Haven’t heard much from you
since your Floridian breakdown.
I’m hoping you’re OK
and you pick up
after that last set of put downs
and come on up here again.
I hope those words
were not the last
I’ll ever hear from you
and that the South
doesn’t swallow you whole
– or even half.
I hope you come back
and I hope what went wrong
makes you righter than ever
eventually.
The population of prisoners
in town has grown substantially
now that the age requirement
has been lowered dramatically.
Since you need only be twelve
to get thrown in for a crime
the cops have been busy
catching punks on a dime.
So be wary, small-towners
who live life out on a limb:
lest you end up in the pokey
that’s been filled to the brim!
I wish my wife on the East Side
had not found
that darling little place
on West 73rd
as it is three blocks away
from my wife on the West Side
and I have found no excuse
not to move.
This will prove
embarrassing
or hilarious.
For a week now
I have been living away from home
watching cats
a borough below
from where I belong.
Things are strange
in this temporary space.
The cats
are not used to me.
The dimensions here
are wrong.
Soon
I will return
to my place of comfort
and see the street that has been mine
for all these many years.
These creatures,
I think,
will not much miss me.
I have been trying to cut bread out of my diet.
With pumpernickel,
it’s easy
since pumpernickel
is crap.
Once, when writing something appreciated about bricks and blood,
I wondered about repeat action
but who wants to get
stuck in a rut?
What if, though…
what about a piece about
blood and bricks?
Is that something new enough?
We shall see:
Blood and brick
and sweat and bone,
they can build
what is necessary
for a new life.
Blood and brick
and will and tools
will cause the change
that we desire
if we band together.
Blood and brick
and you and me
are all we need
to fight the enemy
at the gate
and crush him
and her
and it.
Nope. Rewind.
It does not look like
blood and brick
will do the trick.
Let’s leave this
back in the rut
it came from.
In hindsight, the whole event could have been resolved with a search engine
but even if they existed, I probably wouldn’t have had the skills to have mastered them.
If there was an encyclopedia lying around, I wouldn’t have known how to use it
to prove my point, so how would Google have gotten me through?
It was just me against my Grandmother, and I didn’t have the tools yet
for that kind of bullshit.
When I arrived down in North Carolina to visit my mother’s parents, I was proud
of having taken the plane by myself. I was a big boy! The flight attendants
had told me so. I was calm and cool without my parents as we drove to Chapel Hill
where my grandparents bunked.
I peered out the window.
“These trees are awesome! They’re all so… straight!”
“All trees are straight,” My Grandma observed.
“Mm,” I thought, recalling Central Park, and the gnarled monsters
branching in all directions
reaching upwards, yes
but also crawling through roots everywhere
with branches torturously twisting toward anything it could imagine.
“Not in New York.”
Grandma looked at me. “Trees reach toward the sun. The sun is up. Trees are straight.”
“I don’t know about that, Grandma. I’ve seen straight trees before, sometimes. But not always.
There are lots of bent trees back at home.”
She would not give this up.
How could the old woman be so intransigent?
We argued the whole way to Chapel Hill.
I don’t think we ever resolved the issue.
I’ve kept my eye out for crooked trees, ever since,
though Grandma’s been in the grave for thirty years.
Only now, in research, did I put the question to Google
but
I won’t dignify this poem
with the answer.
Your father is not
my father
though I sometimes
think of us as brothers.
We are not
and not only
because of
the above.
You have a brother
and you two do not seem
very close these days.
You have a very different
family dynamic
than I.
It raised us differently.
Our families are not the same.
Brothers from different mothers?
Perhaps.
Different fathers?
Definitely.
Ipso ergo parentheses sum
(I just made that up
but you probably knew that):
we are not brothers.
Science!
Still
I will see you later
for wings
bro.
When you lie a lot
you have to keep
on your toes
which
if you think
on it
is more
of an aphorism
than a poem
but
by thinking on it
has added enough context to…
well,
you get it.
Many many buildings
have restaurants
on their first floors.
Many of those buildings
have apartments above them
where people cook
night after night.
The smells and sounds
intersect
far more frequently
than the other senses
– unless you add
your sense of time
but
when you do
this becomes
a much longer poem.
jonberger 