probation poem

Probation Poem 1-8-18

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , , , ,

I arrive early. I want the best seat.

Front row for the front line

of shadows meted out as justice.

I whip out Walt (he’d of loved that phrase!)

and begin to read from “Song of Myself,” section 32,

the section Walt wrote with Bonnie and Clyde in mind:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

So they show their relations to me and I accept them,

They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.

“How do you spell ‘application?’”

the young man asks me.

I close Walt.

I stop thinking about the tokens

of myself the dogs bring me.

This book is about those tokens.

He’s in the brown hoodie again,

always,

always greasy,

he asks me

without looking up from his phone.

I presume he’s filling out a job application,

or reapplying to become a human being again,

but then why do you need to spell ‘application?’

I spell it. Three times.

We talk. He mostly talks.

Talks about his darkening

marginalization,

into the dark unknown,

already past the black border

on one of the ancient maps

when the earth was flat

and sea serpents

gobbled up the explorers.

Walt was an explorer,

an explorer of the marginalized,

their poet, too,

their greatest poet,

but Walt is dead to them now,

and I use pick and shovel

to entomb him for them,

us.

In fact, the young man

is applying for a job,

a job processing crabs,

the ones about to arrive

in Astoria, the only job

allowed him (and me).

But we get to wield

the best knives,

sharp ones pulled

from the Internet.

There are no crabs in the restaurants without us.

I wish Walt could sing about that.

He’d know what to sing. I don’t.

The meeting convenes.

Bursts of advice. Almost in song.

A man praises his ankle revoke.

A man loves his new A.I.P (approved intimate partner).

(I didn’t make up A.I.P. The State did. There is a form.)

A man loves the old fishermen stories in AA.

A man is going to sea.

A man cut his friends like bait.

Some salty language for familiarity.

Like from the old salts in the hold.

A crew we almost are,

backslapping, drinking our stories.

Don’t call me Ishmael, though.

He’s the only one who survived.

I want all of us to make it,

and return one day

and harpoon our Ahab,

even though his soul

is already dead.

Let him eat crab.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Probation poem 12-4-17

NSP Meditations, Poetry , ,

They decorated the

probation office for Christmas:

Stockings, snowmen, Santas.

Green garland and green lights

shaped like a noose.

 

Stillness reigns.

Christmas pills.

Christmas black eyes.

No baying yet.

I can’t write a poem without baying,

so I won’t.

 

I’ve got Walt with me.

Was Walt into Christmas?

I bet he wielded his eel spear

to bring home eel

for Christmas dinner.

 

What would Walt make

of his country today?

Of course he’d be in prison,

doing what he implied

in Leaves of Grass.

 

Walt was always singing

praises for America.

Can you sing like that

for America anymore?

You can certainly bay.

 

We assemble around the table.

A new man

already in the act of disappearing.

I hear Americans gently baying:

I can’t go to church.

I can’t ride horses?

I can’t go see cattle with my dad?

I have to live in a stable.

I want to use so bad.

I need a job.

I can’t take a welding class?

I can’t live near a bus stop?

I can’t go to AA seven days a week.

I live in a culvert.

I can’t burn but I can take pills?

I spent the night on the roof.

I’m becoming more sallow.

 

Sallow!

A man said sallow.

I heard it.

 

He was wearing

a greasy brown hoodie

with the hood on.

I could barely see his face

(and it was sallow),

but I heard sallow

and I listened.

There is a difference.

 

I’m hearing

Americans baying

in this soundproof studio

and I’m recording it,

mixing, (no over dubbing),

producing an album

of an undetermined

musical genre

that somehow

I must release

because Americans need

to hear their

fellow Americans bay.

Probation Poem 11-13-17

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , , ,

I drive into the parking lot

of the probation office.

I am not going to write a poem

about the experience today

or ever again.

 

Wind billows the American flag,

naturally at half mast,

perpetually at half mast.

Just keep it there

and turn it upside down.

 

I survey the vehicles in the lot:

meth rigs and a pickup camper

with a homemade red, white and blue paint job,

jury rigged with duct tape and baling wire.

Living upside down,

at half mast.

 

Time to go in.

I bring along Leaves of Grass.

I put my right hand on it

and swear I won’t write a poem.

 

A man bums smokes

A woman plays Angry Birds

A man hides in a hoodie

A woman fidgets

I hear a man say he has a 1:00 appointment.

He has no idea what time it is.

He has the wrong day, too.

 

The man now offers to buy a cigarette.

The woman takes him up.

He fishes out change.

They go outside.

I check her face: surface of the moon.

I check his face: faceless.

 

Sterility. The humming. The inertia.

I feel myself becoming the gray carpet.

I crack open Walt

to glean some life.

 

Rain begins to collide

against the windows.

The talk moves toward rain.

Two men describe it as “pissing.”

The talk moves toward pissing,

into cups, beakers, tubes,

and training their minds

and bodies for the UA.

 

We go inside the room.

I hear:

“I’m living under a bakery.”

“I’m journaling instead of drinking.”

“I need one good day.”

“I’m almost out of pills.”

 

When you hear a man say,

“I’m living under a bakery,”

how can you not write a poem?

Or whatever this is.

