House in Motion
By Paul Callaway
Copyright 2011 Paul Callaway
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Cover photo taken, owned & copyright by Paul Callaway
contents
masking tape on the bedroom floor
10 poems ending with ‘so sorry’
paper fedora with a black band
My thoughts are feeling a bit restless today
so if someone would point the way I think I’ll get going.
Charles Heilige
*****
Where to? Where to?
Where to in this wonderful land?
Drag me through your hills. Your valleys.
Draw me into your beautiful eyes.
I won’t mind-
Which way? Which way?
Which way to your meadowy vista?
Cart my curiosity across your countryside.
Cradle my love in your open arms.
I won’t mind-
What now? What now?
I’ve been this way twice over.
My devotion is driven like a tourist
returning to his favorite love.
I don’t mind-
What now? What now?
I’ve been this way thrice over.
Your every curve mapped with kisses.
Each kiss an old experience made to feel new.
I don’t mind.
*****
Somewhere on the flanks of the city,
perhaps in the gentle descending streets
of downtown, as though poised on the verge of
discovery, a bounty of silver-copper diversity
lies pooled in charity along a water fountain’s floor,
glistening under the softly churning surface
like so many pocketful of forgotten
wishes waiting to be
1) collected
2) cashed
3) honored
In those summer time odysseys pedalled by youthful
enthusiasm atop an orange Schwinn
complete with a banana seat and ape bars,
I happened to make good on 2 out of 3 for them.
*****
Disloyalty is such a strong poison
that one drop, just one little drop
on a dogs tongue will kill the strongest man.
So it’s best to keep it bottled for a special day
and use it sparingly.
*****
A hard cold morning is what I remember most,
the frozen ground’s snowy ghost
crunching its wintery protest
under my every foot step,
and the night sharpened air
instantly biting at my ears
while the dry Februariness
does its best
to displace my breathing
with coughing.
Yet I kept walking,
my brother following
behind me, completing
our two soul convoy of silence - nothing spoken,
while ahead Pepper lies broken,
her time with us expiring during the night,
her body covered in a light
dust of white
snow and the yellow
glow
of the back porch light.
Brown eyes, still open and warm, seem to toast
us her final thanks, but
a hard cold morning is what I still remember most.
*****
masking tape on the bedroom floor
The math
was simple, even for a couple of kids
constantly fighting against the odds.
A path
you might say, to establish the order
of living arrangements between two brothers.
A dresser,
your bed and a narrow pathway to the door.
The rest is mine. Oh, spacious space galore!
What better
way to sum up our sibling relationship
than simple division by masking tape
on the bedroom floor?
*****
I’m not angry
nor am I mad.
I’m just happy
you’re only sad
about my loss
of composure
that day I tossed
you right over
into the cold,
flowing current
and cruelly held
you under it.
There’s no deny-
ing you were sore
when I said I
was over bored.
*****
I have a brother whose name is Russell.
When we were kids we use to tussle
until he started to work out
and his body began to sprout.
Now he’s like Popeye with all that muscle.
*****
I didn’t mean to do it. Blow up Barbie that is.
I took her plastic life in a well planned accident
of adolescent subterfuge, lit fuses and…POP!
Lady fingers for a lady.
Knowing full well my sister would miss her
I couldn’t resist her.
With her pompous nerve
and her equally lavish curves
that taunted me to dollnap her in the first place,
she probably
deserved it. Not like you.
Not like when I rubbed you the wrong way
after wrapping that jump rope around your neck
and pulling it with the prospect you’d spin like a top.
Instead all I got was punished
by guilt and mom.
If I had to empty my pockets of admissions
that is one I’d own up to and say
I didn’t mean to do it.
*****
Does it matter how far someone falls,
be it from grace or someplace
closer to Earth?
Such as from the top of three concrete steps where,
at the bottom, you landed after I gave
the tricycle we shared a ‘little’
push with my foot.
Four pulled teeth and a quarter century later there’s
still an apology stuck somewhere under
my shoe like warm gum.
*****
I had so much to say that day
that I just had to cry it out
to anyone who would pay attention.
To the woman manning the cash register
To the smiling bank teller
To strangers on the street
To my grandmother
To my father
To my mother, especially
Especially to my mother
I cried it out to the pediatrician who examined me
and I wailed it out to the nurse penning my registration in the ER.
I even screamed it out loud to the doctors saving my life from the meningitis
kicking my ass when I was only six months old.
Christ, I had so much to say that day.
Lucky for me we have the First Amendment.
*****
There’s so much you can put between two slices of bread,
like peanut butter, or butter, or sugar,
or chips, or cheese,
or even another slice of bread with peanut butter.
Oh, yes.
There’s so much you can put between two slices of bread
(especially peanut butter) when you’re poor.
*****
The wrinkles in my brain are subsidized by the sum
of the lessons learned while sitting on my bum
as the moon barters with the sinking sun.
