Why I Have A Crush On You, UPS Man

by Alice N. Persons

you bring me all the things I order
are never in a bad mood
always have a jaunty wave as you drive away
look good in your brown shorts
we have an ideal uncomplicated relationship
you’re like a cute boyfriend with great legs
who always brings the perfect present
(why, it’s just what I’ve always wanted!)
and then is considerate enough to go away
oh, UPS Man, let’s hop in your clean brown truck and elope !
ditch your job, I’ll ditch mine
let’s hit the road for Brownsville
and tempt each other
with all the luscious brown foods —
roast beef, dark chocolate,
brownies, Guinness, homemade pumpernickel, molasses cookies
I’ll make you my mama’s bourbon pecan pie
we’ll give all the packages to kind looking strangers
live in a cozy wood cabin
with a brown dog or two
and a black and brown tabby
I’m serious, UPS Man. Let’s do it.
Where do I sign?

***

See?  There’s someone for everyone. 

Ms. Persons at Wikipediaand The Writer’s Almanac

Legs

Mark Halliday

In the last year of my marriage,
among a hundred other symptoms I wrote a poem called
"The Woman across the Shaft"—she was someone
I never met—she had long bare legs
on a summer night when she answered the phone
in her kitchen and lifted her legs to the table
while she talked and laughed and I tried to listen
from my window across an airshaft between buildings
and watched her legs. I doubt she was beautiful
but her legs were young and long
and she laughed on the phone

while I sat in my dark of dissolving faith

and I tried to capture or contain the unknown woman
in a poem: the real and the ideal,
the mess of frayed bonds versus untouched possibility,
so forth. Embarrassed now
I imagine a female editor
who received "The Woman across the Shaft"
as a submission to her magazine—the distaste she felt—
perhaps disgust she felt—I imagine her
grimacing slightly as she considers writing "Pathetic"
on the rejection slip but instead lets the slip stay blank
and then returns to another envelope
from a writer she has learned to trust,
crossing her long legs on her smart literary desk.

***

Read more about the Poet:  CLICK HERE

He also has a Wikipedia page:  CLICK HERE

Shema

by Primo Levi

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

***

Primo Levi, an Italian Jew, was a concentration camp survivor, who became famous with his autobiographical book, If This is a Man.  Haunted by the fact that he’d somehow survived Auschwitz, while many he believed better than himself did not, he tragically committed suicide in 1987 at the age of sixty-seven.

I thought it was time for another PSOetry entry, as it had been a while.  Thanks to PQS, who’d sent me this quite a while back.  This is kinda-sorta a special entry for my dear and sweet Jewish callers who generously give me their time and attention, and teach me so much with their indubitable wisdom and humble majesty. 

Read more about Primo Levi:  HERE and HERE and HERE

An explanation of the word, Shema

xo, Angela

For the Beautiful Woman Across the Room

Louis McKee

In a time of Revolution for instance
I could have fucked her"
–Lawrence Ferlinghetti

In another time, in another place,
I could have gotten her
attention, could have wooed her
with my allegiances, my afffectations,
recited to her a poem
laden with revolution and romance,
one I drew just for her–her lovely eyes
and wonderful long hair–from the heart,
from Brautigan, or from Ferlinghetti.
There was a time and a place
where beautiful people walked
with the rest of us. We all carried signs,
wore buttons, and damned things
that made no sense. We stood together
in crowds, sang the same songs.
They couldn’t tell us
apart, the radicals and angels,
and when they gassed us they gassed us all.
The night we took over
the offices in College Hall, after
the commotion died down, and even
the public defiance squad parked across the street
was nodding off over cold coffee,
I was stoned enough on the events of the day
that I sprawled out next to the prettiest girl
on campus and used her
blanket against the cold tile floor,
but kept my distance, that few
tremendous inches between our bodies,
and stayed there for hours, my breath
stretching to reach the hairs at her neck,
waiting for her to turn, to change
positions, to join the revolution.

***

Sent by a retro-hippie caller who just tickles my pink.  And he knows it.

McKee at Wikipedia

An interview with Louis Mckee

Slicker
by David Trinidad

came in a pink,
orange and white
striped metal tube,
with a black curlicue
border and a splayed
gold base. It came
in any number of
mod shades: Nippy
Beige, Chelsea Pink,
Poppycock, Hot Nec-
taringo, Pinkadilly,
Dicey Peach. There
were several tubes in
my mother’s makeup
drawer in the bath-
room five out of six
of us used (my father
had his own bathroom,
as forbidden as the
walk-in closet where
his Playboys were
hidden under a stack
of sweaters on the top
shelf). All the girls
at school had Slicker
in their purses; I
watched them apply
The London Look
at the beginning and
end of each class. I
marveled at what else
spilled out: compact,
mascara brush, eye
shadow, wallet, troll
doll, dyed rabbit’s
foot, chewing gum,
tampon, pink plastic
comb. At home I
stared at myself in
the medicine cabinet
mirror and, as my
brother pounded
on the locked bath-
room door, twisted
a tube and rubbed,
ever so slightly,
Slicker on my lips. 

***

I imagine that for many girly-boys this is pretty much how it all started.

Wickipedia on David Trinidad

An Interview with David Trinidad

Books by David Trinidad

Thanks to he who shall not be obeyed  (he knows who he is) for turning me on to this extra special piece.  Let me exuberantly note that this is positive proof that  Kink and Art need NOT be mutually exclusive and can, in fact, snuggle up quite nicely together.  But then again, if you knew the guys I knew, this would come as no surprise.

xo, Angela