Flight of Ideas Read online

  Flight of Ideas

  Poems by Robert T. Jeschonek

  *****

  The Last Night of the Last Bokey-Bokey on Earth

  Hindquarters glowing dim red in the darkness, you perch on the sleeping man's big toe,

  Holding on with your barbed black feet, six eyes gaping like pimento-stuffed olives

  'round your pink-glowing knot of a head.

  You shiver like a violin string in time with his breathing, so excited you can barely control yourself,

  Yet melancholy, for this will be the last time your kind merges with humanity,

  With a man,

  For you are bzzeep zeep you are the last of the Bokey-Bokeys.

  Your name meaning savior

  Your name meaning conscience

  Your name meaning beauty

  Your name meaning hope.

  As you shinny up his leg, through the forest of his leg-hair,

  You buzzwhistle a traditional song, a mating song that's been with your people always,

  Something about crawling through gates, oozing up a tunnel

  Burrowing into a mound, piercing clay with roots like needles,

  Only the gates are teeth, the tunnel's a windpipe,

  Bzzeep zeep the mound's a brain.

  Once, men begged your kind to visit them in the night, they made burnt offerings and spoke through shamans and priests who knew the chants and dances it took to draw you from hiding. They cheered and shook rattles as you shinnied up sweat-soaked backbones by firelight, buzzwhistling your litany of promises. Sparks of static flickering from your million-fold cilia, wings glittering like fresh-dipped paraffin, pincers clacking front and back as did the pincers of your forebears, all the countless googolplexes of them in all the nonillions of centuries. Gods you were then, your methods unchanged from the first trilobite, first coelacanth, first dinosaur, first rodent. Names unchanged from the grunts of the first amphibian squatting in the mud, buh-kee...buh-kee...Bokey...Bokey...first gods of the creatures of the Earth, bzzeep zeep and now this, and now you.

  If he woke, he would fling you across the room or crush you with the flat of his hand,

  So pick your steps carefully through the thicket of his belly and chest.

  Easy now, pry his lips open and slip past the teeth,

  Giving off just enough anesthetic salve from the glands between your toes to numb the tongue and throat.

  Once inside, you will make him dream as in days of old,

  The bull bowing its head before him,

  The eagle carrying him aloft, the sphinx with his features.

  This is how all gods bred prophets at one time bzzeep zeep by entering

  And entwining with the animal form.

  Just because man has forgotten the Bokey-Bokey doesn't mean the Bokey-Bokey

  Has forgotten man.

  The man chuckles softly in his sleep as you claw your way into his brain,

  Swallowing nuggets of salty gray pudding as your sacrament, the host of your host.

  By morning, he will be changed beyond recognition inside,

  Become pilgrim of an ancient nameless faith, disciple of a god both real and in his head

  Who will give to him the greatest gift for one last time, the inspiration

  For the leap of intuition and compassion, bzzeep zeep geometric evolution

  Fit to change a world as a thrown bucket of paint changes a painting

  And you shall curl up and wait in your burrow, Bokey-Bokey,

  For the bullet that pierces your hideaway as one always does,

  The god-killing bullet that stops the leap forward

  And you, the last Bokey-Bokey, squirm and sigh one last time,

  Receding like the final whir of summer's last katydid, unseen in the shadows,

  A candleflame snuffed by the wind, a god of gods past,

  Sinking fast,

  Your name meaning barren

  Your name meaning conscienceless

  Your name meaning unbecoming

  Your name meaning hopeless.

  *****

  What Was Under the Refrigerator Magnet Stuck to the Death Ray Generator

  Dear Doctor Stonehenge,

  Sorry about scalping you

  inadvertently

  with my laser vision,

  but I couldn’t let you put on your

  Thinking Cap

  and possibly defeat me.

  As for the Death Ray,

  why not point it at someone

  we all hate the next time?

  People would pay you more

  to take lives

  than save lives

  You idiot.

  But you didn’t hear that from me.

  Now about the baboonapotamus:

  Wouldn’t a crocotiger

  or piranhahawk

  make more sense?

  Or a couple of codependent

  manic-depressive

  passive-aggressives

  crossed with vampire bats?

  But that’s just my opinion.

  Now listen:

  We both know I’m a righteous crusader,

  Red, white, and blue

  from my shades to my jock strap,

  but times are changing

  and to tell you the truth

  the country’s headed more in your direction

  than mine.

