Disemployment
at the Side-Show
I
see no good coming of this.
The ostrich feathers mix
With the
chicken feathers mix
With the peacock plumage.
Down in
front
They know feathers from plumage.
I should have never
booked the act,
Expected from the start it was too
Egalitarian.
Money is made
In painting the lower classes
Publicly
upper, and the upper classes
Privately lower. These,
these
Are miracles less than useful,
Events that stand on their
own,
Pure physics without caste.
I simply see no good out of
it.
Soon the performer is raising the dead
And any necromancer
worth his omnocracy
Knows it is not the raising
But the quality
of the dead that matters.
I've got to send a boy out front
With
a bowl full of refunds.
On stage, a cat is turned into a frog
And
it should be the other way around.
Working class men are putting
their hats
Back on, society knobs
Are balancing their weight on
their canes.
I can't blame them. Just
Up the street a
pleasant enough fellow
Gets it right, knows the character
Of
his art: every extraordinary
Event in its place, every
surprise
To its scheduled climax. Next
There could be a
talking rhinoceros
And my patrons lining up like
Newspaper men
at the fish market,
Each with a hand out. My day's
Profits
will go back into
A trip to Merkle's Glass Menagerie
Or The
Amazing Rubber Girl.
In the emptying tent the artist,
This
artist, is turning water into gold.
He just does not know how it
goes.
The
Metaphysical Man
All the long walk I wanted
hydration.
The key to happiness is wanting what you need,
Being
happy with essentials, content
With what your body tells you
Is
your fair share. Seems
For days I walked: the
landscape
Nothing but homes, trimmed yards,
An ordinariness
without distraction,
The details put by. I can tell you
By
the end of it the mental numbness
Was worse than the physical
exhaustion.
And all the long walk I wanted hydration.
Not
success, not peace, not knowledge.
The longer you walk, the
simpler your motives.
I strode uncaring,
The thought of
hydration - not of
Liquid, but of the act of hydration - consuming
me.
The weight of my want was a ponderous joy
And I crackled
with the pleasure of purpose.
No man has ever walked with as much
meaning
As I for those days walked: thoughtless motive.
Then
one day I was home:
I turned like a feckless storm into my own
driveway,
Bounded to my own front door, the most
Successful man
in the world -- and there
Was my tireless wife holding for me, all
for me,
Water, ordinary, absolving, careless, unrestrained
Water.
Bio:
Ken Poyner has published two chapbooks and perhaps 300 poems in
60 or so journals, most recently The Adirondack Review, Eclectica,
Frigg, Blue Collar Review. He lives in the lower far right
corner of Virginia with his powerlifter wife and five rescue cats.