller Band. It’s also now a sort of job description. The work is more difficult than it sounds. When I walk, wherever I walk, my shadow walks ahead of me.
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The white police officer has too small a heart. How is that legal? the prosecutor asks. The wily old judge gestures that he can’t hear over the roar of the rain. Witnesses in the case exchange anxious glances across the courtroom. The defense attorney just smirks. A while later, a van taking away the jurors runs completely off the road. No one is even hurt, but angels are everywhere, joking and laughing and smelling like turned earth.
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It was soon raining again, scarlet and black, the drops alternating between blood and bile. Even the cows on the hillside wondered what the fuck. If you ever go searching for an answer, you’ll just end up disappointed and confused and alongside broken old farm machinery rusting in the weeds in an abandoned corner of the heartland.
Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity
The ground is littered with used paper face masks. I want to shake this person and that person and tell them, “You can’t be lost in your own world all the time.” But, of course, I won’t. A purplish darkness creeps over the city. I stream a movie about an international crew of astronauts on a journey to the cosmic womb. The ship malfunctions. Their sanity frays. They slowly turn against one another. Something out there in space is acting like a hulking bouncer who won’t let them through. If they knew what I know, they would just chuckle. A month from now my daughter is having a daughter.
R.I.P.
Tennessee Williams woke in the middle of the night groggy from two Seconals and reached for another on his bedside table, only to mistakenly pick up a plastic cap from a bottle of Murine eye drops, which got stuck in his throat. People have been crushed by falling masonry, burned alive with gasoline, run over in the street. But choking to death on a bottle cap?! I don’t understand that kind of poetry.
Howie Good is the author of more than two dozen poetry collections, including most recently Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing) and The Bad News First (Kung Fu Treachery Press).