4 Hour Hard On

BORN INTO SILENCE
(c) '09; by John Bennett

The leaves have fallen
the first frail
old woman has
slipped on the
ice &
broken her hip
the air is
crackling with
amplified
marching bands &
the cries of
baton-twirling
cheerleaders
pumpkins are
rotting on
doorsteps
the bars are
packed with
plumbers &
tax evaders
the suicide
rate edges
toward Christmas
the Black Mass
is celebrated in
far-away places
Tina Turner
claws her
sagging breasts &
in a moment of
despair
curses the
Buddha
the last circus
folds its
tents &
heads south
old flames call
old loves &
talk dirty
a small
town in Nebraska
is struck down
by Shingles
Barack Obama
roles over in
bed & says
"Hey, baby.
You awake?"

A few thousand
garage bands
beat their
instruments violently
in the panic
of youth &
on the
tenth day of
November
every child born
the world-over
is born silent.



NOT WANTING FOR ANYTHING
(c) '09; by John Bennett

Years ago
trapped in a
smoke-filled
living room
at dawn
on a
bad acid trip
with my
friend Abe
he
walked me
to my
motorcycle
& said
let's get on
& go.

We rode to
a beach off
the Presidio
climbed down
a cliff
stripped &
plunged into
the ocean.

Standing
chest deep
with the waves
lifting us &
setting us
gently down
again
Abe smiled &
said
I know you.
You need to
always be
moving.

Which somehow
left me
not wanting
for anything.




NO SUBSTITUTE FOR MEMORY
(c) '09; by John Bennett

There is no substitute for memory. Think about that until you forget what you're thinking about. Then you'll see what I mean. But you won't know you're seeing what I mean because you'll have forgotten what I said. You'll think you've figured something out, and you'll begin to scorn others.

Scorn leads to bitterness, and as you get older you'll begin withdrawing deep into yourself. Thinking about what I said that you don't remember will become a full-time obsession until it destroys your memory completely. Then all you'll have left will be functions, like how to make coffee in the morning, how to winterize your car and pay bills.

Functions are not memory. This is not Alzheimer's. Bitterness will morph into something for which there are no words.

The ego is an illusion. Memories are its building blocks.

Now you understand why people commit suicide. It's going on all around you. It may even be happening to you, but you have no way of knowing.




THE MAJOR TOM FIASCO
(c) '09; by John Bennett

Fiasco may be too strong. Misunderstanding perhaps. Mass confusion. Well, mild perplexity. A kaleidoscope of hope and fear.

I want to supercharge rainbows of color into a drab existence. Not mine but the one mine is mired in. Yours too, but if you don't realize it, it hardly matters.

I hold the palm of my hand over the candle flame. "This is not what candles were made for!" I'm admonished. "This is not romance!"

I know that much. It's a form of discipline. A way to learn not to cry out and give away my position when the pain torques. If I had my way I'd turn the whole world to metaphor.

What information I possess is like a pored-over smorgasbord. The mangled remains of what's eatable. Tidbits and scraps. When you travel fast and non-stop, odd things from everywhere cling to you.

People in the know write back that David Bowie, who created Major Tom, is a musical genius. One in-the-know individual made mention of Peter Shilling, a German who did his own spin-off on Major Tom, which threw another turnip into the potpourri of my mishmash information.

Those who never heard of Major Tom grow agitated when David Bowie is mentioned. The more unknowns get tossed into the salad, the more vehement they become. "You're making things up because you can't handle reality!" they scream.

I can't handle screaming. I let out some tether and float off into space.

"Come back here!" they scream. "You can't just float away!"

Someone else has a hunch that Major Tom was my commanding officer in the army, and they want to know what took him out. Something took him out if he no longer exists like it says in the poem, Shard, whatever the hell I'm calling them these days. Was it in Nam? Somalia? Afghanistan? Was he still a major? A colonel? Maybe a one-star general? This individual is a frustrated historian who longs to take part in a literary seminar, and so launches deeper into inference: Am I still a soldier at heart? Am I about to wage war?

"What right do you have to bombard people with this esoteric blather?" ask the totally out of it. "What right do you have to write this way?"

Let's see now. When I went to school at the age of seven, I could read and write. When the nun got through with me, I no longer could do either. I had to start from scratch, and this is how far I've got.

The right to write? What goes around comes around, unless you kill it dead.

We live in a culture shattered like a huge pane of glass. I'm just a clown with a tube of super glue, sweeping up the shards and pasting them together willy-nilly while longing to float into space.

Me and Major Tom, off on the great adventure.

THE RECURRING LAMENT
OF A PAINFUL REMAINDER

I had a locked jaw, from chewing
pen caps rubber bands and sugarless gum
in the Barnes and Noble store, and much
more, ... it was in fact
a sort of broken record,
like the time

before, and before and even
before that, as Jimmy Durante sang scat
on public address system, a toddler bawled
his little ass off in the Photography aisle,
the poor kid scared witless behind
a life size glossy of John Lithgow ...

