————————————————————–

buzzards

i always laugh

when i see

the buzzards

circling over

the nursing

home

i’m not sure

if that is the

kind of roadkill

they are looking

for

———————————————————————–

add a little blood

trimming my toenails

last night and the little

toe on my right foot

decided it was time

for a surprise

sure, four in the

morning why not

add a little blood

to the show

as i pulled the

fucking nail off

i grabbed a tissue

for the blood

i found some

neosporin and

did my best to

put that on it

before i finally

got some sleep

hell, what is

a little more

pain

thankfully, the bar

is fully stocked

———————————————————–

to kill the pain

and here come the sad songs

a tainted beauty and all the

alcohol to kill the pain

loneliness stumbles down

a broken road

stops to look in a window

sees nothing but flashbacks

of what could have been

her rosy red lips pressed

against what little of your

soul has left to claim

she always believed

even when you stopped

caring about the future

still waiting for you to

come to your senses

and give in

pride has killed many

a man and here you are

becoming another statistic

one last kiss

one last roll in the

proverbial hay

old souls determined

to peel back the years

—————————————————————

still allergy season

one of these passionless

days

sunny, warm breeze

still allergy season

wondering if the fridge

is still making that sound

running out of clean glasses

but rather do paper than

run the dishwasher

the rich friends are bitching

about their fortunes

i’m wondering if the lakers

are going to cover the spread

watching a squirrel checking

out a power line

i’ve seen this tragedy before

——————————————————————————

playing for drinks

one of those nights in a pool hall

watching my girlfriend flirt with

every motherfucker in the place

wondering if i should get angry

or tell her which one to bring

back to the farm to rob, fuck

and kill

the longer she flirted with

someone the more shots

i would make

she came over and whispered

in my ear, i see you play better

when you’re angry

i told her to remember this

when i’m playing for money,

i don’t need the anger when

playing for drinks

she went home with me

on that night

i showed her where her

g spot was

she broke up with me

two weeks later

J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know better. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at Mad Swirl, The Beatnik Cowboy, Yellow Mama, Horror Sleaze Trash and The Dope Fiend Daily. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)

I remember my first semester in grad school taking fifteen hours.

I remember working in a just opened pub checking proof and reading A Clockwork Orange.

I remember reading twelve hours a day with a baby and another one on the way.

I remember the job became an everyday of the week thing as the bar took off.

I remember not sleeping.

I remember how that made me feel.

I remember my draft status at that time changed from 2S to IA which meant I was Eligible.

I remember what that made me feel like.

I remember that my thoughts were becoming jumbled, hazy, mixed up in class and out.

I remember listening to the college clarion chime the early morning hours as I read another endless Victorian novel.

I remember literature into movies, my favorite class.

I remember Mixing up sentiments from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and Traven’s Treasure of Sierra Madre and somehow the observation about negative influence Catholicism was pertinent to both books.

I remember feeling like the two men and a woman in Jules et Jim driving off the harbor to drown together.

I remember seeing Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf at the Stanely Theatre in Utica.

I remember how the audience thought it was a comedy, laughing all the way to just before the end.

I remember them not getting the question and answer, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I am.

I remember thinking I was too; afraid that is.

I remember seeing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly there as well, my first Eastwood movie.

I remember the first time I heard Warren Zevon singing Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.

I remember the first open coffin funeral I went to.

I remember it was a Sonny Corleone experience I never wanted to relive but here I am doing it.

I remember thinking I could write books, novels in the modern Barthelme, Coover mode and make money doing it.

I remember how many years it took to disabuse myself of that absurd notion.

I remember playing The Association song, “Requiem for the Masses” and the B side, “Pandora’s Heebie Jeebies” on all the college bar jukeboxes in Utica.

I remember in grad school hearing that Kurt Vonnegut’s brother taught Physics at the State University of New York at Albany that I was attending.

I remember Bernard Vonnegut, the Physicist, was largely responsible for the theory and execution of cloud seeding.

I remember never meeting him.

I remember almost meeting Kurt but not quite.

I remember Kurt worked at GE Schenectady and lived there  though not in the same neighborhood I was living in.

I remember Vonnegut’s novel, Player Piano, as a fictionalized account of working for GE.

