Hugh Fox, US

 

 

Free Verse    Agéd   These old beast-women with the perfect black-nyloned legs and the parfait blonded hair, whoever heard of unaged wine, unantiqued furniture or jewelry, just off the bench surrounded as I am by my own treasure house flesh, amiga soul-mates over-sweet-ripe in the shedding orchards of (classic Roman Holiday films) once-upon- a-time lust.     Hauntings   Maslanka's Concerto for alto saxophone, midgety Joseph Lulloff on sax, and my uncle Jake/James Mangan reincarnates inside me, jazz saxophonist in all the right Chicago bars, when he wasn't bugging his sister (my mother) or selling jewelry on the job at the First National Bank, or beering it up, bowling it down,         E = Jake Mangan         to the power of               infinity. gone now for, what, 40 years, buried somewhere in the Arizona (Rest in Heat) Desert, I don't want to know where.     Sleep   In the beginning was sleep and the Word was sleep and night became vaed/ eternal, instead of these words, sleep, instead of pizza, sleep, instead of falling-apart news, erection ads, sleep, as if we had never been, had had been forever sleep.....V'sham-ru v'-nei Yisraeil et he-Yashan / The people of Israel shall keep ....SLEEP.....     Starting   Starting to look foreward to Death now, no more changing the covers ten times every night, trying to turn off what was her name, you know, the Swedish or was she Norwegian ass in Florence when you were 23... AAS, that was it, the name of that Thai restaurant in Kansas City we used to love, the name of that mall, it's closed down now, isn't it...that obscure side street in Lansing where they have a bench next to the river that no one seems to know about but me, Beethoven's 6th symphony, the what?, Tristam and Who?. the bone-cartilage pains in the left side of my chest, all the little itchy-witchies in my groin, some kind of uneraseable penis-fungus, snow-shoveling and here come the remnants of Hurricane Oz, she doesn't like garage sales, I live for them, although in the last few years, whatever happened to the antique flowering English China and the Hopi Indian masks, my sleep pills' rotting rooster taste, their two day after-effect, little big-bark dogs all over when you're out for your evening survival walk, the sectarian violence, Osaman Ben You Know, my TIAA Cref retirement money, the price of peaches, poet-friends and Chicago cousins dying, "healthful" instead of gorgeous chocolate....not even wanting cloud-walking next anything, just eternal zero.     Mid   Not mid-West but mid-Ireland, mid- England, Bohemia, fiddling around on ancestral roofs, the only caustics the crumb-munch black bread and sourest of krauts, driving by thousand acre farms, always a forest on the horizon where I want to tunnel in and forget any electrification.