from an idea by Sheila Sharpe

In the foul heat and damp and rot and stench
After dusting off 1 the bodies of dead pals
The living and the dead, the living dead
Old Boats 2 lit off a cigarette and growled

“They say this stuff’ll **** ya.”



1 Dustoff – noun.  Dust off – verb with an adverb.  A dustoff is a medical evacuation via helicopter, as in “Doc, your dustoff will be here in three.”  To dust off a patient, then, is to transport a patient, not to tidy him.  I have recently read detailed arguments about the terms dustoff, dust off, and medevac, but no one quibbled about such minutiae along the Cambodian border.  

2 Boats – a boatswain’s mate, the brains and muscle of the Navy.  Boatswain’s mates do it all and are seldom acknowledged in history or art, not even in the recent film about Dunkirk.  A boatswain’s mate is often addressed as Boats, and always with deference, even by the C.O.

Dunkirk; night
Swallow might
Losing sight
Yearning light
Hugging tight
Is your feeling right?

The underlings stare
In submissive awestruck
Subjugation in landmine-filled
Landfills, are stuck
In the trenches, the feces
The carcass-strewn muck
Where the vermin-spawn ****
As they're taught how to work
And to fend for themselves
Like the Fall of Dunkirk
As the imminent doomsday device overhead
Incapacitates them
As mere prey to a web
Of a global dominion
Ambition connection
Subconscious hive-mind
Buzzing out the objection
And phobia-spreading
Pandemic misanthropy
Greed in disguise
Subsidizing atrocity
Not for me,

I am
The justified treason
The reason the man-hunters
Close open season
The cease-fire peacekeeper
Proliferation
The water war's rising
Desertification
An MIA runaway
AWOL defector
Still haunting the tombs of detente
Like a spectre
With what I assure
Mutually in the end
When I send go-aheads
On the ICBMs
And avenge the dependent expended
Caught in
This crossfire for-profit
Arms race it has been

“Mrs. Tubb, prepare my raincoat,” he said, “I’m going under the carpet.”
His ears were steaming.
“I’ll be waiting by the hanged stag,” he said. “If it gets to six and I'm still not home, put tobacco in the telephone.”

Down there, at the foot of the stairs, Mrs Tubb’s tears fell to the flattened backwards.
In the middle of the night, whilst she was sleeping,
And without her permission,
He had changed her name to Margot St. Vincent.

“Take off that murderer’s moustache and stretch out on the infamous Chelsea Blackmail Floor.
Ask the biggest bugs to dance,
You may never get another chance.”

The quietly handsome and magnificent Millicent Milligan was feeling rather ill again.
She had been dreaming of the brittle marigolds of Saint Petersburg.
She had been dreaming of pine cones and boiling marmalade.

Her home had fallen into a hole.
It was on the evening news,
But by the following morning they had lost interest,
A mountain had struck a commercial airliner and so no one was much impressed by her Home in Hole Hell.
355 were dead,
And possibly a well known racehorse,
And a corpse in transit who, of course, was already dead, but still, it was vexing for the family.
They found a priest in a poplar tree,
And the head of a hand model at the back of a cave.
(The hands were still intact and were couriered to their agent in a special flask).

Half in, half out of her delicious stockings
Wendice Titian cuts out scissor clippings of her
Sinister yellow sister.

Overnight the years twist.

Edgar Snooker has  heard he is to play ******'s dog on the silver screen.
Edgar Snooker is not a dog.
And the screen was never silver.
And besides, it is not true.
Someone is out to destabilise him.

As posh, brainwashed sausages consult
The Punchline Advisor of Dunkirk,

As the Lord is seen on all fours on His moon
Causing daily electrical police misfortune,

As the masses embark on the clamorous, scattered and impossible journey to disappointed purity,

As her money is without temperament,

As the self-conscious guilt daughter unbuttons her plush helmet,

So the richly magnetised stars are winding down.

As candles whisper in the middle of the road,

As Margot St. Vincent revolves the nickel tap
Of the gas powered knitting plate,

So Father Flynn is inconsolable.
He found a photograph of ****** Bob on top of his wife’s hat.
She denied everything,
Including that she was there at all.
Father Flynn fell for it.
That's faith for you.

