Timing

It’s the pollen,

my friend says on our morning walks.

We share the excuse--

she for the mask, I for the not-dry cough.

At night the excuse wears thin,

troubling my sleep as if

it might be my last,

making each morning the more glorious.

One month to go before such alibis wear out,

when my friend no longer need explain her mask

and my Benadryl must step up

and be my miracle.

                                                                                                                                        m.d. paust

HOPSCOTCH LIFE – Kris Neri

It’s the part where we still have trouble remembering the name of the town. We know it’s somewhere in Arizona, and we see the streets are nearly deserted. We see signs in some of the windows saying yes or no, telling us this town is in some sort of trouble, but we don’t yet have a clue what that trouble might be.

We’re seeing all of this through lens of the 16mm camera, which now pans up to the empty highway leading away from town. Our vision distorted by the wriggling heatwaves rising from the sun-baked asphalt, we see a wisp of dust in the distance. Something is moving slowly toward us. It grows in the camera’s eye until we make out the shape of some sort of military vehicle--yeah, a Jeep!--bouncing along and getting bigger and bigger. And now we hear from somewhere, maybe coming from the approaching Jeep, oo-we-oo-we-ooo waa waa waaa…

CUT! Goddammit, who’s playing that goddam Morricone theme?

Waitaminute, that angry voice doesn’t have an Italian accent. In fact, it sounds more like a Mel Brooks New York accent, but he’s dead. Simon? Apatow? Dunno, but that director is not Sergio Leone! So what in hell’s going on here?

If I might relieve the suspense for a moment, this screwball scene is a figment of my corona-torqued imagination, set to twanging by the hilariously screwball novel Hopscotch Life, a twisted romp by mystery writer Kris Neri of Silver City, New Mexico.

Our troubled Arizona town, Applewood, is a figment of Neri’s quirky imagination, as is the stranger approaching on the deserted highway in her dilapidated Jeep Wrangler...waitaminute, did I say “her?” I sure did, and thus endeth even the pretense of an oo-e-oo-e waa waa spaghetti western unless we accept Hopscotch Life in the satiric light Neri’s imagination might well have suggested. Add to this the revelation our stranger, who’s presumably here to save Applewood from itself, has a name—in fact it’s Plum Tardy—and we might as well...what? Plum Tardy? OK. OK, the jig is up, but may I remind you I’ve already let that cat out of that bag, calling Hopscotch Life a “twisted romp?” The cat, by the way, called Scrappy, is a stray that takes to Plum like a plum to pudding, if I may, and moves in with Plum in the apartment above the bookstore she buys with cash from the satchel she brought with her in her hopscotch dash from Santa Monica, California, after finding another woman in bed with her schmuck of a fiance when she arrives home unexpectedly after losing her job as an executive chef in a restaurant her boss abandoned after stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down.

Hopscotch. It’s how Plum Tardy characterizes her life of impulsively leaping this way and that, sometimes with nary a thought as to why or where she would land. A vague memory of family friends mentioning Applewood as an idyllic vacation spot they’d enjoyed, and some mysterious empty envelopes with an Applewood return address prompted this most recent hop.

Kris Neri

Leaving behind her flighty, man-hopping mom, who’s in a coma in a nursing home, and a hoity toity lawyer younger sister, she at first welcomes the sensation of being in a strange place, where no one knows her, no one to remind her of the failures she’s always blamed on her hopscotchy self. She quickly makes friends, even the odd, grumpy woman who owns High Desert Books where Plum, who loves to read, stops by to browse, ends up staying in the apartment above the store, and...well, no need to repeat myself.

The town, as we expect, has a bully who’s leading the fight to bring an unwanted shopping mall to town. Naturally, Plum sides with the townspeople who fear losing the laid back charm of Applewood and the competition with their local businesses. Plum lets the opponents of the mall meet in the bookstore, calling the bully’s bluff when he arrives with sheriff’s deputies to stop the meeting. Soon thereafter, during the bookstore’s grand opening, the deputies return, this time with an arrest warrant for Plum, charging her with stealing $40,000 from the woman she’d caught in bed with her fiance. She’s taken back to Santa Monica in handcuffs and leg chains to face the charge.

This is where Sergio Leone would cue up the oo-ee-oo-ee waa waa to heighten the suspense, and it’s where we will leave off so’s not to spoil the tale for all of you waiting breathlessly to click the title cyberlink in the fourth paragraph down that will take you to the book’s page at Amazon.com.

And one last plot thickener in case you just can’t stand not knowing a tad more: the race car driver Plum had grown up believing was her father and who gave her his surname, and who died in a fiery crash when she was a child, was, in fact, not. There. Now I will cue up the oo-ee-oo-ee waa waa...while you click one of the cyberlinks embedded above.

Happy reading. 

 

Our Secret Winner’s Remorse

Oh, how royally grand the celebration

for George the general’s marshaling sensation

and the British abrogation. Oh, how quietly grand

our bankers’ realization they’d won the golden scepter

with George the king’s cessation.

