Chubby makes me sound like a dog
from the North, the idea chewy
as cetology. Mother insisted I scamper
with skinny kids from cul-de-sacs.
Stickball was a game for boys whose mommies
made them dance around bases until dark.
Everyone else went home, racing around corners
to beat lights.
Mother said, play ten minutes more,
as though my fat would fall with daylight,
seep into cracked asphalt, relieve her of faults.
During the ten minutes of my childhood
I played like the B-side of a record nearly everyone
had forgotten—loud, obscure, unpolished.
I saw a crack seeping into the neighbor’s yard
and the boy drooled on himself over green
figs. The rope on his belt kept him
from reaching the doghouse. Mother opened
the screen to find me with a hand of figs.
Tugging my belt she yelped,
You don’t need friends like that.
Disarticulation
Once the muscles and internal organs are removed,
it becomes much easier to speak with impunity.
Bones, rigid and frail, only need three pounds
of pressure applied in just the right way
to snap. Break off and leave the soft, sweet marrow
for tomorrow’s lunch. Imagine the naked elbow,
tendons dry from exposure—tennis
elbow was nothing you now know—as the arm flails
hailing a cab that will never stop for something
so pure as the white of bone. My wife says
there are not two hundred and six bones in the body,
and I believe her when tells me this is because
some bones fuse together, depending on age and sex.
Age and sex. Sex and age. Sages and exes are like
axes and wages, both grinding life to a halt
as calcium clings to osteocytes, small halos
on street corner lights. My teeth have fused together,
sothateverysentencebecomesonelonggrunt.
Which reminds of the time when my fingers fused
from being over used, a crippled arthritic hand holding
my twenty-six-year-old thoughts like a cup of prune juice,
like tomorrow. To my marrow, thanks for keeping my bones
smooth and working like the fine levers they are; I’ll level
with you: I like my bones, but I think I’m going to need those muscles
and internal organs after all.
Vox
You spend your days talking—
about the voice of the people, heard by learn’d men,
about the imaginers of sin going blind with the knowledge of delight
about poems written by blind men laden with images that none of us seers will ever get
about blind men writing poems about the images that they hear in the word hubris
about hubris buried in a poet until the girl from the third row of his poetry class
. . . . . . .whispers to him.
And we don’t need to know what she said to know that this is the voice that Adam heard
when he was offered the smallest bite of that fruit, that warm, coy breath of youth—
the words smell aptly like apples, bright red-skinned plumpness, but here,
amid the rows of rosy cheeks, fresh-faced girls
who’ve pushed their fruit to the tips of the branches,
who leave nothing to the wind’s secrets,
whose chests open like trunks in the low cut shirts,
. . . . . . .the loci of love for clueless boys.
You spend your days talking about how fruitless it is to look into the lives of poets,
reading letters, looking for whispers, the lines on the page breaking like innocence
into a million words of Braille. Just little bumps to overcome you say,
spending your days now talking about how to not be heard,
. . . . . . .trying not to become a poem yourself.
And in that moment—
when the whole world knows,
when the whole class knows,
when the whole of your wife’s subconscious knows—
you see the sound of temptation slinking back,
pulling the fleshy blanket overhead,
pulling hubris back behind the zipper,
pulling in under the scrutiny of ears and eyes,
pulling away from the stories that will fall from mouths
because even though you knew better, you took a bite.
Stolen Book on Buddha
You went to New York to see the Times
and hear a lecture on society, but you
brought me a book
on Buddhist Understanding.
And now, I’m sipping black
bourbon from a cup that says
I ♥ NY,
which really makes no sense
because I’ve never even seen
NY, what with the work of yesterday
open on my desk, a lotus of late work,
the zen of procrastination.
As long as I hold my fingers
together and softly hum,
the father’s day tie with a tack
through its back can’t stop me,
or so the mechanical mouth called
human resources softly chants.
Still, those little hearts
are cute and I do like the cup,
but I really like the story that goes
with it, which sounds like this:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . One day a man appeared in Times Square,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . geeked out in goggles and pink legwarmers,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and asked a puzzling question—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . Here are two men; tell me the sex of each.
And there’s really no response here,
no answer; I see we’re still on that query
asking queerly about sex and snakes
which are a lot like gilded strings
leading to a ball, a knot
of some kind or other, some lump
poking out where it shouldn’t,
and that’s really all sex is for us—
something pokes out when it shouldn’t, prods
others in ways that no forked tongue could,
like a HB#2 in the back of the skull, thumping—
get back to it—enlightenment can wait.
Jesse Bishop's poems have been compared to a drunk white guy dancing, which is not entirely unlike the author himself. He lives in Rome, Georgia, with his wife and daughter, and he teaches for Georgia Highlands College and works on an MFA at Georgia State University. When he's not crushing the capitalist dreams of his customers, uh, he means students, he likes to hang out with daughter and read and write.
