THE KENSINGTON BEAT

 There are drum solos rumbling down the avenue

where storefront lights burn into the dark

and get diffuse in the

amber glare of bottles and rim shots clinking and reporting

the news of the night:

Yes, we have to go to work again on Monday,

only planets have converged,

lined up in a way that leaves my gravity and shoreline alone,

the highest satellite dish we see tonight

will still be there

in the morning with

birds sitting on them, tennis shoes hanging from them,

giving someone so many sharp moving pictures of

moronic diversions.

Everyone steps up and takes a solo on the melody that becomes the

tattoo on the big shoulder of the crowd that leans into the wall of sound that

each player powers their riffs against, yes, it’s dark outside, the streetlight cannot burn away the black or the mist that surrounds the glow,

I consider bills to pay, bills to pay, 

your face smiling or looking down,

at that point when you think you’re alone,

whistling and singing

the trilling ends of

famous Hendrix riffs, gutter growl,

 whammy bar tirade, ostinatos and legato salvo, tongue triple timing

imperfect harmony with sonic

bitch slap pick harmonic tooth grinding chop heaven,

screams go across the night, I think of you singing whole

sections of

Axis, Bold as Love

when I got home early years ago,

you had all the kitchen gadgets grinding, the stereo

blasting, you

had your voice unleashed in vowels and consonants

riffing in sustained syllabics that

kept away the lurking edge of the night

that would come over the horizon

and up the street

on tiny feet

and bring with it a wake of

wasted blackness that swallowed all

All there is left to do is sing

and consider bills to pay,

Warm nights and drum solos 

from the back of the Kensington Club

 where my brother plays

and demonstrates

the history of sticks

on drum heads, what the hands do when

getting busy is the business,

Everyone gets to take a solo,

to rail their music against the wall of sound,

the night abates; it gives up its claim

on your division of city street and passes you

as singing

to yourself burns a black smoke

 and sparking fabric of sheer emotion

that life stories end up as notes on sheet music

in an arrangement that seems to give we room to

stretch and take our time, to talk to the ends of our existence

so far

and burnish the ends of

our trilling and thrilling cadenzas with a name

that announces itself as part of that

invisible “it”

that is the nature of the street, the kiss of the town you live in,

There are drums the spill out of the doors

and on the street

we go back to

in order to find other streets

to find our beds

before the sun rises over the

eastern mountains and chases the dark back to its recesses,

making this world safe for money.

But tonight, there are drums, a song,

step to the mike, take a solo,

it’s all yours

for 32 bars,

or sunrise.

 

THE LOCUSTS HAVE NO KING
a novel by Dawn Powell
A New York comedy of manners set in the Forties, it concerns a married couple comprised of a famous playwright and her husband, an academic who labors at his specialty in obscurity. While successful in this discipline, the husband works away in his obscure scholarly endeavors, known by virtually no one saves for a handful of peers. At the same time, the wife is the toast of Broadway, blessed with hit after hit, loads of favorable reviews, and admiring tidbits in all the newspapers. Fate, or some other cruel force that loves to upset the smug and arrogant expectations, works so that the husband gains great notoriety for the research he's been pouring over for years, even breaking through to what was then the mainstream media. 

At the same time, the wife must deal with a box office bomb and negative reviews, items that have her reputation sliding quickly down the social ladder. Powell is one of the better comic writers we've had --a spikier Edith Wharton, shall we say, a funnier Thomas Hardy (think of Mayor of Casterbridge)--who provides momentum, atmosphere, and rich, crackling dialogue in this many -charactered satire. This would be the sort of novel Tom Wolfe has been trying to write for years. Powell's dialogue is crisp, curt and telling in what it reveals about the characters, and the prose has a jazzy feel too it, a lightly worn eloquence that doesn't smother the momentum. Tall buildings, over decorated apartments, and rattta-tat bustle of agendas being advanced, abandoned Big Apple bring us a comedy of hubris. 

More about Wolfe-as-novelist, he lacks the precision of detail, character quirks and reveals himself to be a rather drifting plotter. The arcs of his novels lack the efficient forward movement of Powell, who has the sense along with the aforementioned Hardy that fate, triggered by seemingly insignificant gestures, remarks, or stray, condemning thoughts, results in reversals of fortunes, either comic or tragic. We are fortunate Powell opts for the comic. Wolfe piles it on, sentence after sentence, clause after clause, until he suffocates the good ideas he might have hard. Powell keeps us intrigued as to how much deeper the characters in question can deepen the hole they're in. We have here a situation where the fortunes of a famous wife and unknown husband are suddenly and realistically reversed, a turn that reveals the shallow relations and loyalties tied as they are to one's fortunes. Or lack of them.

DON'T SMILE TOO FAST

Try not to smile
too fast in crowded places
like elevators
or even at
intersections where you
are waiting
in your car, 
drumming the stirring wheel
and sipping scalding coffee
in a cardboard cup:
the citizens around
might feel left out 
of the game|
they think you're playing
and begin to tell
you stories of
the private deeds
as as the elevator 
slithers open on your floor,
the dull bell
pinging like
a decade's worth of old headaches,
or even as
the lights change
and traffic  begins to move
and your coffee has
spilt in your lap
making you scream
and the fool in the next car, 
not moving despite car horns
and swear words,
smiles when he pauses his
woe to you through his
driver's side window,
thinking your howling
is a sign of commiseration,
empathy rather than agony,.
Yeah,that joke wasn't worth remembering,
her kiss wasn't that sweet,
last weekend wasn't
that wonderful,
tell yourself whatever
you have too
and remember
the examples,
don't smile too fast
and don't drive
with coffee
nestled between
your thighs
contained
in fragile cardboard, ok?