  Plus which,

  ever since we broke up,

  I’ve been thinking

  you have a point,

  and maybe if I’d compromised a little,

  taken an interest in your work,

  like instead of stopping your plan

  to hire more illegal immigrants as henchmen,

  what if I’d, say,

  wiped out the rain forest with my nuclear piss

  or carved Satan on Mount Rushmore?

  I think we could have had

  a different cliffhanger ending,

  one without your new sidekick Contempto,

  who by the way I’m sorry about killing

  in the line of duty

  with my hyper-sneeze and gun-shooting powers

  in the line of duty.

  So anyway,

  maybe we can team up sometime,

  but only if you get your act together,

  and no more lameass weapons

  like the Low Self-Esteem Ray

  or the Incontinence Flea

  and no theme crimes based on nursery rhymes

  or silent movies.

  And no, for the record,

  this has nothing to do with my trying to dominate

  the relationship

  (which there isn’t one, anyway,

  as we both know)

  or what happened last November

  on the cruise ship you sank

  single-handedly.

  But let’s not beat a dead horse.

  What matters is,

  I’ve seen the light of evil

  so to speak

  and we’re both on the same side at last.

  With my brawn

  and your brains

  (all three of them)

  nothing can stop us.

  (And just imagine how great the sex would be,

  not that there would be any

  because of course there’s no

  “us”

  and I swear to Hitler and Jack the Ripper

  I’m totally only in it for the evil.)

  *****

  Whisperin' Jim

  Whisperin’ Jim came by today, said he wanted to play him some bill-yards. Instead, we ended up talkin about the brevity and tragedy of existence over this here bottle a tequila, now empty. For some reason, Jim had it in his consarned head pod that life’s a hopeless dogpil
e, and the best we can hope for is ta duck the worst of the crapstorm. Bein a member of the Order of Quasi-Approximates, I hold to the belief that life is more or less a kind of almost thing. Neither here nor there, fish nor fowl, boots nor beer. Everythin’s half-formed, half-realized, half-nuts; take a look around ya and tell me ya don’t agree. And maybe we’ll experience the other half someday, and all this garbage’ll make sense or at least it’ll be less nonsensical. We might all be surprised.

  After our talk, Whisperin’ Jim spread open his chest cavity and out popped Darnell, this li’l lifeboy that keeps ol’ Jim’s organs tickin and ticklin. Darnell said in his garglin kinda voice that he agreed with me, there had to be more to it all. Lookin around at the beet red wiry roots of the ingrown trees, I said you got that right, buddy. Maybe the other half of our reality has blue ingrown trees steada red. Maybe the squirrelsquitos got a neon green proboscis stead of a neon orange one. And then there’s our one emotion, rishiga, the feeling of solidity; maybe that’s a feeling of intangibility in the other half a the univerge.

  So tonight, I been thinkin. What if that other half a reality exists and is aware of us? What if even now, as I write this in my own exotic fluids, someone else on the other side a the curtain’s extrudin a very different side of the story on their piezo-electric hardshells? What would they think a all this boozin Whisperin’ Jim an I do every interval with Darnell and his own inner chestpup Queeg? Would they unnerstand what we been through these past seven awarenesses, or would they turn away an say how inappropriately cartilaginous our gag reflexes have comported their attitude/lyricism modules? And what about the world bubbles fizzing always around us, rising from the electric yellow up-ground and sailing downward, then popping with the sweet shrill squeals of released pressure. Each planet swarming with barely visible bug-specks in ant farm formation, all bursting into the ether when the razor breeze slices through their watery, craggy globelands, spraying them into eternity as we sing the ancient “Wish upon a bursting bubble” song. Maybe, in that other half a reality, they sing the same song, but in reverse. Wouldn’t that be somethin to hear, Whisperin’ Jim? Wouldn't it?

  *****

  Sister

  I used to think the Holy Spirit scratched daily at my door

  Furred in gray and black and mottle,

  Winding around my legs and singing for supper.

  Now I know that at best, the Spirit is a feckless hummingbird,

  Darting in and out of my life on whirring emerald wings,

  Been and gone before I finish a blink.

  I felt like Saint Francis of the cats

  But my Sisters bitched about the smell and filth and one day

  My strays stopped coming.

  I still kneel in the rose marble chapel

  Wearing the gleaming silver band of Christ my bridegroom,

  Silver as the hair beneath my habit,

  On my wedding ring finger.

  But the one thing my Sisters cannot command is my prayers,

  And I confess,

  I do not always pray good things for them.

