The rocket's red glare

 This is one of the many crank rant poems I used to enjoy writing when the combination of coffee and cigarettes had sufficiently charged me and reinforced what my ego demanded a clean and sober artist must be in order to be interesting, expressive, a hat full  of cornball gestures: the personality I'm trying to project here is, please note, fictional and the intimations of wild things having happened with serio-comic consequences are created from whole cloth as well. This might blow my reputation as a poet who recounts hard living in funny and bittersweet couplets and rhythmically charged lines that simulate the rapid eddies of a Freddie Hubbard solo. Well, it might threaten what street cred if I had a reputation more expansive than friends, estranged drinking buddies, a few associate professors and members of my family who like what I do no matter what it is I put on the dinner table. I make stuff  up in half the stuff you'll find in my various chap books, anthologies I've been included in, the various blogs I fill with words that yammer and shriek a loud, if vaguely articulated discontent. 

Discontent with the skin I'm wearing, more than likely, as this current sheath is wrinkled, getting flabby and the joints ache worse than the linger effect of losing whatever person, place or thing that truly mattered to your existence. But don't think this a dishonest poem; I disagree with the notion that poetry in this age requires the poet to expose their darkest don't-tells. Poetry will not change behavior and will not make you feel better about being a shit heel; that is what therapists are for. 

This , I think, is worth reading for the same reason some recent science fiction movies are worth seeing because the computer generated animation sequences are  as spectacular as the stories that justify their use are insipid. This is honest poem because the attitude, the language, the tone that waivers between confirmed don't-give-a-goddamn and the  congealed frustration that threatens to become something louder ,  vulgar and violent. They ring true for me and reflect those days a time ago where going insane seemed a viable an option as any young alcoholic artist and poet could choose. Thankfully, I have survived the logic of the heated impulse and stayed around long enough to enjoy a more modest means of getting to the point. --tb

_____

 The rocket's red glare

how drunk could be get

before we began to

look attractive to the

flies that buzz around

our heads ,

against

the broad strokes

of red

and henna coded clouds

that set the horizon on fire

as the sun sinks

just a tip under the

blurred line of the planet

where earth and sky

are a duo

that play one masterful rondo

after another

one of us stands up

to God and his

whispering minions

that he is tired of

suffering the results

of a good idea

gone to bullet bursts

and fist fights over the change left
on cafe tables.

i raise my head from my palms,

stop studying the way

my shoe laces are

coming untied,

i gather a sense that

there is more to life

than gas , food and lodging

but would settle

for any thing

because i had

none of the above

and no love for curbs

and the drainage dreams

they inspire,

i ask

"IS THERE AN ARE ART SHOW

CLOSING SOMEWHERE TONIGHT??"

the other one of us

was still

drinking as he careened up the street,

one side to the other,

all the billboards

should read "tilt",

"LOVE STRAYS

AND STAYS ARID"

he yells at a passing bus,

i laugh, Jesus what a jerk,

i will take the bus

and play music in my skull

until it comes,

i will be serene and lean

on the vernacular

that's so spectacular

when I'm in the bag

and full of mean remarks,

i will behave,

i will be silent,

nothing will upset me,

i am invisible on the bus line,

but even as my mantra

is uttered and folded

into a vest pocket of the soul

over where the heart still beats

with what remains of

my sense of my self and

virtues beyond the

bulge of my wallet,

a car approaches

through the intersection,

it veers closer,

i sing to the streetlights,

the fixtures on the power lines,

the car slows down,

i'm on the twelfth chorus of "Cherokee",

something breaks in my lap

and then I am wet

with water

neither painful nor holy,

the car speeds away

into the slim v perspective

that runs right to the water's edge,

i am wet

yet am i blessed

in such a state,

i hum another chorus,

my lap drenched

with tap water and

bits of burst balloon,

and now it's dark

after eight pm in July

when the fireworks go off

from the end of the pier,

where i wanted to be

to make a phone call

under the rocket's red glare.

_____