(a failed reader poem)
A fellow feels not when he doesn't stop to think about the baby crying behind his ear. Does he hear the inhuman shrillness of the infant? Does it stir his basest instinct?
No call can wake and no salt can shake him. He doesn't smell the Sunday cooking; doesn't worry ’bout Lord in Heaven. It's make me want to shake him, blurt advice and break him, after the booze that made him curse and touch the nurse's dress and he spilled his ginger rye. Why, he broke his glass and scared his wife, and now he dares to lie? Sticks and names can only hurt him, yet he tries to hide his hurting, praying he is certain that his God is just a Bible and this world his only trial.
But I cry out in hurry that the night will end with rain, and the women carry water jugs, but their necks will feel the pain of a chore that's never-ending while the countryside is mending and the trains are full of shore men and the coast land got fished dry.
The wetness of the morning calls for jackets, cords and warming with the hot cup of the cider and the fairy-tale spider rhyming words that were inside her while the Wright brothers did fly.
But friends of all the Grease kids flavour speech with slang and beatnik; they dream of road trips down the coast and wish the hottest spice that words can buy. They smoke cigars, inhale and choke, but even phlegm can't hide the smiles when they're dressed up all in robes and books they never plied.
Their dreams all lay with books that lie: novels, poems, diner fry. Food unfit for eating, words wasted on the breathing, ideas for forgetting, ill-gotten flights of fancy.
That's not to say Jack was wrong, or the bohemian was lying when he sang seductive songs; it's just that life is more than leaving homes where toiling wears out idle minds—never minds that think to pray for work—which cuts the hands that never tried.
And it's just that every poem is a story of a loneness that breaks itself when spoken, adding ink stains worth but tokens to the tomes of men who cry.
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