  From my window, I see the very graveyard where I will rot but

  I think I am rotten already.

  *****

  Night School

  Little kids

  playing at sin

  break rules shuck

  laws kick

  curfews go

  wild under young moons.

  They flow down alleys and black streets

  like whiskey,

  blood like liquor,

  burning and dizzy.

  They explode in Chevys out

  tailpipes strained

  mufflers and Yamahas

  that roar their heart

  beats.

  They blaze neon paths

  through schoolnights and

  fast food, beer

  cans and back

  seats, whispers.

  They stalk the shadows

  and storm through

  smoke, laughing

  loud, spitting

  brown, kissing

  lips and bottles.

  They stand tall, strut

  cocky, mark

  territory with broken glass

  and shiny tin tabs.

  They shake fists, curse

  hotly, gun

  engines, sneer savvy.

  And in bottles and smoke,

  through beer and rage,

  they hide,

  take a stand

  against scary dawns,

  dicey futures.

  They flicker through midnights

  like cigarette ashes,

  wild and bright

  and aimless,

  finding out.

  *****

  Prayer Against Children

  The first time you realize

  Five fourteen-year-olds

  Acting in concert

  Can kill you

  Five twelve-year-olds

  Ten-year-olds

  Eight-year-olds

  Ten five-year-olds

  Not even with guns or knives

  Or rocks

  Just fists and feet

  Nails

  Teeth

  And the only thing holding them back

  Is the thinnest tissue

  Of rules and fear and conscience

  Gangs of child pickpockets

  Pick you blind and leave you for

  The streetsweeper

  Laughing playing tag

  Cherubic

  So empty

  So unworthy you were too

  Remember

  Twenty-five

  Thirty

  Forty

  Was that when it happened to you?

  Became a victim?

  Behind every smile

  Every one of them hungry

  That's what worries you most

  You remember

  You know

  A crackling flame lashing blindly

  An avalanche

  A runaway truck

  Screaming

  Flashing across the glittering ice of your precious predictable life in the

  glaring

  sunlight.

  *****

  Where we go by the cold light of day

  In your pocket

  In your purse

  In a song on the radio

  In the sole of your shoe.

  By night, we scuffle under the bed push the switch on the ice maker jangle the wind chimes whatever it takes to make you start make you stir from your blissful

  In the hem of your skirt

  In your wallet

  In the corner of your mouth

  In the voice on the train.

  Midnight you might think would be our favorite time when dreams roll in and wash over you you ragged flotsam on the sand but no we love the day the best the time of diversion when we can

  Under your fingernail

  In the smell of coffee

  In the smoothness of your desk

  In the ring of a phone.

  We love you I swear we'll never leave you this our passion our purpose to pluck you always like strings on a fiddle like buzz in a wire always keeping you in play never letting you relax or find the kind of peace that lets you

  In your inbox

  On the sidewalk

  In the stems of your glasses

  Over the cubicle wall.

  In the face in the mirror.

  *****

  Incongruity

  In a public bathroom,

  On a urinal,

  A crumpled pamphlet rests,

  Trying to reach patrons

  With the word of God,

  Ignoring incongruity,

  Using it to attract,

  Hoping, between flushes,

  To save a soul.

  *****

  Rain

  Listen

  Listen

  Listen to the rain,

  That forlorn tattoo

  Patting
my windows consolingly

  As if to say

  “That’s all right”

  “That’s all right,”

  But only making it worse.

  Like a thousand sympathetic shoulders,

  The droplets seek to hide my pane,

  Succeeding only in blurring it

  For a moment

  And streaming away

  In

  Tiny

  Glass

  Ri

  vers.

  *****

  Synchronize

  Three men with mallets

  And swing drop lift

  Swing drop lift

  Pounding a

  Spike in a

  Railroad tie.

  Each one in rhythm

  And swing drop lift

  Swing drop lift

  Striking the

  Spike with an

  Echoing clang.

  Smelling of sweat

  And tobacco and

  Coffee they

  Swing drop lift

  Mallets and miss not one

  Beat.

  Hot grimy sun like a

  Brand in the sky and its

  Bright blazing rays

  Could fry eggs on the

  Steel.

  Bandanas and workshirts are

  Soaked through with sweat and the

  Faces are shining

  With glistening

  Sheen.

  Expressions contorted

  And swing drop lift

  Swing drop lift

  Muscles all straining

  As if they could burst,