Truck drivers wanted

When Cui Bai painted for the Northern Song Dynasty in 1027, he didn't worry about the shortage of

Truck drivers or,

Super cargo ships getting stuck in the Suez Canal

Cui painted birds and animals that would make Lafontaine drool 

Emperor Shenzong of Song loved his work

He probably could have received him with his favorite musician, Tom Waits, playing

Phantom 309, singing his ballad with a raunchy nicotine rasp

Cui would have been good at drawing 18 wheelers

Racing down a highway

Stuffed with Chickens and pigs

It's driver on a cell phone trying to remember the latest access code to

NeuroNations

An app that saves your memory from being distracted

The Song Dynasty was hard working but appless -not hapless 

They grew apples and watched the birds

Mao Zedong could have learned some lessons watching those sparrows

(He tried to eradicate them in 1958 and that led to the great Chinese famine)

They were innovative: introducing the first paper money in history, inventing gun powder,

Fire arrows and astronomical clocks

They believed in culture and entertainment 

And probably would have loved Netflix and Amazon Prime

Pity  we didn't know Cui Bai was ahead of his time.

The Knuckle sandwich

I went to see a doctor after eating 

Too many calzones.

The doctor told me to feast on a knuckle sandwich 

Pig, ox or horse are all worthy to suckle

Back home,  my wife was in a pickle

She couldn't find her favorite belt with a buckle

And I saw her chewing her knuckle!

"Margaret!" I cried

"Eat a sandwich" I insisted clear-eyed 

"Fuck you and your confort food" she replied

"I've been teething for 40 years and now I'm chewing

On this job offer 'cause you lost your job."

I knew I also had a bone to chew about our

Defaulted loan

Instead I decided to go outdoors and

Throw some stones

At Ruffy, our pooch, 

Known rather to hold dear 

Slurpy chewing of all things bones.

Chewy things

The discharger

My title is ZSC, or Zoom spit controller.

I review and certify 72 to 80 spit tests a day

After 3 years of doing PCR nose swipes I was glad to be 

Offered this promotion

After all, my fingers started stiffening from tendonitis 

Turning the swabs 3 times to the left and then 

3 times to the right

(My first week I got slapped on the wrist for doing a swirl)

I tested so many noses I got callouses on my fingertips.

Today, in my executive chair I proudly sit with a virtual

Backdrop of 3,000 vials full of spit

It's a technique to encourage and give impetus to my 

Client-droolers

(We prefer spit over drool, if you ask.)

The virtual moments we share 

Are a sign of due diligence, scientific compliance and trust

There have been times a client over-spits

Ejects a loose tooth into the vial or

Under-spits, which is the worst.

Being at times thousands of miles away I cannot even offer my tweezer

To recover that tooth

"Just mail its in and we'll send you a picture from the lab" I chime, trying to smile and 

hide my own crooked teeth.

Vivaldi, Bob Dylan, Cardi B, you name it, music helps the spittle flow!

I got such good results from the Beastie Boys I sent the negative results to all my family.

It's a work of pride and its got me to appreciate

Young people who spit in the street or

Dogs drooling at the table or

Saliva discharging from an angry person's mouth.

Everyday now I consider a  precious day, and 

Spitting in my spittoon makes me feel like Kobe Bryant,

Going for the swish, or a WWII pilot dropping bombs from a Spitfire.

What's essential is that today I'm no longer spitting in the wind

I get emails from clients who thank me, sometimes years later.

And tomorrow I'm flying to Haifa for a personal spit test with a client

Who has green saliva so I'm bringing her a box of Godiva.

The Smoke Boy

I was born on the 12 of September at 38,7° North and 120,4° West or better known as El Dorado or the Eldorado Fire.

Daddy blasted a pyrotechnical device during our gender reveal party that burnt 22,744 acres of woods and lasted for over 3 months.

