1. Afro wig 2. A Place Under the Bed 2. The Bedside Book of Bending Down 3. The bedside book of Open Windows 4. Chief Pontiac His Fortress of Solitude 5. Curious Goths Tour the Cheese Factory 6. Eddie Harris 7. The Lemon Poem 7. In Dreams 8. Instead of Discussing Marriage 9. Garage Band 10. Jukeboxer 11. The Last DJ 12. The Lemon Poem 13. Saturday Night on Mars 13. Lipstick Traces 14. Longest Day of the Year 15. A Place Under the Bed 16. Requiem for Harry Partch 17. Rock and Roll 18. Rock and Roll Part Seventeen 19. Saturday Night on Mars 20. Saxophobia/Saxophilia
A Chapbook By: Glen Armstrong
By: Glen Armstrong A Talbot-Heindl Experience, LLC chapbook Copyright Š 2015 Glen Armstrong | all rights reserved Cover & Layout | Chris Talbot-Heindl www.talbot-heindl.com
Contents Afro Wig | 4-5 The Bedside Book of Bending Down | 6 The Bedside book of Open Windows | 7 Chief Pontiac His Fortress of Solitude| 8-9 Curious Goths Tour the Cheese Factory | 10-11 Eddie Harris | 12 In Dreams | 13 Instead of Discussing Marriage | 14-16 Garage Band | 17 Jukeboxer | 18 The Last DJ | 19-20 The Lemon Poem | 21 Lipstick Traces | 22 Longest Day of the Year | 23 A Place Under the Bed | 24 Requiem for Harry Partch | 25 Rock and Roll | 26 Rock and Roll Part Seventeen | 27-28 Saturday Night on Mars | 29 Saxophobia/Saxophilia | 30
Afro Wig And as soon as I do, the phone rings.
She tells me in no uncertain terms: You can’t title a poem “Afro Wig.”
Federal agents wait behind the ice covered lilac bush for my neighbor to let her dog out in her bathrobe. How would you like it if Sam and Dave wrote a song called “The Bald Caucasian?” After all these years, I’m in love. The streets fill with angry young men who wear their neckties in a confrontational manner. Is it a commentary on race? No, it’s love. Are you being ironic? From here on out, there’s no such thing as irony. One of her breasts slips out as she yanks the dog’s chain from the frozen ground.
One of the younger agents questions his career path for the first time.
He never knew that someone like my neighbor could look so vulnerable.
It’s true that the handbook recommends stepping down if an agent starts to feel himself compromised by feelings of a personal nature,
but somehow this is different. I write an ode to hot pants and another to Bruce Lee movies. I’m too busy writing odes to my neighbor’s light
blue bathrobe, peace, love, understanding and any other imperfect membrane
dividing hand from heart to answer the knock on the door.
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The Bedside Book of Bending Down We will remain ambivalent about animals and animal control.
We will shield our eyes.
We will choose between secret and sacred passwords. We will fondle the dirt in the garden, wash our hands and pile salami onto a slice of bread. We will listen as the Violent Femmes scream for their runaway train to let them off. We must figure out how to ask.
Something that fast.
And then it hits the wall.
We are listening. We have been listening all along
to their harried song, their hair-brained scheme to escape from it.
We don’t want to live this way. We will straighten up and fly right
into the wild blue.
The Bedside Book of Open Windows No one listening. A sleeping world shutting down,
block by block, square by square
as if losing power on its imaginary grid.
But I heard the lone flutist maybe a block away
conceding fragments of arias, pop songs and the ragged
hoodies of runaways to the night,
setting right the mistaken notion that everything’s wrong with the universe
if we’re still breathing at 4:00 a.m.
I was breathing. I was cold. I was too old to run away. I was listening and trying to pick out the kinds of melody that break
a song apart.
