Futile Efforts

by Piccirilli, Tom

  now?…did he know Kerouac, Steinbeck,

  Heller, when he was young?…(I didn't)…does he

  sip coffee with Vonnegut or Barth? (I don't).

  Doing a pretty poor job of hiding the traces

  of petulance from their peevish pierced tongues.

  And me,

  there reading some of the horror, monsters rising

  from the back seats of wary campers, setting the scene

  of where a band of killers lurk, throwing

  in some pages of the new mystery, even a little

  poetry—the terse verse doing it's thing, the way

  it's supposed to do, like oil, replete, until a few

  of the self-deprecating jokes started to work.

  And the rhythm of my voice became the cadence

  of the room, our heartbeats—for a second there—

  all in synch, the circuit complete. Soon, a tenderloin

  nineteen-year-old stood in the last row, the light

  framing her full porcelain features like angelic

  illumination, and her lips parted with all the beauty

  and wisdom of mad existence calmed to living

  clarity. I sat back and smiled, angled my chin at her

  with an air of familiarity, understanding that, yes,

  we're all in this as one, and there's no better way

  to do it.

  But perfection is easily shattered

  as I finally noticed what others had before me,

  while the snickers and chuckles grew. One

  of the old ladies had conked out

  and lay sprawled in her chair snoring,

  purse open between her spindly legs,

  pantyhose rolled down to mid-calf, hat carefully

  pinned to her white hair, drool dripping

  from Billy goat chin, blue knuckles in a fist.

  And me,

  supposedly in charge, trying not to lose focus, I

  stepped forward and touched her on the elbow

  and the wrist. Now

  here's the important part:

  of how she shot up, snorting, stammering, startled

  all to hell, and her purse slipped from the perched

  wedge of her knobby knees, fell to the floor, spilling

  the contents all over the place—and there,

  among the tissues and licorice, the yellowed receipts

  and coupons, photos, loose change, the denture grip,

  flipped a nickel-plated .22, bright as murder.

  Jesus, what now,

  you have to strip-search the grandmas

  in bookstores, is that what it's come to? As she sputtered,

  hoisting herself into my arms, shrieking, "You're my favorite

  writer! Heaven bless you! Bless your sweet soul!"

  And I muttered and I'm thinking,

  For fuck's sake, lady, are you going to put two

  in my forehead now, for what? What'd I do?

  The rest of them crying and running, my books

  stomped into the carpet, the manager cowering

  and giving me teary-eyed looks.

  Until granny finally stopped and scooped the gun,

  lunged, and there I was, tensing up, figuring,

  So this is how it ends, this is it, plugged

  by the old broad between the romance section

  and the restrooms,

  shit. Hoping to Christ,

  that she wasn't some elderly women's libber who'd feel

  compelled to shoot me in the nuts first, god damn it,

  leave me something, lady.

  As she cried, "I love your books! Bless you!" and doing

  a sort of jig, shaking her fanny, the way the groupies

  are supposed to do, and with that last shout,

  she .ed, beat her .at septuagenarian feet

  out of the store, hat still perfectly

  tilted on her head, and I thought,

  Well hell maybe

  at last they've finally given me something

  to write about.

  In any case, this much is forever true,

  I'll always remember you, baby.

  Why I Can't Stand Behind Some People, And

  Why You Ought to Be Scared About It

  He's pure leather slickness with the face of a Greek myth,

  quiet but smoldering ember-eyed imposing,

  young enough to seem hip and swiftly adolescent, shouldered

  with some of our greatest, standing a touch taller

  than any of them now. Rock god demeanor with debonair

  .air, just enough curl to his lip to show disdain

  for those who know about it. The girls sway in their seats,

  sigh and coo and rush for his touch, all of them swimming

  in heat, the flashes go off every second or two

  like fires in his bacchanal eyes.

  But see,

  all of that is all right. It's this that gets me:

  how we're in the hallway passing each other one night,

  and I nod, give him the grin that says,

  "I'm glad you succeeded at least, that you

  clawed yourself up from the muck and that you're riding

  the good luck all the way to the end, even if it's not me,"

  and he gives me this slow turn,

  you know the one,

  that burning turn, Adonis features loading the loathing,

  that finally learning to burn turn, repulsed, sickened,

  insulted, revolted,

  offended, disgusted, and antipathy rises

  from him like the stink of city sewers

  as he goes silently on his way.