My parents named me Yogi to try to hide my identity but and from the age of a toddler I was always smoking -not cigarettes or anything, it was just my attitude. For my birthdays parents always lit fireworks and I would spin like a firenado, laughing and spinning 'till I was too dizzy to stand. 

I was also a Boy Scout and at the age of 8 I got a medal for lighting more forest fires that anyone. But later on at school, I got into manifold trouble to the point I had to see an ear doctor because I set off so many fire alarms that my ear drums had a melt down. 

My mom sent me to a shrink to get me out of the frying pan because I had recurring dreams of Bobcat, Creek, Zogg, Glass and my own El Dorado fire.

In my dreams The smoke was rising higher than the ceilings of the Vatican, higher than the clouds of His Holiness who kept pointing his finger at me and saying: "burn baby burn".

At 16 my dreams went up in smoke: in 2036 most of all the forests had burnt down and there wasn't a fire to be had. I couldn't light or put out a fire if I wanted to. Temperatures were still hot but there was talk of another ice age. 

Before graduation I set fire to the girls locker room and burnt all their clothes. It was a good time for an hour and then I knew I was between two fires as my friends had sisters who lost their belongings. 

Fortunately, my friend Ted who was captain of the Lacrosse team, pulled the bacon out of the fire by telling everyone it was Sally who lit the fire out of a fit of jealousy. That was cool and I stayed friends with Ted forever. 

When I went to college my parents divorced. I tried to keep the home fries burning for Mom but she rarely cracked a smile and the rest of her life was a Chinese fire drill; just chaos.

In 2040 I graduated in pyrotechnics, like the science was saying temperatures were dropping and there was a need for fires that would burn a long time with little wood. The trick was to use trash, there was a lot of old plastics that granted would melt and make a nasty smoke, but it would keep you warm.

I liked to believe I was a principled person, holding his feet to the fire, never abetting anyone to do wrong.

Before I sign off, here a little poem I wrote that I thought you might like. It goes like this:

 

My first job I loved burnin' tires

I admired

The black smoke on fire

However, every day I was required to 

Pray before a friar

Who lost his hearing and

Spoke through an amplifier

My second job was a quagmire 

Not fit for a raccoon or a blind 

Umpire

I had to extract muck from a waste zone 

Load it in a pickup truck and

Drive to Yellowstone

There we would burn and bbq the catch

Of the day

There we would perspire and dream of Norway

My third -and last job 

Was to swab throbbing noses

Under diagnosis

At times irascible clients sneezed my way

Which made my hair a premature grey.

People stopped calling me "feuremester"

And I stopped acting like a ringmaster

Rather relax with a gin

And read Dante's Inferno.

The Art of Confinement

This is a homage to Elisabeth Bishop's villanelle, "One Art", known for its refrain "The art of losing isn't hard to master".

You can confine me for a year or two

Forcing me to pine in my mental forest until

My face turns blue 

I tremble to think of a shaky fault-line if

I leave my corner

For I fear my computer will become foreigner

So I watch Simone Biles as she dials up a 

Yurchenko double pike 

I try to copy her in my cubicle but feel unsportsmanlike 

In search of new boundless, forbidden marginalized borders

I attempt to loosen mental and physical transformers 

-Even on this page

If only I could find the courage to muster up

A filibuster of paleolibertarian conservative woke jokes 

Or sing about my confinement to the tune of Lionel Richie's "Easy"

Everyday I peer out my window to gawk at my neighbor's tree

-It hasn't moved for a century 

(My tab-key has predicted something about redwoods)

If only I could confine behind the stars of an Amazon feedback request and a comment that says,           "All good."

Tomatoes and boiler

At a time of the year when my tomato plant roots usually are reaching into the ground

Reaching past busy worms who 

Know not what is the time of day

Who care not for holidays

Or working conditions for that matter

This time of year

I found myself scrambling

Potting my tomatoes from one pot to another

Ever larger -a reverse Russian doll ritual-

And apologizing every morning to a slightly wilting crowd 

That I could not, must not, dare not

Plant them in the garden for

Inclement rains and tomato-breaking winds were on the way.

