Shit Town

Old poem that I revised a bit and just had published by don’t submit. https://donotsubmit.net/shit-town-by-m-p-powers/

Shit Town

No one here listens to Beethoven.
No one reads the Greeks, or Shakespeare,
or Nietzsche. (Or if they do
they keep it a secret,
not wanting to be made fun of
for being an elite, or pretentious).
Shit town.

A town whose mayor moonlights as a life
coach despite his 2 bankruptcies
and 7-year sniffing
glue addiction.
Shit town.
Where half the cops are peeping
toms and cat burglars by night.
Where the barbers can’t cut hair or hold
a decent conversation.
Where the plumbers call themselves
crapologists.
Where every Circle K has a beercan
philosopher
standing outside it and the firemen
just want to hold a big hose.
Shit town.

And it’s true what they say.
Nobody here cares about anything but money;
poetry counts for nothing and no one
ever seems to mention
the night James Valvis, the town preacher,
mixed ketamine with rye whisky and Viagra
and mugged a Bolivian tomato picker
behind the trouser rack at Big & Tall.
“Yo, dog, that bling is fly,” he said, then admitted
feeding his ‘libtard’ stepfather to feral
hogs and collecting the insurance money
for the next two years.
Shit town.

And the woman here have all the charm
of a goat chewing bumblebees.
And the kids bathe in that irrigation
ditch behind Jersey Mike’s Subs.
And there’s a drive-thru lane at the morgue
because it used to be an Arby’s.
Shit town.
And the rent adjustment commissioner
just got run over
by his own lawnmower
and ended up in the bag.

“Hey, I’ll lather myself
in the bodily fluids
of Joe Rogan if I dern-tootin’ want to,”
said Mather
Snyder, 32, a disgraced softball
coach and highly qualified feces
picker-upper
from Big Beaver, Saskatchewan.

And it was the eleventh hour
of the Feast of the Apparition of Our Lady
of Guadalupe
and we were eating fish head stew
we’d heated up on the dashboard
of a Buick Roadmaster
when Don Parcheesi, 45, a Chinese
herbalist from Chokoloskee,
ran out into the parking lot with his hair
on fire and offered a pair of eel-skin
slippers to the Judges of Hades.
“You bastards!” he shouted. “Give me life!
Give me life!
Make
things beautiful!”

Easter Services

Easter Services

There is a church
on the other side
of that garage door.

Inside the church
(which used to be a Jiffy Lube)
there is music,
there are stomping feet
there is a passion-inflamed
madman
shouting
into a megaphone.

Jesus is being summoned
on the other side
of that garage door.

But on this side,
where gas-powered tools
leak and dream
to be rented, a white cat wanders
into the room
with a white-haired
hoarder.

“They’re either right
or ridiculous,” he says, referring to the
churchgoers.
“Maybe neither. But you can’t say
they’re wrong.”

(repeat)

And disappears into a cloud
of smoke,
leaving me alone
with the cat and the sound of glory
beating
down a garage door.

This poem was just published by Bombfiire Lit. https://bombfirelit.com/2024/03/24/easter-services-by-m-p-powers/

Blue Collar Blues

Lately, I’ve been retooling a lot of my old blogs because my blogs are often first drafts, and as Hemingway very rightly said about first drafts – they’re shit.

Blue Collar Blues

They’d come into the shop in all their motley appearances, this one with a sleepy dignity of expression, that one with a Hollywood smile, another with nervous hands and a head like a walrus, a fourth with sunken eye-sockets and steel bands for arms – they would come in, sometimes only once or twice, but the impression they would leave would often be with me forever. More curse than blessing, I rarely forgot a face. I’d see them, and they’d go into me, into my soul. I couldn’t get them out of there. They’d settle in there like sediment at the bottom of a boiling flask. All those faces from nearly three decades in business. Sometimes they come back to me when I’m in bed, or in daydreams. They revisit me like ghosts, bringing their words and wisps of memory, old scenes. Many have been dead for years; some have moved away or simply vanished; others still come into the shop, old now, hands crabbed, faces disfigured by a lifetime of drudgery under the punishing South Florida sun. They too would meet their end soon through cirrhosis of the liver, lung cancer, throat cancer, heart disease, freak, on-the-job accident, overdose; so many of them without health insurance or means to escape, succumbing in their forties or fifties, leaving little behind but the debt that dogged them all their days and the handful of tools that loved them.

 

My Father’s New Friend, Les

My father loved cars, but it took him until he was 80 to get the one he’d always wanted, a candy-apple-red corvette that went 0-60 in 2.9 seconds. The car looked like a fireball on the road, and my father couldn’t have been happier his first day out with it, driving along A1A, opening it up on the highway, tooling through the backroads of Boca while listening to Neil Diamond on his Bose premium ten-speaker system. His last stop that day was at the supermarket. He went there to pick up a key lime pie and some diapers for my mother and when he got out of there, he noticed a man of about 60 lingering around his new ride.

   “This your vette?” the man asked as my dad approached.

   “Yea.”

