John Bennett

SLEEPING CROWS Signifying one thing and then another, he inched his way to the door. He hoped to turn the knob and be free. To slip thru the crack in the sidewalk. To alter his face on time's passport and make it into L.A. with the drugs. To find his way home again. Settle down by the fireside bright. Bounce little Billy on his knobby old knee. Tell stories about the places he'd been. Pass the hat and start a quarter collection. Mount them like butterflies on black velvet with a fast-drying glue. Tour the midwest in a mini-van. Show off his goods. Cook up some snake oil to sell on the side. Ride the ferris wheel into the night sky with the dream of his youth snuggled close. Was it too much to hope for? Was the jig truly up? Not by a long shot! He was engaged in a standoff, and a standoff's not a standoff unless it goes on forever. *** He woke up in the night with crows going wild in the sky. He lay there and listened. Then he got up and pissed. This had been going on for a very long time. For forever, as far as he knew. He went back to bed and slept the crows into silence. *********************************************************** SMOKE BREAK The quarterly report from sugar-cube heaven. Just what is it you see when you turn out the lights? Flashes of blue-green? A ship in the doldrums? Bobtailed baboons on a galloping slope? Chinese girls in a laundry, enveloped in steam? You try so hard to do good. To even the score. To level the playing field. To find time for a breather. *** Take ten, men. Smoke break on a killing field. Gladiators in repose. Off in the distance, on the green grassy hillside, fine-breasted women with waists cinched in corsets laugh in the arms of their dandies. The breeze ripples their hair that they brush like coral snakes from their wild shining eyes. With the right kind of training, their world could be yours. Somewhere far off a bugle sounds, and you rise from the earth in your armor. *********************************************************** THE REAL ESTATE OF AGING Covered wagons on an infinite prairie, upside down in a ditch with their wheels slowly turning, arrows zinging thru the silence of the valley of death. Tent cities popping up everywhere. There's a deed to the ranch but no ranch, the one lesson life has to offer. It all comes down to a grandfather clause. *** They retire early, these silver-haired apparitions, but no one sleeps. Death rattles tattoo the night. Moans ripple the darkness. Cigarettes glow and then fade into black. When first light strikes they throw back their tent flaps and step into the day, dressed in yesterday's disheveled clothing. They begin breaking camp. By mid-day the tents are collapsed and women sit quietly weeping on trunks that they can't get to snap shut. Men wipe sweat from their brows and frown up at the sun. There are no dogs, no children. There is coughing and the clearing of throats. Otherwise, silence. Slowly, the sun sets. *********************************************************** BELLY OF THE BEAST Love, hatred, tenderness, gloom, a bird on the wing, a bird in its nest of twigs and cellophane, a bird in the belly of the beast, the belly of a green tree python, warbling its red-crested song. The truth is a never-ending story, but facts are just facts, they stare you down with their cold python eyes, they wrap you in their coils and swallow you lock stock and barrel--a bird singing in the belly of a python on TV, the world watching from its couch, its divan, its water bed with ceiling mirrors, its yacht in the bay, from a distance even light-years can't measure. *** A friend e-mails this news. I print it out, stare at the hard copy, hear the bird's muffled song. My friend is a man of precise ways, he doesn't mince words, and listening to the bird-singing python, he applied the word awe. Awe, he informs me, includes fear and wonder. Awe implies admiration. He hopscotched to awe from reverence, and he got there via veneration. Veneration just didn't cover his feelings for the bird-singing python-- the word is rooted in love. But reverence, ah, reverence says to be wary, and lack of reverence was the little bird's downfall. *** Inspired by awe, my friend talks about ineffable powers, the bird's likely terror and the snake's seeming delight, two spectacularly intricate creatures wove into one! He wavers on the threshold of poetry, and then draws cautiously back. The bird's song comes to an end, and the snake slithers off thru the grass. *********************************************************** FAME & FORTUNE AT THE OK CORRAL To the race go the swift, to the victor the spoils, the worthless things we buy to pass time, gas, away, up and over. Sword swallowers and tin men and tamers of shrews. A triadic nightmare in a big-top of pain. On the road again for your third farewell tour. Strike up the band, here come the fans and the groupies. Whip out the felt pens and start signing casts. *** Fame and fortune at the OK Corral. Gun smoke and screen tests. Everyone wants it all for a little while. No one wants to go back where they came from. Logistics and distilled satisfaction. Longings and a tree full of jays. James Dean combing his hair until tendonitis sets in. *** No one's going anyplace fast. No one wants to. What we want is to just get away. It's repulsion that drives us out of the garden, stark naked with fear, something even God turns his head from. Just what is it you see when the other cheek's turned? *** The Prince of Darkness rides onto the set, and reality strikes like a cobra. ********************************************************** THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES I've got ideas in my head. I've got spiders in my bed. In my chest there's a windmill, an emotional pinwheel, about to rip loose from its moorings. Off in the distance, an old man on a broken-down pony gallops in for the kill. Thanks for the memories. Thanks for the ersatz love like a shot of bad junk in the groin. *** Remember those nightmares, how I rocked you back down to safety? How is it, waking up in his arms? How is it when your dark storm hits that pale placid beach? Who sucks up and swallows your terror? I've gone high into the mountains and may never come down--deep love is hard to scab over. Mortal wounds are often inflicted long before death takes its toll.

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