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Chief Pontiac Digs His Fortress of Solitude I am digging a hole and wearing my Sunday best. I am digging a deeper hole and have given my earthly possessions away. I am hoping to strike not treasure but time, for I desperately need to do some thinking. But I am never quite sure if the shovel is striking time or not. It might be like striking a clock or a clock striking itself or a clock striking time or rather one of time’s hours. My shovel strikes the occasional rock which pleases me, infinity in all the local folklore depicted as littered with rocks. My wife throws a rock at my head, for she knows that I’m a man of infinite potential but a tragic passion for digging. She gathers the children around, and soon the neighbors are peeking over our shoulders. Soon she is begging me to stop as the curious crowd starts singing “Stairway to Heaven,” holding hands,
swaying, circling around me and calling their nearest neighbors on their cell phones to come join in. Though I promise my wife that I’m not digging my grave but my secret laboratory, the widows offer her handkerchiefs. A handsome younger warrior offers my sons sticky, lint-covered Tic Tacs from his pocket and watches to see if my wife notices his kindness. The impromptu serenade starts to fall apart as one of my neighbors sings, just a bit too loudly and a bit too beautifully, “If there’s a hedgehog in your bedroll, don’t be alarmed now,” and a newer voice to the chorus insists that the correct lyric is, “If there is headroom in your Rolex don’t be alarmed now.” Fist fights break out over the words. My children start to cry. It’s getting harder and harder to find a place to think in this town.
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Curious Goths Tour the Cheese Factory I compare myself to the cheese factory where the serial killer worked. The girl with crooked teeth and straight tattoos is blue cheese on white skin. She needs to see the evil. I compare her to my left eye, a murder ballad, early in the morning, flash photography in my body. She compares me to the peel-off back
of a devil sticker, my right eye now younger and inside me. And as the next tour bus unloads, I check for signs of life, thinking, There’s more than enough cheese to go around. I compare them to visitors from nowhere, random acts of metaphor, the black gauze that just happens to hold us together.
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Eddie Harris When we went back to talk to Eddie Harris between sets at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, he remembered selling my buddy a book of jazz etudes in L.A. years before, which to Eddie may have seemed like three minutes or a decade ago, having just transfigured so much space and time through the chamber of his tenor sax. He was relaxed, content enough that we liked his set, but he let us know that what we’d heard had been conjured from the past, rebroadcast, dusted off. He had strange Swahili sparks mixed with interstellar confetti in his suit jacket pocket. He was just passing through to get us ready for the future he was already living: a country of undiscovered blue that wasn’t afraid of its genius offspring.
In Dreams When the great Roy Orbison sings “In Dreams,” he redeems the broken things in dreams. The lonely bush, the golden jackass, topiary fit for a king in dreams. Used bandages like two Japanese flags, the redwing blackbird spreads its wings in dreams. I kiss each naked finger goodbye every time the telephone rings in dreams. Subconscious swings through jungle trees, hit by shit chimpanzees fling in dreams. The twentieth century’s empty room. Yellow lights flashing under blankets in dreams. I’m tempted to let this world unravel, to detune all the brass and strings in dreams. Beware, Glen, equally the sweet talk of honeybees, the hornet’s sting in dreams.
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Instead of Discussing Marriage I should have opened the window to yell at stray dogs, slunk from the bed like a wounded satyr, thoroughly checked her naked body for anything the gray men from outer space might have implanted, offered to fix her breakfast, tried to explain the family curse that held me honor-bound to name my firstborn “Tuesday,” compared her to a summer day: her pirate tattoo a patch of fresh asphalt, her breasts competing ice cream trucks, had her explain to me again the difference between films and movies, assured her that it wasn’t her but me, insisted that I never discuss such life-changing events without first consulting Mom and L. Ron Hubbard, had her define “marriage” in 1,200 words or less, refused to discuss such options until our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters were granted the right to do the same, asked her to make me breakfast, demanded that she ask me the price of grapefruit, en français,
urged her to live in the moment, urged her to live in the urge, urged her to live with me out of wedlock in a one room shack, asked if her stepmother had sent the green ceramic kitten from Tokyo, predicted that heartbreak would once again change the face of contemporary poetry, sung all twelve verses of “American Pie� into her hairbrush, argued that a salmon’s spawning ritual, not the actual spawning, doomed it, remembered what Emerson wrote: there is no luck nor witchcraft nor destiny nor dignity in marriage, started planning a trip to the beehive state, massaged the small of her back, drawn a map on the bed sheet with a purple felt-tip pen, a wedding arch and gazebo,
an x to mark how far we were from there,
continues 15
put Too Much Too Soon by the New York Dolls on the turntable, questioned that sliver of primordial light shot like an arrow lodged in her heart,
propelled from the big bang’s center at a pace I could never keep up with.
