John
Kusak
Tracks 1996
Someone called the cops.
For fuck sake, we were only slamming
A tree limb
against the Taco Bell intercom
Demanding they serve us on foot and after-hours
When the blue and red lights came flashing
We were on the tracks near the
campus
Sitting and sharing our whiskey from out of the bottle.
In
the drunk tank I was thrown.
After being stripped-searched
I felt an absurd
invincibility-
I couldn’t go much lower
Then this massive Mexican
brute stole my jacket
And used it for a pillow
I shouted profanity through
the key hole
At anyone who walked by.
My Grandfather bailed me out
the next morning
And asked me where my jacket was.
I told him I didn’t
want to talk about it,
He said someday I would.
John Kusak
Copyright 2004
KEYS
My
girl’s asleep
I’m thinking of stealing her car
going for a drive.
But, the moon is out of reach
I grab for fistfuls of Irish mist
with keys
in hand
and decide that rain has a purpose
tonight.
I walk back inside
find a letter
read the white instead of the black,
read a Robert Creeley
poem
entitled, “I Know a Man”
look out the window
at stillness
as hard as concrete
toss the keys on the table
slip under the covers
naked as glass.
John
Kusak Copyright 2004
St.
Petersburg
Jimmy was one
of them.
At age 13, his
eyes jubilant
We all knew
for sure,
He’d change
things.
A couple years
later
He fell in with the
wrong crowd
We all saw
it coming
Down he went;
Holding
crucifix’s to the wind,
Stealing
gravity from the local store,
And
sleeping in the pasture.
We
just let him be,
Thought
he’d turn it around,
By
18, He was in jail
Never
graduated high school.
Apparently,
the story went that he slit a man’s hamstring
Over
a 12 ounce can of Budweiser.
If
I was the judge, I would have found him guilty too
With
his airs of riding mermaids,
And
flicking off the moon.
Couple
years later,
His parents
received a letter from Paris
Turned
out that he had been speaking
To
some French girls
And one
of them suggested he try the University.
His
ma told me, that the letter smelt of gasoline,
But
that he was in school and alive.
Again,
we waited for him to grow up
And
get a job, make something of himself,
Couple
years later, back in 1998,
He
wrote me a letter,
And
from what I could decipher,
He
was broke, hungry
But never
coming home.
The letter
was postmarked from Indonesia.
I
showed it to his mother,
She
blamed drugs,
His father
thought that he was a lost cause,
That
he was long gone,
On some
frequency without waves,
Floating,
Falling,
Never hitting the ground.
The
stories went back and forth,
Rumours
Flickered
against the wind.
In 2003,
may 3rd exactly,
A young
American was given the Nobel Prize
In
Mathematics.
I remembered
how quickly Jimmy’d spit out answers without
Even
hearing the entire question,
Like
some idiot savant.
Turned
out that the Nobel Prize winner was in a wheelchair,
And
my hero, my nephew
Was
shot to death the following year
In
a small town outside St. Petersburg.
Police
reports said it was over a bottle of Vodka,
Others
say it was over a 12 ounce can of Budweiser.
John
Kusak Copyright 2004
Box
of Sawdust
Hidden in a
box full of sawdust
Was
a baseball with Jackie Robinson’s signature,
My
grandpa said he was just a nigger.
We
used to listen to the radio
Together.
He’d pace the floor
And
shout profanities at the speakers, I’d sit on the couch
With
my glove in hand, watching Nanny tip-toe round the house.
“He’s
only a coon, unleash the dogs” he’d yell.
Nanny
would bring us cheese pretzels, occasionally a hot dog,
He’d
stuff his mouth with food and once he nearly choked to death,
When
Jackie rounded second and took off for third,
The
radio announcer relayed the call,
A
foot went into the speaker.
Years
later, I got that ball out from the box of sawdust,
Sat
in the living room and yelled,
“Unleash
the dogs”
I stood
up and put the ball on the mantel
Kissed
my Nanny on the forehead
And
walked out the back door.
John
Kusak Copyright 2004
