It’s a High Voltage Adventure
Nathaniel S. Rounds
Fowlpox Press
©MMXII Nathaniel S. Rounds
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-0-9879561-3-2
Contents:
Can I level with you? Like the bread you buy these days, this is mostly air.
Red-Handed Dial Bliss
Hit banal, inebriant truth
With the story of a downhearted pop
And his grown boy
Old people still talk about them
The fatherless, motherless aurochs
Chuck Steak Durabrand
Who came out of Nowhere
And disappeared down a crack in the sidewalk
And his adopted pig
Blind Ludwig Howdybrant
Chuck Steak is sitting in his skivvies
Scrutinizing television
And coaxing a beer
Sofa and floor boards bowing beneath him
And he recounts while he takes in the Leafs score
How he was pushing hard this old ambulance
Up a steep hill and his tires gave out
All eight horses gave out
And his spirits gave out
He had been a fast driver
Saved countless people from death
Including one kid who had slashed his wrists
Horizontally
Chuck Steak wanted to say
“If you want to do it right,
Cut this way,”
Showing vertically
“Not like that”
But calmness of the tongue
Is the Tree of Life
So he bound up the kid’s wounds
And took him to emergency
And the kid mended his ways
And sold radio ad time in Toronto
Until his early retirement
But after the burnout on the hill
Chuck Steak was shaken for good
He drove taxi to make ends meet
That’s how Blind Ludwig the pig
Came to live with him
He was left in a blanket in the backseat
With a note that read
“My husband died of thorium poisoning
In a lab explosion. After settling our affairs
I have no money to look after Ludwig,
So please take care of him,”
Which Chuck Steak did for eighteen years
No complaints
He had always been skeptical of his own parenthood
So it just seemed the right thing to do
He kept the taxi top light in a steamer trunk
With a Bible and some pictures
But he kept no secrets
His sins gibbeted in full view of neighbors
There above the laundry lines and chalk-marked sidewalks
He drew his lost loves and regrets in the air
With a broken hoof
Dreamt of green fields
And streams in spring time
And no enslavement to CB radios or taximeters
And time to get it right
With this father thing
And making peace
With peace
Home Amongst the Ruins
I tried to build a building from the sky down
Didn’t get the roof top level
That’s why the stone foundation
Floats over the dugout cellar on the east side
Crows took to sliding off the slanted roof line
Wild boars wandered into the cellar
And settled in
Seems a sin to ask them to leave
It’s like they were meant to always be
Below the frost line
And I now have affection for
Their adaptation as endorsement
Maddening, Large Arsonist
There goes Pink Al on a pale horse
That febrile poet
The largest of the lesser apes
His horse dances forward
Then backward on chair leg stilts
Pink Al rewords in finger-cymbal sing-song
Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis divi Claudii
Reeking of marigolds and tangerines
Then he writes rabbinical babble on bottles of soap
Decrying the plasticization of both cobbler and cook
After their journey to the Kingdom of Kush
In search of a whale shark refugee camp
Stuck aboard a jollyboat
Rife with factionalism and bad sushi
This old heel and the good soul, says Pink Al
Were so very far from Sanssouci
And he meanders into their alchemic fate
As cadavers circling a water wheel
Pulling up wisdom from a deep well
Pink Al then takes a non sequitur by the collar down a long
Dark alley and shakes him down for some change
Moments later
He exits the alley
Agitated and alone
His solitary prize:
A one hundred dollar bill and a signed declaration of stagnation
So he and his horse board a crosstown bus
Now they’re off to ask Gambrinus
For a pot of ale and safety
Fake References (Keen Farce Frees)
When Devorah Vasconcelos
Came from apartment 2204
To babysit my Chihuahuas
I was initially grateful
Until
Following the concert and dinner with my wife
I received a full report from my eldest dog
Detailing how Devorah
Drank all my beer (which I substantiated)
And dressed herself in my chicken costume
(It
Was in a locked security box
So how did she…)
Devorah lined up all three Chihuahuas
In the kitchen
(ages 1-3)
And told them a tale about her near-murder
Of a college roommate
And how they would need to be careful
So as not to distress her
And then she made them watch Midnight Express
And now my three-year-old Chihuahua
Wakes up barking Billy Hayes
Billy Hayes
Staring into middle distance
And biting his kennel door
Like prison bars
Pull
One arm grappled around that summer house that sits on the crag over New England foam
While the other brushed away that gull
And my eyes told the chatty Kathy from Rhode Island to shut up shut up shut it and bury it
And then I tried to pull you closer to me
As we rode on that bus-as-trolley so popular in Ogunquit and York
Words failed me
I see you as a wild doe might
Or as a nocturnal feeder
I can’t deal direct
Ly
With you nor can I
Build a bridge
And let you cross it with confidence
We walk along the Marginal Way
I fear asking questions that dig too deep
Even in this sea rose vista
Then
Hours later at the Fun-O-Rama
We smash our way through pinball games
Until they are matchsticks and fragments of numbers
Perhaps we’ll count the time together
Against the score we forgot to hold on to
Paysage
The bachelor apartment on South Park Street
Has this thi
rty-year-old poster reproduction
Of a Rouault landscape
That looks like a Ryder
But it is not—there are too many greens for Ryder
And look at that bold yellow
Maybe it’s too abstract even for that eccentric fart
But I can see the two discussing it
Man to man
With a certain camaraderie
Like a preconceived conversation
For a 1940s newsreel
The cracks in the painting
Seem to have been contributed by Ryder
The
Sketch-like quality seems to belong to Rembrandt
With that bold afterthought of the man
When the Dutch genius made field sketches