Charles Heilige
Instead of moaning and groaning about what I don’t know
I’d rather collapse into the cool evening lawn
to wait for the sun to settle into its nighttime motion
and bare witness as it swaps spaces with the moon and its pale notion
of what bright really ought to be.
Bathed in her watery light we’ll plunge into a lengthy lunar conversation
of celestial proportions, our thoughts and dreams transcending
the empty miles between us as we discuss this and that.
“What shall we talk about tonight?”
“The sky’s the limit”.
And so it was.
Nearby, a maple tree tries to pry discretely
as our heavenly discussion glows enlightening-
if only barely so.
Nevertheless I can tell you this, I feel smarter already,
lying in the dumb grass
looking up at the dumb stars
being bitten by dumb mosquitoes
while ignoring the call of my dumb parents,
“Paul! It’s time to come in!”
I really don’t need their preaching and teaching
to add to my understanding
when all I truly require is a moonly
soft reply etched across a nighttime sky-
lunar
solar
astral
stellar
astrophysical
cosmological
universally comical
*****
If my wants are fleeting
and ever morphing
then my needs,
both real and ones
I keep inventing,
must be something
a little more unyielding
and a little less fluid
than these teasing aspirations
that fill my pockets
like ghosts in the attic.
*****
It’s only a cold, quiet morning
sometime in some winter
and I’m lying under a blanket
on the living room floor.
From the kitchen I can hear daddy
preparing for work,
his heavy laid boot steps
echoing deeply through the silence.
BOOM BOOM
A slow drum of dread
BOOM BOOM
on the skin of my head
BOOM BOOM
that beats until he’s fled.
Only his voice is deeper, God-like to a child
and something to value for its wisdom-
a tone to revere and love even.
Yet I get so nervous.
It seems even the hands of time,
confident since the Big Bang,
shy from keeping pace
to the glum tempo,
skipping the tick and only tocking in
moderation.
It’s an oddity only Einstein may well appreciate
should he of had the fortune to poke
his scruffy scalp out from under
the same circumstance.
To think, hours ago I was lost in a dream
and buried in blanketed shadows
deep of my own making.
But now I’m stifling any desire to stir,
breathing barely enough to be living
as each footfall stiffens my resolve
to feign sleep until they finally fade away,
BOOM BOOM
waiting to take away this beautiful fear
BOOM BOOM
and cut loose it’s stitching from my eyes.
BOOM BOOM
I should be use to it by now,
these two different houses surrounding me.
One still, one in motion.
*****
I’m a little boy with a giant spider over my bed.
It’s crawling on the ceiling,
It’s climbing down its web.
I’m throwing off the covers as it’s falling on my head.
Can someone tell me what the meaning is?
I don’t know the answer except I was only dreaming it.
There are ghosts in the attic calling me out to play.
They call me while I’m sleeping,
They call me out by my name.
I’m throwing off the covers so I can join in their game.
Mama, can you tell me what the meaning is?
She doesn’t know the answer except I was only dreaming it.
*****
Throughout his career I must admit
daddy never had any big hits.
Not like Tracy Lawrence
or Bobby Brown.
Even gifted with Sinatra blue eyes
and a voice like dynamite
he never hit #1.
For the most part he played it circumspect-
Except for that one time
when he really belted it out
and had me pissing in my pants.
*****
Sweep. Sweep up all those ants.
One zillion specks strong.
Deader than a door nail,
Daddy wants them all swept and gone.
Down. Down in to the basement
On daddy’s firm orders.
No quibbling about it
‘Cause daddy never gives us quarter.
Sweep! Sweep! I grab the broom
While Russ grabs the pan.
Daddy grabs the trash bag
While mama grabs Mellisa’s ‘lil hand.
Down! Down! Our feet step in sync.
First Daddy.
Then mama.
Then sis.
Then brother.
Then I.
The irony not lost
That we march down the steps like ants in a line.
*****
As a boy I often carried my insecurity
from room to room, keeping them
in a pocket or in my shoe.
That is, until one day on a sweltering summer afternoon
when boredom overtook my fear
I burned them with a large magnifying glass
I kept upstairs in my room.
Little black piss ant
crawling up the broken bricks,
not afraid of the fall or what’s to come,
how unfair for you to be so bold yet so small,
so safe and secure in what you do and who you are.
As a man I should throw away
such funny disparities between an ant and a kid.
Kids so small.
Ants so big.
*****
Morning comes early to the fields of Foley.
Before even the sun itself fully wakes to
call away the groggy mist hugging both
eye and ground, a strong morning chill
penetrates through both soul and sole
as Russ and I parade in step after grandpa,
mindful of the divots we dug during
yesterday’s dawn raid. With pitch fork,
shovel and coffee can all with us again
we stop, stab, and overturn a fresh mass
of wriggling muck, scenting the cold air
in moments of fresh dirt, worms and family.
From this Earth kinship grows in the soil
we now labor through with our hands.
It was among these fields that family took root
generations ago in the fertile bottom
lands just a chew and spit away from
the muddy waters of the Mississippi River.
So as I pull worms from clogs of dirt
I can’t help but to see familiar faces.