Penelope was angry with me,
earlier this week I had ripped up
a story that I’d been working on for
a long time.

The story was about an ex-con, with a heart of gold,
he wandered around Nevada and righted a few wrongs
along the way.  

The coolest thing about him was his name and the fact that
he was a little banged up.

In my head, he was kind of an older guy, a ***,
kind of greasy, you know, shifty, reckless, a guy
maybe you could relate to, and he walked with a cane.

Big deal, right?

Penelope didn’t think so; I mean she was smart enough
to know that this story wasn’t my ******* magnum-opus
or anything, but she got ****** because I flipped out, started yelling
about how I was a no good sonofabitch, couldn’t write for ****,
and should give it up and take up ******’ basket-weaving or something.

She tried to tell me that I was being a ******* and that I was a good writer;
pointing out that I’d made it into rags like “Clues”, “Dime Detective”, and that once
I’d even been published in “Web of Mystery”.

But I wouldn’t listen and I told her that she was full of ****, and a pain in the ***,
and that she could do better than a hack like me, and I told her to get the hell
away from me or I might lose my ******* mind and strangle her.

So, she did.  She packed a bag, got in my car, and took off for her cousin’s house upstate.

Now, here I was, without my car, without more than maybe twenty-five bucks to my name,
and without the girl of my dreams.

I was just about to throw my typewriter out the window when the phone rang…

“Penny?”
“Nope.”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, ya dumb ****!”
“Who the **** is ‘me’ and what the **** does ‘me’ want?”
“It’s Dale, ya *******!”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah!”

Dale proceeded to tell me about how he’d just been picked
up by both “Amazing Stories” and “Tales From The Crypt” for a
six month run of short fiction in each and he then tells me that
they’ve seen fit to advance him two-hundred dollars each.

“Eat ****, Dale,” I say, and hang up the phone.

About thirty minutes later there’s a knock at my door.
It’s not Penelope, unfortunately.
It’s Dale.

“I don’t wanna eat ****, Chuckie-boy.
I wanna eat a steak.”

I tell Dale to go get a **** steak and that I’m not planning on going anywhere.
He won’t take no for an answer, so the next thing I know, we’re loaded into his jalopy and heading downtown.

The first place we go is Rico’s.  

Rico’s has pretty good food and they know what to do with a KC strip,
so Dale’s pretty jazzed.

“Chuck, you getting’ a steak?”
“Nah, I was thinkin’ about the club sandwich.”

While we ate, Dale told me about how he’d gone about the writing of the pilots
for his two series of short stories, about the correspondence between himself and the
editors, about sending in edits and revisions, and about finally getting his acceptance letters,
signing the contracts, and getting the checks in the mail.

I listened, sure, but mostly I let my thoughts wander to how Penelope and I had done, and been doing, much the same for the past several years.  
I would mail manila envelopes back and forth to “Mystery and Suspense” and she would do her monthly allotment of sentiment scribbling for The Renaissance Greeting Card Co.

Neither of us were hacks.  We got some checks in the mail, same as Dale, and more often.

What chaffed was that Dale had gotten a contract for a run of stories.

Dale had gotten what I wanted. And, I couldn’t handle it.
I had forgotten about all that I had done, all that I had achieved,
I had dismissed all of those manila envelopes, all of those little checks, I had forgotten how they’d added up, how they’d kept me alive, fed me, sheltered me, how they’d sustained me.

And in the dismissal of those envelopes and all the good they’d done me, I’d managed to dismiss the only other things that had done me any good at all.  I’d dismissed myself as a writer, and I’d done the very same to Penelope.  

What a fool I was.

When we’d finished, Dale paid the check and asked if I wanted to go to Auggie’s *******
and have a look.

I said that I didn’t.

I thanked him for the meal and asked if he’d mind dropping me off at home.

I told him that I had a lot of work to do on a rewrite,

and that I had a telephone call to make.

*

-JBClaywell

©P&ZPublications; 2016

Penelope is sitting at the kitchen table.
She has a large manila envelope spilled
out across the red plastic surface.

There are about 50 blank greeting cards,
the fronts of these have pictures of butterflies,
palm trees, puppies, strawberry patches, assorted
flowers and birds, and artist’s renderings of quiet places
in nature.