I remember how much he hated it.

I remember how GE outsourced twenty or so thousand jobs from the plant in the 70’s and effectively killed the city.

I remember thinking Kurt would have said, “So it goes.”

I remember hearing Kubrick planned to move Australia after releasing Dr. Strangelove.

I remember Kubrick fearing for his life, career, and his family’s security after filming Clockwork Orange.

I remember the first six times I saw Strangelove in a theater.

I remember Seven Days in May.

I remember Fail Safe.

I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I remember thinking I would not live to see 25 years of age.

I remember when I was 25 at The Blue Note record shop in Albany buying Vintage 45’s to put on my jukebox in the tavern I now ran two years after reading Clockwork Orange checking proof at the door.

I remember scoring a Philadelphia orchestra conducted by Ormandy version of the Star-Spangled Banner.

I remember putting it on the jukebox under the title Fear and Loathing in America.

I remember playing that every night at closing along with “moving music” Blues in F.

I remember that no one ever found it on jukebox.

I remember thinking it wasn’t really that hard to spot the ringer but no one ever did.

I remember some extremely tempting offers from sorority pledges to reveal the secret location but I never would.

I remember submitting poems and stories for three plus years while working and alternately attending and dropping out of grad school.

I remember nothing ever being accepted.

I remember how excited I was when The Iowa Review, edited by my literary hero at the time, Robert Coover accepted my story, “All the Coney Islands of the Mind.”

I remember the hand-written rejection for the Chicago Review comparing my story favorably with Samuel Beckett’s writing the same week.  

I remember the handwritten not I got from Iowa Review assistant editor at the time, T.C. Boyle, regretting that the Review had to trim the acceptances for financial reasons and mine was one of those to go.

I remember keeping that note and thinking I should frame it the way Byron had a human skull on his writing desk he often drank wine from.

I remember when Woody Allen movies were funny.

I remember phone calls I got at work where I told no one ever to call me.

I remember my uncle telling me my mother was arrested.

I remember he told me in a matter of fact, composed way I could never summon under those circumstances, that she tried to kill their mother and that the hearing was later that week.

I remember that was the longest chapter, a prelude, or the hell portion, leading up to my personal book of the dead.

I remember six or seven years later the call from the New York City Police department with regards to the case of BJC.

I remember asking the detective, “What has she done now?”

I remember him telling me someone from your precinct will be by to deliver the news in person.

I remember telling him we don’t have precincts Upstate.

I remember thinking for the first time that no matter how worldly, how streetwise most NYC policemen were, they have an extremely insular frame of reference and near total ignorance of all things not immediate NYC metro area.

I remember the detective told me that someone would be by from your department then to tell me the news.

I remember I knew what that meant.

I remember the rookie, fresh faced, nervous as all hell, kid from the police department ringing my door bell and not knowing what to say.

I remember saying, “She dead, isn’t she?”

I remember how relived he was that already knew and he wouldn’t have to break the bad news.

I remember how relieved I was and that it wasn’t really bad news.

I remember thinking a few months later that you never know what troubles are until the real troubles begin.

I remember a line in my first chapter in my Books of the Dead that said, “There wasn’t enough        scotch in Manhattan to completely drown that feeling (of what it was like to imagine what he life had been locked into a dismal dark hotel room in midtown Manhattan) And there never would be.

I remember when No Trump was just a bridge bid.

I remember the first time I formed an opinion about Trump was when an TV interviewer told him how beautiful his new wife, Marla Maples was and Trump replied, “You should see her naked.”

I remember high school.

I remember how much I hated remembering high school until I finally had a girlfriend my junior year.

I remember writing a poem in English class , An Ode to a Shopping Cart, as a joke and Sir Sev, Marty to his friends after graduation, allowed that it wasn’t half-bad.

I remember thinking maybe I could do better if I actually tried.

I remember of such humble beginnings an apprenticeship begins.

I remember thinking despite having hundreds of poems accepted in the early 80’s, I really had no idea what I was doing until I wrote a series of poems about seeing my mother at Pilgrim State.

I remember how those poems came, almost whole in a white-hot stream of elevated consciousness unlike anything I had ever experienced previously.