  So now,

  I've got this small viper in me growing,

  every hour, every minute, as he prowls the halls

  with the bounty of the beautiful, the treasure

  trove of love and wanting,

  the respectful bowing,

  the ancients in some instances kowtowing, chicks

  waiting to juggle his balls,

  and me with another sort of venom

  pulsing inside my wrists, as I turn the corner

  and find myself behind him, staring

  at the sweet spot of his skull, hell itself

  must be daring me,

  as the adoring roaring crowd gives him more

  and more,

  and I fight the urge to keep my fists steady

  and not let all of our various

  paltry and petty hatreds

  suddenly spill out

  gushing and screaming onto the floor.

  One For the Worm

  I've pressed my face down in graves and breathed in

  the right kind of dust, fists clenching dirt so that everybody

  who looked at my black nails

  used to think I worked as hard as the grease monkey

  edging his flaring nostrils into the fan belt,

  digging further,

  hoping to find out exactly when the interred world

  would open wider

  yet finding only cut drying flowers.

  I used to have a real problem with that sort of thing,

  but I'm working it out.

  I've learned to stand at the sides of sepulchers

  and not leap on in, to stare for hours at the mysteries

  of the mud and headstone and exhumed bone

  and contain my urges to get under the easy earth.

  We all have to heed and feed our inhibiting

  demanding perfection-driven needs—

  cemeteries have always called to me as they've

  called to my entire family. Whichever graveyard

  I wander in I'm never alone, there's a familiar name,

  someone sitting around just waiting for a visit. I'm shocked

  that at 37 I have friends who've still never met the dead,

  who know no dead, who've never had to play this particular

  shined-shoe, kn
eel at the coffin game. Me, most of my relatives

  lie underground.

  I've paid debts to graves,

  been laid in graves, I've traveled deep up wombs

  into the freezing winter tombs and avoided the painfully

  clear trail

  of my own insistent doom—I've painted those shadow-tossed

  trees at dawn, taken charcoal impressions

  of the sleeping stone children at noon, sat in on

  rain-swept funerals of those I didn't know, holding

  an umbrella for the weeping daughters of strangers.

  I have presence among caskets and I'm at home

  in any hole. The dark buried intersections are crowded

  but the planted traffic is moving.

  It Knows So Much More Than Me

  I was soft and had never been face to face

  with a roach before, but this one had climbed out

  from beneath the sweetly-perfumed sheet,

  humped up my chest, and stood nose

  to nose with me, eager

  to make contact, to understand, little insect paws patting

  and telling me, "Good boy, nice boy," antennae weaving

  all across hell, the way a man

  might fling up his arms after losing another woman

  in the heat—

  which reminded me…

  I scanned the one-room apartment, like she

  might be behind the couch, someplace

  under the sink, wedged upon the edge

  of her bookshelves, behind the prints and photos

  of her other smiling selves.

  I'd blacked out after the first ten minutes

  in bed as the night folded around and consumed

  my cracking gin-soaked head,

  and so now was now and now what?

  Even Ralph the roach turned his chin

  searching for his old lady—

  and the caterwauls of the centuries came up

  from below,

  laughter of a thousand defeated

  dreams, never-ending tear-streaked dance

  of slaughterhouse despair,

  three a.m. shrieking of hideous

  bleeding and jagged glass

  cut throat.

  She was down in the street, naked, running

  back and forth from sidewalk to sidewalk,

  a couple of cabs trying to ease on past,

  her red hair rising

  in rivulets of flaming lullabies,

  shoulder blades so sharp

  and jutting she could spike you between the ribs,

  flashing cop cars

  around the corner as she tilted and bent wildly

  in inhumanly crooked,

  broken-necked witch fashion

  to look up at her own window, glaring

  and wishing the heartache of eons upon those invited

  into her own dead end charnel nest.

  Ralph bolted one way

  and I cut the other,

  and we both scurried to our own hidey-holes hoping

  the raging ageless exterminator would get

  somebody else instead.

  When You Look Down to Find Yourself Going

  but Not Yet Gone

  They tried to teach you back then, when you were a kid,

  the right way

  to become a man, and a lot of it had to do with having

  strong hands,

  knowledgeable forearms, the strength of legs, tattooed biceps,

  you were only six but that was old enough to start down

  the right road

  to your father's world of engines and baseball, of sweat socks

  and power saws, to begin carrying your own load and

  welcome in

  the acute understanding found inside those locked tool boxes.

