DOC'S GOT THE BLUES
For Gary "Doc" Holloway
Your horn sounds the lows
Of memory, the hole
The guard you once were
Tossed young thugs into.
Lock up. Cell blocks
Holding con and C.O.
Alike. All
Backed to a wall
And being done by time.
Worn down by seventeen
Years on the graveyard shift,
State job, right, but no gravy train,
Your breath was sustained by notes
Sounded down those long night
Halls, alto to soprano,
Bawdy to dreamy,
Hunting the key
Out. Where now
You grin, saying Good gravy,
Man, it's all gravy now;
Now it's all good.
EXCHANGE SCHOLAR
Here to teach haiku,
Sato from Tokyo puffs smoke
from a Lucky Strike
over beer and shots
at an off-campus gin mill
and levels with me:
hard boiled crime stories,
not haiku, are his true love,
and he stays up nights
in his rented room
smoking in bed and reading
Hammett and Chandler --
like the lonely wolf
private detective. He says
He can tell me this
because I am not
like the other professors,
not the college man
but the real McCoy
American street-wise guy.
I shrug my shoulders,
another life, that;
one I'm glad to leave behind.
But he looks away
and I tell him how
on a bad night in a bar
back in Toledo
I pulled a snub-nose
Smith & Wesson thirty-eight
on some big mouth punk.
Ah, Toredo guys,
he says, like Flank Sinatra
and his pack of rats.
A GUARD SHOUTS AT SPYING CLEOPATRA COLLAPSED IN HER BEDROOM
Look at the asp on that woman!