The Poetry Of.
Steve De France...........................
OVER THE RAINBOW
I'm looking out my window
at a huge black crow.
He's standing in the exact
center of the cement driveway,
pecking at a dried turd.
Shakes it around
to make sure its dead.
Tilts a glance at me,
breaks off a bite-sized piece,
tips his head back,
& it rolls
down his feathered
ebony throat.
Life would be so simple,
if we could all do the same.
My neighbor, a blue-haired crone,
rolls up in a new silver Lincoln.
Her matching silver-blue poodle
spurts from the car,
like toothpaste from a tube,
& in a neurotic attack of energy
lunges at the crow.
"Felix, No!"
The Crone snatches up her pooch,
& kicks the turd
into the sewer opening.
She trots into her house.
And the crow is left
skulking
in the rose bushes.
Even if you're willing
to eat shit
it may not be enough
for some people.
CHAOS AND THE
COMMON MAN
Drinking morning coffee.
Out my front window I watch a man
standing in the rain--- stolidly
cleaning rainwater off his car's windshield.
Stoically he disregards the weather
as traffic flows about him.
Everywhere there are people like him
executing a superfluous rite,
exacting an extraneous task
partaking of some kind of human ritual.
Performing some private ceremony
that tells the mind I've cleaned a scrap of dirt
off my little piece of this world...
I've done something! I am not part of the chaos.
I look back out the kitchen window
And he still stands like a stone in a stream
Yes, he has the audacity, the balls, to stand
cleaning his God Damned wet Windshield,
as if he has all the friggin’ time left in creation.
I have a second cup of coffee.
Well, it's days like this
that just piss me off.
Days full of endless lines
of well-meaning chaps
down on their knees
cleaning a smudge off the carpet,
old crones sweeping the alley,
Park Rangers picking up leaves in the forest.
Watching TV--- I pour a third
cup of coffee. CNN is showing
citizens blown apart---bodies
smoking in the streets of Iraq.
Telling myself that caffeine
facilitates all thoughtful people
into reflecting on chaos.
I decide to consider uncertainty,
Then the lilies of the field,
Then the Aurora Borealis
I pour the remaining coffee into my cup.
Here we are on a one-way trip
pushing into a perplexed cosmos,
a cosmos spinning into, or out of,
some scientific fiction---a fictive thing
called an unknowable black hole.
Feeling philosophically vulnerable I speculate---
then extrapolate on a black hole in space,
a rip in the universe...sucking all of us
into an eternal vortex.
The rest of us stare from our respective windows
at the devastation of the ignorant. We see a
world mortally wounded----broken.
The death cock crows---as by fading light
the Savage Armies of Darkness race across barren
ground where they crash into a thing called eternity.
Even now
souls are being weighed against a feather.
I finish my coffee---the old man drives off.
Even now
Chaos is much closer than I thought.
BECAUSE I CAN'T WHISTLE
It was my mother's dream
for me to play the violin.
The maestro came to the house
for $ 5.00 an hour lessons.
A slight balding Englishman
who had been wounded by the Germans
in the Allied assault on Normandy.
His left hand trembles still
tendons twisted from the flame thrower.
He sits in pained attitude
crippled fingers pointing out
full & half notes for me to murder.
I learn the strings & some bowing
but nothing comes of it.
I saw away maliciously
making notes screech in pain
even mother agrees I have no talent.
I try piano.
it goes the way of the violin.
I can't whistle or carry a tune in song.
I am audience material.
I listen to mother play
Beethoven, Chopin,
Liszt, & Rachmaninoff
on piano or guitar---
when she has time
she paints & draws,
writes poetry & songs,
or reads tea leaves
and acts like a gypsy.
I start shining shoes & fighting,
excellent at both---a disappointment to her.
When my nose is broken, she cries.
Before she died of dementia
I remember her asking me
"Who are you?"
"I am your son."
She couldn't hear me anymore.
So, I began to fashion poems.
Tonight sitting before a desk
I feel her watching my writing progress
not frowning---but smiling encouragement
as if amused that I stopped molesting
instruments & now confine my brawls
to words. I turn toward her shadow,
"Can you hear me now mama?"
COMING HOME
From a distant place my hand finds the phone's receiver--
"Yes," I whisper---"what the hell time is it?"
"I don't know, he said...late...very late"
"3:00 AM?"—I hear my voice rising as I look at the clock.
"It's 3:00 AM!"
Rain is pattering softly outside.
"She left again."
"Are you drunk?"
"No."
"Have you been shot?”"
"No"
"Stabbed?"
"No"
I hang up.
The phone rings again.
I slide the receiver over to my ear.
We both listen to the rain.
"I just can’t take it anymore," he said.
"It?" I said. "It's 3:00 in the morning"
"IT!" he replies,
the ordinary horrors of the day.
Mostly people don't talk about the
ordinary horrors of the day.
Jim was drunk again.
"So? Why did she leave this time?"
"I don’t know. She started coming home
later and later. Last week she just stopped
coming home." "What do you think?" I ask.
"I am lost without her."
"What are you feeding her?"
"Just regular. She hates that anti furball stuff."
"Try putting out some wet food near the door."
Jim has been this way about his cat
since his wife Patsy died last year.
"You OK?"
"Yeah," he says, "I am good.
I'll try that." He hangs up.
Wide awake now---I listen to the rain.
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