--AND ALL I CAN DO IS SAY PLEASE, PLEASE, BABY PLEASE

 

…It’s Friday feeling like it’s Saturday not wanting to be Monday, though maybe it actually does.

…Today, already, I’ve seen every kind of cloud.  Early on it looked like a war was happening in the skies, everything sooty gray and claustrophobic, clouds with terrific wingspans, clouds wearing 1980’s shoulder pads, one cloud after the other trying to crowd out the next, like the paparazzi or groupies desperate to make it inside the room.

When the rains started everything lightened, not totally, mind you, but a little.  It felt like a release, like popping a ripe blister on your big toe.  The clouds looked like tattered sheets, like old garage rags washed and dried yet still lightly stained with grease.

Now the clouds are swimming overhead, acres of white pillows, cotton-headed with billowed bellies and the chubbiest ankles you’ve ever seen.  They’re kind of adorable and most definitely entrancing.

Clouds are like fish tanks or lava lamps or a campfire.  It’s easy to stare at them for hours.  There’s no need for narcotics when you have clouds like these floating out your window.

Come have a look…

…I had this happy poem published in a really wonderful journal which uses very slick and intriguing art with each piece they publish:

https://foxglovejournal.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/the-welders-song-len-kuntz/

…And the other day I got a contributor’s copy of the new Slag Journal.  I’m guessing only 30 to 40 people read the magazine, which is very sad, because it’s one of the best journals out there, lovingly done, with heavy paper stock and artwork that stuns.

I have the first two (happy) poems to lead off the issue.  I may have posted them before, but if not, here they are:

 

Menagerie

There is seam in this bottle

Straight as a cesarean scar
Where the two glass halves kiss
I would like to be constructed like that
Bound and connected to another thing so perfectly
Outside on the dock by the lake hatpin skinny girls
In string bikinis absorb midday sun
Believing it will cure something
Camouflage or strip away certain sins
So boys will see them differently
I’d like to tell them not to be so foolish
That perfection is a manmade hoax
A menagerie in photo-shopped magazines
But then I shouldn’t even be looking their way
Men under twenty maybe yes
But not a derelict fifty year old like me
The sexiest thing close at hand is
This table littered with drained Coronas
And an ashtray without ash
Gleaming like a colorless eye
Empty but for a discarded wedding band

 

Fishing

This is the perfect place

For drowning
Have you noticed?
It’s deepest in the cove
Where someone demolished
The beaver dam of evergreen limbs
Laced like arthritic fingers
Beneath the green-gray murk
Take the chain and tie it around my waist
Synch it tight because
I’m so thin now that people think I’m dying
Toss me overboard with an anchor
Count to one hundred backwards
Then float to the other end
Where all the really big fish
Are bored and biting