Truck

8 Poems by Mike Foldes

Glass and Steel or Balsa Wood

Glass and steel or balsa wood.

Why is what we are not more important

than what we are? Would you sooner

lay down on slick cobblestones

in the alley of a North Sea city

than see your future run over by time,

the way ours has been? If it’s a forever

thing standing between us,

garden statues and stone temples,

then let the hanging moss grow

and tangled vines cover us, the way

tears of happiness caress a lover’s cheek.

I would rather book passage on a ghost ship

and watch from the ocean’s fog as you leave

your impressions by making something of yourself,

than slip below penciled-in horizons

drawn by another’s slender hand, blind

to what color wrings from a rising sun.

The Ice Bully

The train stopped on the tracks at the end of the street

about four in the afternoon, when the short days

were already drawing down curtains.

We crawled under rusted couplings to the frozen pond

lit fires, played hockey, then hobbled home

on frozen feet in midday darkness for supper.

A half century later steel wheels still rattle windows,

cattails wag in the swamp, some of the same

houses remain, but kids no longer skate there

the way they used to, preferring instead smooth ice

under pressurized domes without snow to clear,

where there’s not a chance in hell of falling through.

One thing’s the same, though, the ice bully

with his hand out, saying, “Sure, you can play,

you little turd, but it’s going to cost you.”

Good Company

Sometimes she sleeps without clothes

Next to me on the warm bed

One knee drawn up slightly

Head turned away on the pillow

All white sheets bright in morning light

Just out of easy reach, but there

Nonetheless, while from another room

A stranger’s eyes follow movement

Of sun from horizon to moon

Anticipating events in a sequence

Of natural selection taking place

On the fourth dimensional stage

Where lovers once toe-danced

On seashells and starfish

To the roll of oblivious waves.

the spontaneous combustion of friendly fire

a million friends on the social pages

but you wake up each morning alone,

and on Saturday there still is no one

with a van at the curb with coffee

in hand to help you move your shit

from one 5^th floor walkup to another.

sisters, brothers, cousins, friends -- these

days the extended family is limited

only by what it is being called upon

to do: praise, critique, jump on the bandwagon;

it’s  a crap shoot who really cares

what happens to you, one day to the next.

complex words proliferate online,

but explanations are much simpler than that.

one doesn’t really need  an Oxford vocabulary

or Roget’s, to explain what we were better off

without -- before computers, typewriters, papyrus …

or even the legendary stone tablets of Moses.

the spontaneous combustion of friendly fire

was all they needed to sing and dance about.

The Art of Dennis Hopper

July 16, 2010

I see Dennis Hopper’s art collection is scheduled for auction at Christie’s.

I wonder if anyone dressed in blue velvet will ride in on a Harley,

and if she does, will she also wear a clear plastic mask hooked up

to a canister of nitrous oxide slung over her shoulder, and will she also have

a bandolier of poppers to snap under the noses of climaxing bidders?

Dennis, old man, you were indeed the bad boy, you and James,

and Sal and Peter and Jack. Will there ever be another your equal

for suburban anarchist youths to model themselves after – even as they

like you, becoming aging hipsters?  One by one the old guard

is replaced by the new, but not all will be survivors, as were you,

to finally find yourself hawking sound Ameriprise investments 

to similarly aging peers, an irony sharp enough to cut through Rothko,

Rivers, Rauschenberg and other radical contemporaries you lived with

in your head and on your walls. So, Hopper’s collection is up for grabs.
That’s what happens, you know, the great works, the enduring ones,

just go shuffling about, house to house, room to room, wall to wall

at the will of the money changers. But at this stage of the game,

where hangs the art of Dennis Hopper’s not in the living room,

but in room for living -- and not to be traded off for anything.

gospel of poetry

friend john preached

the gospel of poetry is love;

long as the poem dwelt 

on beauty, forget the rest.

he didn’t know poetry

is a distance runner

racing time with blood

in her eyes;

that over and done are blurs

in a phosphorus flash;

(or) when to shred

the psychic distance

between maker and plough.

(or) how to suspend

false resistance.

he didn’t know in this world

beauty rides a black horse,

carries a whip, and the sweat

in the small of her back

does not taste the same

to everyone.

A Cerebral Desire To Wed Infinity

1

Pluck the guitar from street side.

Play chords to stretch the imagination,

Play an endless scale.

2

The locus of concern is an estuary

Feeding the river at a point downstream.

Never been dead before. Same as alive.

3

The body bleeds out

on starched white sheets;

Sticky in the morning. Same as Love.

4

Do they exist because you are here?

Or do you exist because they are there?

A cerebral desire to wed infinity

Materializes while shaving.

Tissues do no one any good.

black beauty and poetry

old friend so and so preached

the gospel of poetry is love love love

long as the poem dwelt in the realm

of beauty, forget about the rest.

in this world beauty rides a black horse,

carries a whip, and the sweat

in the small of her back

does not taste the same to everyone.

Mike Foldes is founder and managing editor of ragazine.cc, the online magazine

of art, information and entertainment. A collaboration of artists, writers, photographers,

poets, travelers and interested others, ragazine.cc is an eclectic collection of material

with a global audience in mind. His recent book, Sleeping Dogs: A true story of the

Lindbergh baby kidnapping, was published by Split Oak Press, Ithaca, NY, in April

2012.  Foldes makes his living as a sales engineer specializing in medical electronics.

Among his favorite jobs was tending bar at the Poetry Society headquarters in Earl's

Court Square, London, England, in the early '70s, where he acquired a taste for warm

Guinness while drinking with Dodie Farr, a distant cousin of the queen, and Neil

Gaydos, a musician friend from upstate New York who he ran into on Portobello

Road.