THE BLUEPRINT ~

T H E      B L U E P R I N T

MAMBO BOUNCE ~

YOKEL ( 20 ) ~

Names

Something happens to them —

They get sullen, country kids.

Not city kids who become country,

But true hicks, who smell of cowshit,

Skin like corn snow in March. We once

Knew a ten year old girl who would visit

Us, braids of sunny hair, who at eighteen was

Hair cropped and sallow. No matter how

Hard I looked I couldn’t find that

Ten year old we would meet on the back road

As she hiked home from school, jumping

Puddles, smiling into our eyes, never

A schoolbook in her arms. Most others quit

School by sixteen, get married and wreck cars

Through their teenage years and can

Rebuild an engine blindfolded, but are

Looked upon as stupid. Slow.

Who torch a vacant barn for kicks

Then join the Army, who look at tan

Whispery weekend girls like a bull at a

Fence, who get married and love their

Kids but piss on their wives; names like

Moose, Bub, Wally, they stomp around.

Mothers that raised them live next door.

Big Mouth

It really should be a simple rural life.

Most times it is, honest.

However, let me tell you about one

Secret meeting I went to once in a

Fine country home newly restored

With the best of apple cider served

By an open woodfire attended mostly

By men who had this great idea to

Save a local sawmill from any development

And the way proposed in whispers by these

Men with too much power elsewhere,

Was to arrange a midnight dumping

Of toxic barrels onto the property

And that should save our forest

River valley of any developers

And their kind.

Potatoes

Native, who was born in our house

And who couldn’t stand himself any

Longer that we were here and he wasn’t

But was a friend sort of anyway decided

One day to come visit with his tractor and

Put in a garden for us of potatoes right

Where he remembered his family once

Knew most of this land to be all potato

Fields and he sank into late Spring mud

And forgot the red oak trees were now

Fifty years older and taller and broader and

Not kind to sunlight where Native tilled

For a half hour getting nowhere but we

Let him do what he had to do 

______________

Bob Arnold

Yokel

Longhouse

2011

JIMMY DRIFTWOOD ~

NO FIXED ABODE ~

R E A D      M E

Seagull Books 2018

translated from the French by

Chris Turner

ALTERNATE TAKE ~

Alternate Take

                  for Levon Helm

I’ve been beating my head all day long on the same six lines,
Snapped off and whittled to nothing like the nub of a pencil
Chewed up and smoothed over, yellow paint flecking my teeth.

And this whole time a hot wind’s been swatting down my door,
Spat from his mouth and landing smack against my ear.
All day pounding the devil out of six lines and coming up dry,

While he drives donuts through my mind’s back woods with that
Dirt-road voice of his, kicking up gravel like a runaway Buick.
He asks Should I come in with that back beat, and whatever those

Six lines were bothered by skitters off like water in hot grease.
Come in with your lips stretched tight and that pig-eyed grin,
Bass mallet socking it to the drum. Lay it down like you know

You know how, shoulders hiked nice and high, chin tipped back,
So the song has to climb its way out like a man from a mine.

______________

Tracy K. Smith

Life On Mars

Graywolf 2011

AWAKENING IN 5 IRISH TOWNS ~

Awakening in 5 Irish Towns


                                                                             "Appalled: I see

                                                           the true shape of my hand"

                                                                            — Robert Sund



Cork


This morning, like other mornings,

one hand tucked into the other,

I watch tap water fill

the bowl they form,

but on its way to wash my eyes,

lifelines in the palm

foretell my heart's climate

and I spill cold water

in a puddle at my foot,

the bowl of fingers as gone

as all that was real when I dreamed.


________________

GO    FIND    THE    POET    IN    4    OTHER    IRISH    TOWNS

Michael Daly
Awakening in 5 Irish Towns
Empty Bowl

KITAJ ~

TAWNY GRAMMAR ~

R E A D        M E

Counterpoint 2019

YOKEL ( 19 ) ~

Old Town

When proudly announced at town meeting

Cable television was coming to the area

In the front row one old native raised an arm

Asking,  Does that mean I have to get a TV?

