A Poem by Danniel Schoonebeek
by Mark Bibbins, Editor
Works and Days
Hesiod insists his name means the shovel.
And this life on my spade
“it will end
in two acts.”
ACT ONE
Before I grow up
& I die a legend to nobody
ACT TWO
I’ll grow up
get poorly
& ghost write
my brother’s life story.
•
They called it 1983 when they triggered me.
And mom coughed me up —
a fist of white drugs on a patch of dead leaves in the timothy.
Supposed to be:
a child was born on this day with a badger brush in his teeth end of story.
But the badger before she is skinned
& the bristles
long after the skinning
each to each we have yearns of our own
& the brush
in my mouth it kept foaming.
•
Yes I followed a girl like a goat who drooled wine from her mouth into mine.
Yes life named this the new millennium, not me.
•
And the man from the Party with the bombardier look on his face & gold cheekbones
you reek he said
like a mutt
with a face that
could cook
up a fundraiser.
They called her Red Dirge their flag & they drove her stake through my chin.
And I bore her
in rivers of grain up to their podium.
I gazed out at the townies my name
on their pickets
my campaign
awareness money
hanging like mouthfuls of haggis from the citizenry’s pockets.
•
(Go, let history tell you.)
•
“He didn’t even have the balls to vote party line.”
•
“I want to smoke me
out of me,” I thundered.
“Like this name you’re calling me is a rodent who’s wintering
no summering
inside the fifty
dividing walls of my ancestry’s body.”
•
Thence I lived a short life the haunch of a joke.
(Rain, gunfire, crows).
•
Five years thence I was famously addicted to whiskey dick & for the umpteenth time in my life
when I smelled the sal volatile
I turned raw
I skinned my head on the sky & woke up in custody
& the poorly cropped
local police they’re a dynasty
& they beat the classified ads from teeth like they were sifting a jewel from a feed bag.
•
No second acts in American lives
sings Hesiod
whose asshole is always bleached white as a daylily.
And no gun to go off neither.
Simply me, said my brother in the middle of his life in an elk lodge.
•
I’ll never forget the telephone poles of my youth, he said.
Mudpuppies under the flagstones, he said.
And my enemies
how I loved them
when they ambushed me inside the bamboo.
•
Hesiod insists
act two
will be fin
when I tell you the jaws of life’s what they needed
when they needed to pry a girl from the mud
with the balls
to wedlock my brother.
Problem being.
Life when you land it
is a low-paying job.
And act three’d already begun with no mud.
•
I have chosen the life of no wants, I tell them.
My house it’s not even one thimble.
Jarfuls of piss
my father’s
they wait
like a trust fund
stacked high
as a plateful
of haggis
down cellar.
I was sent to this village to die in this village.
Now my village
is an ingrown
hair on my dick.
It soothes me the chafing when the head lice rut in the dumpsters.
And the rednecks drive cocked
off the bridge
to the cock fights.
In this village I can hear a mosquito suck blood from the chin of a hireling.
And a hireling
suck dye from a lollipop.
You dynasty men.
You come to my door once a year & sucking your teeth with a summons.
I’ll wire you
what I wired god
when god told me
“eat dust
& find work.”
The man’s not been born who can stop me from slumming.
The mayor he owes me the keys to the village.
And I’ll live here the rest of my life.
Danniel Schoonebeek’s first book of poems, American Barricade, is out now from YesYes Books. In 2015, Poor Claudia will publish his second book, a prose travelogue called C’est la guerre.
You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at [email protected].