And like Poe's Fortunato
with the walls closing in,
I too Johnny-walked
through the Grishams, Irvings
and Joyce Carol Oates made me
so weary

with the little teardrop
discount stickers
on all her jacket flaps; oh, I
so wished to join that poor kid
in a chorus

of caterwaul, I wanted to go down
on one knee, with arms outspread and chin up
to the overhead fluorescent tube-hum, like Al
Jolson via audition, screaming for the dust, for
motes for the "MAMMON!" ... Oh, I have tried,
I've tried ... to chew gum while eschewing

pablum, humming
along with my certified Muses, nose first,
so Durante-like in a book store, yet instead,
more than that, and exactly
as before, I ended up
in the Poetry stacks,

on the verge
of abandoned hope, I knelt
down, cracked a few
lines by Ai, by Bukowski, but always,
when it came time to get off
the dime,

I never buy, I never
buy, I never buy, I don't know
why ... and what is so wrong
with owning some
Ai? Or retiring
to a far corner

of the store, with Robert Bly
in my lap, no stickers on his hard back flap,
but a palm hoot for my yawn, like every
red man with smoke
signs they do get
in the eye? ...

"I'm glad your pansy-ass rhymes
won’t stack next to mine!" snarls
the Charles Bukowski in my mind.
"Nor I," echoed
Ai, and Time, dear reader, coming
'round again, amidst the howls

of an illiterate
brat, Jimmy Durante and my
unpublished ass
in a Barnes
and Noble store,
yes, once again as

before, I shove
Hank in the slot
butt-up to Oates,
I chew, I walked,
when I ought

to have bought.

Love is a many
Fendered string?







uhhhhhhh, no ...









d i v e r t i m e n t o

Get Your Delicious Broadsides, Here!

will leave you all but undone, so click those jayhawk slippers, dot!

THE COLOR OF EQUALITY
(c) 2009; by John Bennett

White men, red men, black men, yellow men and green men from Mars, circling for landing clearance.

"Tower to alien craft, you're cleared for a holding pattern at 5000 feet, repeat, 5000 feet. Meanwhile, beam down Scotty, we know he's up there. We need a little face time. Do you read me?"

"Hrompa gak kot koot kawanga raqnaptaw koowee!"

They ran that through the decoder and came up empty handed, and then they made a voice pattern copy and slapped it down on the desk of the Pennsylvania Polyglot, a guy who sat around all day doing nothing but picking zits and whose job description was conjured out of thin air by his uncle, a powerful flight-attendant lobbyist.

"We need a translation pronto," said the shift supervisor, "or we'll have to send up the fighter jets and blow those creeps out of the sky, and Scotty with them."

A half hour later the Pennsylvania Polyglot strolled into the bee hive of the flight tower and announced rather drolly that Scotty was in the men's room and refused to come out, and the green men from Mars were going to circle the earth three times and if we didn't have our shit together to give them a landing clearance by then, they were going to turn everyone on earth green and fly home again.

This is usually where the hot line to the president gets activated, but the shift supervisor hesitated. How would a black president take the news that aliens were going to turn him green?

The air traffic controllers, totally whacked out on crystal meth and bouncing around in their chairs like syphilitic monkeys, joyfully began clearing away all the planes in the D.C. sky, shooing them off like flies to New York and Newark, Detroit and Atlanta and St. Paul, clearing the deck for some real action.

The aliens completed their three laps around the earth and then banked hard and began radiating waves of equality over the entire planet, turning everyone green within hours.

A green President Obama went on world-wide television and urged everyone to remain calm, and Fox News interrupted his broadcast to have a green Rush Limbaugh deliver a scathing, off-the-cuff speech in which he denounced the Green Scare as something Obama himself had orchestrated to deflect attention from his plot to destroy unborn children and euthenize old folks, thereby showing his true colors, which were all yellow.

Millions the world over took to the streets chanting in many languages, "You lie! You lie! You lie!" and Obama flew off to Camp David in Air Force One where he brooded in seclusion for forty days and forty nights and then resigned the Presidency.

Everyone moved up a notch, and by the time Christmas rolled around, department stores were reporting record sales. A Gallup poll showed that nine out of ten people believed the Green Scare was a gigantic hoax and that we had been green all along.

After that new wars broke out in Iran and Turkey, and things went back to normal.

Scotty was never heard from again, and he was skillfully erased from all Star Trek reruns.

WHY DON'T WE D... DO IT
IN THE LIFT

Don’t even talk to me
about climbing
the walls,
of bombshells,
and barrels,
and Niagara
Falls,

don’t hack my
LG chocolate, to tap
the last
call, just push every
button, prophylactic
song balls.


*


When the Bluetooth
breaks, she

shakes,
flips and
stalls,

bite lips,
smash glass,
a fire drill
ends all ...


*


And rescue means
Muzak,

foreplay and gall,
I slum with Donna
Summer, and come

on like Lou Rawls.