We’d known him, back in the day
At dear old Millard Fillmore Elementary,
As Three-Desks Tommy, highly imaginative monicker
Deriving from his decidedly unimaginative first name
And the fact that he, indeed, had three desks,
Each of them stuffed chock-full
With uncounted numbers of pencils and erasers,
Any number of homework papers
(Usually A’s and A-pluses,
Though there were the odd B’s and B-minuses as well,
As he was a bright, in fact inordinately bright, child,
But sometimes given to sloppiness and stray pencil marks
And a predilection for not reading the directions completely)
Eerily accurate renditions of dinosaurs,
Wildly inventive stories featuring rainbow-hued dragons,
Noble and voluble talking bovines,
And knights and knaves of every size, shape, and suzerain,
Stories which resided cheek-to-jowl with some bit of uneaten sandwich
Until such time it made its existence
Abundantly clear to the custodial staff.
We’d never stopped to think much about his miniature Maginot Line;
It was what Tommy did and had always done
For as long as we could remember,
Though there were some teachers and an assistant principal or two
Who thought the whole thing was permissive bordering on coddling
(His teacher was a veteran of the wars, and well-insulated by tenure,
But she had grown weary of over-glasses glares and snide asides
When Tommy’s name came up in the staff room,
A death by a thousand cuts and all that),
And one day, while moving one of his desks
To clear space for Simon Says,
It had caught on a sticky spot,
Overturning onto a soon-to-be-fractured toe.
When he came back to school, accompanied by an ungainly cast
And an equally ungainly pair of crutches, his teacher took him aside.
Tommy, she purred, Maybe someone is trying to tell you something.
The other kids all make due with one desk,
And I’m sure you can find a way to as well, don’t you, Tommy?
So Tommy embarked on a great cleansing of his little fiefdom,
Filling several garbage cans with his collected works,
(Math papers and mastodons, bologna and Brobdingnagians)
And afterward he’d kept himself to one standard desk,
Duly filing, returning, and circular-filing his paperwork
As the occasion demanded
(Though one time Murph Dunkirk
Asked Three-Desks if he minded downsizing;
Tommy just shrugged, and said Well, it’s better than a broken foot)
And maybe in his dreams he had a thousand desks,
A thousand tops to fling open,
A thousand repositories for light and legend
Or perhaps he never gave it so much as a second thought,
No way to know now, one supposes,
Though if anything out of the ordinary had come his way,
We would’ve probably heard.

.oh look, i can take a screen-shot... so i don't appear as some rambling internet lunatic... sorry about the outcome of what my original ought to have looked like... out of my Pontius' hands... just like a retired person doesn't understand mobile phones... me and a.i.?  can we go back to when i could have understood Dunkirk?!

ever notice this?
the NPC meme...
see the transformation
when you insert...
eyebrows?

    \      /
    .       .
       /
        _

oh look, a rabbit?!

volatile buggers...
listen...

           what?!
i didn't say anything!

i couldn't get the angle right...
does vvvv or wwwww
represent a grrr: of frustration
of clenched teeth?

let's see...
    
    \      /
    .       .
       /
        

satan! oh, hey bro, thanks
for coming...

    \      /
    .       .
       /
      
     vvvv

****... that's not going to work...
you can't craft memes using
letters, letters are too complicated
for a meme...
you need the reserve bank of
punctuation and "punctuation"
markers...
****...

              my bad...

you know... the nights that i spend
listening to music,
and not listening to alt. media
commentators?
    SLOUGH, S'LOW,
   SL'OH....
     the hours pass, slow...

if they ever translate...
oh look... 'ere one...
'ere one for the memes...
                                      
ΙΧΘΥΣ   ιχθυς          / __ /|
                                   | |/

kevin & perry go large...
what?
  big fish, little fish,
cardboard box?
      don't know the dance routine?

it's a ******* classic...
a bit like the Sheryl Crow
debut album.

It’s a “travel week” here in Georgia. I’m writing this on June 1st at the Atlanta airport. This morning Sunny’s flying in from Nebraska, Sophy from California, Lisa from New York and Anna from Oregon - all around noon. Charles put a hard-shell luggage carrier on the roof of the Navigator because he didn’t trust it to hold the luggage 4 girls could bring.

My parents left last Saturday for Warsaw to join “Doctors Without Borders.” Charles, Leong and I drove them to the airport and then we took Leong to “The Mad Italian” for the best steak & cheese sandwiches on this side of andromeda.

Sunday was a typical lake day. We tied off in our favorite cove and were quickly joined by everyone who could get on a boat. Imagine that Dunkirk movie - except this was a get together - with motorboats, sailboats, skiffs, pontoon boats and canoes all crowding the little bay.

Leong’s an avril lavigne - who knew? On Monday, I surprised her with something green - a trip to “Fun Galaxy” roller-skating rink. I made reservations for a “birthday party” and a group of 15 of us had the rink to ourselves all morning (and cake). I thought I was a skater but Leong’s legit. She says that in Macau you either skate on the street (rough terrain and dangerously between cars) or at one of several huge multisport pavilions where the rinks are cement and resemble our skateboard courses.