Other

Some animal pawed

A stone out under the

Chicken hut last night —

The animal in me puts it back

City~Boy

Cityboy liked to remind me once or twice

When we were standing out in the road

Talking how he’d like to give it to someone’s

Wife, you know, up the rear end. It was

Funny though because the second time

He told me this she drove by and Cityboy

Just about turned white but still gave me 

A little wink. A sick fuck. It only dawned on

Me later how much younger and how similar

At a glance the woman looked like Cityboy’s 

Wife who he liked to solo away from on the week

Ends and rough it at his country retreat that

I was hired to caretake and carpenter and

Woods clear and over the long winters to

Shovel his long driveway mainly for the gas

Deliveries and his nice car. Of course he was

Forever late on ever paying. I was young and

Stupid then, often worked far too long for these 

Nonsense wages and it would be more than

Once where you could catch me hand shoveling

 

In a snowstorm way past midnight with dear

Sweetheart helping and both of us working

Under the headlights of our VW all so the 

Place would be ready for Cityboy’s arrival. 

You do what you have to do.

So after fifteen years of this and watching this

Joker at work — with pipe and book in town

Thinking he is Hemingway in A Moveable Feast,

Eating at one of the popular cafes where hippie

Girls once smiled at everyone — I walked away.

But first I told him everything

I’m telling you here.

Work Truck

You’ll never get into a clean one —

Even after the weekend or a

Vacation or a holiday the truck

Remains the same — your feet

Rest on top of a big toolbox or

Tools slide out from under

The seat or off the dash or what

Is usually the case —

There’s no room at all

For passengers

______________

Bob Arnold

Yokel

Longhouse

2011

FINBAR & EDDIE FUREY ~

BARBARA REMINGTON, ILLUSTRATOR ~

BARBARA   REMINGTON

GO RUMBLE ~

Academy Award-winning filmmaker and political provocateur Michael Moore offers his subversive and humorous take on the issues of the day and talks to a wide range of people from comedians and politicians to the people who’ve tried to kill him. Plus various mischief with Mike’s friends, family and the neighbors who don’t work for the NSA.

R U M B L E

AT THE GOLDEN GATE ~

At the Golden Gate


      At the Golden Gate

    A single plover far at sea

                             wings across the horizon

  A single rower almost out of sight

                                                 rows his skull into eternity

And I take a buddha crystal in my hand

                               And begin becoming pure light



______________

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
San Francisco Poems
San Francisco Poet Laureate, Series No. 1
City Lights Books
2001

BE MY VALENTINE ~

Lynx

VALENTINE'S DAY ~

N O N (E)

And then there was none. Imagine that, none. Non. No “e.”

No both Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. No Little Big Horn, grassy as it is. No Canyon De Chelly. No Valley of the Gods (Sweetheart and I once spent a day driving through it all), no big mitts, no Salt Flats, no Grand Canyon even, or ravens, or donkey, or burro, no trails. No Big Sur, no Jeffers, no Six Gallery, no Lew Welch, no Henry Miller, no Partington Ridge, no sea lions, no Lenny Bruce, no Walt Disney, no Mel Brooks. No Ferlinghetti! No Brautigan dead like your Redneck next door neighbor friend. No Eric Hoffer. No Jack London. No MFK Fisher. No Nob Hill, no Salish handmade homes, no Kesey, no Babbs, no Bill Russell. No Kobe. No Ivar’s Clam Bar. No Empire Builder. No Minott North Dakota snow. No Wisconsin Dells, no Chicago, no Sandburg, no Koller, no Dorn, no Hemingway, no Algren. Non. No Sherwood Anderson, no Lafcadio Hearn, no Gypsy Rose Lee. No OJ, no Jim Brown, no Johnny Unitas. No Mickey Mantle, Koufax, Mays. No Highway 61. No Jessica Lange photographs, no Flannery O’ Conner in the same town as Blind Willie McTell. No Muddy Waters. No Howlin Wolf, no Harry Partch, no US Highballin’, no John Cage, no you. No Skip James, no Death Letter, no Edward Abbey, Muir, Thoreau, Snyder, Beltrametti visiting, no knock at the door. No John Kerouac, no Jack Kerouac, no Visions of Cody, no Sal, no Dean, no James Dean. No Woody, no Arlo, no Cisco. No Dorothy Day, no Garbo, no Janine Pommy Vega. No border music. No border. No free range. No rocky coast, no Khatadin, no Baxter, no Moosehead Lake, no Gulf of Maine. No Smokeys. No Pullman. No E.B. White. No Nearings. No Woods Hole Alchemists. No Port Huron Statement. No Billie Holiday. No Monk. No Bird. No Coltrane. No Lester Bowie. No Huey Newton. No Fred Hampton. No Eric Dolphy. No Red Pine. No White Pine. No Route 66, no Peach Springs, no railroad, no box car, no lumber, no Chinese, no Sierra tunnels, no zoom zoom. No tap dance, no Fred Astaire, no Bojangles, no Jerry Jeff. No Dylan, no Zimmerman, no Blind Boy Grunt. No Pistol Pete, no Pike’s Peak, no driftin’ the night away. No Drifters. No rowboat, no sails, no Golden Gate Bridge. No Peckinpah, no Half Moon Bay, no ridin’ the high country. No Ishi. No Jaime. No Geronimo. No Hit the road, Jack. No Nat King Cole. No Easy Rider. No Last House on the Left. No David Goodis. No used books, no good books, no books. No trombone. No Pete Maravich. No Dr. J. No sky hook. No Blonde on Blonde. No Bardot. No Marilyn Monroe. No Tiny Tim. No cat, no dog, no bird. No wind chimes. No arroyo. No coyote. No dirt road. No back road caller. No habitat. No ink. No this land. No my land. No Woody.

