of then

i enter the tunnel
and am shot back instantly 
to hanging around 
and scoring here 
for that secret time 
in my young life

and this chasm 
to anywhere 
still existing 
since my youth 
is one of the bleakest places 
i’ve been for decades

but it makes my heart race 
because i so remember 
the draw it had on me 
desperately needing 
to feed that clawing 
internal hunger

i stop still
close my eyes and open them
allow the beating of my heart 
to merge with dripping water
moan of a cruising seeker
barking dog somewhere near

i fall into the self i built
pathways tackled
courage moulded
strength to run
knowing from age
this wasn’t the place for me

i turn and step softly 
out of the murky hole
past lost memory echoes
some trapped here forever
jeering vague around me
but unable pull me back

pace away 
clean 
from what it was
and meant 
to me of then
not now 

why anything

dwelling on collaborations  
and agonising over those 
encountered throughout 
the journey as it unfolded
gives little to what eventuated 
from consequences occurring   

storing of regret misery  
offers practically zilch
towards gaining answers 
associated with trauma
unexpectedly arriving  
in the domain of hoped for  

failures cobbled tight into 
a construction of gathered
evidence recycled for answers 
when direction is halted
is only what is and no use
in obtaining why anything

terminal illness avoided to date 
by perhaps luck was a chapter
in a sneaky scripture designed 
by no more than fate and chance
so how can anyone’s analysis 
be so ignorant to spit death guilt  

self-gained knowledge held 
rising from ignoring them
sings tunes that have not danced 
to anyone ever before in time 
and so false guarantees are not 
part of the predicted contract 

growth stumbling chaotically  
into a something managed life
leading from their prescribed 
may deliver alternative roads
making invalid wasted preaching 
all of us and not just me and them

for sanity’s sake i decided to avoid 
crowd expectation and opinion
stifling me to not jump into queer me 
my only melody to self-realization  
gifted to me by me is to sing to them
fuck off with your judgemental tactics     

 _For Abunic 

you told me of death/the pain and the weight of its scars
when it paddled canoe with grandma 
on the hot surface of tears 

my tears still falling on the footprints of death
when it walked off my doorsteps with daddy's breath 

you undressed death in lines of poetry 
 planted on grandma's grave

never told me 
that you'll be a poetry/poetry that will count my teardrops 

ball of my pen runs through your flesh 
for words that'll give you pillow in the Lord's arms 
you left your broken pieces scattered on my sheet like puzzle 

you were the pen i knew 
 -spilled on what it feels to run out of ink
like strolling with breeze along the seashore

& told me not of this day
day that will fall like rain from my eyes 
day that will push the arms of the clock 
without counting the sounds of your breath in the air 

i fasten buttons to cover the pain in my chest
fighting to find the semicolon that once held my poems 


it was Wednesday, when the news pointed gun at my head
& stole happiness of my closet 

march 16/ the chapter of 2022
that taught me how to recite euleulogy 
& write elegy 
for a brother with bundles of unfulfilled dreams 


let the soul Rest In Peace 
as the memories forever Rest In Pain
hoping to capture you again.

Broken Legs

it's Ramadan,
& we would wear the lips
of a night,
& speak of the dark memories
standing on
the borders of our country.

we would watch the back
of our hands,
to see the pictures
of schoolgirls, whose mothers
are through waiting
for them to come home.

we would try
to echo the screams
of people,
who lost their hopes
inside a moving train.


we would remember
the burning bodies of women,
& children whose ashes
now paint our sky grey.

& we wouldn't
want to taste the blood,
that quench the thirst of hungry zombies
walking through
the borders of our country.

our legs are broken,
we don't have the strength
to stand and fight again.

we are left with only our hands,
& we would raise them
tonight.

& ask our lord
for a piece of cloth,
that would wipe our tears.

            Gasoline

The price of gas – just think of

What it has cost us, miles and

Miles, gallons and gallons. It

Once made sense. I recall as

A teenager buying a dollar’s

Worth for a night out – same

Station had a cigarette machine

A quarter a pack. Imagine how

It was heading out for the night

Four gallons of gas and a deck of

Cigarettes. Who could ask for

More than that, but it happened.

Prices in the driver’s seat and we

Became poor ride-alongs. Last

Time the prices went way up, we

Began talking about smaller cars

And less driving, even talked about

Public transportation, but when

Prices went down a bit, we became

A country of SUVs and pickup trucks.

Driveways filled up with our sense

What is essential – gallons and gallons

Miles and miles. We have learned to

Consume and complain without doing

Anything but consume and complain

As miles and miles go by and gallons

And gallons we buy – the price of gas

Just think of what it has cost us.




              Out Shopping

Grocery shopping, we wait our turn

picture the gunman setting up

getting ready to shoot, to live-stream

the action we make, he makes.

How long before we begin to run

scream, try to hide, our whole lives

flashing before our eyes, how long will

it be, how many of us will get away

become survivors, witnesses they will

ask about him and how he appeared

before and what did he say, shout as he

began becoming the lead story?