I remember the chapbook of these collected poems was first runner up in The Looking Gladd Chapbook contest and was published by Pudding Publications.

I remember the titles poem, Visiting Day on the Psychiatric Ward was the most republished poem I have ever written including in an anthology by the NIH.

I remember after a decade of frustration and book rejections publishing two chapbooks and a full-length “bar book” in consecutive months in the early 80’s.  

I remember the full-length book was to be the first of a five-volume set of bar-books to be called Animal Acts after the first volume.

I remember the contract the publisher sent em, to sign for those books that he hadn’t signed yet.

I remember not thinking at the time maybe that was a bad omen.

I remember the assistant football coach who came into the tavern I was working in after a division three contest with Albany State.

I remember how he took an ungodly amount of loose change from his pocket and put it on the bar and ordered, “the cheapest draft you’ve got.”

I remember him counting out exact change in dimes and nickels for each beer.

I remember he was the only person in the bar at the time and we shot the shit.

I remember  making the mistake, it’s always a mistake, of saying I wrote when I wasn’t working.

I remember he asked me if I knew T.C. Boyle who was Tom when he was an undergrad.

I remember Boyle had changed his name to T.C. to, if nothing else, to disassociate himself from the crazy over-the -top drunken drug abusing wild man that he was.  

I remember telling him we had briefly corresponded when he was a grad student but I didn’t; keep it up.

I remember coach said they were good friends when they were undergrads.

I remember trying to envision what that one-sided friendship must have been like.

I remember thinking what could the enfant terrible of, rising star of the literary world have in common with this terminal jock type who had risen to the pinnacle of his career as an assistant coach at a division three school?

I remember thinking it couldn’t have been much more complicated than beer, booze, and babes.

I remember after about a dozen of exact change cheap beers, coach scooped up what remained of that ungodly pile of change and stuffed it in his pocket.

I remember he didn’t leave a tip, not even a stray penny or a lucky quarter.

I remember thinking, I bet Boyle actually does know this guy.

I remember wishing I got his name but thinking, somehow, Boyle would just know who it was if I ever got to talk to him which wasn’t likely.

Sounds of Work

Works going on down the street.

I can’t see it, but there’s plenty

Of noise coming this way. There’s

The noise of machines and trucks

Coming and going – grinding and

Whirring and crunching, the usual

Sounds of men at work; no, better

Yet – the eternal sounds of work

Getting done. The gangs of slaves

Slaving over the pyramids must

Have sounded like this. All that

Sand and geometry playing out.

Or the sound of that day they built

Rome. The Colosseum alone must

Clamored, like this, for attention. 

I’m feeling what all those Pharaohs

And Emperors must have felt with

Noise playing out down their streets.

My gathering may be smaller, but

With all their machines and voices

Raised in the eternal workmen’s

Chorus about building, the sound

Must be almost the same.

         $50.20

The amount is there

Hanging in space.

I owe them

This amount.

It’s overdue.

I owe an overdue

Amount.

They’re sure I do.

This second notice

Seems serious.

They’ll offer a plan

To pay the amount

Over time

Monthly installments.

When I ask why I owe

This overdue amount

They become vague.

I just wonder

How I can owe and

They can’t tell me

Any details about

What they did or

What I might have done

To get this

Now overdue amount.

                   11:07

11:07 it says, even though 11:08

Is ready to pop up, a foregone

Conclusion. It does that, keeps

Moving up, moving along. It’s time

And never waits, is never polite

About the way it treats us. There

Once was the minute hand always

Sweeping along, chasing us as we

Made the best of what’s happening.

Now the numbers in the bottom left

Corner of the screen measure us

Push us, pull us, threaten us, cajole

Us, remind us, remind us of these

Numbers piling up. Am I late again?

Early? Then, what’s next to do, to be

Done? 11:07 is moving fast, is getting

Away, became 11:08, 09 …. While I

Was sitting here trying to still their

Shifting, their forever mounting up.

It’s now 11:26. 19 minutes have gone

By, disappeared into where I’m going

Moving into time, becoming part of

The past that’s kept carefully by my

Laptop, down in the left-hand corner

Just above the day/month/year that

I’m stuck in.

We Are Children!