Sunday morning, early, writ out of my brains to Peter in Maine, and no nothing left. Just a Rat and his serfs. Too bad you only had the old radio to listen to his drizzle the day after the impeachment came through, because everything about this Rat is seeing him in body action and expression, radio doesn’t cut it. House member Zoe sounds almost sexy and wanting by radio with her testimony after testimony during the impeachment trial; Sweetheart and I listened to her as we drove a great back road we like, all snow, in the furthest northwest corner of Massachusetts, around the only town that voted for this Rat in all of the Berkshire hills region and what is surrounding them is the most beautiful rural part of the colonial Massachusetts, where Mohawk once roamed, and on TV heavy set Zoe’s words are half lost in her body delivery of shuffle and shove. Her lean down to the microphone on radio sounds like a nuzzle to the ear, by TV she is never getting comfortable. To see this Rat in full action, nose dried out by terrible meds, face swollen and meaty and bleached around the eyes, the same terrible shit blue suit, long red hang-me tie, hair combed all from the back like James Dickey and Hemingway all did it, to hide the baldness, the baldness, the baldness. And every ugly human species that decorates Washington DC is in the big room with him, fuhrer style gathering, all on tenderhooks, all awaiting, and they actually give this cretin from Manhattan (sold beads so he had a place to exist) a corny but to them all real and regale “Hail to the Chief” proclamation horn playing straight out of a Key & Peele skit where they played Obama for fun and exactness (Jordan Peele who would go on to make two classics for cinema: Get Out and Us) and the warped music tone plays precisely all over this big empty blue suit delivery and this one who gave us the None. The Non. Is about to deliver everything he is up to next, and if you’ve been paying close attention — none of it will be a surprise — 'if you love me, I love you / but if you hate me, I hate you, and I will come and get you.' And somehow I have all the power in my empty hateful-eight head, straight out of the Chauncey Gardner school where like Chauncey I learned everything from TV, so one best watch TV to know where I’m coming from. It doesn’t do any good to just make fun of me, ignore me, think this big bag of suit I am is simply going to blow away, and take Teddy Bear Billy Barr with me, Rudy-Judy, Pom Pom Pompeo, Mick the Dummy, and Snow White Mike Pence. Uh Uh, ain’t happening. I own all three government branches, you should have been paying attention. I stole one election and if you think I’m going to be bothered to take the time and effort to steal the next election, you’re crazy. I’m simply calling off the next election for government safety. I’m enacting martial law. Executive Action. For the good of the country. And all the while I’m erasing the entire Democratic Party. I did it with the impeachment. By 2021 there will be no impeachment. Oh there will be for Billy Clinton, but not me. I’m having the House of Reps erase my impeachment when they take over the House, and if they don’t take it over, they’ll manage anyway. The only street fighters in the Democratic Party are the Bernie people and they’re all Communists. Did you hear me, Communists! You better believe it. So I’m having a great time watching the Democrats fall over themselves debate after debate, really sweatin’ it up, man against girl, girl against girl, black against white, rich against normal, gay against straight, dummy against smartie, media against debaters, media against media, mogul against mogul, mogul against all, and me, big bag of blue suit bullshit steering it all.

______________________

BOB ARNOLD

First published on Valentine’s Day 2020 at Longhouse, and digitally at ~ Dispatches from the Poetry Wars ~ 

kudos to Kent Johnson & Mike Boughn