....Collected Poems...of Wayne Noone
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_______________________________________________________ Forever The NPR reporter, gesturing to the robe she left on the chair, the last thing she wore before she dressed for work that day at the Pentagon, says to the professor from Howard, teaches English, married twenty-five years, it was their anniversary, you can't let it stay there forever. And I think why not, why the fuck not? Saturday night lying on the bed, the wind banging the old storm windows sounds like someone knocking, you giggle start to say Come in but I put my hand across your mouth. Don't say that, don't. Woman, Behold Thy Son Mom was always strutting around like She was Joan Crawford but She had a big behind and enormous breasts dressed like Joan cinched at the waist Don’t I look good She’d say and i remember how when She found that picture under the mattress that i tore out of the Saga Magazine at the Giant Eagle She hit me in the mouth with the back of Her hand cut my lip made my guts feel like jelly so when She got drunk that night She really went under sprawled on the couch cause i ground up half a dozen of Her valium and put them in the booze i was just playing around tied Her hands behind her back with some of Her clothesline knew i could be done before She came to i stuffed Her mouth with a big sponge one of those natural ones almost the size of a football then drew it all in tight with an old ace bandage that dad used to use to wrap his bad ankle wound that thing round Her head least a dozen times liked the way She looked with Her head all purple and Her cheeks bulging above the wrap undid Her blouse pulled down Her bra and popped out that fat old tit big brown nipple She rears up sudden almost knocks me off the couch Eyes bulged open watering makes a great raspy sucking sound as She’s pulling air then bucks again and i see the vomit shooting out Her nose and She’s flailing back and forth snorting and choking and i’m panicking trying to pull off the bandage saying Oh Jesus, oh shit sit still Momma, sit still and wondering how things can go so bad Tea Ceremony A statue was placed in Japanese times carved in the likeness of Sen no Rikkyu Master of tea so esteemed was he by the populace for the delicacy of his art which displeased Lord Hideyoshi and word was sent to the venerable teaman commit gentlemanly seppuku or be executed like a commoner. So Rukkyu knelt in seiza undid his tea robe revealing the white robe beneath bared his abdomen took his wakizashi in his right hand and as he gently slipped the blade into his belly he may of thought of vast tea groves or women, hair upturned glancing through their lashes as they pad mouselike in their tabi or of water neither strong nor weak, neither wet nor dry, neither deluded nor enlightened. Nonetheless he departed only after removing a length of bowel and sending it to the Shogun on a lacquered tray. Slice of Life Saw Ronnie in a tie today Ronnie lives alone in a three room kitchen bed and bath used to work at landscaping but couldn’t hold that job due to drink man about fifty spends his time somewhat shiftless great shock of black hair and jagged beard walks leaning back about thirty degrees like he’s truckin’ cept he tends to roll his hips like a girl most recently notorious for the fire he started in his bedroom falling asleep smoking had to jump out the window nude to escape the flames so the whole neighborhood saw his bare ass and talked about that for some time so I said what’s with the tie Ronnie I’m courtin’ the Widow Morelli he says like a Victorian Gentleman Mrs. Morelli was an old woman when I was a boy and she and her husband Lou ran the local market and all us kids would go there to buy penny candy and pick up milk and cigarettes for our mothers on tab now she must be ninety though just recently widowed Lou her spouse never recovered from the attack made by Mr. Seible the Morelli’s nextdoor neighbor for as long as I can remember but developing a grudge due to senile dementia Seible took a carpet knife with him into Lou’s store and cut Lou up pretty bad excising his nose and prompting Lou to close the store it’s a Beauty Parlor now and retire to his bed from which he never rose so Ronnie has designs on the old widow looking at me with a goofy grin like he’s talking about Anna Magnani in the Rose Tattoo Birthday Boy For the life of me I can appreciate no continuity between some fresh and purple infant thrust squalling from my mother's cunt and this graying wreck, double chinned and bad kneed, dead end jobbed and car leaking coolant, whose first thoughts this morning ran to the choreography of a well placed head shot. But my sister, fifteen years my senior remembers this: watching out the window that December day forty