Oh, how sadly odd our grieving fascination

with Diana’s death and implications,

and how frankly queer the enchantment we allow

for every scrap of titillation

from royal family intimations.

Oh oh oh, and how we betray our secret inclination,

shakily insisting irony in Plath’s daddy allegations,

denouncing loudly fascist emanations

lest sheathed in velvet masquerations--

we let the White House rule our nation.

                                                                                                                                           m.d. paust

Why Our Species Keeps Embarrassing Us

We think our gossamer conceit of civilization

lifts us above the "lower" species,

but scratch the surface with so much as a whisker

and our primal egocentrism squirms out and takes charge.

Ideology is sophisticated denial, no substitute for evolution.

Authoritarian religion provides absolution for our atrocities

and gives us comforting consensus. Laws celebrate power.

It's up to individuals to work toward enlightenment.

We are on our own, and we're outnumbered.

                                                                                                                                          m.d. paust

Seeking the Big Picture

Missing the forest for the trees has always been a nono,

a metaphor

for dangerous myopia, the Wagner-loving poet, e.g.,

oblivious to predatory aspiration.

Now don’t go thinking, friends of mine,

I claim immunity from this really quite sane approach

to avoiding cerebral hemorrhage or gastric embarrassment

trying to process some unimaginably horrific implication.

I smiled, feeling warm compatibility with John Prine’s

smiling lyrics advising me to abandon commercial news,

let it jabber, flutter away, rediscover simpler living

in a little cabin, starving fears and appetite for titillation.

Signs of encroachment, barely deniable, impossible

to ignore, a laptop my sole receptor of word from out there--

memes and screams and links to links. There’s one I rely on,

Reliably Uncomfortable, Google it. Get some mitigation.

                                                                                                                                              m.d. paust

A Plague Upon BA ROOFING HOU

In one way I am thankful

the turd-face who belongs

locked in a room infested

with COVID-19 invisible torturing

murderers chose my credit card

to feed its fucking greed, because

I was bereft of ideas for today’s

Corona poem until I discovered

the hemorrhoid-face had ripped my card off

for five hundred dollars, discovering

this after a text message from my bank

urged me to check my account,

which I did, and discovered the

shit-breathed remora had tried

three times to hit my card today

with the first two declined,

while enjoying the charmed third,

after which I managed to speak

with a live human voice in my bank’s

fraud department, and learned that

there was no way to stop the debit

but that the bank would make good the

theft and that I should destroy my recently

updated card and expect a new one

to arrive in about a week, plus some forms

to fill out for their records, which the

fraud specialist said would not necessarily

mean the thief would be identified

and prosecuted, whereupon I expressed

befuddled dismay while remaining

respectful of the fraud specialist’s

undoubtedly Herculean task in

assisting bank customers victimized

during these months of presumably

ubiquitous predation by dead-rat-rotten

offal-souled privy slurping pieces

of...oh, use your imagination, at least

my adventure in digitalic mugging gave me

these lilting insouciant stanzas to further

brighten your already sunny pandemic day.

                                                                                                                            m.d. paust

Water First

Back in the day, the top page of the

little spiral notebook I keep

next to the microwave/toaster oven stack

on the composite-wood desk-cum-kitchen

utility table would come alive

when I plucked the plastic ballpoint next to it,

placed its ink-wet roller on the aforementioned

page and wrote a cruder expression for

toilet paper upon it, ordinarily hesitating

a heartbeat while my rational prowess wrestled

unsuccessfully with reflexive prudence which

invariably begged me to use the euphemistic

form or face possible unnamed retribution from

the humorless, nagging, persnickety, conditioned reflex

we know as that tiny haloed angel perched on our right

shoulder, finger raised in celestial admonishment.

Well, that priority is history, and we’ve come to regard

shit paper [yes, I hesitated] as a staple from days gone by,

with the promise, if luck be a lady, to strut back one day

in triumph with more prestige than it has ever known.

Meanwhile water has oozed to the top, rising

from second place to leave the pack—bread, onions,

mustard, bacon, hot dogs, et. al.--drifting along

with lesser urgencies among things for which

I am willing to venture into dire risk, homemade-masked

and armed

with 70% [the new standard] isopropyl-soaked Bounty towel

in pocketed Rubbermaid compact plastic-lidded holster,

from which my draw is sufficiently fast to execute

microscopic killers on surfaces I touch or might touch

or might wish to touch or that touch me. Why water,

I hear you thinking to ask?

Think funny tasting anything with tap water

were your palate as mysteriously persnickety as mine.

