jonberger

One time, I was walking John to the train stationand on the way back
I had to go to the bathroom real bad.
I was like a block from my place
– half a block –
but I didn’t think I could make it.
The stairs were gonna be a problem.
I don’t even know what I ate
that was making this an issue:
like, what: a pound of bacon?

Anyway, it was the middle of the day,
but it’s an industrial area,
so no one’s paying attention to anyone.
On the corner,
I leaned on the corrugated gate
looked both ways
then a few other ways,
and dropped my shorts
to then let spill.

I had a napkin in my pocket
to wipe with.
It helped a little.

I didn’t look at what I had done.
I stared at cement the rest of the quick march to my door.

As I left my house the rest of the week
I couldn’t help but view what I had wrought
a brown pile upon the corner
until a storm washed away my creation.

It was perhaps the largest footprint
I have left in my neighborhood
in all the years I have lived there.

The dancing was natural once.The dancing was powerful once.
The dancing was irresistible once
and inalienable – except
I just looked it up, and that means
unable to be given away by the possessor
and that is exactly what happened.

The dancing isn’t here anymore.
It wasn’t sold
and it wasn’t stolen.
Maybe it just drifted away on the wind
but it surely isn’t where it used to be.

The dancing’s just gone,
is what it is.
When the music comes on
and Betty begins to get the beat
I just seem to stay in my seat.

It’s not like it was before.
Something’s happened
and the dancing has disappeared from me.
It’s nowhere around that I can see.
Where oh where could it possibly be?
I’ve still got the rhymes, apparently!

But lost
is the dancing.

This: This! Mark the day.
Mark the hour.
This is the time
you failed to do the impossible.
It was inevitable
but unfortunate, too.

You could have done something special
if you were something inconceivably different
but you weren’t, unsurprisingly,
because you’re human
hampered by those abilities
and fallacies
and you did what you were able to
and nothing more was possible.

You did everything right
and nothing wrong
and nothing more was expected of you.

You failed to do the impossible,
I said.
You couldn’t have done any better
or different
or anything else.
It’s all right.
This is what happened.
This
is what was done.

Time enough? I thought I could do it.I thought I could look at you fondly
with composure and appropriate distance.
I thought maturity and resolve would hold sway.
I thought we could be what you always hoped for
and me, too.
I thought it could be so
and it was
for seven minutes.

I held out for seven minutes
before wistful melancholy called
and I yearned again
for a thing that I swear
I have kept away from for months.
Years, maybe.
I have been free from your gravity for some time
– I firmly believe that.

A steady diet of absence
has left you less of a deity to me.
But seven minutes changed all that.
I thought your pull could be broken.
I truly believed that
but an older belief system
seems to have a tighter hold.

Perhaps we can try again
in another decade.

Tell me: when are we gonna hang out?
When will I next see that famous pout?
I wanna see you, without any doubt
so let me know please: when we gonna hang out?

Are you around? Just gimme a sign.
I don’t wanna waste any of your time; just mine.
We can dine on swine on the Rhine. Say nine.
Is that fine? Lemme know. Just gimme a sign.

I’d love to see you if you give me a chance.
Any opportunity that we can enhance
this thing between us that cannot yet be called a romance.
So if you would be so kind, could you give me a chance?

Yeah! Lemme know: when we gonna see each other?
If you want it, I’ll come calling to your mother
with gifts and bribes I’m prepared to fully smother
your mother’s brothers and all others if we then can see each other!

Can we hang out? Just gimme a sign!
For a chance at romance; we can make it by nine.
If we see each other soon, it’ll be just divine.
It would relieve a fevered wish of mine.

Let’s hang out!

I did the hits.
They didn’t care for the hits.
I showed them some banter
the old razzmatazz.
They didn’t give a shit about that either.
I threw out some excited gestures
to show I was alive
but I think I just looked like a herky jerk there.
At any rate: no reaction.
Stone faces.

The people were unimpressed
or so their silence suggested.
“I know you’re breathing…” I muttered,
but someone coughed
so nobody heard.

Was it that the audience wasn’t ready
for the wonder they were experiencing?
That wasn’t it.
The folks couldn’t stand the supernatural skills before them?
Doubtful. Doubtful indeed.
Whatever it was, it didn’t work.

You win some,
you lose some.
Some you lose completely.
Some you lose so totally,
you don’t come back from it.

You just never come back.

That Book of Playboy Cartoons and Jokes does not take up much space on my bookshelf
but it takes up a huge space in my heart.

I don’t know what I was looking for
when I bought it from Barnes & Noble
at twelve years old,
but it came home with me
in a brown paper bag
that wasn’t opened
until I arrived behind my own closed door.

I learned some terms
and concepts from that book
before I was truly ready to embrace them.

There was an altogether different source
of terminology for me, though.
The musical Hair, and its 53-second long opus "Sodomy,"
with its list: "Sodomy, felatio, cunnilingus, pederasty."
A little education went a long way
for a curious mind back then!
But I digress.

The Book of Playboy Cartoons stayed with me
but emotionally and physically
for years to come.
It stayed with me as a source of humor.
It stayed with me as a source of sexism.
It stayed with me as a paperback next to the Michael Moorcock novels.
It stays with me to this day.

Some things just stay with you.
Some things are simply too hard to get rid of.

When I was travelling abroad in another century
I had a camera
and I took photographs.
Picture perfect photographs.
Photographs like postcards,
I might add.
Photographs so close to postcards,
I wondered why not just buy the postcard
and stopped taking those kind of pictures.

At some point
in a later millennium
I learned to feel the same way
about pictures on phone-cameras
and then most pictures on phone-cameras
or as we call them today, phones.

I have learned to take pictures rarely
or never learned to take pictures much.
Is the glass half empty or full?
I usually find it two thirds empty
but that
is an improvement
– perhaps growth
in this later millennium.

Were days
not that long ago
when I used to wonder
whether what I was working on
was worth the effort.

“Is this subject,”
I would ask myself,
“Truly something that will sit well
with the serfs?”

And I pondered perplexedly
as to an answer to this
or whatever it was
that I considered composing
until the details determinedly decomposed
before my very mind.

Those days have passed now
and I’m not as in my head
as I so recently was.
I assume these days
that my muse is taking me somewhere significant.
I hope so.
I’m gratified occasionally.
Sometimes, I find the thread.

Sometimes, I see the light.

You’re uncomfortable.
You think you’re uncomfortable?
You could experience real discomfort
like when your grandfather walked to school
three directions uphill with no feet.
You know that old tale…

But more important,
is it truly comfort you seek
in this time of your life?
With the world falling closer and closer
into the sink
do you really want to feel snug as a bug
with a slug of cocaine?

You know where the temperature is perfect
where everything. Is climate controlled
exactly correctly?
At the funeral home.
Is that the comfort you’re hoping for?

Plan for a more vivid life.
It’s there for you
and you’re here for it.
Dive in.