He didn’t make monkeys. He just trained them. Because everyone he knew had a big “but”… So he hit the road, not the drive-in. Not some other crappy bike. Ghosts of the highway. Like a garbage truck. It’s not so bad in the big house, Mickey said. We all saved our questions for the end of the tour. Can you say tortilla? A lifetime later we don’t remember the Alamo we remember the basement. Au revoir, P.W. I took a picture so it would last longer.
Category: Poems
Raft
We are floating on a very thin raft, myself included. I am mostly talking about white people I know. Though 300,000 Cubans crossed the border this year. Some on rafts, but mostly on foot. Poverty so extreme a family I became close to insisted I purchase their teenage niece. They cried when I said no. There is no way a functional human intelligence can grapple with the horrors of the twentieth century. The 21st century looks worse. A person smarter than me said There is fire, water, and the atomic bomb. We’ll see. I wept when I saw a photo of my mother riding her bike to school in the small town of her birth.
Sequel
At the crossroads of late puberty and supreme self-consciousness sits a classroom. It is here they teach Algebra II. Algebra 1 was a worldwide SMASH so they made a sequel. One of the worst in history, the critics said. Part of me still lies impaled upon a word problem on page 144 of that old textbook. A passing grade was anything higher than the indoor humidity (80% in August). I still have some extra credit outstanding from a book report on Pascal which they accept at 7-11 when I’m low on cash.
Caine O'Rear 