Gravity
I am a
passenger on a train called Gravity,
my feet are
plunging toward the Earth,
my moustache is
losing its hairs as I fall,
my nose feels
like it’s being inflated.
No wait, I am
the pilot of a ship called
What the Fuck,
and I don’t know how
to steer and I
don’t know where I am
going. Or I am
an infection on the ass
of that
percentage of America’s youths
who are
clueless. I don’t kill them
but I make them
do dumb things to
relieve the
annoying pain, like listen
only to music
that has a certain number
of beats per
minute, or sniff bath salts
to get high, or
stay awake all night being
revolting with
thinking about revolt.
Sometimes I am
a sponge, soaking up
the lotion, the
spilled nail polish, the
sickly sweet
soft drinks, the bodily
fluids that
somehow escape the hold
of industrial
strength adult diapers.
Man, that’s
gross, and I’m gross, too.
But I’ve been a
puppet, a pauper,
a pirate, a
poet, a pawn and a king,
which means I
was once Frank Sinatra,
telling you to
get out of my face, Jack,
after a show,
and while you’re up get me
a martini, and
I was also a woman in Vegas
dressed in
nothing but silver dollars
and a smug,
almost witless grin. And
I was Mothra,
Godzilla, the Hideous
Sun Demon, a
killer shrew from
the island of The
Killer Shrews,
but best of all
I was King Kong.
Ah, Kong, he
was huge, he was scary,
he was a
monster. I was huge, I was
scary, I was a
monster. But above all
I was a love story,
the only kind of
love story
you’re going to get nowadays,
the only love
story you can afford,
so close your
eyes, rest your hands
in your laps,
my friends. Yes, listen
closely to
these words, because I am
your friend,
and I am sitting next to you
here on this
train.
Ride a White
Swan
It’s 1968 and
I’m high on something
someone said
today in class about
dinosaurs, how
Tyrannosaurus Rex
was the king of
them, how he seemed
to soar into
almost space with his head
full of teeth
and hunger. These words
make me feel
like the end of a long
equation that
used to confuse me,
the response to
the question to which
I could never
listen because I was
busy thinking
about the distance
between me and
the door. And
the person
speaking was me,
at about the
age of eleven when
for some
reason, maybe it was eating
more mangoes
and less cheese,
I stopped
staring out the window
and looked at
my teacher because
I didn’t have
to hide and because
I knew what the
answer was all
along. If this
were today, before
I’d achieved
the clarity of mangoes,
the doctor
might have recommended
that my parents
pump me up with pills
to make me
focus, to make me take part
in the society
of youths who pay proper
attention to
the more boring parts
of their
childhood. But in 1968 the air
is becoming
breathable again, and my love
for the world
that surrounds me
is becoming a
car, driving away
from all the
other children, leaving them
behind like the
dust the people who used
to live in the
house I lived in then
left behind
when they left and
we moved in.
Jose
Padua's poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in many
journals, newspapers, and anthologies. After living in big cities like
Washington and New York all his life, he now lives the small town of
Front Royal, Virginia where he and his wife, the poet Heather Davis,
write the blog Shanondoah Breakdown http://shenandoahbreakdown.
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