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].