Читать книгу Night Became Years - Jason Stefanik - Страница 7
ОглавлениеSwig-men, c. the 13th Rank of the Canting Crew, carrying small Habberdashery-Wares about, pretending to sell them, to colour their Roguery.
Advent
I’ll follow you
to the heat-lamp diner.
Follow you
to the fruitfly barstool.
Follow you
over wailing overpasses.
Follow you
to bedbug theatres.
Follow you
down warehouse elevators.
Follow you
into communal gardens.
Follow you
to where, with disinterest,
we can wallow
amid the gristle
of food-court cynics.
Follow you
to visit a keen-eyed Inuk
under a crumbling icebridge
where we can kiss.
We’re nine grandmothers
removed from nomads,
with nine beautiful sisters
to teach us numbers.
I’ll follow you.
Aphorisms of a Visored Paladin
At some point you’ll finally feel the old show’s double entendre dull
in a hyper-sexualized world.
When the greenery was haranguing you into joining it for spring,
shouldn’t you have plied a trade?
If your eyes past midnight bled with metaphor and effort,
good.
The cat you passed up forever tingled behind
like a war vet’s ghost limb.
Why didn’t you, Steven, Bank Manager, friend, say life was a roll
of receipts tallying from first credit card to below the grass?
Those molten burps bursting in your throat never heralded
the brouhaha before the heart attack.
She was a Cree scoutress, quiet through wood, ear to ground,
and I lost her trail.
You know you raved too hard those two years in a row the Best Cheddar in the British Empire
went to Bothwell.
So you didn’t make the NHL – weren’t you a foot-hockey champion, who pounded home
a frozen tennis ball at the backstop mesh when high up slot?
You know the man of eighty-something highlighting his Bible beside you
was you.
The hoebag devouring pomegranates in the nightshower was you.
Since he was one serious imam, you were one serious Orangeman when you were drunk.
The mucked-up world, when a high school English teacher informed
the only people reading it are poets.
An acid-wash jean jacket with Anarchy felt-markered black
on the back is not that bad after all.
Rejoice for all the years Astrology.com sent you a birthday card.
Thank God you pulled out when your diet fell to hell,
Cantonese and creatine by the bellyful.
Hemmed in the indigo gloam of a basement bedroom, more like a bordello
of velvet black drapes, us trinity of Goth kids, so far gone into Dungeons and Dragons,
rolled out our fates on twenty-sided die, and you, Steven, Bank Manager, friend,
were always the DM.
Sister Aspires to Destress
Sister got sloppy on Oxycontin.
It really set our broken home into motion.
Her basement teen-den decompressed one afternoon
Sister and her bestie rolled a Shoppers.
I didn’t agree with Mom enrolling me in martial arts
when she was overcome with unspeakable woe
and signed me on for classes in tae kwon do.
I didn’t want to live, so what the hell:
I wanted to go and beat someone down.
I wanted to be someone beaten down.
Dad hated me for not writing to him in jail. I hated
him for not escaping to kill Stepdad. Alphonse!
Sister got floppy on Oxycontin
and I was gifted a white belt and crackling white gi.
All credit to me, I snuck from the school library
a dog-eared tome on Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee
and spent hours each night throwing daggers
at a backyard tree. To prep for the Tuesday I’d arrive
at the dojo on my blue ten-speed Raleigh.
Street-fighting, Master said, was the class’s emphasis.
Striking pressure points, gouging eyes, kneeing groins
was the best defence, and in twenty minutes
my ribs cracked holding pads for the Master’s son.
He beat me to tears in the sparring session.
I yearned for a hole to fill up inside me,
unlike Sister. She aspired to empty.
Night Caprice
The blend of humour
and humiliation, Tina,
when I saw you sitting
on another man’s lap.
The feeling of élan!