We make the world go round

but we are taken to the ground

We make ourselves ready to be used

but we are abused!

We make the world a proud place

but we are pushed aside in many ways!

We make up the figure

but we  are not shown the gesture!

We make forgiveness our priority

but we are faced with cruelty!

We make the truth our watch-word

but we are influenced by the Liar’s Rod!

We make the world one

but we are treated as none!

We make freedom play out itself

but we are stuck in the growing years of  self!

We make ourselves happy at school

but we are not just cool!

We make our elders better brethren

but we are children!

(E)

Family

I am the symbol of unity

I am the showcase of magnanimity

I am the reason for marriage

I am not regarding age

I am the room where my members rage

(Yet) I am the reason for the home

I am the husband’s and wife’s foam

I am the reason man and wife stay warm

I am the inspiration behind children

I am the very society’s pen

I am “Love Reign Supreme”

I ensure all members are at their prime

I put the very needed effects in the home on time

“Who are you?” asks Mr. Rhyme.

I simply reply: I am Family.

Nervous

I was always a nervous 

little boy, negotiating 

playground perils,

the bigger, louder 

boys, girls, figuring 

when and how to kiss

Patty under the wild 

cherry tree. (The why 

remained an enigma.)

My apprehension 

loomed from more

malevolent origins: 

a dark violence,

a cruel neglect, 

too many horrific events,

a long list efficiently 

repressed. (But we won’t 

get into that, will we?)

My symptoms manifested: 

my belly, a perpetually 

clenched little fist;

my frequent and 

spontaneous bloody

nose on the school bus; 

my peculiar and relentless 

obsessions and compulsions.

Now gray, nearly sixty, 

that small, anxious child 

huddles, cringes, 

desperate for a quiet, 

unobtrusive corner.

The Dead Man

When she was still young,

When we were yet a family,

My mother found a dead man,

A very dead dead man,

On her way home from work,

Drudgery at the carry-out.

Old Mr. what’s-his-name

Had been raking leaves

In his yard, that tiny red

Bungalow on Martinsburg Road.

I could guess at her usual

Oscillation between shock, curiosity,

And annoyance over the bother.

Did she poke at him a bit, feel

For his pulse before seeking help?

(Years later, a girl I danced with

In the Pleasant Street Junior High

Cafeteria made her first home

With her new husband there.

I imagined the dead man still

Breathing, raking, poking about.)

In the kitchen, after supper,

Mom and Dad whispered

And joked over her adventure.

I thought, as there was no one

But my mother to find him,

Shouldn’t we be a little sad, a little 

Thoughtful over the dead man,

Old Mr. what’s-his-name?

How was it when, her turn,

Someone found my mother dead, 

Alone in her bed long after her 

Mania and violence split us apart?

Did they whisper and joke about

My mother at their kitchen table?

What If You Were a Psycho Poe?!

 Inspired by Boston-born poet Edgar Allan Poe

What if you were a psycho Poe?

Would you read poems to me as wolves howl by moonlight?

Would you be that “uncle uncouth kook”

who scurry around with a black cape at night?
Would you read to me about your obsession with your

  elderly neighbor with the “evil eye” and

  how in your madness you dismembered and buried him below your thighs ?!

Would you tell me about your pet bird “Raven”?

And that you often think about stuffing it in your oven?

Would you tell me incendiary tales of lurking males whose

                murderous prowess never fails? 

True! VERY true-you could be a shadowy vision in the night
Hiding in your own fermented fright
No friends or foe abide in your sight
Only you seem to be the lone one under the cover of night
HAWK! HAWK! Who goes there?!

And in that moment truth be true,

why you’re undertaking your own entombment

Resulting from autonomous nervous system reactions to loveless threats

Resorting to becoming a kook who cooks his pets!

An embodiment of dysfunctional patterns of psycho prototypes

Practicing man-made madness archetypes

    negative neurological feedback loops succumb to lunacy

Living on chilling hills in your ominous haughty chateau

Where you’re likely to take down your victims

disguised as guests with just one blow!

Below you sit a body of water where bare bodies are submerged

      and nightmares come true

And as mounting bodies are stacked,

To Boston you’ll turn your back too!

