Driving Through Bumblefuck at 3 AM

Seventeen degrees.
Crystal clear above and pitch black ahead.
No signs, no billboards, no nothing.
Just high-beam headlights blasting like shotguns
over the never-ending snake of asphalt
as thick heat rolls through the black plastic vents,
a fevered preacher rails through the radio
and the green ticks of the gauges glow on chapped knuckles.

A Hunter's Haiku

She's magnificent
but she's more magnificent
dead and on my wall.

Meditation on a Potted Plant

It was once the pride of my bower:
A bastion of growth, an emblem of success.
But today, I stare wanly and know full well -
It's just another potted plant.

The leaves are still green, but
They show their age in brown crackle,
Lining the edge of their variegated blades -
Not death, but a notion of it.

Weekly, the verdant resident mumbles its outrage,
Sags in meek folds towards the blotter,
Demanding more, expecting better;
I mostly comply, if only out of guilt.

What was once rising
Has settled;
What had been soaring
Now skids.

It's becoming a nuisance, really -
The tendrils stretching sardonically
Here over a neglected file, there over the edge
Of the desk, seeking oblivion.

And no, pruning won't save it;
The center can never be reclaimed; only
Dangling legs outgrowing, paler leaves out of place,
Reminders of what was, and what was not.

Stopped

He stands serene
in the officer’s spotlight
on the side of the highway
as the din of the traffic tries unsuccessfully
to eclipse the crickets and the tree frogs.

He doesn’t hear the hollow, rubbery pitch
coming from the oversized off-road tires
of the country boys’ trucks
or the airbrakes on the flatbeds
as they downshift for the hill
or the crackling voices over the officer's radio.
He's lost in the breeze
sliding through the pines
and the tall grass covering the hillside on mile 17.

His eyes are fixed on the moon
as he alternately folds each outstretched arm
back to his body
slowly
and somehow gracefully.

He lifts one foot
and he’s a crane,
waiting to take flight
over the pines
and the hills
away from the flashing lights
and the cars
and for that matter,
the billboards
and the bottles
and the taxes
and the papers
and a woman
who is fast asleep in someone else's house
a thousand miles away.

Trying to Get Fired

I swear, at first, it wasn't intentional.
I don't really know what drove me to it.

I'd crawl in a few minutes late in the morning,
complaining about traffic.
I'd sneak out at 4:55 in my gym shoes,
and linger over lunch.

Then came the doctor's appointments.
I had an eye exam, a dental exam, a trip to the gynocologist.
It's been a while since I had a checkup and a cholesterol check--
Healthy workers are happy workers, right?
Got my oil changed on the way back to the office.

I'm not sure at what point it became a game,
a battle of inertia - theirs and mine.

I started yawning in meetings whenever the boss talked
humming to myself and doodling with an extravagance
beyond what is politely accepted.
Sometimes I would pull my phone out of my pocket in alarm
leave the room as though something pressing had come to my attention
and simply not return.

After hours, I became an stealth nuissance
shifting files from one person's desk to the next,
turning family photographs on their heads
stealing the soap from the company restroom.
I took papers from the recycling bins and returned them to inboxes.
Each day I moved the wall of my cubicle an inch
until my neighbor had an extra two feet of space.
Then one night, I put it back.

I have to admit the rest of it came as a surprise, even to me.
I began asking others to do things I'd been assigned,
flatly refusing new tasks without explanation.
One day I dumped my entire filing cabinet on the floor
and sat rummaging in the contents for over two hours,
scowling at passersby as I looked for some non-existent file.

Of course, I made the intern put everything back.

As time went on, my fear faded entirely
and I began even to relish the day I would be caught
I prepared myself to handle any consequence with an absurd indignance -
I was ready for anything, but I will admit
the promotion came as a surprise.

What We Do

Sometimes people ask me, they say "Bob, what does your company do?" And I say "Nothing. And everything." That's usually about the time they look at me like I'm crazy. And they're right. I am crazy. This whole company is crazy. And we have to be. Know why? Because the world is crazy.

You see I can't say "What we do" by saying the name of some category of business or some particular form of communication. What we do is really an amalgam of so many different things in so many different aspects, there's not a single term or phrase that can describe it.

It's like what Louis Armstrong said when the reporter asked him to define jazz. He said "Man if you have to ask, you'll never know." But let me give you the closest approximation that I can, just so you can start to get your head around this thing. If you take what Louis Armstrong did for jazz, what William Faulkner did for the novel, what Julia Child did for cooking and what Abraham Lincoln did for the slaves, mix it all up in a blender with some hot sauce and some pancake syrup and some textured vegetable protein and then take that mixture into your body by means of an enema after wrapping your head with seaweed that has been soaked in vodka, that's the tip of the tip of the iceberg of what we do.