To finally solve your lost pounds,
your trumping our every debate
with last words. Hooray, night caprice,
hooray, pyjamas furnaced
to my epidermis. Hooray, lust
conspiring that bid me
overcome my whispering
woes and taxi to your place.
I can now puzzle out
the night I heard for minutes
when you pocket-dialled me
from your purse, and you laughed
happier than I’d heard in months.
At last I know without wishing
to know, and it soothes me some:
you keep me at the edge of town
for when you’re older, uglier,
and need to settle down.
Talking Shit
How you hold such unflinching love for him – you can’t
know him as I’ve known him. A bony kid too sickly
to lug his tuba home to practice. A jazz improviser
awaiting only a single treacherous chance.
An exasperator, a sluffer, sulking in the hull
rather than earning keep pulling lobster traps.
A pimply line cook huffing nitrous from Whip-It cans.
A reeling religious erratic who fails to rouse
his drunken uncles for midnight mass. An oily oldie,
with the same pesky authority as a game-show host,
insisting mumbly kids elocute their responses.
A dirty letch, double-yoked by mere chance, to the coax
of any pheromone-sticky tongue. A career sellout
claiming he’s writing the comedies our city requires.
A dull consignment and I’ll-convert-on-my-deathbed optimist.
A flophouse violinist in flip-flops on social assistance.
A lisping DJ on public radio with an itch for ‘S’ titled songs.
A boy wanker busted by camera-savvy buddies
between crooked venetian slats. A third-liner at best
afraid of going in the corners and taking a hit.
The type of tweaker who couldn’t last one hour
within the Pen’s general population, and I wager
when you hear of him again he’s already dead
and I’m a full-patched Sergeant of Arms in the gang.
Cousin Ass at Bingo
Orst wraggles the hush at late-night bingo.
I hate the Ass. Whereas rows of quainter fogies
wear bifocals and blink at the number board,
Orst wears wrap-around shades, earbuds abuzz
with Frankie Yankovic and the Polka Kings.
He and I share the same wobbly table,
dabbing two cards apiece. I despise
the way waitresses avoid us, mostly Orst,
as they shirk bringing peanuts for his leering
up their skirts. His meat hook rarely cups
a buttock without a prong toward the pelvis.
His bombast snarls across the dulcet
professional tones of ushers inspecting cards.
The Spaniard in the money cage, he cusses
for peeping at a paperback while not on break.
Over and over, Orst tells of the afternoon
he laid the beats to a gangbanging kid
for barring the path to a beer fridge.
‘That’s nothing compared to the May Long
I brawled both LeValley boys and a junkie
Eskimo behind McLaren Hotel,’ boasts Orst.
I loathe the Ass until the vodka shots dry out
his tongue. When he passes out, pisses himself,
and I cuff a ten-spot from his wallet.
Real Estate Ballad
Resale is guaranteed in that precision:
the curb sits higher than the snowplough’s grade.
Barely a busted trough along the roofline:
I judge the builder by how the basement’s laid.
How fierce the family dog needing shade
depends whether the garden shed’s breached;
I know the buyer by the down payment paid:
it’s on a great piece of land – motion cams are cheap.
I merit the neighbour by his friendly strut
and see a cat that is not an alley cat;
single from married moms I can tell apart:
foul kid from holy I divine by the tat.
Keep the door unlocked, but sleep with a bat;
nobody clears the back fence in a leap.
Down the street there’s a coin-op laundromat,
it’s on a great piece of land – leg traps are cheap.
I tell the truth for each property I list,
whether the seller asks for it or not:
I point to flaws other agents missed,
like how at the stoop a kid’s cat got shot.
I know the convict by the time he’s got;
but moms dream well if they knit before sleep.
No graffiti artist here will get caught,
it’s on a great piece of land – bleach is cheap.
Friend, for the cost of a paid tithe, own this land;
walk with your son to where the food bank’s deep,
all the opportunity you ever dreamed,
it’s on a great piece of land – deadbolts are cheap.
