Dean Johnson

The Contagion of Ruin

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I’m standing in the ruin of an old building. It’s an office building.  I can tell.

I’m in a shirt and loosened tie standing there among the tilting concrete slabs

and re-bar stabbing out.

Fuck. Everything is bent, broken and twisted.

I’m standing in the wreckage in front of a cigarette machine. Can’t find a quarter.

But I need a cigarette so fucking badly, though I quite so, so long ago.

And then an old man

a hobo

a bum

shuffles up.

He punches the glass of the machine again and again with a bloody fist

until the glass cracks and packs of cigarettes tumble

to the tray.

DuMarier. My old brand.  Each red pack in a strange configuration.

Packs of 24.  Packs of ten. Some tiny packs of five.

Some opened and half empty.

The old man me.

Type and the words shall appear.

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Type and the words shall appear.  A punch. A rock through a window.  The fiery finger of a subducted  and boiling mass.

A stretch to fill all mornings. A skip across the waters. A slide down a slippery slope. A lingering note.

Red fading in lament that the sting may linger but never last.

Prose and poem in part, in past

present and shifty now, all searching for a finger’s grasp.

The Opera Singer.

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You look like an opera singer, she said

puffed out shirt and pin legs

untuck your shirt. get some fucking style.

Thank God, I thought.

Respectable is getting old

and I’m forgetting how to sing.

The Old Slap and Tickle

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Just the sun I needed

but blinding too late

to keep meaning from the memory of my eyes.

A key for every knocked down door.

Every ivory slapped and tickled.

The bruising and the pallor comes upon the Sunday face

and the jowls of Saturday night.

Life is but a lingering death.

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They wobble when they walk

not knowing

they are the dead

and tremble at the cawing of the crows.

But not me.

I walk steady laughing across this tilting land

calling out:

“Here come rest upon my arm.

Life is but a lingering death

and leaving it no harm.”

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