six years ago, Dad back from the hospital, pulling into the lot, cigar thrust in his mouth, with a grin that could crack the world. Hymnal Toward the end of his life he began to pick up books he had read years ago as a student, their edges already begun to yellow. He would turn through the pages, look at the underlining penciled in a different hand, sound out the text, silently mouthing the words like his father. Taking a book at lunchtime outside to the parking lot behind his office, he watched the light glancing off the Monongahela River strike the concrete at his feet and fill him, as if his eyes expanded and his head were gone, as if the light were pouring into him, as if his whole person were relinquished in that gray December light. Cautious by nature, he was rarely rash enough to write, but he wished he could capture this, put it down with some semblance of clarity, that it might give others some easiness with the hard things. Barometer Kenny runs the only Cuban restaurant in Pittsburgh. He's not Cuban, his wife is. Draws a large smattering of the downtown lunch crowd, all types: bullshit local politicos and media hacks, blue collar survivors wheezing emphysematically and recounting the glory days of the mills. Kenny is a barometer for the state of my own physical decay. Stands around six three and over 300 pounds with a pasty gray pallor and deep circles round his eyes, chain smoking as he works the griddle. I figure as bad as it gets with me, Kenny'll still go first. You can order American or Cuban food, so along with kraut loaded rubens you can get your plantains and media nocte. He allows just about anybody in but occasionally draws the line: three pachucos dance in wearing chains and faux leather jackets. Kenny looks up from the grill, drops a few ashes on the eggs, says "Hey Tony, take a hike! we got no spaghetti!" The greasers eyes bug out and they disappear with a finger. I sit back and sip my Cuban coffee, listen to the murmur of the black girls. Poem for Jim Saturday night we got talkin' about people with brain diseases famous or otherwise how nobody knows what drove Nietzsche mad some say his relentless quest for truth others syphilis tho he claimed he was only in a brothel once in his life and all he touched was a piano and Brian the guy who comes into Dietz's whenever we're there so he probably comes in every night carrying a walkie talkie which is never on like he's some kind of volunteer fireman they often seem to attract these types and really seems a bit teched with a big bull of a head somewhat like Nietzsche so I speculated that poor Brian might have the syph as well recollecting to Karen that as a child I watched Dr Erlich's Magic Bullet in black and white both the movie and the set on afternoon TV and asked my Mom what syphilis was she saying it was a nasty thing you shouldn't talk about in polite company which is just what happened when Edward G. mentioned it at table in the film everybody was shocked then one day later Dancer mentions Erlich in a poem which seems to me more than just coincidence on good days at least seems part of a vast pattern a pattern that appears more obvious as I age but I pray that my recognition indicates a touch of the divine and not the monomania suggestive of tertiary syphilis although like Fredrich and Brian I have a large head Thinking Of Lunch Kenny has a special recipe for his pancakes. Claims he's worked on perfecting it for years. Breakfast is served all day, so I order the tall stack for lunch, five cakes. I pull the stack apart, and starting with the first cake, grease it down with butter and syrup. Another goes on top, greased down likewise till the stack is rebuilt in appropriate fashion. Wash the works down with coffee. Kenny weighs in at over 240, is pasty gray and lets the ashes of his omnipresent cigarette fall upon the griddle. He'll die soon, as I will. Thinking of Lunch 2: God's Lunch I am hepped up, hopped up on coffee and a strange exhaustion with a pinprick pain in my heart. So on this, perhaps my last day on earth... Kenny's head has ascended to heaven balloonlike, his great gray head bobbing above me grinning with his cigarette. Maple syrup pouring forth from the bosom of Father Abraham streaming down his bloated, plastic skin. I am writhing in fire below. I call out to Abraham to allow Kenny's head to descend, to allow one drop of syrup to fall upon my tongue. But there is a fixed gulf across which Kenny cannot cross. I call out further, begging Abraham to allow Kenny to go to my sisters, to Dolores, to Charlotte with a word of warning. But they have the Law and the Prophets. Since they have not heeded them, why would they listen to Ken? On To Page 3 ..............Return To Other Poets This site sponsered by 
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