by David Stankiewicz

Doctors were plotting their
bold interventions
as if the look on my face
could be found in their manuals

My lungs told them nothing,
blood refused to perform

Drawn forth in fear and trembling —
hands clasped before me,
sweat crowning my brow —
the living water from my spine
was a pure revelation,
esoteric witness
to an undefiled source

But the technicians of doom
weren’t concerned with such
holiness as they huddled
intoning my agnostic data

I was lashed to a mast in a cyclone
machine, something charted
my brain        my mind
left to its own
unscientific devices

Mortality punched its clock
in the fluorescent netherworld.

The drunks and the homeless
disappeared before dawn.

At last a stranger came in:
there was no term for
my condition no reasons at all
they could name.

A carnal day was breaking.
I was free to go, free
to live or die.

Culture as Remembrance, Or why should anyone bother learning French?

by Gerald Locklin

In the outback there is Mozart,
Still and this night only,
And the lizard reads the lithographs,
The monolith blurs to a pluralith,

And what is left is
Edna St Shakespeare Elizabeth Robaire

And Emily Dickensian and the Browning Movement

But in the drawer,
Beside the dusty artifacts and paste jewelry,
One always finds the whiskey

At her age one could do without a corset,
But she wears one anyway,
Protection from a pinch,

The liner-pale of lyricism
Or the laziness of after-after-afternoon:

Where have the lost ones gone?

by Gerald Locklin

Once each first week in December,
I used to find it de rigeurto remind myself
Why I should really quit drinking egg nogs
I’d pick an evening, preferably having just
Consumed a large, rich meal,
And then I’d down about a pint
Of rum-and-bourbon mix,
Stirred into a couple quarts of egg nog mix,
In about half an hour
After I fell into bed
I’d lie there for about a week,
Chewing wafer upon wafer of Maalox
And waiting for the concoction
To force its way from esophagus
To stomach and through the mile or so
Of twisty intestines

I only found it necessary to repeat this ritual
Once a winter, though,
For about thirty years,
And eventually, twenty-four years ago,
I gave up drinking altogether

So it can hardly be said
That I was a man,
Who took an inordinate amount of time
To learn from his mistakes

by Gerald Locklin

“Some people come here to sit and think;
I just come to shit and stink.”

How often we have read that
On a shithouse wall.

To me it is perennial philosophy,
The psalm of life:
It’s one of those eternal verities
Of which William Faulkner waxed so eloquently,
Accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature.

I bet it antedates Homer,
Although it might not rhyme as perfectly
In Greek,

Which goes to show why English is
The most poetic of languages.