Baker's Dozen

I.
Thirteen
non-surprises
accumulated
over a weekend.
(regarding a life)

II.

When I was younger,
sitting in the back seat
of a station wagon with no
air-conditioning,
like other bored children
I would count the birds in the sky,
taking special notice of red-winged blackbirds.

I do not know why I found them
interesting.
There was something ominous
about the way they
wore those bloody patches
like a banner,
something different and dangerous,
a quirk that set them,
like me,
quite separate from
all the others darkening the sky.

III.

There is something perverse
about taking photographs in a zoo.
Even those not enclosed by bars
are trapped by the existence of
these terrible prisons.
When you see the animals in chains
it reminds you of your own life,
your father and mother and lover
and cage.

IV.

When my father was stationed in Korea
(not for the War, he is not exceptionally old)
the men in his squad would be angry
at him in the mornings.
He would sit with a coffee cup
cradled in his hands to keep them warm,
and hunch over it to smell the rich aroma of
general issue brew
until it became cold.
He would dump it out and grab another cup.
He did not like the taste.

When they had target practice
the peasants would swoop
beneath their feet
in search of casings,
and many times would catch them before
the spent cartridges hit the ground;
on occasion branding grasping hands
with five point five six
millimeter
brass.

V.

Those with blood
eternally stained
to fingertips
tell the same tired stories
of their torment.
They cannot be believed.
Gods do not feel sorrow
for those they murder.

VI.

Left alone,
a maddened king on an ancient throne
whispers orders to phantom legions.
He sends them to their doom
and they do not blink nor deign to shed a tear.
They are not the first to die.

A regal voice swells like a tsunami
and with four words prepares
a missive of death.
“I require a priest.”
You must appreciate that
certain men
do not smile upon being told
that desires are impossible.

The gate to his palace sports
a round dozen sun-bleached skulls,
all of them, in death, declaring their treason.

VII.

It was as though
he had stared into a flame
and seen instead the future.
It whispered in his ear, “I think you
will not like
the places you must go
if you
intend on achieving your aims.”

VIII.

Directly outside of the door
we have a table with
two chairs
an ashtray
two bottles of lighter fluid
a candle (rose)
and a chess board.

The tablecloth hangs
nearly to the ground.

When it storms
the tablecloth’s slack
is whipped up
on top of the table.

When the wind comes
down
again
the cloth flips down
and frequently
causes the chess pieces
(they are fashioned in glass)
to fall.

Most of the time a chip
or two
presents:
the crown of the queen,
the neck of a knight,
or perhaps a small theft from the
dejected feet of a pawn.

We put them back the same way
every time.

IX.

When I was six,
I had read what the Mormons
call “The Standard Works”
and was filled with what was
to become a life-long contempt
for the indignities
forced upon me.

My incarceration
did allow
the potential
for sarcasm
that entertains me
to this day.

My mother was indulging,
as she sometimes did in those days,
in a particular religious zealotry:
she had decided that playing cards
were sinful in nature and so
they were confiscated,
and either hidden away
or destroyed.
I do not know which.

I am particularly fond of
deviled eggs. In certain
states I have been known
to eat a dozen or two.

I was furious about
not having any right
to personal integrity.

I wrote a little speech
about how it didn’t
promote
righteous values
to have such a delicious food
with such an infernal name.
Pursuant to this,
I proposed a change to
“heavenly eggs”
and to my shock and surprise
my mother actually
changed the name
of the recipe in the cookbook.

One of my favorite ladies
at church
did the same.

I do not know if their books
are still around
but I’m pretty sure that they
never knew
that I wasn’t being serious.

X.

I would say that I was exhausted
but it wouldn’t be what I meant…

It’s like listening to “Femme Fatale”
when you’re coming down from mushrooms,
Nico’s voice totally full,
magnificently haunting,
taunting and tantalizing.
You lay your head down and close your eyes
and float for a little while,
lighter than you have been in ages,
as if the world had fallen
in the coils of the trees
and left you alone.

XI.

I make mistakes expressing myself
because I’m constitutionally limited to superlatives.
I’m terrible at nuance or subtlety or tact.
I write you cryptic messages
because they’re pretty close
to these thoughts firing
aimlessly in my head.
In me there is an element
of fantasy,
a suitcase of nothing at all.

XII.

I had bought a bottle of whiskey
that had been infused with honey.
The labeling was yellow
and I thought that I’d never seen
a yellow whiskey label before,
at least not one that I remembered.

We drank it out of glasses with ice
and water to cancel out some of the sweetness.
Christ, you should have seen her hand spun
around that glass, so cold and forbidding,
so far away.

Even diluted with water,
it looked gold like her breath in the morning
and when her lips parted
you could almost taste
the labor of the bees.

XIII.

When watching trains go by,
their tracks an endless
premeditated division of the land,
I think of tunnels
that Nobel dug
and how odd it would be
to stand on the end of one
and wait for a train
then jump
onto a boxcar’s roof
and roll a little joint
and ride out in that open air
until the sun hits the horizon.