This is Friday grocery shopping. Here we

are trying to get a jump on the weekend

a task accomplished – and there he is trying

to get a jump on what he wanted

wanted to accomplish – the first few are

carefully picked out of Produce, the rest are

random, much like our grocery shopping

might have been.




           Cut to the Car Chase


Shoot-outs, we grew up on them,

war pictures, cowboys and rustlers,

gangster films. We’ve seen it all, so

when they happen around us, they

seem almost scripted. The guy, whose

sad face we saw on TV last evening,

tells the expected story about the masked

intruder who he chased off, then on

a car chase, three towns long, shooting

out his window, like some action star,

a budding Clint Eastwood, shooting as

they tried to get away. The passenger got

hit, didn’t make it to the hospital, and

now our shooter gets his TV moment. His

story holds together as well as any other,

a few shots to explain, charges filed, and

of course the pictures, the car with a blown

out back window, the roadside, and our

hero’s sad face, his bloodshot eyes. They

say it’s drug related, like most of these tales.

They are always seem to be scripted that way.





J.K. Durick jdurick2001@yahoo.com

Motif II: Crash/Landing
(A Semi-Tragedy in Two Acts)

I. On the south side of Liberal, Kansas

For some reason, we all know to gather along the old highway
just north of where it meets the bypass; between them, a wedge
	of dry prairie grass anticipates dawn and something else.

The plane comes in from the south: long, thin, white, unliveried.
(Picture the offspring of a Concorde and a 707, its father’s nose
	and its mother’s wings, and you have it close enough.)

Gear still retracted, it slides in and turns top, three perfect spins
down the field without bending so much as one thin dun blade;
	there is no sound but breaths all drawn in at once.

No flame, no laceration of aluminum skin, not so much as a cloud
of honest Kansas dust; nose pointed back where it came from,
	the plane rests unperturbed, maiden-flight pristine.

From somewhere in the crowd, a Panhandle-tinged twang:
	Well, that ol’ boy done ‘er again, didn’t he? Might
	as well go see what all he brung us this time.

II. Manhattan, Kansas, on the street where Jim Roper lived

Stuffed with burgers (eaten, as ever, standing in the kitchen),
we walk north toward the football stadium, discussing the 
quarterback situation and whether threatened rain will hold off.

Someone – probably Gary – brings up a years-ago summer
solstice party, the honey-haired girl nobody knew who showed
up in a toga and antler-danced with Jim in the living room.

This is routine, ritual, sacrament, not to be disturbed by 
anything like that belly-flopping 747 two blocks ahead, 
plunging into low brick blocks where married students live.

Impact now, an infrabass thump and rumble. A fireball races
to consume families, tricycles, maples, all of us. It is red
and orange and beautiful; I breathe in and am not afraid.


 
Shawnee, Kansas, Which is Not Really Shawnee, Kansas: Dream II

This is another in a long line
of whole-cloth hotel lobbies
on streets which both exist and do not:

a tile-and-Formica spot 
on an off-map stretch of Johnson Drive

(pick dumpy or retro
and either will suit, depending more 
	on you than on the place),

and I’m trying to explain to Larry 
that I did (eventually) recognize

the young Clint Eastwood and the 
older one when I ran into both of 
them at the coffeehouse in Union Station

sitting at a table with either Anthony Hopkins 
or John Wayne – or occasionally but not 
always both, though why the Duke should 
resurrect for three-dollar drip is beyond me –

and for some other unfathomable reason 
James Urbaniak, thin and vaguely dangerous,
who smirked at all of us and left halfway 
	through the conversation.

Larry all the while fiddles with his phone,
poking it with a little screwdriver, 
only making appropriate noises so as 
	to seem engaged,

so I walk out into a half-dawn of
backlit plastic, oddly angled streets
	and lumen-polluted overcast.

I suppose I might eventually find my way
	back to the map and home –

that, or just go upstairs and fall into dream 
within dream, still in my clothes on
forty dollars' worth of rented sheets.

Don't press me for a clear answer; I am and
will be asleep the whole sometime.
 
Bonner Springs, Kansas, Which is Not Really Bonner Springs, Kansas: Dream II

The stakeout is just beginning. I have time to go for coffee.
The town’s heart is only a few blocks south; its buildings 
are taller than I remember, but this bodes well; somewhere
in this tangle of five-story limestone, there must be a place.

The sidewalk spans a ravine, brush-lined, hundreds of feet
deep. There is no handrail, and the walkway is less than a
yard wide. I take no shame in dropping to my knees to cross,
but a man on the other side rolls his eyes and tosses a few
	dead dogwood branches to impede my way. 

No need; I am being called back. We have been made. Our
	target has seen telltale peanuts floating in his gutter.

(He looks like a television character actor of some minor 
note, one who always seems to play a well-meaning but 
largely incompetent foil to the protagonist. I will remember 
his name someday, likely on my deathbed, and my loved ones
	will always wonder why those were my last words.)

We will have to take another tack, so we roll back into the
city along Kaw Drive. I see a coffeehouse, set back among
trees on the north side of the road. We do not stop.