Penelope is writing things down on a yellow legal pad
and contemplating the art on the fronts of the blank cards.
Penelope is working.

About once a month, the Renaissance Greeting Card Co.
sends one of these manila envelopes full of blank cards for her
to ponder.
Sometimes while she ponders,
she drinks wine.

Other pondering sessions require ginger ale
or coffee.

She tells me that the wine is the best lubricant for
the ponderings of wholesale sentiments and she writes
one down on her legal pad.

When she has turned each blank into, what she believes to be, a
suitable greeting card, we will sit together and number the blanks
with black marker, I will type up the sentiments and match them to their
corresponding blank, we will stuff these into the supplied return envelope
and mail the whole mess back to Renaissance Greeting Card Co.

A few weeks later, Penelope will receive a check in the mail.


I am in the bedroom.
I have a little corner desk set up in there.
On this desk, is a typewriter, an ashtray, and a tennis ball.

Sometimes, if I run out of ideas, I’ll chuck the tennis ball at the wall
and catch it on the return bounce for a while.  
Usually, I drink coffee while I do the chucking, sometimes it’s
whiskey.

I write stories about bank robberies, diamond heists, or other
tales of daring do.

Sometimes I write prose poems
about what Penelope and I do
on a Wednesday afternoon.

When I have enough of these to fill a manila envelope
or two, I send them off to various editors/publishers of
magazines/rags I have found that serve a particular
audience for these sorts of writings.

Sometimes I get a check in the mail,
sometimes I don’t.

But, there’s always another Wednesday afternoon.

*

-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications; 2016

Just fifteen minutes ago
Penelope and I had been
******* like a couple of
fire-breathing, rabid dragons.

I say dragons as opposed to
rabbits, jackalopes, or whatever
because we’d only been awake for
the past half hour or so.

It was 11am on Sunday;
neither of us had brushed
our teeth yet.

There was a party at Reilly’s
last night and the bourbon and
gin were flowing fine,
I have to say.

John Reilly’s oldest boy
had gotten out of Wabash
Friday afternoon after serving 7 years
so it was definitely time for some levity.

Penelope wandered the bar and made
over some of the regulars, sitting on laps
or patting bald heads.

Reilly wasn’t giving drinks away,
despite the joyous occasion.
Ol’ Johnny wasn’t about to pass up a buck,
but Penelope made sure she and I drank for
free.

So, we drank.


I found the bedroom to be sour,
smelling of *****-sweat and ****-fumes,
so I pulled my shorts on, making my way
to the kitchen.


I turned on the stove,
found a pan and went to the fridge
for the butter and eggs.
The coffee *** stared at me.

“Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you.”


After a brief pause to get
my first love percolating,
I grabbed what was left of a loaf
and my finest, read that as only,
cast iron skillet and wished I had a
sirloin or flank to fry in it, but I didn’t.

Instead, I grabbed three coffee cups,
and set to work, using one of the cups
to cut circles out of six slices of white bread;
luckily I had a half dozen eggs left.

Some people call them
hens in the nest
or
eggs in a basket,
but we always called ‘em
frog eyes when I was a kid.

I won’t bore you with the details,
but I had those little golden *******
looking pretty good by the time I heard
Penelope’s bare feet padding from the bedroom
to the can.

I listened carefully.

I heard the tiniest little **** echo into
the bowl of the toilet while she peed;
I found it endearing.

The shower ran,
the coffee dripped,
I grabbed the Tabasco, some maple syrup,
some marmalade.

Options, right?


I made myself a cup of coffee,
added sugar and some powdered
creamer I had.

I rarely bought milk.

Hell, I rarely slept here.

The frog eyes were done.
The shower stopped.
I heard Penelope padding back to
the bedroom and rustling around in my
chest of drawers.

She appeared in the doorway.
her shower-wet hair a deep, mossy
brown that would dry to a mousy color,
her large, deep, wet eyes the color of emeralds.

I could get lost in them.

Penelope was wearing one of my undershirts,
and, from what I could tell, nothing else.

“What’s for breakfast; it smells good.”
“Coffee too?”

“Indeed”, I said.
“Frog eyes”, I said.

Penelope made a face,
but sat across from me anyway.