I should have been more honest, more deceitful,
more chivalrous or more of a perfect rogue,
but we were young and I wanted her to float from the bed with the same radiant faith in me that had undressed her and put her there in the first place.
Garage Band They are closer to the garden hose than Hendrix. The bag of rusty hammers hanging near the drummer’s head
suggests they call the band Thunder God,
but the quiet boy on rhythm guitar, who secretly gets good grades, suggests
The Ball Turret Gunners.
They all agree at least that the band’s name should seem to fall from above:
Sky Captains of Today
Rain of Terror
Angel Sperm
They know that as soon as the perfect name is uttered aloud,
naked girls will be passing it through their lips.
They’re all sure of this
except for the quiet boy who knows too well how the best words tend to end up stillborn.
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Jukeboxer 1.
Spinning soda straws to gold. Weaving cherry stems into syrupy trees. The gypsy with the gold-capped tooth is back and madder than Hell. She’s building something:
Sex machine. T-Rex machine.
2.
Dear Madame Ruth: Let us compare bone machines at your earliest convenience. Enclosed, please find America in all of its former splendor.
3.
She was still a congenital dreamer.
A runaway. A beatnik queen. An odd girl with strange ideas,
some of them spinning, some of them broken:
A crow smoking a cigar. A box where the unspoken hides.
The Last DJ There was a vaguely Japanese-sounding rag and then the last DJ’s voice. There was a keepsake inscribed by Robert Johnson:
Stop Breaking Down
And then his voice, calm, almost apologetic, aware that he’d entered our bedrooms. There was a saxophone player who filled a chordal bell tower with flutter-mouse melodies
who had been the best man at the last DJ’s second best wedding.
In the Still of the Night. Misterioso. Bitter Suite in the Ozone.
When he told us about his famous friend, I thought I heard him coughing. He worked that almost secret shift between trouble and sunrise,
between memory and dementia, between the blinking red light and the accident cleared from his throat.
Each time he approached the microphone, he seemed to lose something irreplaceable.
continues 19
Without his advent candle of a broadcast, the smoky clubs, the sharkskin suits, the bad blood in the rhythm section,
would never have been forgotten.
Like him, I wanted to distill my every fiber down to a voice
that could protect those naked bodies from the shadows beyond their sheets,
that would nurture insomnia until the uncertainties of daylight replaced the certainties of jazz,
and like his other desperate listeners, I wanted to be loved for hearing things that might not be there.
The Lemon Poem He said “lemon” over and over. Lemon. Lemon. Lemon. Until the word was just a can of creamed lemon. The radio played a marathon of lemon songs. All over the city a million plastic boxes sang out until each radio was likewise a can of creamed radio. And what of those cans? Losing their edges and hollow cores as they proliferate? The edges? The creams?
Undone. Becoming dreams and juice.
By eight o’clock his yellow bathrobe and gym socks
were no longer his yellow bathrobe and gym socks.
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Lipstick Traces So that we’ll remember the shadowy windows, so that we’ll remember Elvis all lit up like Christmas lights,
duck-tailed hipsters twirl their heavily tattooed Betty Page clones around
and around.
The cow-punks are in attendance as is the neo-surf faction. And actual Christmas lights somehow make a dreary December evening in Detroit even drearier. We’re in denial here,
about a lot of things not just the past.
Black pasties the size of silver dollars screen printed with clean white Misfits skulls
have made their way into my baby’s performance art.
She approves of me calling her “baby” because “babies are strange and problematic.” We kiss against the grain, and the rain turns to snow.
Longest Day of the Year Summer starts with a lug nut. The sun starts with a twisted bird. Pants start with a zipper. A woman with chartreuse pedal pushers does the twist on television. She is here to spread joy and other hypnotic states. Hypnosis starts with repetition, the gentle suggestion
“you are getting sleepy”
descending like an airplane that descends from an airplane that descends from an airplane that descends from sleep’s cloudless umbrella.