The Crash

We lost engine power
and then cabin pressure
so the pilot came back to say a few words.
He apologized profusely and said he felt personally responsible,
and everyone really appreciated that.
He said it was OK to smoke if we wanted to
as he lit up one for himself.

He was very fatherly,
and did a good job of keeping everyone calm
and acknowledging all faiths and cultures.
He briefly shared some of his favorite memories
of growing up in a small town in Texas
as our jumbo jet hurtled towards the Pacific.
He quoted a Bible verse
and a line from a Talking Heads song
and looked at each person on the plane
as if he had known them for years.

The flight crew made sure everyone had a wine glass
and then we started passing around the bottles.

We raised our glasses for one last toast,
which was made by a very eloquent, flamboyantly gay flight attendant named Richie,
originally from Savannah.

As we polished off the wine,
sealed plastic baggies containing ether-soaked rags
dropped from the ceiling.
We buried our faces and took long deep breaths
and then curled up with our fellow passengers like a big litter of puppies
for our final descent.

When we hit the water
our bodies broke apart like starfish
each arm tumbling off on its own trajectory
into the vast mumble
leaving little trails of fizz
that dissolved almost as quickly as they had formed.

The One Good Thing About Winter

With the branches bare

you can see the moonlit shadows of the sleeping trees

cast on the ground;

the dark, secret souls

stretching out

to spend a few silent hours

lying close to the roots.

Alfred and Janie

They built the house themselves
back in the early fifties.

Little attention was given to decorative details
but the structural ones were subjected to the highest scrutiny.
There's not a loose nail in the place.
No creaks. No squeaks. No cracks.
Every joint and every seam is perfectly flush.
Every board in the house
was hand picked,
measured twice,
and cut once.

Every piece of furniture is still in the same place.
The same painting of the barn in the country hangs over the mantle
which also serves as a perch for the same porcelain birds.
Out in the shed, it still smells of damp, packed down dirt and sweet grease.
The same sturdy tools
hang against the same peg board, their wooden handles
rubbed smooth over the decades.
The handwritten labels on the drawers of the tool chest
haven't changed since the day were so neatly crafted,
all caps on tiny fragments of index cards,
and the shelves still house the rows of mayonnaise jars
which hold so many parts and assemblies
soaking in oil
like organs in a lab.

The swing set still sits in the yard,
without a speck of rust,
anchored by concrete
on all four corners,
another monument
to Alfred's war against chance.

All of these things are the same,
but Alfred and Janie
aren't quite.

Another evening settles over Fairburn,
and the streetlight slides in between the slats of the blinds
that cover the eight-foot picture window.

Their thin soft bodies pad through the house,
cleaning, arranging, and moving without segue
between observations about belongings in the house, the vegetation outside of it,
and recollections of meteorological events;
that storm, this chair, that tree,
as if the concrete nature of those things
gives comfort
even as the differences between them
start to fade.

Alligator Days

There's an alligator in the sewer.
I don't care much, but
Apparently I am alone.

I'm looking around at the people
Now crowded around the
Now-open grate
That used to separate them
From the harmless, overgrown lizard
That hissed and thrashed, trapped and helpless
In the puddle of nasty water
Way down below the street.

The people have been here
Since that kid Corey asked me why
I was face-down, looking in the storm drain.
He left, and they came:
Mothers ordering other mothers' kids
To get away from there for God's sake;
Two policemen, leaning back against their cruiser,
Chuckling and sipping sodas;
A fat sweaty man from the county,
Pulling against the grate.
They all kept one eye on that gator, though.

They've let me stay and watch
Since I was the one who heard that grunt and splash
As I rode by on my metalblue bike,
Just trying to make it home from school.
They haven't noticed that my bike
Is missing its brand-new yellow pads.
The first two sets were stolen.
They were stolen again today --
But I guess they wouldn't know that,
Standing over the grate,
Staring a gator in the face.

Two weeks ago, I was staring into the sewer:
Lying flat against the grate, watching
Drops of blood falling from my face,
Way down into a pool, making runny rainbows.
I couldn’t hear it splash, but I heard
My friend Joey's helpless grunts, choking
With each strike of the bat.
I could hear him thrashing, trying to dodge
Every cut of the knife, crying out when it struck
(He told them to go to hell).
We were trapped. We were helpless.
When it was over, I got up off the metal bars
And ran, but looked back at Joey,
An orange and blue lump against the pavement.
They tell me Joey couldn’t get up.
I haven’t seen him since.
There wasn't a gator in that sewer, though.

I really should go home now --
There's nothing to see here.
They'll help this lizard prisoner out of his cell
And into the canal that runs behind my house.
And they'll go back to their houses
And do it all again tomorrow.
And I'll get on my bike
And try to make it home again
For another day of sunshine and orange trees
And of gators, free and caged.