She’d never seen an air-conditioned, basketball-court-smooth-hardwood, disco-lit, rock concert sounding, American roller rink. It was love at first sight. She spins, does double lutzes, skates faster backwards than I can forwards, and the manager threatened to pull her off the floor for doing backflips (“There are liability issues,” he insisted.) She was also amazed because there was a built-in diner. At home, she said, you have to bring your own water and sometimes your own toilet paper (toilets are completely different in Asia - don’t get me started on THAT).

Yesterday, Leong, Kim and I were waiting for a Facetime call, to coordinate today’s arrivals.
Before that though, at my behest, Kim helped me ferret-out - Holmes & Watson like - the dire skinny on something, and we, as long time besties and co-conspirators, had a plan.
“Did you know Rob Chen was class valedictorian this year?” Kim asked the room.
“No!, congratulations Rob,” I said.
“Yea, Rob,” Leong echoed nonchalantly.
“We’re so proud of Rob.” Kim continues.
“But, you know,” I said seriously, “there are Rob haters out there. I understand it - he’s hateable,” I expand.
“ek,” Kim blurted, like a little bird, at Leong’s reaction as Leong gasps, “What.. Why?”
“Because he dresses ugly!” I explained.
Kim, unable to curb her excitement, squeaks out loud.
Leong looked at Kim, shocked, Kim was looking down and rocking with the effort of silence.
“That’s not enough REASON,” Leong blurts, “to hate someone!
Again, Leong looked to Kim for agreement and got none.
“I don’t hate YOU,” Leong says, turning on me.

There’s a moment of shocked silence.

“WOW.. wow,” I say, as Kim nervously snickered with glee.
“First of all,” I begin, between my own chuckles, a defense:
“I’m wearing a very **** black ensemble but not exactly dressed to go OUT, (Kim laugh-coughed) and SECOND,” I pause for drama-queen effect.
“YOU,” I say, turning my head significantly and accusingly, towards Leong, slightly askew for a better view, “seem to have quite a few hickies on your neck this morning.”
Kim can't stand it any more and squeals, full out, with delight.
“You, need,” Leong said, pausing just before she lunges at me playfully, to put her hand over my mouth, “to cut off THAT line,”
“I knew it.. I KNEW it!” I say, bobbing and turning my head away as Leong pins me with her body while still trying to mug me and we’re all howling with laughter now.
“Those are Rob Chen hickies! - I. KNEW. IT.”

The facetime ring interrupts us and Leong reluctantly lets me go to answer it.
We all sober as she moves to press “Accept.”
“Let me just loop-back to say,” I looked at Kim with elementary-dear-Watson satisfaction, and said to Leong, “you didn’t deny it,”
Leong blushes crimson as the call begins.

THE SOLDIER


Billy Clark was seventeen
When he went off to war.
He kissed his mum and dad goodbye
And walked out through the door.
He kissed his girl at the station
And wiped away her tears.
He said that he’d be back again
If it took a  thousand years.

He headed for the trenches,
For Afghanistan.
Gallipoli, The Falklands.
Beirut  and Vietnam.
He set off for Dunkirk,
Agincourt and Troy.
Passchendaele would make
A man out of a boy.

A million Billy Clarks
Have gone away to war.
Old men sit and shake their heads.
They’ve passed this way before.


He was in the thick of it
Right from the very start.
But Billy was a brave boy
With a patriotic heart.
Billy fought his hardest
But he was in a fix.
These were guns and tanks he faced
Not childhood toys and sticks.

Now, Billy was no coward,                            
But he was scared as hell.
No boy should have to bury
His comrades where they fell.
It took a thousand years
For Billy to return
And still the burning question is:
When will we ever learn?

When will this crazy world unite
And watch  each others’ back?
When  media screams  the headline:
‘GREEN MEN FROM MARS ATTACK!!!!’.

A million Billy Clarks
Have gone away to war.
Old men sit and shake their heads
They’ve seen it all before.

Holy, black typewriter, frenzied,
spits out strangers’ love letters, desperate, the ink band half dried
(but ultimately returns to its grave of  dust).
Withered books, yellow pages carelessly leafed through, devoured
(pay no heed to the traffic - walk and read),
falling from one pain into the next;
such are beginning and middle of these days...
And benzedrine fever dreams are fleeting,
as elusive as great insane private revelations
mentioning Ginsberg and Hendrix by name
- a swirling fata morgana of Buddha, Dharma, cult,
and a thousand angelic punks, punk angels, safety-pin-winged,
dreams about Neal and I (not I) being cops -
revealed to my hands in a crazy stupor, darkening and
illuminating the whole café, unaware-

and I know that Marlon knows a jeweler, knows
his hands -
how does that fit in here?

