by Charles Plymell

Sorry I was strung out on Cosanyl
and didn’t make it to your wedding
as best man, Wichita in the ’50s
but I did drive with you in muffler
dragging Chevy to Santa Fe Opera
to hear you sing Ballad of Baby Doe
and Women of Trachis (Stravinsky)

We stayed in your loft on the Bowery
two families didn’t seem crowded
the Bums burned their barrel fires
to keep warm, pimps in Cadillacs
and latest trend in dress & jewels.

City was a crowded collage pushing
boundaries on Lexington Avenue
cut out my face and put in you
where sleeps the self I can’t escape
carried in wind of blind night of
neon in Church of the Unnoticed.

Bags of hope ended the ’70s with
dump truck driving along the Bowery
picking up bodies to dump in Potters field,
Punks appeared at CBGB’s to usher
the ’80s into cocaine and derivatives
bringing out more criminality of racial
consciousness of shooters and judges.
Buffalo shot for sport, now the humans.

by Charles Plymell

In Hollywood aged poodles recoil in fright.
Ancient sorority queens, chew Juicy Fruit
in Topanga Canyon all night.
Hitchhikers from eternity flag your Chevrolet
and hug your Blue Jeans in Barney’s Beanery
where they’ve added another room to hell
the jukebox keeps repeating
“Second Hand Rose.”
And in unison across the land
a thousand long fingers
of high school sweethearts
hold their cigarettes
through wisps of smoke.

There is a chance,
Second Hand Rose,
a star may fall at your feet.
But you know that chance
withers your lips as you sing
many versions of your love poem
torn alone in pages of the night’s
tarnished wings of the Angel’s Flight.
Past Fante’s all the way up Sunset Strip
unlikely as Dante’s self help programs
in heaven while lights of Los Angeles
hang like a hustler’s mad beads.

Cast this spell on neon
dye tonight, dark moon,
for tomorrow that ounce
of stardust will be
wiped from Cadillac chrome
unnoticed by freeway hawks.

by Charles Plymell

He felt obliged to parasitize when it came time to measure
the medications of life, brains changed outside of life, society
morphed subtle as the stain of light, fast and right, just behind
the light formed crash when fish are found in rocks not water.
In the beginning was the word and the incunabulum of the turd.
I got the rattlesnake rumble gonna strike if you tread on me.
Oh professor of English is death past tense or future perfect?
The nice man cometh, Lady Gaga excels in retro–classic
and the phyllotaxis of taxis in Times Square form a drama
she’ll buy a toy for a lover boy in a relationship of the moon.

by Stephen Petroff

All I will say of that great tree is that it has been cut down.
I went for a visit and found it gone.
I was determined not to be stalled
by a death so large and sudden.
In the late afternoon, I went home
and continued my activities, as ever.
My first business was to make a pot of black tea.

As evening fell, a great deal of water fell,
from the sky, rain water.
I was suggestible: The tea tasted of rain.
As I drank from my old cup,
I listened at my open window:
I heard individual rain drops fall,
and I heard the things the raindrops hit:
a woodshed roof,
a piece of plywood propped under the eaves,
the leaves of the crabapple tree,
the leaves of the peach tree.

I flew the length of the ravine behind my house,
“using only my ears as wings,”
and I heard short bursts of sharp rain,
I heard the raindrops hit every bush and stone.
It was the kind of night I love,
but I wasn’t satisfied with it.

I would never deliberately complain about
how much I suffer from self–pity,
yet with the loss of this great catalpa tree,
I have dreamt of becoming Evil.
I knew that the rain was best for me:
I wanted to listen, rather than speak.
I listened to the storm and drank tea.
All the same, there was the earlier image before me,
the great tree of my life, reduced to a stump.

When they saw down a large tree,
they saw it up, as well.
I always expect the sawed–up tree
to look like a butchered ox,
but there is no red flesh,
no slabs of fat, no blood at all,
no empty chest cavity,
— if there’s no tree–disease, there is no empty torso,
just arms thrown wide, and that look of headlessness.
All the same, if someone would paint
a picture of the best section of a giant
(freshly–killed) catalpa tree, it would be
like one of the famous oil paintings
of a beef–critter’s hanging carcass
(Rembrandt and Soutine)
brush strokes aswirl on slaughtered wood,
wood swollen like muscle, muscle streaming with light /
light like living minerals /or powdered gold,
gold in a form that you could eat,
golden food for the conqueror of the tree /creation
that has sheltered whole families,
and who but the one devouring it,
can know if its flesh will be sweet or bitter?