Best Song

by Ralph Monday

He said that he sang the best songs being Chicago born, that all would be kosher between us even if what he ate wasn’t food. That was over bad Yugoslavian wine after he came up to me on Burnham Park and told me that I looked like a young Mara Corday, and said yes, I’m inside your head and know that you don’t know who she is, no matter, all things forgotten are eventually remembered, resurrect like geese migrating south over the lake.

That was only one of the stories he told.

He was a history professor specializing in the Holocaust. I was from Appalachia and we didn’t speak the same language even though we knew what the words meant.

Slightly drunk, he laid out narratives like a winding staircase with missing steps. He played the Wise Man like in the Bethlehem story or Obi Wan fingering the Force.

I played Damsel not in Distress, all on a dark barroom stage. Look, I said, I’m not the temple priestess that lay with Enkidu for seven days.

It rained longer than that, he said, in the deluge.

He admired my skimpy red skirt, long black hair that looked like Grace Slick singing “White Rabbit” at Woodstock. Yeah, I said, but mother wouldn’t like the pill you carry. He garbled a Yiddish poem and I told him that growing up too much Patsy Cline had spoiled my head.

But no.  I told him stories of my own: of the missionary beheaded outside Mecca, the actor who hung himself because he was emptied out, a girl without milk singing goat songs, the Depression bum who stole the apple pie and was tarred and feathered, Ophelia who drowned for false love, the real King who died before Slick slicked up her song. There are many ways to lose yourself if you only listen to your screwed up nerve endings.

Filaments for None

by Ralph Monday

I looked for love as though it could be
fish hooked from the sky

tasted in cracked nuts taken from a squirrel’s
mouth, splintered alley bricks

coated by a callgirl’s tongue, soldered
sacrifices woven from a crow’s nest

shingled stuff from a house divided by too many
colds uncared for.

Epiphany of sorts in that Calvinistic clouds
trapped me before birth.

Degrees already determined, love may as well
be found as anachronistic

Victorian gas lamps replaced by Tesla’s
crusade to have all

carried forth on humming
strings.

Goodwill Pilgrimage

by Ralph Monday

 Cleaning out the belongings of the dead
is supposed to be therapeutic, a Dr. Phil
healing, closure needed to be whole.
Going through my uncle's belongings
brought forth the same emptiness as
a recently excavated Roman urn.
His sweaters, blue jeans, dress pants
neatly hung in the closet as though he
had only went to the hardware store for
some nails, screws, a coke pulled ice cold
from an old fashioned machine. A real
coke, flavored with sugar, quality product
the way his World War II generation was
the real deal.

Even after a year the clothes still held his
scent, the way that a rejected lover longily
pines for one last caress. I carried them
to the truck. The faded fabric became a
Necromancer—live or Memorex—and I
rode with him through the Michigan forests,
waded in the stream casting flies for trout.

Only for a time, only for a magician's illusion
where swirling smoke would never suffice, and
permanence promised by the cross he cherished
is like the dry, plastic flowers boxed up for
Goodwill, brittle, never real, left for the collecting
lady in the back of a cluttered store. Put out on
racks for strangers to wear, themselves alien
to the tender mercies that would one day rummage
through mothballed closets.

The Burning Bush

by Ralph Monday

I do not know your god filtered
through you, speaking tongues,
where you sit like a broken Roman
statue reciting Etruscan.
How can I know this spirit language
that is plucked from thought’s burning
bush? Ask, and I will give you a god,
a great Grecian urn, cracked, singed
black by the fires of dead dialects
that does not speak language of the
living. Run your tongue over its fissures,
taste the waters pooled in dry desert
oasis. Fill it with all the dross of your
years: anger toward mother, father, husband’s
suicide, intoxicated philosophies only you
can decipher, days of cum and roses, black
spots on the heart singed from a welder’s torch.
Mix it all together like a spell in a witch’s
cauldron, write that ink on a granite wall,
let the god tongue split you open through
an aria’s incantations. You will be no more
whole than the butchered underbelly of a sow.
All the gods long ago retreated to the sky
when they could no longer replace the faces
of women shivered by their dark tongues.
Words do not fill emptiness. Words make
the empty, the infinite void spoke into
being before the tongues came through you.

