Riffing on James Tate's "Goodtime Jesus"

Jesus the absentee father mopes the dirty streets in rags. He looks for work down by the Sea of Galilee but only hears of fishing jobs. His kid's belly swells every day and it's a wonder there aren't flies around the eyes.  You've heard he hitched a Mary, like his mother. Oedipus, much. I heard he's a wino. Who knows. He should get into catering. My boy Jephat can cook up a loaf-n-fish that tastes just like heaven.

Draft 4: Something Traumatic from Childhood

If you must know, I've never had a 'traumatic experience,' sir,
not me, not younger me. I have lucked out.
But now that you mention it, since we're both sitting here,
your office that reeks of burley's thin tar,
this reminds me (you said it was fine to ramble)
of my great-grandfather's Prince Albert cans
and his locked knee. When he slept, he kept
it perpendicular to the bed, jutting ceiling-ward
outside the sheets. Now, when you ask me to share,
I'll share, but please let me continue. These cars
seem too loud and close through the open window.
And he would snore, I tell you,
and hack up fluid at all hours, especially after
plowing the garden with the tractor. It now belongs
to my father. Great-grandfather's knee would swell
beneath his overalls. He would strip down to longjohns
and prop the useless thing by the woodstove and smoke
his Prince Albert, and I almost believed he was the man on the label
with the handlebar moustaches, some Houdini in denim
who hung up his hat along with his dogtags.
And then like magic we had him buried in churchyard
where he'd never went and prayed real hard
for his soul because mother told me to.
A few people cried, but I wasn't one.
How they got the leg to lie down in that box
I'll never know.

Draft 5: Interview Exercise

The clown kicks a good sturdy pair of Converses
near the pink-haired girl, a good, sturdy
pair clamped to the concrete like a grandaddy longlegs.
She recites lines from Stevens' 'Thirteen Ways'
in line to get the stitches removed. Jay Lynn
tells her there are thirteen ways to jump from a building
and the brother beside jogs his leg, doglike
to a song that never ends.
She chews sugar.
Warm vanilla cut with ozone; the lobby
smell. Nine, twenty two, eighteen, and her,
cruise tickets crumpled in a canvas purse where a black widow,
dead, cannot weave.
She's named after the pop singer.
There's a sign above her head in big bright neon
flashing I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU and
a champagne flute snapping in syncopated time.
They will excise the stitches with cereal
and little spiders, a million of them.
She pats her kid sister's head and the kid says
it will be all right, do not worry,
little sayings the computer programmer kept on the fridge
where he kept cured meats and sauces.
Neon purple, the kind that glows in alleys in movies
with illicit intent. The doctor will see her now, the fat nurse
says, features masked like the clown.

Riffing on Claude McKay's "The Harlem Dancer"

She drinks the cold coffee chased with water
and stares into her hand, convincing it to calm.
A drunk trombone wheezes like her father
walking up a flight of stairs at dawn.
She sang and danced wearing an urgent shirt
and hole-riddled jeans and Bobby ordered
another gin drink, one part booze one part balls to flirt
with her through the smoke-bordered
bar. Neither had a loaded gun
or American flag decal slapped on their foreheads
but you could tell whose soldier-story won
their expressions instead.

Riffing on Jorie Graham's "Salmon"

Through the motel walls I hear the accreted sex of years,
of mothers and fathers on lunch break, loaded soccer players
after practice. It winds like a golden current and wraps around itself
like ivy. It hisses, thuds. It slams into the alarm clock and tells me
to get up, Alfred, get up, hurry up it's time.
Wendy--the waitress across the street in Lafiglia--cooks up
a mean St Louis BBQ. I am sure she has never mouthed those
thimbles.

Riffing on Wendell Berry's "The Vacation"

Once there was a man who worked the graveyard shift.
His days were really nights and vice versa. In the day
he'd sweat out whiskey from the drawn-curtain evenings
and it would pool in his armpits like unanswered
questions. He lived by a river that had dried
the previous summer and all the cranes had fled en masse.
He worked to pay the rent on this house by the river
that was close to his job. Once, he stepped into the river bed
under the noon Georgia sun that hits like an ACME anvil
one evening and wedged his hairy toes into the clay and did
not miss the water.

Junkyard Quotes 11-20

"a song that could be wailed well" --Wally
"German hellos"- Dr. D
"all across the stacked United States of woe"-- A song playing from a passing Jeep.
"every song turned out to be a prophecy, didn't it?" --Whitney, a friend, commenting on some of my shitty, sappy songs that you can find at www.reverbnation.com/tylerkeystrangers (NB: these are just as bad as the poetry.)
"better the devil you know"--Grandmother King
"to piss outdoors is the last free thing in this world" --Logan
"heels of the bread" --Amy
"To Doug, / Toughly, I hope ye may thole." --Inscription in my copy of a James Joyce book
"the daily violence of the strong overcoming the weak" -- a reporter in the cult snuff-film Cannibal Holocaust
"It's basically pornography that appeals to anger instead of lust"-- EH on Glen Beck
"Sometimes we throw rocks when we orta be lookin' at a mirror" Dr. Padgett