These days waste by, racing, crash-trickling like waterfalls,
like the Niagara Falls that made Joe cry -
and now I watch him cry,
shamelessly, inconsolable in the face of beauty,
crying like he’s never seen water,
as he hands me another case - Morpho menelaus -
dead, killed, (killed on Denver roads), escaping freedom
in the giant hands of a not-so-average Joe (secret hero of this poem),
his eyes glued on life, and full of tears
and his dad didn’t want a daughter neither, wanted no children at all-
And down in Mexico (where he is now, or was last)
the plywood violin plays the open-highway-blues
for a not-so-sober Jack who loves and hates and loses.
Somewhere amid the British-American chaos: a pair of twins
suffered at the hands of their mother,
suddenly forgotten on the road...

Speaking of “mother”: Soon I’ll miss a wedding, and
- come to think of it - so will Jack, won’t he,
the other one,
with his red lips and olive green canvas, with his
made-in-vietnam imitation of
father Dunkirk’s blood, fallen soldier, 1916 Jesus didn’t rise -
How to lose my mind positively, flush out the memories?
Swimming at midnight: the cold lake homely in my bones
all washed over by iodine-orange water.
Mark hums sweet country tunes, wheat between his lips, "hey la, my boyfriend's back" -
and the sun never sets
and the coffee is always cold
and all the pages are black.
And Springsteen lies on the nightstand, his spine turned to me,
sharing his makeshift bed with Kerouac and butterflies, and

a cruel storm of stories that sends my head spinning
makes it so that - unable to form in the hurricane -
poems cower in the back of my throat
like predators waiting to jump on their prey, and -
any minute now, I beg them, any moment-
but they shake their Rottweiler heads and bare their crocodile teeth,
taunting me, saying
that the wordy intelligence of others dumbs me down,
burns me out, charcoals my brain with the soot,
leaves me without originality; no
mind for my own words, no
regard for the verses crying to happen, only
the need to write, write, write,
stupidly, like a dog is forced by instinct,
the insatiable need to spill, to transform, to twist, distort, to prophesy, to-

Some  journal entry reads: healthy coping. Think:
Growth is inevitable.
God is inevitable!
Pain, and fury, and love, are inevitable! Luck -
To take this earth and make it yours,
this oyster,
and realize that it’s also everyone else’s;
(boys, no, kings of summer)
inevitably working together to create beauty,
only one glass case away from bewitching your living room,
from taking its seat right beneath the busy hand of God
and hold up the mirror:
this beauty was you all along. And me. And Him,
and everyone else.
This Father wanted a Son, wanted a daughter, even,
and,
suddenly,
this close to the face and hand and chest of God,
the old fear of 23 turns into excitement
with all our eyes, full of tears, glued on life -
still,
even now -

outside, the out building  

we talked of  the war, swallows overhead.  



avoided the cockerel neatly on the lawn,

admired the rhubard flowering,

a dunkirk conversation,while sun shone.



even small boys mourn  commentary

repeated, the small days of their lives.



they were brave men,

it is a good exhibition.



sbm.

Moon tideless
mud ***** at
rubber booted cocklers.

Crackle of *******
crustacean lifted
by ***** slipshod

Raising fractal shells
in practice old as man.

Listless boats loll
sealess, same little
boats, fishers of men
dunkirk.

Migrant birds ebb
and flow from africa,
struggle for land.

Have you found a new mythology.
The ones we knew died off.
Hammers, thunder, nails,
Multi-limbed gods of gold,
And phoenixes have turned to ashes on my tongue.
My eyes don't dilate, my throat closes.
Once we were blessed, but now,
John A. is a white supremacist.
Not since Dunkirk and Troy have wars worked miracles.
A Hard Day's Night and Help are formulating a following
Surpassing Jesus (John, Ch. 1. Verse 1).
Look to the Walrus.

Out stretching
Out reaching
The callused, bleeding hands
Of tightly gripping on.

The permantly furrowed brow,
Weathering a face which has seen too much.
The innocent eyes try,
But are clouded over.

His everyday grows like a plane
flying over
Dunkirk dawn
Guns drawn.

His green home
Of west is best
And his voice would flow
With a carefree blow

which has blown
to fragments.

His streets turned red
When in November they would tred
To remember
Those who bled
Now they are only spotted

Every year dearer
Washing away.

The storm seems to be over:
Tender droplets of water,
Make their way down thy windowpane,
As soaked hills, swell in the distance.

The Green Mountains, bulging out of the earth.
I must be brave like the men of Dunkirk.

Do not be afraid of the animal spirit
It's hard enough looking in a mirror,
So let us make amends as we pray.
Gabriel, Your watch is over.

Storms might be over
But never done.
Do not be afraid.

Let them gaze at the withering surface
Let them be strong in the face of power
Let them be meek in the company of cowards
Let them be free.
Amen.