....Collected Poems...of Wayne Noone
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_______________________________________________________ Approaching Sandusky Street Watch me summon the dead. See her barreling through the mist in her blue chariot down Fort Pitt Boulevard at my command. I will compel her to tell me, despite the cancer and lupus that hieroglyphs her skin, the steroids inflating her head, tell me the secrets of the dead, why there is something and not nothing. As we fly across the Sixth Street Bridge I will stare at her admiringly, how lifelike her wig looks, how waxen her sheen, and she will split her face in half so she can keep one eye on the road, and whisper in my ear sweet nothings. Cold Mountain Tit Cold mountain tit, cold as a mother. Ice and rocksalt shotgun crack under foot I don't care what you say. For A While For a while it was that patch of woods on Confederate Avenue near the Virginia Memorial, leaning against an oak, taking a pee long summer ago, Bobby Lee casting a verdigris eye in my direction. Then it was the Trough Rock over by Devil's Den, with the green moss and rusted iron horse hooks hidden lest you looked. Lately its been the big white public library on Baltimore Street, on the sidewalk, walking past in the cold fall rain. But in this dream it was the Timbers Farm. A place obscure, moving across the field, never in the same place twice, foundation like a bombed out basement, busted stone steps and the ghost of John Timbers smoking in the background. Down came Tom Byrd, old priest I loved. Had to help him down the stairs, his knees still fucked with arthritis, and his cane. Led him to a stone chair where he sat and heard my confession. When I was done we just waited for a while. Then he spoke: did you love anyone? I said I did. Then I asked him how it was, being dead. Cold. Cold, he said. After a while he told me: It's not real. None of it. It's not real until the saying. The Real Enemy I look at the guy who's looking at me as he turns onto First Avenue from Smithfield in his monster 4 X 4 gunmetal gray this huge monster and I know he's a monster too with his salt and pepper hair cut close, he knows the score, dad was in Korea, and he's sizing me up, wonders what side I'm on, am I one of those Michael Moore style pinkos who just doesn't get it, and I really wish he would just pull over or stop right in the middle of the road so once for all we could settle this thing, come to some kind of agreement after debating the issues, find some common ground or, failing that stomp each other's heads in. Ambush In Iraq the private from Kansas status POW, voice shaking eyes darting, tells 'em he come to fix broke stuff. They don't bother me, I don't bother them. While in Mogadishu the window gets popped out of the HMMW Vehicle, and the kid screams Colonel I'm shot! Tom Sizemore, bleeding from the neck, says hell, we're all shot. Parousia You know Kay you were telling me about what happened to you last evening as you were bent over pulling weeds in your front yard and had split your jeans so the passers by on route 88 could all see your underwear as you knelt well not to be outdone let me relate my experience of moments ago as I stood alongside the United Way Building on 1st Avenue having a smoke and decided to risk passing a little gas I had eaten pinto beans for supper the night before and I let a stinker sneak out but it came on louder than I anticipated just as a redhead rounded the corner clicking her high heels and she looked at me with the same expression I imagine she'll adopt when Gabriel sounds his trumpet at the end of days. Roger's Wedding Let me tell you about Roger's wedding, the little I can remember, when I was 21 and without a woman or wisdom and filled with the terror of being 21, when it felt like the scrape of gunmetal across my teeth, and I was asked by him to be his best man. There were no doves in the concrete shelter at Scott Park, Roger's 2nd marriage out of 4 that I know of and he the same age as me. He wore a blue tux which hung baggy on his thin frame and I can't even remember the girl's name, but I do recall him less than a year later sitting in a black Cadillac with a little white casket across his knees but all that was yet to come. Mark worn his new gray suit, and Mum told him not to forget to get her a piece of wedding cake, she knew I'd never bother but she could count on Mark, after all, she was the only real mother he'd had, and he loved her more purely than the one who used to climb into his bed at night, stroke his cock and whisper about Jesus, so, yeah, he'd get her some cake, and we'd get very drunk, I remember both he and I dancing with the mother of the bride, a gal in her 50s in a blue gown low-cut so Mark and I could see the great split between her breasts, boy, we thought she was great, and we thought, being 21, that she would fuck us but of course that never happened and I remember as we left we both had to piss so we stopped at a clump of bushes both of us fumbling around in the dark when Mark just disappeared and I figured he went back in after her but turned out he had passed out and fallen headlong into the bushes so I went home alone. Mum, waiting up, said where's Mark and I told her I had no idea, but an hour or so after I went to bed she was still looking out the window and called me saying here comes Mark and we watched him zigzag down the street clutching waxpapered pieces of wedding cake, a slick of white icing and pink flowers across his suit. Seeing See a crow, other birds this morning and think of you. See fat white flowers blooming - have to ask you what they are. See you sitting on a park bench, in a black dress, looking beautiful, eating pineapple. Just want to let you know: I see. Milkweed There is a place, a minor intersection of Kerr Road and Old Greentree Road and the new highway marked only by the braided cables of the roadside barriers and a blue Port Authority sign, an indifferent place ignored by the trucks passing along the highway, only populated by an occasional soul on a Tuesday morning, in light rain, waiting for a bus. I have made a study of this place, can tell specifics of its history, know the number of meters from Kerr Road to Ursula Drive, McArthur Drive, can draw you a map that would allow you to find it but there is little to say about it really, no one to remember. My sister Charlotte recalls stories about Indians. among the cinders and gravel you can find a shard of flint, an arrowhead, a tooth, a blessing It was part of the Samuel Nutbrown Farm in my father's day but the Nutbrowns are all gone or moved and across the highway there were Victory Gardens in the forties, I can show you chokeberries, raspberries, echoes of the hands that picked. Now just a roadside, cinders gravel and vegetation, debris, a plastic carton, butts of filtered cigarettes in their season. pick up one of these butts insert it in the quarter slot of a pay phone take up the receiver you will hear voices And the vegetation, ragweed, milkweed goldenrod, dandelion, and on the underside of a pale flat leaf is written in white: you do not see, ye fools and blind, that all things have started here that the confluence of these roads is mapped in the veins upon the back of your hand but recognition will offer your life no greater significance You must come with me then, to this spot. We will not read those leaves, merely wait in silence for the bus with a short fellow in a flannel cap jingling the change in his pocket. Falling Diagnosed with lung cancer Bogart compromises switches to filtered cigarettes riding the stairs in an automated chair Lauren gently draping a blanket across thin shoulders. Uncle Ted has no woman, doctors at the VA scraping away his jaw. I saw him presciently thumb the wet label from a bottle of Silver Top Beer as he sat at formica table in the kitchen. On To Page 10 .............. Return To Other Poets This site sponsered by 
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