October Death

by Ralph Monday

October in Tennessee, the fields
speckled with wildflowers like
pennies shook from a piggy bank:
goldenrod, swamp thistle, ironweed.

Frost will soon take them, crusted
white like sea salt, dying seeds
scattered by the wind fretfully
finding root for hoped resurrection.

You are dead to me. I cannot grow you.
Your leaves crumpled, sickly brown
forest rot spread over black tree roots,
perished stone, abandoned, dry, insect husks.

You do not bloom for an artist’s love.
Yours is the Judas season.
The quiescent center spat upon,
Nothing can bloom from your tangled roots.

Terror Without a Timetable

by Ralph Monday

Dread follows along, creeping behind like
vines on a forest floor. Like taxes and
relationships, love and hate, Elvis and Liberace,
even vodka won’t dull the patina settling over—
a kind of mind Novocain that dulled baptism
in amniotic fluid flowing like a river from
spread thighs.
The feeling can never quite be pinned down,
an insect squirming, wriggling on a pin.
It blooms red within us.
Perhaps it is Oppenheimer’s uncorked genie
in the bottle, Bin Laden’s watery ghost, Nazi’s
singing at the Berlin opera, Wagner’s Valkyrie
ride in Apocalypse Now, Augustine’s conversion
under the tree, the Spanish burning Mayan codices,
Joan of Arc’s visions, or rock and roll burying
Glenn Miller.
Maybe nothing so exotic—more like a bad date
at a drive-in, rush hour traffic, road kill, alimony,
the dentist, the unfathomable rush through space,
or staring muddy-eyed at the clouds in morning coffee.

Blood Moon

by Ralph Monday

This moon, orbiting like the cataract
in a blind man’s eye—russet, coppery,
lensed female oldness—id dreams where
the universe becomes movie myth, no
matter the player’s scene, urban, rural,
all hear the night owl calling above on
experienced wings, for it knows the blood
song played above like an asphalt aria.
In bars, hospital rooms, dance halls where
light mimics salvation—uneasiness
spreads like flu in a crowded elevator.
This moon is a lost Mayan codex that
no one can read, no television prophet
can explain. The apocalypse is not
bare rock knowing both savage heat and cold;
No, the old doom is filtered through each dark
pupil gazing at the sky’s stitched message.

Within the Depths, All the Days

by Ralph Monday

I never realized that the mind is a movie
Projector until one day walking the beach,
Used condoms, stink of dead fish, broken
Bottles, world flotsam dredged from the
Whale's belly--bits and pieces making up
Life's hologram. I could walk around all
Sides, explore each scene like a clock wound
Backwards, stop the film for a momentary
Gaze into the heart of darkness.
Often, at middle age, experience becomes
Surreal--once tender moments exposed as
Severed flesh unstitched.
Such was this time knowing two realities:
Electrical brain impulses resurrecting the
Vanquished, the earth's energies scratching
Out every moment tread—the way a record's
Needle conjours song.
The mother is out there in those depths,
Beyond memories’ horizon, in the dark,
Beneath waves feeding with sharks, sister
To piranha. She is the first witch encountered
In the moment when she refused the nipple,
Sprouted fangs, a cinema scene scripting
Infant horror. They all become naked things
In the forest with horns, pot bubbling, spells
Cast. When grownups read witch stories,
Confirmation that I was not insane, though
They could no longer see their black skirts.
Still they float about in homes, offices, schools.
Time now to give up Circes, put the film
In a can, like the octopus floating in a tidal
Pool that sees in color.

Dali’s Window

by Ralph Monday

When Dali painted himself as a character in the
Persistence of Memory he gossiped about the Bible
in an unneighborly way, instructed to always clear
your throat before addressing Moses without concern
for other people’s feelings. Above all look down on the Bible
in the second person. If meat is involved, lubricate it
metrosexually. Start a rumor about evil while rolling your
eyes with dinner guests talking about women in a letter
of resignation.
His advice: only hypnotize a statue if you want to but explain
bells to your grandmother in a message in a bottle.
Don’t mention the window as if you are freezing to death.
Pile up words on regret in a language your mother would hate.
Let the ghost reconsider a guilty verdict, but above all
fulminate over postal carriers as a sacrifice to the sun
and hitch a ride with Christians while looking at pornography.