Doug Holder, US

 

 

Free Verse   I Know Bernie, I Can Get You In * For Bernie Madoff   There was a long line for the men's room. You know, when men reach a certain age, there is an urgency to their frequent trips. So I saw an opportunity, I told them: "I know Bernie, I can get you in." "Really!" they cried. But I played it coy, "But it ain't easy", I said. "Bernie doesn't let everyone take a quick trip to the head." Their lips quivered, their hands started to shake: "But, but... you can get us in right?" They forced money in my hands and they stampeded to the portals of those so valued urinals and knocked ferociously on the locked door "I know Bernie, let me in!" They wound up doing it on the floor.     "Words are stains on the silence." ( Samuel Beckett)   The disembodied tongue flits and flutters just above the looming void. The string of household banalities— all the expired and dented cans the litter for the cat's unending piss. The nervous lamenting, the grocery lists of that and for christ's sake this will never be missed in the abyss.     About Doug Holder   Doug Holder's work will appear in The Long Island Quarterly, the new renaissance, The Boston Globe Magazine, Home Planet News, Poesy and others. He is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press, and his latest poetry collection is The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel ( Cervena Barva Press); he has a new collection of interviews: "From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers" ( Ibbetson Street)—Doug Holder. This is Doug Holder's first appearance in Sketchbook.