A Weekend In London Smoking Fags
I am sitting in a bus terminal at the Stansted Airport on the outskirts of London waiting to return home from a friend’s wedding. I was here less than 48 hours ago. My jet lag is just now beginning to rectify itself and I am going to careen through the time zones again making my body, and my watch face, tired. It’s 8:30am London time, and it will be 6:30pm Ohio time when I get home. That will make for a sixteen hour travel day, after which I am expected to be ready and awake to host the freshman in our home for three days of consecutive partying. When I got to my motel on Friday afternoon I napped on and off for 5 hours which felt great at the time. When I was twisting and turning in my bed that night at 1am, more awake than a little kid on Christmas Eve, sleeping next to bridegroom and best man snoring soundly, I realized that the my naps may not have been the best idea after all. I decided to take a walk, smoke a cigarette, and discuss some of my life questions with God, or at least the black night sky. Two minutes down the sidewalk is a 24-hour service station that looks to me like a rest stop you might find on the side of the highway. I ordered a bacon & egg sandwich and what I actually got was a flattened hero role with some strips of bacon bunched up in the center, a few strands of half-melted shredded cheese, and something white, which I can only assume must have been the egg. I ate my smashed breakfast sandwich in silence and lit a cigarette inside of a public building. I guess our anti-smoking laws haven’t made it quite this far yet. Upon returning to the travel lodge I struck up a conversation with Anna, the front desk lady on nightshift. 3.5 hours, a coke, and over 10 cigarettes later I was ready for bed. She told me about her 5 husbands, her combined 39.5 years of marriage (and going strong with hubby number 5), her thoughts on love at first sight, about the time she met the translator to the queen of Morocco, and fancy fingernail painting techniques. I went to bed at 5am that morning wondering if my idea of love at first sight, and my idealized version of falling in love once and being in love forever was indeed a fairytale. If Anna could be in love 5 times, did I really think I was going to get out of the war of the heart that easy. I am sick of being on the frontlines. I want to hide in the back of the medi-vac, licking my wounds and stuff every one my pockets with extra gauze for the day when I may really have to stop my own bleeding. Anna said she had no regrets. She said she lived the life of the unknown. If you live the life of the known, she was telling me, it is not challenging, it is not exciting, it is manageable, unadventurous, and chances are good you like calling yourself an adult and carry a briefcase. But if you live the life of the unknown, anything can happen to you, and it seems, as if almost a dream, that you can make anything happen. She has loved five times, has 4 children, lived a life of mystique in Morocco, and works as a cab driver and night receptionist in England. And the mind-boggling thing is…she actually seems happy. Four times divorced and she seems happy. She worked as a therapist for a while and onetime one of her clients spotted her in the public square and began to ask her questions. This was a client who was having marriage problems. He asked if she had ever been married and when she told him that yes she had, five times, he didn’t know what to say. He looked over at a young mother pushing her baby in a stroller, looked back at Anna and said “how can you give me marital advice when you can’t even get it right?” She smiled, and replied unflustered, “who said I got it wrong?” I went to sleep puzzled, fatigued, woozy from too many cigarettes, and desiring to know less and less about my exciting and challenging future. What was in store for me would be just fine After the wedding reception the next night Claudia, one of the twenty-something guests, and myself decided to head off to an English nightclub to find cute boys and give me assurance that, being out so late, I would indeed sleep on the plane. We waited in the cue for ages and then we were tossed aside by a bouncer who didn’t want to let me in because my trainers (aka sneakers) violated the “smart casual” dress code. “I am just a dumb foreigner,” I told him, “and I won’t show anyone my shoes on purpose.” I flashed my best innocent American smile. He apologized saying there was nothing he could do, so Claudia and I ended up smoking some fags on the edge of the greasy sidewalk a few meters down from the club. In England they call cigarettes fags. We lit fag after fag sitting on the pavement and deadening our lungs. It got me to thinking that maybe we should call homosexuals cigarettes back home. Cigs for short. “Wanna go to the cig club” we’d start saying to each other. Or “God hates cigs” would be the new signs on the nightly protests outside the grave of Matthew Shepherd. In England we smoke fags. In America we smoke ‘em out. As we headed back to the travel lodge I stared out the window of our taxi feeling like I was a piece of grizzle that the monster that is the London club scene spit up
The Reason For Rain
A quarter of a century has gone by for me, and sitting on a plane on the way to London for the wedding of an old friend all I can seem to do is check out the hot guy waiting to use the men’s room five cramped rows in front of me. There was a time years ago, during that stage of my life where memories are covered in fog and smudged by time’s chiseling fingers that I would sit for hours in front of our gigantic picture window and be completely absorbed by the rain falling on the road. If it was sunny I seemed to feel in the pit of my stomach this obligation to be outside. Adults used to keep telling me that it was nice outside and “the fresh air will do you good.” That was a sentiment I didn’t quite understand. I wanted to sit on the hard wood floor, flatten my paper against a comic book hero on the glass of my picture window and trace the hours away in my living room, in my imagination. “If the air is so fresh,” I found myself