Chronology

Some months feel like years, but I feel like I just had my annual physical when I open an email to schedule the next one, / I have early memories of a 45 from a 1959 girl group that I can’t place the name of, playing while I danced to the beat when I was three, / and of seeing carpeting ripped from our apartment floor just before we moved when I was four, not knowing when that carpeting was installed, / and of toys I played with when I was five, whatever happened to them, / and of time markers, / Halley’s Comet and solar eclipses, / the Voyager mission reaching Jupiter in ‘79, Saturn in ‘81, Uranus in ‘86, Neptune in ‘89, / in ’77, I was wondering where I would be in ‘89, / I’m in a future already lived, / piercing through the years of madness, 1968, 1984, 2001, / and my son graduates college next month, not long after I was driving him around in a car seat, tossing back stories I made up about this or that, / but now I’m sixty, living life in a bad novel and what might end up being a great movie, unable to see much beyond next month, looking back at yesterday as if it were weeks ago, / didn’t I just get a new furnace last year?

(Published in LIPS #50, Spring 2019)

As 1918 Pandemic Creations Were

what palette colors
a five-day old mask

what tempo paces
beeping machines

what scale echoes
footsteps in crowded wards

what string instrument sounds
the timbre of exhaustion

what poem recalls
dreams of intubation

creative decisions
are best made in hindsight

but experience slips away
if unrecorded—

a journal is an art-form
forged while life is lived

as is song and prayer
pushed out from still-healthy lungs—

creations birthed in this horror
won’t be understood

for many years—
may they not be buried

(Published in POETRY in the TIME of CORONAVIRUS Volume 2)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0892HNGK1

Groceries

the screen trying to get a delivery slot
my cart is set up veggies wipes the usual
refresh

they say that new slots appear at midnight
but three times the app froze and then they were
done refresh

now we wait an hour to get into the website
and the game is to get on at midnight
to snag refresh

slots but maybe they will add delivery
slots during the day just to mix it up
so I try refresh

every hour and I feel like a mouse
pressing keys to get that pleasure hit
it feels like this refresh

looking for a delivery slot which
I actually saw once before the app
froze and I’m trying to refresh

after I got an Amazon grocery delivery
trying for an hour almost bleeding fingers
but I lucked out while pressing refresh

to get a limited selection unbelievable
and twice saw the slot open but it disappeared
but it only took another twenty-five refresh

to get the order and it was delivered after
three hours wow wow dopamine rush
so here I am again different store trying refresh

on their slot machine so I don’t have to
travel my aged body with non-covid pneumonia
what I have to do now is sit and refresh

(Published in Frost Meadow Review)
https://frostmeadowreview.com/pandemic-poetry/

Stationery Store

Red Bull in the cooler, five-hour drinks on the counter, lottery tickets and cigarettes behind me, Penthouse on the top rack, herbal tea on the corner shelf, ATM near the door, coffee canisters by the pastry bins.

When I was a kid, we called this place Pop’s Candy Store. Pops sold it to me twenty years ago, and I changed the name to Park Street Stationery. I sold Mars bars, baseball cards, Twinkies, Pez dispensers, even pens and paper. I ask myself – when did I become a drug and porn dealer? When did I start running a numbers racket?

I never changed the sign. It still says stationery, candy, cigars. I haven’t sold cigars in fifteen years. No one buys them anymore.

People come in for their fix— coffee to wake up, Red Bull to stay up, lottery tickets to feel hopeful, cigarettes to feel calm, sugar to fill a craving, herbal tea to sleep, porn for immediate use. I know what my regular customers need by looking at their eyes when they’re in the line. That saves me some time.

Last week, I signed with a delivery service. They text me orders and send a guy with a van. Next month, I’ll hire some kid after school to pack boxes. I’ll tell him, keep away from the drugs, the gambling, the porn, don’t feel dirty about the product, don’t think about the customers or their families. Just put the blue gloves on, pack the damn boxes, cash your paycheck, and wash your hands before you go home. There isn’t much room for sympathy in this business.

“Stationery Store” (a persona piece) was first published in Red Wheelbarrow #10 (2017).

No ID

Without ID, there is no existence.

Without ID, there is no ‘be’ in a be sea. A sea without be is an empty vastness. A map of a beless sea is a measurement without dimension, an arrow without direction.

A number without value.

‘Nothing’ cannot be conceived— nothing is not born from nothing, nothing cannot be born from anything. The opposite of a vacuum with no dimensions is infinitely filled indeterminateness, which is not the same as a vacuum, but is no different. Divide by zero to prove 1=2.

A synonym for belessness is ________.

A person without ID is as invisible as a paper match’s smoke in a strong wind. People look through, look past. Who? The question cannot be answered. Can you distinguish one ant from another? One mathematical point? Something less than that? How many irrational numbers exist between zero and one? What is the difference in value between two neighboring irrational numbers? Two neighboring transcendental numbers?

