Thunder Sandwich #26 - James Valvis poetry

The Club for the Caretakers of the Not-Really-Dead Celebrities

We meet on Tuesdays, 8 p.m.

Usually it's six or eight of us,

but we get as many as thirty.

Nothing fancy. We gather on

the 2nd floor of a bookstore

by Hopper Road, here in town.

Myra, who's been watching over

Janis Joplin, supplies the treats.

Usually cookies and thermos tea.

Old Nancy Turner is our president

and founder, and has been watching

Amelia Earhart since 1939 or so.

When Nancy gavels us to order,

she always says the same thing.

"No, the old bag ain't dead yet…

Me neither." We all know what

she means. Jane Kinsley has watched

Marilyn Monroe since the fifties.

Tom Porterman's been hosting

Jimi Hendrix since--'70? And me--

well, Jimmy Hoffa's been living

in my closet since I was a boy.

I guess it could be worse.

Look at poor Gavin Malone,

stuck with that incorrigible Elvis,

who never passes a 7-11 without

getting in a Slurpee and a sighting.

And then there's Allan Wickowitz.

Poor Al. You try putting up

with Hitler in a kosher household.

Anyway, we all meet on Tuesdays

to talk about our troubles.

How the Not-Really-Deads control us

in their oh so not subtle ways

to go out and buy all the new books,

new albums, new movies, new

whatever-else about them,

while they sit around and bask

in their endless notoriety,

usually with the remote in one hand,

a big bowl of Hagen-Dazs in the other,

your dog and girl heads on their laps.

All the blasted expense: emotionally,

mentally, not to mention financially.

Few of us marry, fewer have children.

A handful of us no longer have testicles.

Some have joined the Greys. Some

never venture out without wearing a hat.

It's like being a damn alcoholic,

minus the pleasure of getting drunk,

so we meet on Tuesdays, 8 p.m.,

and we bitch about JFK's flirting,

Princess Diana's endless shopping, and

all the rest of the Not-Really-Deads

because no matter how much

we hate them, despise them, really,

if you want to know the truth,

for being things we never were,

even just once a long time ago, because

no matter how much we hate them

we would never turn them out,

never forget them, never release them,

never give up the only thing we have

that's real.

The Bug Massacre Poem, Eight Years in the Making

Reading one of my old journals

I see eight years ago this day

while working as a gas attendant

for five-and-a-quarter an hour

and as much angst as I could eat

I swept into a pile some 150 bugs

who flew too near the overhead lights

and plummeted to a needless death

The charred bugs lay on the sidewalk

a heap as ugly as any Hitler ever made

and I imagined an insect newscast

where bug politicians (aren't they always?)

buzzed the same broken promises

of a "complete investigation" and "reforms"

while the fireflies swarmed in the streets

like so many dim Molotov cocktails

And oh, how my heart ached

for those poor hapless creatures

contorted legs and singed wings--

the injustice of it all, the damnable injustice--

so that after work while writing

in my run-down single-wide trailer

I swore to remember those insects

(for I saw in them a symbol of myself)

and vowed to be utterly miserable forever

and one day soon write a beautiful ode

to the fallen of the Massacre at L'il Champ;

Like I said, according to my journal

that was eight years ago this day

and in those eight short years

I must have slaughtered 10,000 bugs

I've stepped on them and slapped them

they walked in but they didn't walk out

and once I swallowed whole a swarm of gnats

for the audacity of flying in front of me

while my mouth was open in mid-sentence

I've killed enough insects to be a Mosquitolini

a Butcher of Bugdad, an Osama bug Laden

and here's the most obnoxious part:

I've never felt a moment's guilt

about the savagery of this carnage

yet my life has only grown better and better--

I left the gas station and trailer behind

and now I have all the wants a man needs

a wonderful wife, and a Gerber baby daughter

whose face is like my face made young again

so that all is fresh, and sunny, and holy

and each day is my childhood begun anew

I don't know how to explain it, other than

I saw my path to light and took it--

But what of the bugs I left behind, you ask,

and let's not be coy any longer

the people too: the arthritic old man

who took an hour to mark his LOTTO stub

praying the Our Father as he handed it to me

his hand spotted and gnarled, his eyes wet

with tears he could never begin to cry;

the cashier who ate her second lunch

inside the beer cooler so she could maintain

the lie she didn't eat too much

she was just big-boned; the teenage girl

who tried to win sympathy from her boyfriend

by telling him she'd been raped by a gang

and when he confronted them, they knifed him

and dumped his body in the St. John's River;

the drunks; the riff-raffs; the down-and-outers;

and those I've since forgotten, shame on me--

What of them, that heap? Why do some make it

and others do not? And why did I

while others did not? Didn't each

try as hard, and as nobly, to be happy?

What's the answer? Well, to be honest,

I no longer much care about the answer;

I am a weak person, a worker bee easily lost

in the honeycombs of life, and

I've abandoned my false sentimentality,

and with it the desire to get philosophical:

Suffice to say, if we must say anything,

some combination of chance and choice

drives our lives, and what part chance

and what part choice is anybody's guess;

though if you believe too far on the chance side,

you'll grow bitter, and blame your suffering

only on others, excusing yourself, and if you

believe too far on the choice side, you'll be

blind to everyone's suffering but your own--

As for me, what interests me now

is my happiness, its continuation

and growth, and while I don't expect

to ever be forgiven for telling the lie

that I ever greatly cared, about them or you

or the bug massacre, let it not be said

I do not keep my promises, and so

I offer this ugly eight-years-late ode

to those fallen Icaruses, be they bugs or men,

whose hunger for warmth destroys them

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