 

THE MOMENT OF THE WORLD

The better words we have

are the feathers on the wings

of effervescent angels

who'd prefer the poets of the earth

to cease staring in the mirror

of their self-assigned appellation

and leave the library, the desk,

that place where the muse goes to

wither,and walk out the door,

Take the elevator down 

and then a train out of town over mountains a

nd state lines to cities for that perfect cup of coffee,

that lingering kiss on a stranger's lips,

the waiting for traffic lights

at odd intersections

and with not a clue

about which way to turn

in this unfamiliar confusion.

Our angels might take 

their feathers back

if something isn't done.

Imagine us finally 

in the Day of Miracles

with cats and dogs

saints and shitheads

having civil meals,

tending to each other's wounds

and not one of us

gets the itch and tickle

to write a word or two

wholly inadequate as witness

but scribed at the moment

of the world,

not above it.

That would be shame.

page not found

not the voice that comes
from the steam

nor the tide that turns
at the drop of a dime 

into a newspaper machine.
not a name that fades in the ear
when you turn a corner

nor a name that comes through the
earpiece of your phone that
rings at the dinner hour.

not a lover who misses you
after all the years in jobs

on a far coast where time zones and
temperatures are closer and hotter

that the hotel sheets
are to the mattress where you stare
at the door to the hallway,
the shadows of feet passing in

the middle of the night,
you wonder what your lover
has to say,
not about this meal you're eating
or by what you're reading

but instead about how you're living
in this world when
nothing seems real enough to
count on as if life itself mattered,

i say all these things come back to us
always in the moments when
we're required to be
the selves we've always rehearsed in

mirrors, at home, imagining interviews
and interrogations,

i think of the way your lips grew puffy
the first time i made you cry,

the way your hand traced the words of
the book you were reading

before setting it down
to dress for openings, dinner,

where ever we might be going,
the masks crack and fall to the floor

when some meaningless phrase is said
and suddenly, powerfully

it’s clenched fists in public places,
the world is removed just then and too loud as well,

it's all those things after all,
every last cough and bottle of beer we balanced
on the fireplace, there's nothing i ever had

that i don't miss, you were everything
in front of me, passing by and gone
like a road sign that couldn’t be read.

SHE LIKES A WITH A SHAVE

She likes a man with a shave
and a room temperature IQ
who can trips over his words
‘though he hasn’t spoken 
for weeks and months and more.

He is both Popeye and Bluto
brawling on avenues
and twisting streetlights
around the neck of the other
over a friendly
dispute over which one of them
is going to pay the bill.

He is also Leopold and Loeb,
Abbott and Costello,
matching pairs of
the same dark impulse
to play in traffic
and keep score besides.

He trips over words
he hasn’t spoken,
he is hit by buses
he didn’t see coming,
he is always flat on the asphalt
staring into what remains of heaven,
circles of planets, stars, and singing birds
and some notion that
he might have been someone named
Roland Barthes getting pulverized
by a laundry truck
in a city where words
are loud as car horns
screaming in configurations
that cannot be untied.

She likes cartoons
above all else,
cute animals
destroying
hungry wolves and
wretched vermin
endlessly in variations
that allow them to
eternally return to
the sparely drawn
desert-scape where
the only laundry truck
within 1,000 miles
in any direction
will find them
and collide with their heads
and flatten their bodies
like sheets of wax paper
just as they
are about to claim their feasts,
amid all their famine.

What goes around
turns out badly, she thinks,
I need a man
the way a man
needs a shave.

NOTICE TO ENTER

Wrap these sandwich slivers
in a paper napkin, place it
in a crumpled plastic bag
from the 7-11,
leave it by the dumpster
that's been locked
for fear the flies might escape,

Go to work
and bill every citizen
whose accounts are in arrears,
take an extra twenty minutes on
your hour lunch,
sing a happy song,
buy tickets online
for a reunion concert
of a band whose original members
are dead or are quarreling
with those who've passed on,

Pass on a chance

to get with the girl
two cubicles behind you
because everyone
is  suing everyone else
for bad pick-up lines
and suspicious gravity
around the waistline,
return emails drink more coffee,
call your sponsor,
plan a trip on Trivago
and then cancel the purchase,

Regret that you gave up smoking
because that was the only
good reason to leave the office
and hang with the inventory boys
at the loading dock,
ask an intern if they've
ever heard of Woody Woodbury,
ask the intern
if they remember the theme song
to "One Step Beyond",
update your blog
with 500 words on
why the good things
in your life
are being forgotten
or turned into
theme parks,

It's still twilight when
you get home,
the plastic sack
with the sandwich halves
is still next to the dumpster,
the napkin discolored with
the grey stain of congealed mayonnaise,
the bag is covered in flies,

And on the
black security door
of your apartment
is a notification from the management
announcing a date and time
in which they will need to enter
your space
to inspect your pipes,
your comic books,
all your bullshit,
all of it.