Without ID, people are uncountable.

Without ID, there is no I, and there is no way to identify the body from dental records.

For those who cannot be identified, there is no origin, so there cannot be a destination or movement. No licenses, no work, no taxes to be paid.

ID is the key to society’s lock. ID opens eyes, allows recognition, and provides a path to somewhere. ID is how we know where on the map we are and where everyone else is.

Drop ID onto a person, and everyone else thinks they know who they are. The mask can be seen in a mirror, so it ‘exists’. They also know where they are— the Northeast side of Southwest Centerville, five miles up the road past the Jones cabin that burned down last year, by the old Bennett farm where Sam built the cheap condos.

If you leave your ID at home, you can slip through the world unnoticed, be a person of no account. Move between the masks, above the grid, and slide right in— a vampire of no reflection, who takes without giving, endlessly existing between the rhythmic beats of reality’s subtle drummer.

A mask is art, or artifice, or artificial.

A poet writes his story, his name is Forty, he sings of glory, but as he runs out of time, his mask falls away so he can no longer say the poet’s play; only empty pain remains as his life-stained mask slides down the drain.

Have a party to burn your diary; toast the loss of your past, and then go to the mall to lease three new masks. What is in style today? How much do you have to pay?

Hide your masks. Use them when nothing is not enough, when something is better than something else, or when anything will do.

Each day, wear one or all of your masks, or put me away; choose to be, or ________.

“No ID” was first published in the Fall 2015 spoken word issue of Arc Poetry Magazine.

The Babalus

Musical instruments wail as the truck rolls
under the train trestle. We exercise the echo—
I bang my buffalo drum, Joe slams his congas,

Sandy shakes her tambourines, the kid
in front pounds his vibes, the guy in the back
goes full throttle on his drum kit.

Sunlight flares as the truck turns right. Crowds
on both sides of the street wave as we restart
whatever rhythm we were playing.

Every July 4th in Ridgewood, Joe hires out a flatbed
truck usually used to ship construction lumber.
Signs remembering Joe and Sandy’s friends

who passed in the prior year surround a frayed
banner with the name of our group— The Babalus.
We tie down our instruments and chairs and hope

to be the last float in the parade. Some years
they put us between a screaming fire engine
and a shrill ambulance, but other years are better.

When it rains hard, I cover my doumbek and djembe
in black garbage bags, water spraying on every beat.
Near the end of the parade route, we stop in front

of the Elk’s Club where Joe and Sandy’s friends
watch the procession and we play for a minute or two.
After the bows, we drive past the town’s reviewing

stand as the announcer reports how many
parades the Babalus have performed in.
We never won best of anything, our annual

get-together with no uniform, little rehearsal,
and an uncertain roster, but soaked or sunburned,
for all of us, drumming is breathing.

Video of “There is Life to Do”

Here is a video of my monologue “There is Life to Do”, performed on June 4th, 2016 by Sam Perry (as the bartender). Tracy McQuillan plays the bar patron. The Strand Project is a collaboration between Lit Youngstown and Selah Dessert Theatre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6C1v2PwPig&feature=youtu.be&t=4683

There Is Life To Do scene

Wayne L Miller and Sam Perry

Repast

orange juice yellow beets brown bread
once more she sets the table

arranging dishes
placing napkins

forks spoons knives
centering chairs by placemats

then placemats by chairs
tureen vegetable soup steam

cold salads covered
no grapefruit spoons or fish forks

yet again
she checks the simmering roast

reverently adjusting burners
almost hot enough

to start with
blue corn chips green salsa black olives

inviting me she
touches my shoulder

— Published in The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow #8 (2015)

Corporate Theatre

An act performed with stock props—
common avarice, preferred prayer,
garaged convertibles, arrest warrants.

Setting: a dimly-lit office—
boxed files, encrypted evidence,
accrued interest, hollowed equity.

Enter the four players—
Founder. Investor.
Manager.  Employee.

A shroud falls after the first scene of
hushed negotiations, rash decisions,
turnaround specialists, legal execution.

Time of death? Written on a form filed by men of habit,
a notice sent to the local business rag,
a remark whispered in a pub— the company foundered.

The as-yet uncontaminated engrave an epitaph on the vault door—
Available, after the lawyers scrub out the stink of failure.
Of the stricken within— a rotting corp, with hands folded.

Recyclable employees claw into vertical positions,
managers supplicate quotations for furniture and fixtures,
founders stiffen attitudes, bury emails, spawn excuses.

Office equipment is consigned to a resting place—
disposal men grasp them by their attached cables
and file out, precisely positioning each into a black van.

Responsibility? Blame this! Blame that! Sue the consultant!
When driving by a seven car pileup, the officers direct:
move along, there are no lessons to be learned here.

Missed opportunities and fumbled execution
play no role because— well, just because.

Let’s raise money for our next brilliant idea.

— Published in The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow #8 (2015)