   “Boy this is a beauty. This thing must’ve set you back a fortune. I mean, what a gorgeous car…”      

   Introductions then followed along with car talk. My father loved good clean car talk and he was especially interested in hearing the first comments from people about his new Corvette. He told his new friend (whose name was Les) about the 6.2L V8 LT2 engine, the HD rear vision camera with park assist, the power-retractable seats.

   “It’s just such a gorgeous machine,” said Les. “Hey you mind if I sit in it? I just want to know how it feels…”

   Les was a small man wearing khaki shorts and a pink Polo shirt.

   My father let him sit in the driver’s seat and was happy to hear that Les found the seat to be comfortable, extraordinarily so.

   Les got out, and there was more of that good clean car talk, more flattery of the vehicle, but somehow the subject veered to politics. Les, it turned out, was an avid Trump supporter, my father was a democrat. They had strongly opposing views, but my father, not wanting to waste his time in senseless debate, didn’t let Les know it. Instead, he dropped a few hints that it was time for him to get going. Les ignored them and went on babbling about everything from taxes to inflation to immigration to healthcare and finally to his prostate.

   “I don’t know how it happened,” he was saying. “I mean, I’ve been doing it right for years: exercise, a good diet, lots of whole wheat products, legumes, hardly any meat, no soda, I don’t drink much. I didn’t think I’d ever get prostate cancer, but sure enough…”

   My father by now was sitting in the driver’s seat with the keys in the ignition and Les standing there, hovering over him. “And let me tell you, the surgery? I knew it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, but I didn’t ever think it’d come to this. You see, well, ya know my dick’s kinda curved now. It’s one of the things that can happen with prostate surgery. It curves to the left… It’s just… it’s not good. Who’s gonna wanna date a guy with a dick that’s shaped like a pothook! I feel like a freak!”

   It wasn’t too long after that proclamation that my father, feeling both duped and disillusioned about the turn the conversation had taken, managed to weasel out of there, leaving Les and his pothook standing in the middle of the parking lot, staring at that marvelous red machine like it was a woman leaving him.

Florida Men

I just had this poem published the other day in Resurrection Mag, and here is a sketch of the building my business used to be in. We recently sold the building to the city, so I figured I better sketch it before it gets demolished. So many stories in this place.

Florida Men

I think sometimes about my old customers.
The ones who died young.
There were so many of them: painters, roofers,
landscapers, handymen. Salts
of the earth.

Some had been coming into my shop
for decades, always with the sense
that it would go on like that forever,
the two of us – shopkeeper and customer –
Sisyphus and Tantalus playing our little roles
in our mutual little corner
of hell, impervious
to any profound or meaningful life changes.

But then one day,
you’d hear it
2nd or 3rd hand: R. had a massive heart attack
while sealing a customer’s driveway;
B. died of throat cancer; F. overdosed on painkillers;
carbon monoxide got P.

One after another they peeled away,
most of them leaving very little behind,
just a few meager possessions,
a handful of memories
and a reminder of what precarious
ground we all stand on.

I think sometimes about my old customers.
I think about them the way I think about
how the sun would pour into the shop
in the early mornings,
filling the room with bouncing light,
and a feeling
of something glorious yet incomprehensible
contained within it, something that hung
suspended in the air
for about a half-hour or so,
then poured out through the southern windows,
as though it had no business
being there.

I think sometimes about my old customers.
I think about how they
were too good
for what little
lives they were granted.

The Clouds

It’s been ages since I last posted anything here. The reason: I have been consumed… no, that’s not the right word… I have been possessed, literally and figuratively, by my artistic endeavors. This all started very early in the year and has left me almost no time to write, let alone blog… but I’ll get back to it. I always do.

In the meantime, if you’re on Instagram, you can follow me at: https://www.instagram.com/mppowers1132/

Or just check out my some of my sketchbook drawings. I’m trying to do one every day.

On another note, I just got back to Florida the other day. I’ll be here until July doing what I always do when I’m here: renting equipment and swimming as often as possible. I’ll also be drawing a lot of palm trees and iguanas and scissor lifts and I might even fit in a few poems. Here’s one about something I love in South Florida: the clouds.

The Clouds

I had become a babysitter
of men with strong backs and weak
minds, dullards,
crackheads, sad sacks, village idiots.

I had become the smell of secondhand
exhaust fumes
and cheap tobacco smoke.

A brokendown lawnmower,
a blown head gasket, dusty oil drums,
cracked piston
rings, flyshit in the carburetor port
of a 2-cycle leaf
blower had all become me.

I was a burglar alarm at
3 a.m., the jarring sound of a telephone
on Friday
afternoon, the collective sigh
of the people in my small
town, their harangues and jeremiads,
their habits and
obtuse convictions, their unwritten obituaries.

Sixty
hours a week for sixteen years,
I had become
institutionalized.
I had created a Frankenstein for a
business.

I kept getting deeper into it
and with each
downward revolution the pain
of longing for distant
unknown places – Japan, Germany, Ireland –
became that much more acute.