And during this unusual climatic journey

That went against the news of another chunk of Ice 

That had cracked into the ocean,

My boiler cracked:

One repairman, two repairman, three repairman later

Electronic pieces and devices were replaced like hot cakes

Yet the boiler kept breaking down.

So every morning, even before I would say good morning to my tomatoes

I had to run down to see the boiler

Reset the time, the date and restart 

The CD player to play Mozart's symphonie 41, Jupiter

And read Dante to the boiler in hope that somehow

Despite its defective state of mind

It would come to reason

Because Beatrice never committed treason

And freezing bees avoid preseason outings

When nectars are  too cold or

Just not sticky yet.

After 2 weeks of this tense rocambolesque activity

Yesterday I planted the tomatoes and

Like some miracle

The boiler started working again

The connection being all too obvious. 

The Whooze

 

After travelling high and low -an Alpine adventure

I've got the shot 

I've got the whooze

The feeling goes down to my shoes

For weeks I was less than enthused

As politicians tried to defuse the potential

Side-effects of this and that vaccine.

My whooziness  reveals

The truth about my Covid arm 

Is it is sore, a wound, a contusion

Only under this iceberg of sore lies

Billons of human cells 

That switched to a manufacturing center

An mRNA production facility that on a molecular level spreads

Over a larger surface than all Amazon warehouses put together.

Today it is not only my body readying for a Corona foul play

Around the  globe we see 

In Mexico next to a cactus, the vaccine is given to a Padre

In Iceland to a dancer at the local cabaret

And in Mongolia to a man who preferred to ignore his tooth decay.

As proteins race around my body

I am tempted to celebrate with some booze

To soothe the whooze -remember?

And that bruise

And hopefully soon end my days as a recluse

Or a hermit longing for a ticket anywhere on the horizon

Soon I shall stop mending buttons and socks

To finally reset Time on my clock

And rekindle connections

That today are fuzzy recollections.

"The Shot" or a Covid Dream of hope

A line snaked around the corner of an old barbershop 

Walled with mirrors

Black and white tiles 

In the corner a nurse is holding a mallet with melting

Blue ice packs poking out of the casing 

Like a backhand in tennis she deftly hands over the needle to the Dr. 

Who is sporting 2 hairy, shaky forearms 

Misjudging his target

-an 80 something lady sitting the barber chair in a reclining positon-

We see half of the precious serum spilling onto the floor that

Is already puddled with a small lake of serum and

Hundreds of vials, some broken, strewn on the floor

(Modrna, Astra, Sinovac, Phizah)

Is this the Center of a crazy Miser?

My turn has come 

The nurse throws me toilet paper, points to the floor and barks,

"Hands and knees!"

I dutifully seek to soak the serum on the floor

It smells of nano-particles and m-RNA

I hand back the saturated ball of TP to the nurse who

Is now donning yellow latex gloves

She squeezes it into an empty vial and

Pulling out a needle form a haystack 

Slowly fills the empty cylinder 

Hands it to the Dr who is pushing the lady 

Off the chair and 

Now the hairy forearms wave me to take a seat

And I hear my shoes cross the wet floor.

"Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass" a nod to Robert Lowell

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass I

Smelled pop corn popping over and autumn breeze as

Venus rounded the Sun at 48 degrees

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass I

Took a wiff of peppercorns as

They cracked out of their mill and

Smelled Grandma's armpits sweating from 

Grinding refills

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass

My salivary glands danced around a plate of melted brie whilst

Driving bumper to bumper in noxious tunnel fumes

In a new olive green 77 Dodge that mirrored my father's showroom.

Before I lost my smell, before I lost my smell,

I would eat eggs with their eggshells

Do barbells and

Run like a gazelle

Today, my impotent nose renders me

Tasteless and rundown

I quit my job

Managing a Scottish carousel

Where horses spun wearing tartans

Chasing whales chasing krill chasing Martians.