Your traumas, your wounds your trials

Lead to your passions your purpose

That which makes your pig lust hideous heart beat faster at midnight

Amidst the night when one longer stick lie atop a shorter stick and the

Coo coo c (l) ock COMES oooouuuuut to flip you his bird!

A ghastly desire that you must retire

Sunken shadowy “eye” peeping peep holes

Maladroit cataracts heal their woes

Oh! good god! this tell-tale is finally told!!

Now this heart no longer bears a confession to behold…–

Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian American Poet, Educator, Author of four books and a literary arts student at Harvard University online. His latest publication “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self”  & other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of  Wyoming, Askews and Holts Library Services in the United Kingdom, The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Amazon etc…  He has been published in prestigious publications such as Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Litterateur Redefining World anthologies out of India, Poets Reading the News, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others…Visit him at:  http://www.authorsden.com/jacquesfleury.–

The bird in the blue sky pauses wing motion and hovers, glides, surveying something. Those fields are open and not. They are interesting to imagine from a Carlos Castaneda type view, a would-be mystical lens. Sky and ground and sky and ground what’s all around? There are impossibly tall hydro lines, looking like stationary monsters, and their wires go down just a little bit, right?- if you watched them from car windows long ago you know this and you probably know this anyhow. They are comprising something from another world in the midst of those lands. A copse of trees near, winter branches barren and lonesome, jutting upwards in airs, also still and bereft of life. Grey. They are grey and I wonder if anything besides the black and grey squirrels traverse ‘round them. 

Hawk. The bird is a hawk. Another one arrives and they seem to sway as if on invisible strings in a cosmic play. Then they move along and soon disappear. There is then nothing. Water flows along a stream, as a stream, and on the inside ridges are formed icicles half melted and looking for some reason like champagne glasses, dozens of them in each group as one goes along.

There must be deer and coyote that go past at some point. Nocturnal? Coy? Like some spirit totem animals. Rabbit. The summer snake, dragonfly, butterfly maybe also. Other things. There is always more than one thought. Other worlds. Could be spirits if metaphysics is true. What then watches?- deva, sprite, fairy, limbo soul earthbound spectre happy angry or sad phantoms?- I don’t know. Pebbles. Stones. Some bricks at certain passages. Places where water traces lines on hills and follows them down into the larger water. Sojourns for precipitation. Beingness. The natural world of wildflowers and animals, of flora and fauna plus the ground in any season and the skies, are better than social constructs and the infrastructure of metropolis and even the quaintest of towns. 

Hue. Realm. Language gives the possibility of poems and poets, so that’s good, the benevolence of idiom, diction, slang and formality both,  doesn’t go too much farther than that, or so I would think anyhow. 

Existence raw. Those hawks. Flowing water. Those things were before and will be after. We just enter for a little while. If there is the transmigration of souls, a continued journey after, fine, good and well. If not, it’s a win-win situation as there would be no ‘us,’ ‘soul,’ or consciousness to be disappointed anyhow. If we are dust and ash, far less than the beautiful winter hawks, far less than even a field mouse, far less than a part of a dying flying falling petal, then so be it, and that world, which is the real world, universally and scientifically, physically, is okay, has to be okay. It has its own eternal flare, glare, and stare. 

Soon the wind arrives and goes along the branches and distant lakes, around tall golden growths like wheat proud and together in the middle of somewhere. But it’s cold. It doesn’t carry the true and desired warmth that spring air can sometimes, the type of warmth that assuages the trouble of many souls for a minute, and inclines them to shift perspective towards minor but important comments such as, ‘Spring is coming,’ or, ‘I heard it’s going to get really warm next week,’ and, ‘I’d like to clean the outside places of some leaves soon…’ no, the wind is not from an auspicious poem them, but still cold and it is also like this: winter, a guest that one thought left but hadn’t. Thought: ‘Oh, they are still here. They had left the room momentarily and I took it that they left the greater house and grounds. But they are here. What’s more, they don’t even look like they getting ready to leaving.’ 

Oh how  it goes like that. But it’s nice, the company of the competent bird there. Hover again just like then, no?- over the hydro lines monstrous, above the stream, perhaps as spirits watch on, by the great glen that leads to wide and wild side boulders. Hover and glide for a few seconds more.