Airplane glue unlocks what it builds. High from the fumes, tossing as much blue as I can back to the sky.
Memory thrives in my teeth.
The sun refuses to set which worries my lengthening shadow.
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A Place Under the Bed There was a place under the bed for her bass guitar. A place in Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong to wonder about man’s tendencies to mistake miracles for business ventures. A place on the tip of her tongue where kisses outwitted cigarettes. More places on the chessboard than there had been a few minutes ago. There were wild, open spaces between moves,
under lives, beyond love.
An empty box for the cassette tape, another for the two opposed armies. There was something wrong with the other box:
the heart-shaped one that still held a few smashed, dark chocolates.
She put the television on mute, and silent bi-planes filled the room.
Requiem for Harry Partch I was born in a scenic motel. Vast open spaces, my birthright. I could do some damage with a little mescal and a suitcase partitioned for 1. a giant bee 2. the loveliest part of a cloud 3. silk pajamas Even as a young man, the other young men called me “Grandpa.� I never knew what in Sam Hill was going on.
I studied tarnation. I traveled from town to town.
There is a kind of American soldiering that is known only to those
who hear voices, who know how to breathe
life into a shortwave radio late at night.
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Rock and Roll I was wearing the Garden of Eden. My feathered boa hissed. She was wearing her wine colored dress, and when we’d finished the wine,
surprise,
she was wearing her sloe gin colored bra and panties.
At some point in the evening I was hacked apart and stuffed inside the jukebox. Such was the crowd’s adoration, oh, sweet intoxication. The coils of wire in a ‘57 Les Paul’s pickups ferment just as surely as the grape or grain gives up its ghost. And if this little trail of rhinestones doesn’t lead me back to the blues, I’ll be lost forever.
When I’m naked with you it’s like I’m wearing the entire world,
and then,
when we’ve finished each other, a world with no direction home.
Rock and Roll Part Seventeen What starts as a kind word finishes as a kind of word. Some homeless poke the rubble with broken flagpoles as if searching for Steven Tyler’s still tiger-skinned Hey Nonny Nonny. I always knew it would come to this for me
but what of my city?
They’ve torn down the stadium where Aerosmith played. When I was little I had m-i-t-t-e-n-s. Now my h-a-n-d-s have become mysterious things,
two little yelps in the night.
Please. Thank you. Skyline, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble,
where am I, and how did I get here?
The muscle cars have wilted under some undiagnosed dystrophy.
continues 27
The blond girls who used to know my name make eye contact
then turn away ashamed of the crippled music box dancers
that used to spin inside their throats.
Saturday Night on Mars Try to imagine someone frying
onion rings by the light of two small, misshapen moons,
the deep fryer’s extension cord leading to a big occulting satellite. The swimming pool was once a polar crater, the bathing beauties once earthly carbon propelled
from one generation to the next by ballroom dancing and candlelight.
Sit at the piano with the composer, the planetary anthem
newly scored: “It’s not amazing.
I just took the notes already spread out for me on this piano and rearranged them,” says the pianist, with that odd modesty that comes from seeing too much of the angry, red world and kissing too many lips.
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Saxophobia / Saxophilia 1.
These damn kids. These days. These green snots. They have some very different ideas about what is and what is not a saxophone.
2.
Plastered, the teacher half-notices
that the clock has stopped. Poor bastard.
3.
Digitally remastered,
these bleats and beats blow away.
Like gum wrappers. They fill the room and soon
we are up to our asses in Jazz.
4.
I don’t trust words, particularly those that describe:
Like smoke busted up in the corner. Like cotton warmed in a saxophone.
Acknowledgements Thanks to the editors of the following journals where these poems first appeared: Atticus Review, Bayou Review, Cleaver, Eunoia, Review Fine Flu Journal, Flare: The Flagler Review, Gargoyle, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Review, The Lake, Lyre Lyre, Oddball Magazine, Poem, Route 9, Slipstream, SOFTBLOW, Stickman Review, Transcendence, UCity Review, Unlikely Stories, Vagabond City
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