Walking While Visible to Motorists
Whenever I walk through my neighborhood, I wear a thistle-green t-shirt. One with mustard-yellow stains beneath the armpits. Sometimes I switch to a white undershirt that was once my go-to for the dates I had with the woman who didn’t want to appear in my poems. I cover my torso with a lemon-colored vest accessorized with reflective stripes so motorists will see me. And I think about the women who said no as I walk. Marcie. Ruth. The noirette who sold me Springsteen and Seger tickets at Stonehenge Records. The houses on my route are decorated with jack o’lanterns or Valentine hearts, depending on the season. I decide I would like to plant sunflowers in my pollinator garden next spring. Maybe oxeyes and yarrows to accent the back door. A school bus driver keeps a sign on top of his mailbox to boast of his allegiance to men who wear red hats. I’ve stopped wearing Cincinnati Reds caps. And shaved my beard. I ask myself if I’m too old to rescue one more dog.
Masques
In the third year of the pandemic, you look in the mirror to find Sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster strolling across a landscape of jackalopes and thunderbirds. The sky is clouded with saxophones that play rainbow notes. Along the horizon a jokerman rides a white moose bareback toward a grievous angel’s watchtower. History no longer repeats herself. No one remembers how to rage against the machine. Shakespeare’s butterflies have passed into a white dog’s starry night. Along with the poet’s insults. Three-inch fool. Cream-faced loon. Fustilarian. The huckleberry season approaches as the last band of Nicholas saints circles a campfire. At sundown they don Guy Fawkes disguises to serenade Kokopelli with ballads by atwoods and vonneguts. With lyrics about a headless Thompson gunner and the werewolves of Bardstown. Look closer at your reflection. You haven’t wept since the last time you rebuilt a bridge to a woman’s heart.
Maybe it’s the villain within me.
The man who dares himself to drive through flashing stop lights. The one who turns toward shadows while shoving kings and pawns off chess boards. I speak for the night side of any protocol. For the car windows that are blackened and the bottom lines that shortchange monarchs and pauper popes. I always sign the check with a superhero’s alias. Illegible as a coyote’s tracks. As cold as a magpie’s unblinking eye. I have counterfeited maps. I can say no in all the seven thousand languages of the world. I spent decades lying to the robots who will replace me.
Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His prose poems have appeared in Alien Buddha, confetti, and 912 Review. In addition, Brockley’s prose poems are forthcoming in Ley Lines Literary Review and Stormwash: Environmental Poems, Volume II.