  But the old man was swept away by a strong wind one fall,

  an ashen monsoon of murder that started deep in his throat

  and carried him over the side, buried him while you played

  up in your room and stayed inside

  while all of them constantly lied about what was happening,

  and Mom would wince and shiver until finally you were told

  and you used your small fists of frenzy a week after he'd died,

  a week too late

  to ever come face to face and make fragile peace with your

  Dad's fate,

  and something in your chest grew too cold and dragged itself

  around in dwindling circles, and has never stopped moving

  or warmed up since—

  and his tools were never taken up although his books were read,

  his voice soon forgotten but not his smile or his

  undaunted stance,

  the way he'd give a straight grinning glance—you went crying

  into cartoons and crape paper cut-outs, Mama's boy

  surrounded by toys

  that held more significance than manhood or the fact that

  your daddy

  was dead.

  You've stood nearly forty years out in the rain, hoping to find

  your own gray outline, to prove you have substance and mass,

  that you're more than drifting fog, more than the useless pink

  roundness of wit and profound rants against God and the grave

  and your own lazy fat ass.

  Would he forgive you for your slack and your weak back

  and everything in you

  that to this very day you still lack—would he

  be able to stare at you for more than a minute without having

  to turn his face and hide his eyes—would he look with a

  hint of pride?

  Do thirty years of carrying his torch mean anything to him now

  behind the veil of night and mist—does he know how

  many rocks

  of regret you carry on your shoulders as you try to work off

  this everlasting debt?

  You never learned to use a torque wrench but you still suffer

  laid out across the work bench

  the way you should, sweating

  as much as your father ever did,

  full of weakness but perhaps

  becoming just a bit stronger now, as you approach his age,

  not so squarely settled on all your wrongs, but still occasionally

  lost in the storms of fruitless rage

  and both of you set about hammering the nails in

  just where they belong.

  From A STUDENT OF HELL

  POISED ON THE DIVISION BRIDGE

  Up over the division bridge of archaic balance

  between logic and faith, your taste and your teeth,

  losing some of both but coming out ahead

  of your last enemies whose names escape you

  they'll be back

  The returned dead, gnats in your ears

  violent muscles on the rise, attack

  dreams boiling under the tongue

  the way you champ down and turn blue

  and turn green, crimson, and whisper women's names

  who no longer have faces, these scarred fingers

  that once roamed freely against her throat

  and her throat, and hers, and her creamy perfumed wrist,

  gone now without a trace

  Odd how you feel like you're falling when you sit up

  and how mired in your own tired fires you've become,

  how your sister stares in disbelief,

  your wife holding a broken wine glass, your brother

  still ready to kick your ass, your son pointing, neighbors

  peering through the back window fainting, the cops

  breaking in your front door, mother wailing,

  your dead fish gaping, the dog needs to be fed

  and you have absolutely no idea

  just what the hell you might have done or said

  SUNDAY, WHILE THE SAUCE SIMM
ERS

  At least the old man is laughing, Christ knows

  how he does it, lying in bed like that

  with Mom vacuuming out the grit of his tracheotomy

  handling it so well, the hose in his lungs, dinner on the stove

  Even the cat is half out of his head, crawling in the drapes,

  seeing ghosts, he's begging for a lobotomy. You, yes,

  it was you

  who asked how I can make the storm

  slip under the trees in the back yard, uncoiling

  lashes of wicked water lapping

  heaving against the window

  like your older sister's tongue and breasts

  wondering where all these faces

  have come from. Listen,

  watch my finger, you can part your anguish like this,

  or like this,

  get some rest or diaper the baby,

  go and make extra ice cubes, uncork the wine

  My old man likes his nightmares

  chilled, remember

  like this

  you can't stare into the humidifier or study the systems

  of his poisoned past without being killed

  Go turn the baby over, he's coughing.

  The television's spitting

  there's static in the attic and old photos of men

  you only meet when you're dead, the lasagna's

  getting as cold as grandma. Move your ass for the repast

  You can't use the microwave, you shake too much, lurching

  to the burning of unseen venom in the air, radiation in your hair

  half the time it's only a little joke,

  the rest, you feel your intestines melting

  crumbling to just dust

  Two weeks ago your only worry

  was the parking lot fumbling with a redhead's bra

  and now, and now

  you make a run for the camera and hold it against your head,

  the baby's got to have something to remember you by

  when you're dead as that.

  The flash burns out

  the back end of your life,

  and now, and now, like this,

  you'll never have a wife or kids

  you won't even get to graduate

  There's too much lasagna and desperation

  on the chipped gold-rimmed plate. You've got

  to make it to the bathroom,

  on your knees, quietly, and now, like this,

  see your reflection

  you've got a date with lusciously shaped fate.

  DIVINITY AS WITNESS TO THE DEPTH

  OF OUR DARKENING LOVE

  Listen at the pillow when the night winds froth