thinking, “then why don’t you go get some of it for yourself?” We endured many surprise tornado scares and hurricanes in southern Connecticut growing up. Some mornings my mother and sister would wake up shivering and bewildered by what sounded like God’s wife slapping him one good smack upside the head. I can imagine what her complaints might have been. It’s too hot in August in California. It’s too cold in Norway. Not to mention that Sandra Bullock hasn’t made a good movie in years and there are millions of starving children dying weekly all over our death dotted planet. But I digress. The thunder seemed to send a panic through the people around me. And just as the rain would start pelting the roof and window outside my bedroom I would be scooped up and carried to mom’s bed, where Cheryl, my sister was usually already waiting and breathless. I sleep like the dead. So I never heard those dark early mornings when God was being slapped around and we were quarantined to our mother’s bedroom. The following morning as my eyes blinked into focus I would see clearly a ceiling pattern that was different than mine. There was no oblong crack in the plaster here, and there was no reflection of familiarity hanging above me. We must have had a storm again I would admit disappointedly to myself. I have always loved the rain. And thunder and lightning were, to me, dazzling special effects that weren’t to be missed. But I sleep deeply. So I tended to miss these late night showings. And I would wake up feeling sick about it, as if a best friend had moved away and we didn’t properly get to say our good-byes. I grew fond of the rain growing up because it seemed to be the only weather that would allow me to do the things I wanted to do with the approval of all the grown-ups around me. When it was raining I wouldn’t hear from a teacher or a babysitter that I should be outside. Instead, I was admonished that I could catch cold if I wasn’t careful, and that I should play inside today. The news that I couldn’t play outside was always delivered with such apology. Are these people crazy? I want to play inside. I always want to play inside. Inside is where I can write my feeble poetry, turn couches into the batcave, trace my comic book role models by the gray light streaming through the window, through the paper, through my soul. Or I sometimes would simply stare, dumbstruck at the television as Jamie Summers saved the day from bad guys on another antique re-run of The Bionic Woman. I often used to sit and stare out that picture window contemplating the reason for rain. When I visit home now that gigantic picture window doesn’t look so grand anymore but I still stare out from it….wondering if childhood could simply still be on the other side of that sheet of glass. It’s sunny and even now I feel something inside, an implanted irrational guilt, telling me I should be out doors. “Go and get yourself some fresh air,” I try to muster, “it will do you some good.”
Coffee Beans Spilling Noisily
*Written in Gasworks Park in Seattle. The rule was that the phrase “coffee beans spilling noisily” had to be someplace in the poem. She is tired from sitting Under the hot morning sun Drained, like tea leaves in lukewarm water She expected to fall apart when the letter came To scream or get angry, or at least cry. But she new. Somewhere in her mind she heard the click of the teletype And her patriot son was gone. And she can hardly squeeze out the tears. Hard, they fall, one by one From raw, unwiped cheeks, Like coffee beans spilling, Noisily, into the afgan in her lap.
Spitting On Emptiness
This poem was written in a botanical garden in Ghana, West Africa. The challenge from a friend was to use the phrase “spitting on emptiness” in the poem. I linger in green places. I shuffle my feet on wet earth, the cirrus are a heavy grey with rain and emotion dampness in thick air twilight’s colors awaken me I thirst I drink flower purple and eat rubber tree latex I sway in nature’s gripping and smug, as if spitting on emptiness I splash barefoot in mud puddles dance to cricket song and leaves breathe. My wooden cup is full
South Carolina
Skipping through fields I dance with the sun Or she dances with me… I don’t know which, and who cares about that? Certainly not the wheat tips As they sway to the music And watch us play.
Real Life
The trees breathe on the streets And the streetlamps burning gold In frosty shadows Distant cats brawl And glass bottles break Loud laughter for only seconds Then silence Beeping breaks the ominous calm And bells on doors intermitant But overall the still is steadfastly unbroken Moonlight and headlights Tires roll through puddles like splashing in the bath tub Strangers dance And children sleep Mom’s worry and Husband’s are just getting home from the office. I wonder if the city is more alive now at two am Than in the masquerade of the hot noon day.
Paris
Paris Empty city streets Waiting for me to break The dark Soggy trees drip, Cold, wet, damp My bones are soaked. Shallow puddles holding your shallow dreams Chilled to my core Trees sway bare in the breeze Windows fogged And steamy roads Whistling through the buildings Brisk, always moving Even through corners of stillness Quiet noise And when trees are dead There is no shade to protect me
Sisters
A loving sister the joy she brings in a brother’s life her presence rings emptiness would shoot throughout a brother’s life without a doubt without a sister there at all
Writer’s Block
People and places are interesting things Hearses and newborns and gold wedding rings They dance, they act, and some even sing Oh what to write? I haven’t a thing Planes and trains and automobiles I could write about them if my writer’s block heals Breakfast and lunch are wonderful meals I could write about dinner if my block ever heals Planets and stars, the moon and the sun I could write about them, it might be some fun I need an idea with which I can run So I can cure this block and get something done When I looked up, I was astonished to find My pen had written on every line I cannot remember, have I lost my mind? This poem I’ve written and for which I pined