                                                                                                                                             m.d. paust

Dead

Looking for something to lift my

corona-dampened spirits on Easter

I rooted thru my box of DVDs

and started laffing the instant I spotted

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,

laffing at my memory of Jerry Lewis

grinning maniacally as he swerves

in the street in front of police headquarters

and flattens Spencer Tracy's hat

while Tracy (Capt. Culpeper)

leans out the open window

through which he had tossed the hat,

aiming for the hat rack next to the window--

[pause here to finish laffing]

laffing at my memory of Jonathan Winters's

rampage in a brand new service station,

bringing down the building and knocking

its two uniformed owners senseless

before driving away in their wrecker.

I laffed as my eyes caressed

the DVD’s mad mad mad mad cover,

with its cast of 15—many of them

comics—peering madly at me

through and around the title’s letters

while leafy green silver certificates

rain down on everyone,

and I laffed remembering that scene,

and while I was laffing, eager

to pop the movie into my laptop,

a wee harmless question

bubbled up through my excitement,

and I Googled up the movie’s Wiki site

and, losing the fight to keep from

clicking the next link, I learned

the one thing I didn’t really need to know,

want to know--

I had already assumed the lion

in the MGM logo atop the cover was dead,

which didn’t bother me, but when I saw Mickey Rooney

had died April 6 six years ago I knew

I soon would be laffing at the antics

of an all-dead cast, which, I had little doubt,

would lift my weary spirits,

nonetheless.

                                                                                                                        m.d. paust

Answer Me!

Sick of pretending

this is some temporary inconvenience

and that we'll actually some day

have toilet paper again.

No one will say when. No one

can say when

hugging will be safe again,

or kissing or shaking hands

without some documentary proof,

we don't have this or that or some other

microbes or enzymes or...what the hell,

germs, about our person.

And we know they're everywhere,

like Chicken Man

they're everywhere they're everywhere,

some good, some bad, how in hell

can we ever be sure, can we ever

feel safe again? Ever?

Well, then again, we really never have

been safe, have we?

It's just that we didn't have to

be reminded of it

EVERY GODDAM DAY

AND NIGHT!!

Sorry.

But when will it end?

Rhetorical question, of course,

yet a necessary one

at least for me

to keep my illusion of sanity

somewhat intact, without which

I WOULD SHOUT LIKE THIS

AT EVERYTHING, ABOUT

EVERY GODDAM THING,

I JUST WANNA KNOW

WHEN WILL THIS FUCKING SHIT

END???

meow

SHUDDUP!!!

                                                                                                                         m.d. paust

Plastics is Not the Word

No idea where I was or when,

when the word became my savior,

where it remains, relieving now

corona dread.

Gratitude

Just one word.

Tripped me

with my head somewhere else,

tripping in a way,

were it my feet,

releasing all sorts of words

some imprudent to reveal

even here.

Or was it more than once,

tripping in various ways

or simply showing up

as part of a background

but standing out

in an upstaging way,

winking?

All I know is at some point

I took a closer look,

picked it up, studied its

angles,

trying to grasp why it wouldn't

abide my insularity.

Now that it had my attention,

showing me its power,

resembling the effect I imagine

of a depth charge on a submarine, except

this impact healed

something I hadn't understood

wanted healing, thinking

ailments were up to me

to feel and know

and try to mend.

But now the metaphor is sticking—

what is happening?

Do harmonic wisps of this word

burrow through layers

of conditioned reflex,

cognitive complexities, fragile certainties,

brushing past teasing tangents

on its rush to the core and into

primal magma?

Does it merge with mystery there,

quieting womb-borne quakes,

bringing them into heart?

Simple intuitive maternal cognate?

Gertrude?

                                                                                                                          m.d. paust

Corona Owl? No Cigar

I should start by saying

I hope it's not clinical insanity

or cabin fever or stir fry or

whatever other nuttiness is emerging

in these cooped up days,

as I'd been hearing Ollie or Olivia

a month or two before quarantines and

masks and six-foot considerations

were all the rage.

(I'm gonna call her/him it, so's to

dispense with potential

him/her tedium—and I WILL NOT

surrender to third-person fashion

also all the rage

these days.)

In the spirit of strict adherence

to factuality, I hereby disclose

only that to which I can objectively attest

is voice.

Whooo...whoo...cooo coo--

yes, might it well be the voice

of a mourning dove? Yet,

as you know, I prefer

owl—in fact

baby owl.

Only when I'm on the can

so to speak

does it call

to me, who else?

Workmen were in the attic

back then, sawing, banging,

and the like—dunno why,

I only rent, share building with

beauty shoppe (are the extra "p" and the "e"

passé or

de rigueur?

Whooo/cooo cares?

Unless it’s it, trapped

like Fortunato, sans revenge motive—

oh lort,

I walked ‘round the one-story

building this morning

saw no opening near the roof

for anything larger than a CV-19

microbe

to wriggle in or out of.

I’d love to believe some brushy,

leafy nest

in the neighboring pecan tree

houses my whooo-er or

cooo-er,

meanwhile I wrestle

with plausibility

the weakening

of the whooos or cooos

is trapped

in my

stir-crazed

imagination.

                                                                                                                       m.d. paust