Picking up a circle of fried white bread,
bursting a yolk; sipping her coffee,
she took a bite and
smiled at me.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications; 2016

I like how the moon
is out in the daytime
and that I can see it
while I drive.

Sometimes I talk to
the moon and ask it
if I’m doing what I’m
being called to do.

The moon never
answers me, but
instead is silent
and doesn’t offer
advice or remark
on what I should
or should not be
doing.

In the silence
of the moon,
I remember
that I have my
own voice, that I
am my own creator,
my own master, my
own, my own.

I do not have to seek
approval from the moon,
from you, from anyone.

We are celestial, the moon
and I.  Made of the same
cosmic chaos and calamity.

The moon and I, for now,
have the same fate, the same
destiny.

We will simply continue
to be.

*

-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications; 2016

The air is incredibly thin.
I can’t breathe, and my
hands are shaking.

When I was a boy,
a playmate hit me
in the head with a
glass ashtray.

In an instant,
my father had snatched
the boy up and carried him
****** outside, suspended
by one ankle.

I’ve heard also,
stories of my great-uncles
two brothers, run out of
Saint Louis County
because they’d fought in and
been banned from every tavern
on both sides of every main drag,
of every township therein.

Maybe that’s where this
comes from.

There is a fire inside that
most days is only embers,
but stokes far too easily into
infernal inferno.

The grey mush in my skull is
jacked into some electricity
with jumper-cables made from
too many sour thoughts,
a fierce depression, and
huge piles of self-doubt.

Gladness, contentedness,
feels like fraud, like failure,
like not leaning into it sturdily
enough.
Like not staring into The Abyss hard
enough.

It feels like obscenity to
not see conflict,
to not rail against
some dark thing,
some enemy.

In doing so
is found the ability to
feel like
enough.

But,
what
is
enough?

*

-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications; 2016

There’s a war on,
ya morons!

Shortages everywhere!

There’s a shortage of
sanity, of clear thought
here!

Hell, they’re rationing
everything these days!

No one will pay your
******* cab fare either,
so, find your own *******
way out of this ditch!

Stick your sonuvabichin’
thumb out, hike your
skirt up, show those
******* some of the pink
stuff.

That’ll get ‘em,
or maybe it won’t,
who knows,
who cares,
who gives a circus-elephant ****?

Not me.

I don’t give a ******* cerebral
hematoma about what happens next.

I just want to get out of here
and see how far I can get before
the radiator blows and my eyebrows
are singed off.

Jesus Christ in a ******* boat!

Ah, **** it!

I’ll see you in the morning.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications; 2016

In her leggings,
and her striped
Cape Cod dress,
we meet Kim.

She’s in possession
of ankles the circumference
of Kennedy half-dollars,
a wasp’s nest of black curls
piled on her head,
she’s a straight line
from shoulder to heel.

She’s a real catch, Kim is,
and she knows it.

She has no idea that
she looks like a peacock
dipped in motor oil,

she’s giving ol’ Josh
the goldfish eye.

We’re all here to see The Freight Train,
The Rabbit Killer, but Kim’s hoping
for more.

Kim’s looking to get her
bunny stuffed, she
don’t care much about who
does the stuffing,

but she’s hoping for Mr. Clark,
he’s her mark, no doubt.

Now, Josh bought Kim
a beer, but was asked to
leave the cap on,

He looks at me, confused.
“It’s so you can’t Rufie her.
She wants to *******, but
she wants it to be her idea.”

Josh nods;
so does Kim.

As the evening proceeds,
and we’ve all done
“The Freight Train Boogie”
it’s become increasingly
obvious to Kim that Josh
is not agreeable to buttering
her biscuits, she moves,
which is to say stumbles,

around the room.

Every so often she’ll climb onto
the lap of some guy she’s known,
biblically or otherwise, before.

Sam, Bob, Steve, Ralph, or Charlie,
it hardly matters.

Earlier, she’d told us about
the 6-year-old twins,
the teenaged daughter
at home, ex-husband,
boyfriend, whatever, in jail.

The Freight Train moves ever
onward, but I’ve seen too
much of ol’ Kimmy’s show,
now depressed, it’s time
to bail.

*

-JBClaywell

©P&ZPublications; 2016