(Author’s note: Stay the hell away from Lynden)
1.
An old man sits
Dwindling ice cubes in his wine
Delivered promptly by the average
Gangly looking girl with medium sized
Teeth and breasts at
Nine thirty in the morning.
A bit piece in a complex puzzle
She can’t even see
That only an outsider can understand.
Hay baling punks
Of indiscriminate age, discriminate thought
Wave the old drunk hello,
Ignoring me and my discharge in the corner.
Sad and slow this town,
A place of worship, money, family,
Little else.
To some it seems full. Alive. The goal.
The kind of place you’d want to raise your kids.
The darkness? Well,
That only an outsider can understand.
Large trucks that all obey the speed limit,
Especially on the way to Sunday Dinner.
Expansive houses of cedar and cornfields
Filled with middle aged men
In the prime of their lives,
Who take care of their fathers,
And provide for their children,
And keep their wives firmly in line while they sit and
Rock in hand made chairs
Below stark images of taxidermy,
Dead deer looking down from the wall.
A young man sits writing poetry,
An outsider no one understands.
Peaked, he is passed coffee
By a non-descript waitress in her middle thirties,
And without ordering this liquid he had been given
He understands the power structure
Of caffeine and a strong back
Stretching from his well worn
Hand made
Stool back to eighteen hundred and seventy five.
There is indeed a goal here
That nary an outsider understands.
He can merely venture a guess
As the third waitress happens by,
Asks me if he has enough cream, sugar.
And the hay bums slide off out of booths
To break their backs in effigy
For God and country,
For Sanctity and Family,
For Society and Correspondence.
This town flits to and fro,
This enclosed community.
As real as it gets
For those of us separated
Along the beam that is deliverance,
Outsiders no one understands.
2.
Holds up the mike and gets ready to sing:
Cough! Cough! Cough!
Brazen in her other hand the unworldly cancer stick,
Another glass of wine for the gentleman at the bar,
He’s still here.
He’s still fighting in farm country for God.
Hands her a check and his alcoholism’s all paid for.
The man across from me, elderly,
Proclaims, “That guy there
walking out the door,”
(and into obscurity)
“...he used to be some kind of basketball player
at the high school on down the way, on the guide...
Now he seems to spend all his time in restaurants.
I forget his name.
Bob? Bill? Vick?”
“Flick?” I ask.
No heads raise. Nobody understands.
I laugh at my portrait of an ex-basketball player,
Tip my mug to the statue in the barstool
Who winks and takes another pull from
The bottle of emptiness. The hole of Lynden.
The stage of yesterday.
3a.
Sundays. Sundays are the worst.
So traditional. So straight. So set.
No transitions. No cadence. No sex.
At least in retrospect.
Dinner is provided en masse, post mass,
Family values and Christian Lifestyles,
There’s nothing wrong with that. In theory, anyway.
4.
“Here’s your drink.”
“Thanks.”
“The food’ll be out pretty soon here.”
“Yeah.”
3b.
In theory, anyway, television works.
It placates the men here, anyway.
Football while the managerial staff
Perk their breasts and finish dinner.
They sit so mightily into
The portrait of a small town,
Man at the head leading children in prayer,
Book and babies in his lap:
He makes them call him poppa.
In blue denim overalls.
In the word of the patriarchy.
The hay baling machine,
And the holy spirit of underrated capitalism
5.
So used to white trash kitchen Sundays
Even I, the irreverent, bowed to his control
6.
Something less than noble is on the cut;
A pen capped at both ends, wrong.
There is a penultimate disproof to this,
However obnoxious and freedom lacking others
Of great faith and discourse may find it
There is plenty to criticize of this “modern” world,
Deranged, no one pities, understands.
The undead masses eat their own with salt,
But at least they see these problems,
These infanticides. At least they try and fix it.
In Lynden a stranger stands up,
After his local friend pays for his Pepsi.
Second visit, he’s learned his lesson: become emphatic,
The blond close cropped heads swivel to view
(chase this nigger out of town)
The burning heathen devil close his notebook,
(drinks are on the house)
Head side by side to the front entrance,
(a stranger no one understands)
Pick up the day driving home through the country,
(a Christian, family dinner;
the kids call him poppa)
Lie back to death and blow the day’s lights out,
Hands behind neck in a pretzel,
Wondering which half is
How did the world(s)
(enclosed)
Go so right when so obviously wrong?
It drives this man to think.
It drives one man to drink.