poems in progress - Losing Badly at Chess

Losing Badly at Chess

———for K., who touched me



though I never touched her
and that’s why I’m here
to tell you my townspeople,
about advances being dealt in
less it fall through lost six o'clock frames and blurred pixels.

The very idea of it sends shivers down my associates.
It’s unnatural, with my vows and all.

Others like broken goods, distractions
this far into the game enough to forget it altogether —

just be, so anyone bothering to follow
eventually gives in to the winning level —

hits soulless notes — as if
not even liking whoever was listening
to teasers, not even stories — memories jogged from hints
to pass on reconstructions that never were
because always there in the back of the mind
idiomatic gatherings around the well
while horsemen enter the palace followed by these projections.

Some say her ex beat her, some say she beat her ex.
After the 007 reruns I’m good at dodging bullets,
keeping an ongoing distance as the game unfolds
jumping off at the nearest peak.

Higher ups live to be wheedled,
dashing for overtures tossed off a disaster set
pushed open when everyone tried to be by the hanging microphone
to be discovered by agents in the flashing hallway.

She tests their immunity with long tosses of hair dyed premature purple
forcing the lens to accommodate motions in any direction.
It was part of a game played even after we’d all gone
to the bathroom, checked scooters behind red lines,
played her hand like the fortune-telling machine on Sunmoon Lake,
solitary, self-contained, sending scrolls for whims to come and go

unrelated to anything but the tantrums and good restraint of gods
claiming her, while we chatted up and down the long table
experiencing the dillydallying of Hegel’s service dialectic
whereupon she blurted in vain, I have taken Him as my savior
and we all busted up — to hear it from her here
like hearing The Lord’s Prayer from the mouth of Batman —
gadget junkie under the wing of the Wayne Foundation,
direct line to the Gothem PD – set.

Even if the Penguin had him hog-tied and sending him into the fire
what would he do with such a prayer?
He would never need to say I am here
for a drawing of straws, all moving forward as planned.

poems in progress - Twilight of Good Graces

from
Just Grow UP!

Twilight of Good Graces

Across the bay, helpless neighbors snarl the commute
and moodiness lowers the general bar
to shoulder-padded mumbles—
who rules, who shows who.
Air superiority is the talk of the town.
Waiting for them we head off
to see herring feed themselves to seals—
riveting kersplashes in a hierarchy unseen since
since ape stood up in the evolution to man,
only a bony tail there, a patch of fur here,
vegetarians and hawks—the idea of balance
indelible in the circus.
Wells dropped to hit-and-miss after the heat,
then summer showers kicked in minimally.
The only real hope lie in alien saucers
forming a holding pattern over Mt. Rainier,
smoke-signaling rain—
even my green Oma from the lovely Schwarzwald knew
days blue enough to send us to the lake in the foothills
and sit in the sun until a freckle spread
and we felt like a Nutty Buddy after the hard work of splashing around half naked.
The onslaught of cumulonimbus hardly crossed our minds,
was something cyclical, shapes in the sky barometric.

Drawing by Antje Kaiser, copyright 1996, all rights reserved.