I swear it’s the last one,

until the next one.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Probation Poem 10-17-17….Kissing

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , , , , , ,

I lean against the wall

inside the probation office.

Joint is packed.

Reprobates are jacked.

I read Walt Whitman

at random,

waiting for a form

to set me free.

It’s come to that:

a form for freedom

in a democracy.

Can you believe

they want it in longhand?

I look to my right:

Two couples

make out

before their

meetings and UAs,

wearing her Pink sweatpants,

his black hoodies,

both clutching phones.

Nothing surprises

me in here,

not the sparkled jeans

nor the man reading Macbeth,

not the dog food coupons,

nor the reek of fish.

Okay, this making out does,

these two couples!

It’s like that poem,

“Kissing,” by Dorianne Luax.

Kissing is sometimes

all we have

to stave off extinction,

to undermine Stalin,

to hang from

a thread over the abyss.

Laux writes:

They are kissing
to begin the world again. Nothing
can stop them…

they are doing what they have to do
to survive the worst

It’s the one human act

they can’t take from us.

Even in here:

florescent lights,

plastic chairs,

gray carpet.

It’s an act of

secret rebellion,

or smack dab

in the open,

face to face,

in our faceless times,

not a reckoning,

but a puckering.

I read another line from Walt.

Walt writes a lot about kissing

but never uses the word.

I watch the couples,

the two women

angled toward me,

their eyes are closed.

One has her feet,

out of flip flops.

She is barefoot

and kissing

in the probation office,

and I am no poet

if I don’t write

a poem with that image.

Because it is

a unique image

in the annals

of American literature

and I will take that.

It’s free.

It might even set me free.

A woman emerges

from behind the glass,

long blonde hair,

on taxpayer’s time.

She looks at me,

smiles, turns my way.

We knew each other,

in my other life.

We almost dated.

We would have kissed.

She asks me

how I’m doing.

I show her the cover

of Leaves of Grass,

she nods,

and walks out the door.

One couple has stopped

making out.

The other has not.

I return to Walt.

He’s in love with

democracy now.

No American poet

writes about a love for

democracy anymore.

But more kissing

might help us survive it.

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Another Probation Poem

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , ,

I sit in my car,

drinking three-day old Yuban.

A young man and woman

vape in the fog.

They look like aliens

breathing sustenance

before the invasion.

I walk in the office.

The receptionist wears

knee-high black boots

and a tight orange skirt.

I pay the Man.

He is there,

in the corner,

monologuing the Coke machine,

telling it about

the Columbus Day storm

he survived,

holding on to a tree.

The Coke machine nods.

Today is Columbus Day.

I walk out.

I simply

can’t take it.

Where is that invasion?

Where is the new Columbus for not only America,

but the world?

Wade ashore and plant that flag.

Convert or die.

I think we need it.

The invaders might even

have mercy.

There are woods

behind the office.

He should consider

walking into them

and never come out.

Sit down and return to earth.

One last honorable act.

It’s a hard thing to think

that about a fellow man.

The worst thought of my life,

a thought that reorders your cells.

What happened to my mercy?

It droppeth not from heaven.

The gentle rain is acid rain.

Mercy has walked the plank,

said Bob Dylan.

Why is Dick Cheney still alive and Prince is dead?

Write me a poem on that.

It’s all the harder because

the man looks Kurt Vonnegut

a week before he died.

Kurt loathed Columbus.

Kurt survived the fires of Dresden

in a meat locker.

This man is already dead…

dead man talking to a Coke machine.

(But perhaps not! He also says he wants to see the Fleetwood Mac tribute band coming to town. He’s collected enough cans and bottles. He wants to rock and roll. The probation officer doesn’t know if he will let him.)

Back in the car,

I pull Walt from

the glove department.

There will be something

in there I missed.

There always is.

The leaves of grass

always leave you wanting more.

I open at random and read:

A woman waits for me,

she contains all,

nothing is lacking.

I smile. I didn’t know

Walt wrote science fiction!

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Probation Poem 9-25-17

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , , ,

Men in the waiting room

speak of addiction.

One wears the uniform

of a road flagger.

 

He shoots a text

to a treatment center

on the last Blackberry

in America.

Rain falls outside.

Give me 40 days

and 40 nights of

Bladerunner rain.

Give me Noah meets Deckard

and let us all drown

and start over

with replicants in Congress.

 

I hear an insane man

beyond the door.

I’ve sat in a room

with his insanity.

It caromed like an object in a cartoon.

Euthanasia crossed my mind.

But not for myself.

 

Why do I write

poems in here?

They clash with the

coke machine and gray carpet.

I should stop reading Whitman in here.

He’s clouding my vision

with his hallucinations of democracy.

 

I am no poet

with these probation poems.

Read this non-poem

for corroboration.

Corroboration is a terrible

word for poetry.

(Carom isn’t bad.)

At least I know that.

 

A sign on the wall

says the seafood plant is hiring.

ASAP!/ $11 an hour.

 

The local seafood industry

dies without this office.

They cast their nets

in the parking lots.

I’ve seen it.

Casting from a truck,

not a boat.

Fishers for marginalized men.

Fishers not taught by Jesus.

 

I’ve seen so much here,

none of it poetry.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

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