Rumbleberry Pie

No more a poet than many. Ill
from our waste stream of words
that yak-yak me poor with thoughts,
strike me hard as homemade liquor
jolts me with the jitters, and how
many times language troubled all

I once set out to do, a stupid kid
who bought all the best meanings.
But words trick you into faith, then
get read out loud in courtrooms
until you’re penniless or worse.
“Planning Retirement” closed fast

since no one knows how to age,
unlike old Bible Acts when sages
puffed tents, teepees and yurts
with raw visions bred into smoke,
and the old told the young all
about to happen, despite prayer

or love, hard work or luck. Hell,
even I who knows nothing wants
to tell you all I’ve tried to forget;
it rides the desolate wind of facts
aside me in full banshee tease.
The profane and the abominable

much a part of each day as noon.
You have to hide from half this life.
Anyways, I signed up in bad faith
for the creative writing course
offered in the extension program
at Cal State Fullerton, at night,

in room 422, every Wednesday,
by a professor who looked lost.
My children gone, I just needed
something to blot the spill of days.
It beats me what I hope to find,
as if another world exists I missed

those years in the purchasing dept.
To sum up my life: I paid the bills.
Zeroed it out. All debts paid. Yeh,
I’d pray for blank dates to drop and
disappear away before my payday,
as every hour awake just drains you,

and cash never arrives soon enough.
I’m the last person to ever trust
behind the wheel of an epic poem.
“La vérité est jugée par la distance.”
(You don’t speak this language?!)
Love is the tear gas in our cold war

of doubt. Been coughing, choking
from riot gas for 40 years, and now
I can say, “Steadfastness counts”
—our one antidote to tomb room
or fully strangered night dives. Yes,
I lack the stuff of our greatest lies,

you see, a tree is a tree. I own one.
It’s nothing but trouble each fall
and it’s destroying my driveway.
I’ve experienced this life. Alright?
Everyone I meet is mistaken, yet
some have great cars. Period.

That’s meaning for you: Traction.
Mystery’s bought with $100 bills.
Bluster all you want, but accept it
(best way to avoid heart disease).
Then—are you ready?—a poem
read by the prof twitterpated me!

I found I housed dimensions such
as our jimmyrigged universe! Physics
includes me! Huh? Yes! I could feel
space a thing inside! A poem torqued
it over and onto itself. No clue what
the poem meant, but I understood.

It revved my long plundered soul into
a jumping bean, or kitten and string.
You can be empty and full, Einstein!
All there is we do not know, you write
it! IT! Don’t wait on broke knowledge!
You can move, just move, you know?

Let an obtuse, dark, invisible reason
stomp down on the accelerator until
rebirth detonates a student’s desk
on the fourth floor of Humanities!
Teacher, my preacher, we must talk!
Tell me what this is! Give me snakes!

I’m ready to bleat it out in tongues!
We agreed to meet in Aristotle’s Place
across the street over beer, chili fries,
and a fresh pack of menthol smokes.
My writing teacher would rub his eyes,
and kept cleaning his wire glasses,

not as if he wanted to see better, no,
like he didn’t want to see at all, a man
who glimpsed the world one way, then
cleaned it all off his vision, expecting
life as he knew it to go away. Ornery,
groping for sun, life returns full force.

He bent and twisted his glasses to twigs,
and picked them up fearful, slow, gentle
as tiny bones of an old pet or someone
he once knew. I never saw a sadder man
rub his eyes with the heels of his hand
so hard, erasing eyesight from his head.

The plastic nub fell off one end. Help!
I sat there crazy distracted! This poet,
my sudden priest, will stab his own eyes!
Not much got explained until 3 Buds in,
and then he talked deep, as if unveiling
spine. Repositioning skin. “...you could

trace those eyes on peacock tailfeathers,
with skin 6 tones closer to earth than mine,
legs that make you want to shoot the river.
Go back with me, please, and witness how
Falona inspects the candy 4 steps down
the jelly bean line, while I control boxes.

Too far away to hear me sigh, too close
for me to keep my breathing measured
for the 8 hours to stare at her all day,
escape to dinner and TV and then all
control dissolves in sleep, and dreams
bring Falona right back to me, acloud,

abird, aconvertible, asurfboard, awave,
gone is the clean room dress of day,
covered up surgeon tight, loose gown,
mouthcover, haircap. Can you imagine,
what hellish myth is this, slammed close
to a woman so stiff and grave in toxic

shades of green, invented to disappear
us into an army of nobody we’ll ever
remember, only to have her undulate
nightly in cobra attacks into my head?
So lewdly appareled I searched dream fields
for a husband, cops, or old ladies redfaced

at these displays of lawless, wanton curves,
marauding voluptuously to brown horizons,
loud eye racket, vowing never to straighten,
never to lose their Edenic bounce. “Never!”
Draw her, and you have the map of love.
Yet, we stand as posts holding up nothing

