Street roots
July 6, 2012
Matador
By Jay Thiemeyer
the way was clear
this sidewalk bare of confusion, so
he punched it
full throttle, De/vil take the hindmost!
his wheelchair fairly flew
four wheel drift, only two wheels on the curves
Fireball Roberts lives!
Viva Fireball of the mind, the moment, the vague
ember of a memory!
Fireball’s mottled red sweats
singing in the rain
I lowered an imaginary cape
said ‘toro,toro, Jack’
Jack lowered his head, laughed and fairly
snorted into his soggy beard.
smiled his keyboard grin, and nodded.
it was the same afternoon as yesterday,
the path a bit more worn between his SRO
and the bar the invisible line
an indelible memory and path
like any other meaningless rut,
but the laughter, the meeting of another person
even an unknown matador like myself
(‘the matador’, he laughed)
made the rain bearable, the emptiness
of his room bearable for another day.
Simply to see someone through the blindness
of that room with the loud neighborless hall.
Each day he ‘delivered the mail’
as he called it. Delivered the mail of his spent day.
‘Pulled the cart’, ‘made the overnight deposit’-
it was the nights that were unbearable, the endless
train of them, the endless
herd, the empties piled in toward him as he lay
in a bed that died years ago though her imprint
in the bed balanced by the slope of his
remained and her small framed likeness
on the Goodwill table
a n d a sm ell he’d lived w ith like the rain in w in ter,
stale beer, stale .sheets, stale air, the smell of when
‘ he realized that morning she had died during the night,
its rain a drumming like the noise
of indifferent or hostile neighbors,
with their own prioritized pain.
the cover of an old magazine, read over and over,
the pictures absorbed for their journeys.
he preferred to forget every damned bit of it,
the drink had cheated him by now
he couldn’t forget a bit of it, it was nailed into him
what he wanted was so simple
a pathway to it so easy:
to have one single thing that wasn’t old and on its way out
He was so swamped in what was old,
he thought for once: he deserved it
In his mind he was a bull again, a bull in Spring,
head up, nostrils keen to what was waiting.
A stranger with a red cape
In the middle of his room, leaning against his bed
indifferent to the window portraying rain
he kicked the dirt and scuffed the floor and snorted
hello to nothing, hello to all of it
that remained with the air going out of his tube
his voice gothic and remote to itself from that hole.
Overhead, some geese heading north. Spring was in the air.
7
• I I
Morning Frost
By David Mair
As you open the door
What do you happen to gaze upon the floor
It’s the spirit of a lover lost
gone away with the morning frost
Futility
By Marian Drake
I’m trying to write a poem called “Futility”
or something like that.
I feel like my ideas fall on deaf or stubborn ears
and nothing ever changes.
But all that comes to me is:
I scratch my kitty’s head.
She rolls it all around on my fingers.
She chirps, and purrs aloud,
pouring out her ecstasy.
homeforward
hope. access, poienibt
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Wednesday, July 11, 2012 through Friday, July 13, 2012
Home Forward is pleased to announce that select waiting lists for public
housing apartment communities will be open to new applicants. Applicants
must meet income guidelines. The head of the household or co-he.ad must be
age 55 or older, or have a disability that a doctor can verify.
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