A sketch blurts descriptions of the opening scene
Like a sharp blast of European
Jazz reinterpreted as a theatrical backdrop
As visualized by Chinese followers of Basho
And neither the indifferent reproduction
Or the sun’s rays on old ink
Can diminish the immediacy
Of this entombed land
Like A Red Morn
That shameless little guy, she mused
That smooth-talking King Cottonmouth
He needs to be reminded of his glass house
Get ushered inside
Bolted inside
In this room of orphaned china bisque dolls and pyrite
Tar-scented ship rigging and sail
The wooden ladder positioned under the cross beam
Succumbed to a broken leg and step
Declaring its weaknesses by imposing them upon an
Unsuspecting girl of twenty-six with broom in one hand
Her head stopped by slab stone while King Cottonmouth
Descended a jack post
To examine
Her flailing hands rebuked by rusty saw blades while
She waded through rising rivulets of red
And now we’ve no word regarding the early life
Winterberry wife cake
Zoha Diakonos
Although it is widely understood that she
Did not kick up the dust on the floor
She relinquished not an inch of precious time
For her pocket-sized feet to reach it
And in the morning light
She whipped the warehouse on the wharf
Into presentable-to-the-public-shape
To a new jack swing
There in her page-boy black hair
Black tee and shorts
And
M- 1965 field jacket
She had a broom-as-mallet
And an incendiary comportment
You could feel razing the streets with the cop cars blocking us
From passage
She was a heat that scared Atlantic gentle winds
And motorcycle bar draught beer/mesquite/ white bread and gravy jabber
This
Only child of a man born near the Cave of the Apocalypse
And his wife
(A correspondent cum copy editor from Mumbai)
Sweeping out uncertainty and pained condescension
Leaving no place for dust balls or devils
With her eagle’s watch
Who dared creep amongst this sleeping pile of porcelain
Palms and knees and clothed loins in this many-sided sickbay
Born in the Hôtel Nelligan
Art is not a handicraft you leave in the alley there on Beach Street in Daytona
Art is not something you abort because it counters your programme
Zoha was ART all in uppercase letters
ART had to bleed through all the disparate currents and somehow find a home
She had her long tresses and objections cut with shears by an obliging carpenter
And she worked against the superfine and the self-exalted without the smallest of
Provocations or dog bites
The high tessitura of her role ruined her voice
But the angels still listened with persistent devotion
She gave birth to a man
An out-and-out he-man in snake skin booties
She ejected him from her long, navy kit bag-shaped womb
Which she had often pointed like a finger at King Cottonmouth
I.e., “I want YOU to act like a provider, spade head”
But somehow accepted that she would be busy fighting and feeding
Like a hawk everlastingly
While getting crushed and melted down into
A fly’s breath falling through a passing shadow
She was that muse in the closet to
That bookish poet with the tongue of silk
Who painted her with words
Which variously praised and damned her
As either Queen Esther or Jezebel
And now
In this red sea fashioned from ill ladder and serpent
Made her downfall red amongst the heartwood within
And the palms and evergreens without
While her offspring in cobwebbed pram
Cut through darkness with beaming eyes
While King Cottonmouth minded his own head
Pirate Talk
Rómulo Delgado Raúl Humberto Soto
The paradoxical frog
Had jumped off the Venezuelan tall ship
Simón Bolívar onto a Halifax dock
And through a series of mishaps and mishops
Found himself fighting sleep
While attempting a fluent conversation with a harbour seal
Who had thought it might be nice to bask in the sunshine
On the Shore of Point Pleasant Park
The seal made a few comments in Spanish
Quoting Rafael Cadenas
Then launched into a disquieting story in his customary sailor talk
Which was softened somewhat by his easy smile
Complete with thick tongue and saucer-sized eyes:
While me mate Maurice were walkin' 'is tart hammer and tack home
I flushed me trophy winnin' arse berries dahn the john
And tried ter break the bloody neck of that
Flat-toned tin-eared clammy-fisted Laodicean 'oo spieled dinner speeches
At a table runnin' riot wiv marmoset monkeys dressed as buccaneers
Breafink discontent
(This
Were not a singular event)
And then I 'ad a most delightful Bowler Hat wif a Charles Fox in the bloody Johnnie Horner of the Bleedin' washroom and I 'ad kept me Hackney Marsh mince pie upon it and me Robin Hood Mince pie upon it and could tell from its dimensions that it was a most comely cardboard Charles Fox and I said ter it: Are ya not familiar ter me? Did I not spy ya in New York’s Central Noah's Ark away hammer and tack in 1987? Were ya not then a resplendent oak tree and Pope In Rome ter a fousan red squirrels?
And I were at its feet sprorled out much like I'm now. And its recourse were as follows:
“If yer plan ter spread out as yer do now and ter stay that way, know that I 'ave a mucker in an Axe man 'oo will gladly cut yer frough and turn yer into an 'earff rug. So kindly leave me be and Make yorself scarce, yer froffy seal, right, yer. “
And so I spot frogs and kings and and the quiet and the bloody loud all go pass me by, and I Smile like a child and wish yer well. Anyfink yer wish ter say before yer wish me leave?
To which Rómulo Delgado Raúl Humberto Soto
The paradoxical frog replied:
“El velero lustroso de la muerte
Pasea tu silencio por mis mares sombríos….”
-- Esto de mi amigo, Vicente Gerbasi
You There
Laugh lines and signs of failing liver
Wrinkles and knobby belly
They say one thing:
The child has turned old
/> The child has turned into a crooked man
And he crumples up like a dry leaf
On the dance floor
Ask the janitor for a shovel
Scoop up that dry corpse from the dance floor
Do it quickly
Do it fast
Let the music last
And last