but a dry, brittle temple to ‘do not touch.’
I stare at my boxes and tawny Falona,
little more than another factory column,
yet, because I’m a poet, I’m an auditorium!
A Grand Central Terminal! A customs hall
for all sorts of exotic people who meet

and pass and scurry and wait. Space station.
No, a planet out there among the interstellar
trade routes, a giant rest stop on a flight
from the Andromeda Galaxy to Centaurus A.
You can walk around in me. Visit in me.
Peoplewatch in me. Hell, you can ride

dinosaurs and jetstreams in me, while I
keep one eye on my boxes, one eye
on every man’s oasis just 4 steps down,
in acrid vapors of sugar and candy dyes.
A poet is a planet loose in irregular orbit
off this ground, maybe not high enough

for air traffic control , but in an altitude
of our own making, we will ourselves
unbound, twice past endless, big bang
enough to stare back on all we think
is here and pronounce judgments, tell
you whether it’s this or that, diffuse

all the confusion, hold your hand then
fling you from here to impossible, out
of your Payless shoes clean to stardust.
A poet is a place big enough to lose
your mind or get along fine without it.
I’m here, quiet, so densely packed

at my post. Honest, I’m 10 cubic feet.
Yet that’s space enough for a poet
to see your family for who they are,
review the future as it is, grow young
again, as the kid who stole bubblegum,
then refused to chew it out of fear

that God commands bad kids to choke
to death on anything they love and can’t
afford but find their own way to get it.
On top of all this, our company hires
a roomful of engineers somewhere
dedicated to getting rid of all of us!

Machines don’t even notice Falona;
but they keep all our boxes perfect.
Being human is our curse. Flatline
is the heartbeat engineers crave.
Nothing in my pockets now, I still
let her know this was temporary.

A literary mag of some 36 pages
had published my poem, “Bark.”
An editor said I had his very style.
Got all A’s in English. Dean’s List.
Pre-approved for certain success,
while Falona could care less: Home

and husband, her Mom, sisters,
brothers were her whole world.
Her vegetable garden mattered
more than New York city news.
I gathered Falona’s life all up
like flowers wait on falling pollen,

and heard one day, during break,
“Mumble ferry I,” on a cell phone
call to her giant 6’5” trucker man.
At least, that’s what I thought I heard.
At a dreary Chili’s Christmas Party,
I caught half a whisper in his ear,

“Humble merry lie.” He released
a bank embezzler’s chicane of smile
after taking in the day’s big deposit.
At a picnic on the company lake,
I heard her say, “Rumbleberry pie,”
and he pushkissed her so hard

you could hear them crash against
the wall of a frozen yogurt stand.
I have to know. I wait. Finally, I say,
“I’ve heard about your rumbleberry pie.
Could you bring it to the candy factory
one day, soon? I’d love to have a taste.”

She sneezed a laugh. “This is no place,
my friend, for Falona’s rumbleberry pie.
Believe me. Who told you? Never mind,
rumbleberry pie is my secret. You know,
one day, my man won’t see me again
as the 19-year-old girl he first met,

but I’ll still serve him up a hot mess
of rumbleberry pie every night he wants.
That’s all a woman needs, the only recipe
for keeping the same man in your bed
every night for years and years. Forget
the factory. Forget the college, kid.

You go out there and find your own
slice of homemade rumbleberry pie.”
And that’s where the first poetry book
comes from. 46 poems, all to prove
I was bigger than Falona’s husband.”
The professor ground his sore eyes

as if he could crush them into powder.
“Know this: poetry cannot save you.”
He hollowed out the night. Air turned
icy, and my body temperature dropped
with every breath. Resurrected hours
earlier, transcendent, first time ever,

then defrauded by the first saint found
in this new religion, who used poetry
like I once bought big brown drinks
for reluctant women in hotel bars.
I feel a thing I can’t put into words,
and poetry verifies it like a hammer

to the knee describes your nerves.
The drive home is endless, as time
appears to be as real as our word.
There’s no destination up ahead.
You just put it in gear and go until
the fuel is gone. Nothing to know

in our travels. A species incapable
beyond easy food and reproduction.
This night manufactured nothing
as if nothing was what we needed
to win a world war. I had nothing
in my car pressed against the glass,

nothing outside pounding to get in.
I hate for evidence to be a decision,
for so much to be pathetic invention.
All my life, not much was ever real
if it could not weigh down my hand
until a poem sent me...can’t go back.

I am no poet, house no galaxies,
but maybe I have buildings. Empty
theater? I know a poem lights it!
Have faith, friends, poetry is sonar,
an internal organ, an atom smasher
where energy bursts into matter!

I started to rub my eyes, and felt
the betrayal of this act. Not for me.
I’ll see this world for 10,000 years!
I have to believe a poet one day
will pull back his head, face to face
with sky, open his mouth, roar out

a beam of light back at the sun.
Hey! I just welcomed Union Station
into my rib cage! It’s now waiting
on its first train. Whoever you are,
wherever you may rest, express
route a starliner this way, west.