Looking through the window,
there she was,
behind the bar,
tending to the locals.

She herself,
my friend,
had become a local.

I wondered
if she begrudged
Hiawatha Kansas
the local-ness
that it had ****** upon
her.

I decided
that it would be better
if I didn’t ask.

Because my own hometown
was still home;
still feeling like someplace
That could be,
maybe do better,
but would rather not.

Choosing instead
to smoke cigarettes,
drink ***** and Red Bull,
while waiting for tomorrow.

Tomorrow would always show up,
looking just a bit more hopeful than yesterday;
remaining less motivated than we’d anticipated
last night.

I drove 39 miles with a belly full of
ate-at-home food,
leaving the house in favor of the blues band
playing downtown.

After their set,
I lost interest,
seeking something beyond the proffered
Friday night loudness and parking-lot
Mexican food.

I decided to see my friend, Abigail.

39 miles of ink-black nothing,
speed-trap smallness,
a couple of Casey’s
with
their lights shut off;
pizza ovens and donut fryers
gone cold for the night.

Red’s Alehouse looks like
It could actually be a house.

(there’s not much to it.)

The Budweiser sign,
neon.
the OPEN sign,
flashing.

Peering,
entering;
she screams in delight.
we laugh.
I sit.
we talk.

She dutifully fills new glasses,
washes those abandoned.

Someone puts a twenty-dollar bill
in her tip jar.

It was a good night,
a fair adventure.

I drove home again in the ink of the Kansas night.

36 HWY,
through the same speed-trap towns,
those convenience stores still
locked tight.
It was fine,
there in the dark.

Neither hungry nor thirsty,
I was sated.

I’d met ****,
Steve,
Jared,
and
George, who’d wanted a sandwich and some potato chips
where there were none to be had.

I laughed with my friend, Abigail.

We’d spoken of dreams long-abandoned
to work and changing circumstances;
finding satisfaction in simplicity and our own
intellects;
sometimes feeling that smartness
is in short supply in our
separate Red-State lives.

I pulled into my driveway
grateful for minutes spent,
memories shared.

I’ll stop in again
saying hello sometime
before the winter sets in
to stay for a while.

Maybe George will be there.

Perhaps I’ll stop by one of those Casey’s
before it’s shut tight or gone cold.

We can tell more stories,
sharing slices of our lives
along with
greasy pizza.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2021

I came back to the bookseller’s counter
advising that I wanted to utilize the new
nook.  

As I’d sniffed pages earlier,
we’d spoken of plucking guitar strings and
the benefits of
retreating into one’s office to write for the afternoon.

I used to do that.
No remorse, no regret, always cared what it meant...

after the clientele was seen, observed to be secure
in their homes,
tired eyes, hips, knees and backs noted
as required,
I left houses that didn’t belong to me,
slipped outside of lives that were not mine;
lives that I’d invested in anyway,
as much as it mattered and for what it was worth.

Slipping back into my office,
the blonde wood of the door shutting the hallway noise out
enough so that I could concentrate
on something other than the safety of some old lady,
retreating to the memory of what I’d just done
with the eyes of an outsider.

Write.
Write the sadness of that lonely old girl
out of your guts.

Write.
Write the misery of a 65 year old veteran
who’s fallen into homelessness after serving a country
that appears ungrateful but we both hope isn’t.

Resources, in the vernacular, are a slow go SNAFU,
a ***** that shows up
just as the fall breezes begin to bite
with December teeth.

Write.
(I tell myself again and again.)
So as not to cry
and do it here,
in this quiet,
paid-for space
so that you can feel like a writer,
not like a fraud,
a failure with a heart too big for your chest;
a devil in your brain who drives so fast that everything’s a blur,
a car-wrecked,
attention-span grab,
an emotional ambulance ride to nowhere good.

Write.
So that when the tears fall,
You can publish them,
Taking ownership before they dry.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2021

They ask me about words
and
I forget that they often
don’t know the same words
that I do.

I forget that sometimes my words
and
their words are mysterious
and
often not as profane
as they might be used to.

Then, I remember
that there are countless words,
concepts,
ideas,
and
beliefs that I am totally,
sometimes shamefully,
unaware of.
(all of these based in vernaculars unfamiliar)

None of us live the same type of life.

None of us
have earned passage
through hardship
any more or less
than anyone else.

Ours are circumstances,
unshared.

Not luck, not fate, not grace,
not inherent anyway.

No different than my last name being Claywell
and
my typing that very same name
into the system of The Department of Corrections;
seeing that name,
the same as mine,
unowned by me,
belonging to faces of men
and
women that I have never
and
likely would not ever meet
in our respective lives.

What does it matter?
It’s a name,
no different
or more or less special than Jones or Smith.

The name is mine and theirs,
as unique to us as we are to one another;
poet
or
prisoner.

Person first, second, and third.

Like a story,
a book,
a treatment plan,
sitting on a shelf or locked inside
a mind until the proper moment
providence or provisional,
authored by the judiciary or just
some guy.
(like me)

We live by words,
are released by words,
are transformed by words,
frightening, fitful, fretful or foreign.

Words give us our humanity,
allow us to encourage or enrage,
engaged so as to establish
a renewal,
reestablished ability to
manifest,
to actualize
the abracadabra
of
our own magic act…

our lives.


*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2021

You typed out
your lack of desire
to keep the charade going.

You proffered
a predicted end to this existential
ebb and flow
of day by day
madness and miasma.