But it was the clouds,
the clouds above my shop
that gave the sweetest
and sharpest
feeling of heartache.

Those
massive purple whales
swimming over the rooftops
and palm trees.

To watch them in the morning light
so detached and tumbling
over themselves,
taking on the golden light of the sun
and being
carried off on some fantastic
sea journey.

To watch them do magic
and have
it done to them
as I stood amid the noise of angle
grinders & air compressors,
the idiot
laughter of half-drunk small engine
mechanics riding up my back –

there was something so
deliciously
motivating
about the clouds.

The Eyes of a Suicide

In trying to ‘explain’ a poem, one word just cancels out another. That’s why I never do it. But I wanted to give a little background on the one above because the guy referred to in the tree was a customer of mine. His name was Chris S. and he was a house painter. 39 years old at the time of the incident which happened on Easter Sunday in 2005. I found out he’d died after stumbling upon his obituary in The Palm Beach Post. I found out the details from a friend of his, who was also a customer of mine, and the story has been etched in my mind ever since. “Chris was always on something,” he was saying, after telling me the more gruesome parts of the story. “Oxycontin, Xanax, pot, you name it. He was like that ever since high school. But us married guys – we lived vicariously through him. Women loved him. Every time I went out with him, he’d end up taking someone back home with him. Really hot chicks too. He was super charming. And the amount he drank… holy shit! One time my wife and I went out to dinner with him and he had the waitress running back and forth all night. We were actually kind of embarrassed for him… He had like 10 or 12 Heinekens during the course of the meal…”

I take a photocopy of everyone’s driver’s license who rents from me and keep it in a file. Chris had only been renting from me for a few months before he hung himself. Not even long enough for me to have filed it away. In fact, it was still sitting near the copy machine when his friend was telling me the story. I remember studying the license after he left the shop. The photo is still perfectly clear in my mind, all these years later. In all my interactions with Chris, he was friendly and cheerful. But in the photo, I saw that other side of him, especially in his eyes, which I stared at for several minutes on several different occasions. They were the eyes of a suicide. Deep, deep, deep in a sadness and pain and disgust and madness that I myself was no stranger to. I knew those eyes. That’s what was so terrifying about them and why I couldn’t stop staring at them and why they still haunt me. There was something too about the way his head was raised and slightly turned to the left. It was as if he was about to slip a noose over it, and I remember looking at his neck in the photo and picturing that coarse burning rope cutting into the skin, and picturing his features twisted into whatever gruesome form they held the morning he was discovered. I can still see it all now.

The poem and drawing above are from this month’s Versification. Check it out here, it’s a great issue.

Freeze

Happy Fesitvus, everyone! I just saw a clip on a German news station about iguanas in Florida, and it reminded me of a blog I wrote a couple years ago. Some of you might remember it. If not, here it is, changed a little and rewritten in the shape of a poem.

Freeze

When my mechanic
moved from Pennsylvania
to Florida in 2012,
he told himself
he would never wear anything
but shorts to work,
no matter how frigid
the temperatures might become.

Every year since then,
on the coldest
winter days,
he’d come into the shop
in shorts, see everyone
bundled up
and say something
about how we
Floridians
are such pansies.

“This isn’t cold,” he’d say. “This is nothing.
Youse
guys should experience a Pennsylvania
winter.
Now that’s cold.”

Well,
this week it may not have been cold
by Pennsylvania standards,
but in parts of South Florida,
freezing temperatures
killed off acres
of corn
and green beans. Elsewhere
there were reports of frozen
iguanas falling
out of trees and either dying
or going into a catatonic
shock for several hours.

Nevertheless, my mechanic
had made a decision
and was sticking to it: NOTHING
BUT SHORTS
IN FLORIDA.

The only difference
between this year
and the others
was that this year there was no taunting
us wimpy Floridians.

This year he had on
two shirts,
a long sleeve under a short sleeve,
and he kept coming
into the office
to warm up with coffee.

He had three cups
yesterday by 10 a.m.
Normally he has one all day.

“You must be cold
in those shorts,” I said to him.

“Nah, my legs
don’t get cold,” he insisted.

But later,
when I looked outside,
he was shivering,
working with a pair of gloves on
and the heat
blasting from his van.

Heat, gloves,
two shirts, three cups of coffee,
frozen iguanas dropping
from trees,
acres of green beans
and corn dead from the chill,
but still,
he had his shorts on
and no one
could take that away
from him.

Boynton Beach Inlet

the sea is bright green, almost
mystical in the sunlight
as it moves beneath me
a tugboat with tires on the side

drifts quietly past the jetty
a dragonfly whispers in my ear
something
nothing and somebody’s

fingers weaving palm fronds
into roses and daydreams
as the sun-ravaged old man
whose hair is a white flame

wanders offshore with his
cast net, a gull distinctly
cleverly cries
bluefish like little pieces
of silver mind leap outside the breakwaters

and below my feet, the sea
is playing mournfully
her deep and timeless nocturnes

The Mad Monk & an Old Man (Pen Drawings)