Rick Duffey

THE MORE THINGS STAY THE SAME

In my youth it was almost impossible

To buy oleo in Wisconsin

A mental health day was a day

spent locked up In a rubber room with our friend

and our brother Jesus Thorazine

When I was a boy soccer moms were moms

Who played soccer but nobody

Played soccer especially not

Other bodies’ mothers

Years ago it snowed on Sunday and everybody

Had to wait for the salt

Trucks and even the plows on Monday & you

Couldn’t buy liquor in brown paper until

After eleven or noon depending

When I was a kid everybody cared

Who ought to care about everybody else’s sex

Life like perfect moons orbiting

Equally perfect planets filled with nuns & church

Ladies who likewise didn’t have a clue

How things got this way but they did

Back in the olden times back

In the days of Perry Como and Bing Crosby

It was easier to be an absolute public

Jerk & nobody noticed or maybe didn’t much

Care because they could still remember

Hitler & felt despite themselves mostly

Like survivors if not exactly winners

I’m old enough to remember

When a simple line a line for example like

“In the Beginning” was enough

To set off a landmine under the skin

Make it rain Earthquakes

Stop earnest conversation in a collective gulp

Like it was all of it going to happen again

Limp with fire & crushed outright by the stars

46 lines Rick Duffey

434 S Monterey

Villa Park IL 60181

SHARK’S TEATS

Purity of the goddamn mind I don’t think

Such a thing exists

Too many contradictions, guys working at construction

Confused by the rules, always it’s the rules

Rich-bitch Mom wants only organic foods

No adulteration in her babies’ bellies

Teenaged girls draped over

Aluminum chairs, being pretty

A thousand pundits living in the talking box

Demanding only the most authentic Conservatives

Yea, as if their bowels didn’t know another language

A drum majorette with a flesh colored Crayola

A Sousa march down the remnants of Main Street

Small boy with ketchup bottle

Betwixt his legs, rubbing fake blood

` Into future wounds

Every morning is Monday I no longer question it

Nor do I question why the baby possum waits

At the bottom of my steps,

Newly weaned like a marsupial sock puppet

This predates division by zero, eyes so ancient

It must know the Frame of God

Too bad the interspecies language barrier

Elderly couple sleeping

As close to death as a cougar

To a rabbit in the high grass

she drew me a face on a napkin her other

hand gripped her teacup, faun & brindle shadows seemed

to erupt from her own face but only seemed

M’self I had a head full of meanwhiles & something sharp

In my pants that was stabbing at my thigh

I was running short of money & there was a volcano

Nearby like a newly minted stamp

(SHARK’S TEETS, page two, no stanza break)

Skin like a weather map

Wrinkled like a scrotum

Beneath Mount Rushmore,

A man in a three cornered hat

Lonely as a flag

Who’s got absinthe for brains

From deep in the bushes where the drought birds decompose

Comes the thick moon smell of Autumn Somebody

Steps on a twig & it sounds like Lightning

Weird, it looks like Thunder but it sounds like Lightning

I stopped smoking years ago years

But as for me I wish I still you know

Could set a thing on fire & inhalate the ash

A RAT IN THE ICE CREAM

(SUBTRACTION)

It wouldn’t be so fair or kind to my children

To leave behind me this trail of clothing

mountains of flannel & denim

Rayon nylon cotton wool or pure silk

“worth his weight in clothes, he was, too lazy

To throw them away or give them away

Or wish them away or lose them in airports”

It’s one thing if you’ve lived an interesting life

To leave behind your thousands of books

Your music saved on obsolete formats

The weird & even weirder contents of your top

Dresser drawers called personal effects

But your clothes your shedded snake skins of fabric:

Ties to talk to bankers in: turtle necks to hide tattoos

The naugahyde beneath the jaw The nooses & the love beads

Not to mention the claustrophobia of pants

By the time you get to the Emerald City

Your clothes are your bandages

(LONG DIVISION)

It’s a tunnel in a cave somewhere

Metaphysically speaking

Let’s say the doctor refused, refused to

Do the operation or prescribe you any

Viagra no Viagra for you

& the last escape clause you imagined it limped

In via the Holy Roman Catholic & Apostolic

Church Salvation postage due

Please remit So you crawl & you keep crawling

You’re looking for questions No way

Are you looking for answers

Tonight in video-enhanced fog you start to

Wonder whatever happened to everybody

You used to hang with decades

Ago (before the extinction of the Perry Mastodon)

Before they invented the handshake

But after the rocks cooled

After the boy scouts trained you in the fine art

Of identifying venomous snakes

There’s one now Spotted Abacus

Swimming upstream Upstream

In what happens to be the River of Life

Rio de la Vida Careful not to

Stick your tongue in her mouth

Multiplying factors (& what the hell are factors?)

It’s Lent happens every year

We fast during the season of scarcity

Nuns and muggers lurk in the shadows

I am hopelessly addicted to myself

Can’t go do the Stations

I’m too ashamed

How do Protestants handle these things?

Once a Protestant handed me a pamphlet

It told me things about hell

Protestant Jesus obsessed with our

Bodily fluids returning here pretty damn soon

Eastern Orthodox Jesus looking pretty

Foreign like somebody’s dead uncle from

The old old country & not one of those

Where tourists congregate

But it’s loaves & fishes not bodily fluids

I care about Where are the loaves

& where are the fishes? I’ve heard

About the leftovers Lenten food

HALF-ASS RETURNS TO OZ

I have no idea

I do not know

I am ignorant

like a goat pinned between

two buffalo

I’ve been lost so long

lost feels like home

Also I feel like cold toast

As long as I stay away from

asking questions however

I do just fine

like an octopus

with eight (count ‘em) eight

mittens        but none to spare

My hands are idiots My feet

no longer waltz in American English

There are parts of my body

which have no names