Yet, I could not abide
and
rest assured that I am no savior
nor saint.

My robes are terry cloth
with sequins, none.
No cape,
no boots,
no symbols of better than whomever.

I have only an unwillingness to stop.  

Because stopping is
to ensure that the darkness
and
the demons prevail
and
I refuse
to allow that to occur today.

Together,
dear unknown one,
we will become as phoenix;
being reborn
in the flame of overcoming.

Tempered we will be,
in the forge of discomfort
and
disquiet,
knowing still that we can be better,
we can do better,
we can become better than what is now,
doing so for our future selves
and
those who call us
by names other than our very own.

You typed out
your lack of desire
to keep the charade going.

However,
I see no charade at all.
I see honest insecurity.
A self-doubt that staggers.
I see a sadness
that seeps out of shin bones
rising clear up to the eyes
and
leaks out as heavy as a downpour
for reasons that have little
in the way of explanation.

I tell you,
little friend,
it’s not your fault.

We live in a society
driven mad by algorithms
that over-gift us our own brain chemicals
and
leave us like addicts
at the doorsteps
of churches or taverns,
trap houses
or jail cells.

Our more advanced existence
has handicapped
our ability to
communicate effectively.

The savvy
among our beastly brethren
take full advantage
of the last sinew of innocence
that we have left.

Hold fast,
dearheart,
for this tumult of your youth
will leave scars
and
capture your good heart
in a cage,
leaving a stone in its place.

We mustn't allow this.  

To do so creates a decay
like rust or rot,
which is so difficult to recover from
because it stains everything
and
everyone it touches.  

Even now,
we are surrounded
by the skeptical,
the cynical,
the altogether untoward
and
unwilling to be otherwise.

You typed out
your lack of desire
to keep the charade going.

Be advised,
if it hurts,
it’s not a charade at all,
it is an investment
in a desire for change
that feels like something better
than what is right now,
what is wrong now.  

We will seek a new now;
and
know that there are more of us,
more of you,
more of we
than you can even imagine.

All that I ask
is that you continue…
for yourself,
for my own self,
for the selves
that we have yet to become,
but will eventually.

So, please,
Exist.
Exist for me.
I'll exist for you.
Together we'll exist
for all of the people
who love
and
need us in this world.
Maybe,
even some people
we have yet to meet.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2021

A temporary wealth
is all that I am ever allotted.
A brief understanding,
as well as an ability to be understood.

We entertain ourselves
with coarse language,
crude humor,
a commitment to behave
as we know we should,
for a while anyway.

Even now,
our respective grasps
on whatever it is
that we are allowed to share
during this day’s task is tenuous,
at it’s very best.

There are count times,
microcosms of malcontentedness
that lead to slight infractions
here and there.

We,
I learn daily,
are in passing.
Always, in flux.
We are not pals
and
never shall we abide one another
as more than men,
in conflict
and resolution
at the same time.

It is not a death,
their exit,
usually anyhow.
There is no pall that befalls us.

Each of us is birthed
into the life of the other;
in an effort to facilitate
a change in each other,
I believe.  

An impact,
like an iceberg shipwreck,
rescuing and rewarding the passengers,
most of whom would rather drown themselves outright.  

None of us can swim.
We don’t know how.

We barely know what it means
to live as society says we should.
The rules change more often
than we can keep up.

Yet, we grasp
and
cling to basic, vague understandings
in hopes of surviving
despite our best efforts otherwise.  

We work together,
tumultuous,
listening fecklessly,
recklessly hoping for
the best possible outcome.

It is quite the undertaking.  
This,
this performance,
this penance,
the doing of this
is how we invest,
how we spend our temporary windfall.

We learn,
together,
to be human.

Not that we ever actually were not so.
We learn,
however,
to be ourselves,
incandescent inside of our own skins.

Together, but with lives outside of mine,
for the betterment of all of us.
I learn to be a better humanist
than perhaps I would’ve
if I’d never been endowed
with
this temporary wealth.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2021

The rat-terrier
that I’d loved for
over a decade
has been dead for
awhile now.


Sometimes I miss that dog.
Sometimes I miss cigarettes.

My America is now
the go-to destination
for the suicide-bomber
or
The Mass-Shooting Machine


All of this national abomination
has become all too normal.
&
why is any of this
at all attached,
in any way,
to our
Easter-Sunday-Church-Going
morals?

Tragedy,
a travesty,
trustworthy humans.
-untrue-
mistrustful,
unworthy misogynist,
malcontents
lacking empathy.

Unpaid checks,
no gravity -
a lacking of grateful
hearts.


Our ears destined,
designed, dedicated to hearing
only the hurtful,
instead of the healing.

On the take -
take or be taken
fake or be faking-
make or be made-
scapegoated,
goaded into submission
leaving
us wondering
just what,
exactly is so bad
about hate.

I mean everyone’s doing it these days;
and no one seems to be doing it wrong.

Maybe that’ll change
once we’re on our
deathbeds.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2021

Our job,
in my opinion,
is to make sure
that someone who crosses our grave,
while on an afternoon stroll
across the cemetery,
on their way to the park,
meeting their
love for a picnic,
is able to say to themselves:
“Hey! It’s them! I’ve heard about them!”

Maybe we change things
for the world;
maybe just a handful of folks.

Perhaps the point
of this whole trip
is simply to do;
never to know.

All we can do
is believe in each other;
giving as much of ourselves,
our time,
our talents,
never fully aware
of just how far our
graveyard legacy
might be able to go.


*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2021