Elsewhere

by Jack Ohms

When the traffic clears like a proverbial scotch mist
to let your chicken flesh and bones pass,
the old man from number 78 will buy a newspaper on an average day
at the kiosk across from the church;
his workman's life-history with its back to you
and his hat firmly on his head,
and a lad on a bicycle a size too small wonders,
like all young lads and lasses will
at the dark troupe;
a car or two or possibly three behind,
soon all settled into the corner of a pub you never knew,
to sigh for sighing's sake,
and a few last memories and tentative laughter,
some too-often-told jokes and half-spun stories

- and just as you thought you'd lived enough
to earn a place in merry Hell -

St. Peter will wave you through, not greeting;
his eyes on some other prize
and not even a chicken nugget-sized coal for after-burning -
that's you:

After all,
don't forget,
you were just someone they spoke to in the bars:

"Not very old, was he?"

"No age to go, poor bugger!"

"Smoked like a chimney, though."

"Drank like a fish."

A preist farts and hangs up his cassock, takes tea,
while a boquet flips and flaps, flops in a slight breeze, light grey day,
and the heaving breast mound subsides, in a light rain.

Thunder roars,
elsewhere.

Snow Bound

an unemployment cheque,
shop-lifted necessities,
beer-bottle deposits and you
are all I have to pin myself to,
as clouds chariot over
the steeples of the forest
to other lands; falling
like blessings on other heads,
while I sit wondering
if the seven-year itch
I cannot scratch is really
trying to tell me something.

or is it me - nerve-wracked
by simple circumstance
and the dragnet plain
of bankrupt possibilities?

my eyes shift uneasily
as the mail-slot jumps,
sending me another
thousand thousand offers
on life and living,
while I contemplate
only railroad tracks,
bridges and dim distances:

I have so much further
to go than I ever dreamed
fit, wise or imaginable
through necessity.

by Jack Ohms

one over the left shoulder

(for Dylan LaCross)

we used to drink the days and nights
in chiming cut-glass bars and side-street dives;
me listening, him drawling Los Angeles,
Seattle, Corpus Christi, Meeker, Colorado, Mexico;
the oil fields and the dope deals,
that murder in the Salt Lake City streets,
a life lived out in dog years
and the woman trail ("those rotten cunts")
that led him by the balls to Finland,
where his grandmother had come from
when the white's chased them out:

"dancin' was forbidden during the Cold War"
Charlie told me a hundred times.

then one day the blood turned brown in his brain
and they found him unable to move on his bedsit floor;
he couldn't speak and the stories ended there.

now, up the main artery of frozen pine forest
and birch tree masses come his ashes
arriving here on some ghost train.

here, we are supposed to pinch and scatter them.

where? outside his favourite bar?
the hill he clambered drunk home every night:

"one step backwards, three steps sideways,
one step forward and puke - YEAH!"

or then maybe outside the unemploymet office,
or inside the unemployment office?

or then maybe one over my left shoulder, for luck?

some place, where the ground will dissolve him;
like salt in boiling water, Charlie's gone,
gone, gone, gone,....................gone.

by Jack Ohms