Cowboy Up

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Cowboy Up

“Fear is the parent of cruelty.”

--James A. Froude

Those vivid dreams of rats, spiders, and pit vipers,

rooms full of them, a phobic event, a fear carnival,

squirming with pain, paralysis, rabies, and death,

with no spot to step safely, yet this driving need

to walk through them, running the gauntlet 

like a defrocked priest, 

an imprisoned dictator,

a criminal, a pedophile, 

with the clubs, bats and pipes pounding

your arms over your head,

your knees buckling, knowing

you cannot fall,

you must persevere,

you must survive,

to make it to the Mall

where you can accidently disrespect

a ten year old banger who will whip out

a Glock from under his hoodie

and pop several caps in your ass

so that you can linger nearly comatose

in the hallways of some ER because

worse gunshot and knife wounds

usurp your place in line, where

the mournful screams of the innocent

conjure up the madhouses of history,

rife with mouth clamps, ear plugs, and

shock therapy that will send surges

of evil electricity through your extremities,

snapping your limbs into a dervish

of spasmodic jerks, complete loss

of colon control, needing cases of 

adult diapers, their plastic edges poking

out of your drooping pants now

crackling in steaming shart, 

inviting the inevitable insidious infarct,

the satanic stroke that will disconnect

the neural net from your left side,

so that you will drag that inert foot

and flap that dead arm, becoming

an Igor struggling to drag pounds

of bloody chains across filthy dungeon floors,

the metallic screech fueling the aneurism 

that shorts out your speech circuits, as

language lurches out of reach, and you

further degenerate into an unrecognizable

animalistic grunting defecating drooling husk,

a beautiful soul held absolute prisoner

in a shell-shocked mass of carrion flesh,

a tempting host for conniving carcinogens

that will invade what is left of your healthy cells,

burning them char-black with cancer, eating

you from the inside out, their countless blackened

sharp teeth chewing your guts into pulled pork,

before letting devilish diabetes bring its fiendish 

delights to the body wake, first bursting the blood vessels

in your retina, filling the vitreous with red pulp, 

the garrulous gift of blindness as another challenge,

setting up the scene for the series of amputations,

toes, feet, lower legs--fingers, hands, forearms,

all riddled with neuropathy and decaying rot,

to finally arrive looking like the Kafkian cockroach,

on your back, limbless, blind, mute, with edema

pressing against the weakening walls of your heart,

at the Big Transition, the slimy sill of death’s door,

only to be held back for days, as you are taunted,

ridiculed, cajoled, and invited to saunter through

the viscus veil in order to re-learn the truth

about eternity.

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets-Poetics

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Broken Chains

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Broken Chains

Antoninus: "Are you afraid to die, Spartacus?"

Spartacus: "No more than I was to be born."

1.

Soldier’s Milwr

The third Servile War scared Rome,

small cadres of slaves did roam;

freedom rose up from the gloam.

Becoming thousands they beat

patrols, legions, Rome’s elite,

standing to fight, not retreat. 

Slaves don’t fear death because they

know their pain will become cay,

forged from broken chains that day.

2.

Proest Dalgron

Maybe there is no peace in

this world, for us, or anyone,

it’s hard to tell who will win

remaining true to ourselves.

Spartacus, born to lead, had

to die, both things destiny;

multitudes became very sad

as hope expired on a cross.

Crassus helped change his Rome

from Republic to Empire,

filling lexicons of tome

with dreams of dictatorship.

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets FFA

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Saturday's Soiree

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Saturday’s Soiree

"America is my country

and Paris is my hometown."

--Gertrude Stein

Everybody got involved in

                                  the

                        cooking

                          that

                summer

                      in

               1924

                  at

                27

      Rue de

Fleurus

where Stein held court,

Alice made the cucumber sandwiches,

Ezra baked bread,

Ernie broiled the tenderloins,

Fitz poured the cocktails,

Pablo whipped up the Spanish Salad,

Sal picked the dinner wines,

and Henri and Robert

argued loudly over picking desserts. 

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on G-Man's Flash 55

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The Moveable Beast

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The Moveable Beast

“Writing at its best, is a lonely life, where

the writer, if he is any good, must face eternity,

or the lack of it, each day.”

--Ernest Hemingway

Sure, he had seen the splendor of the Mediterranean

many times when he was a big shouldered kid in his 20’s,

after haunting Parisian cafes, 

smoking fat pungent cigars under red awnings,

traveling with Ezra Pound, or drinking brandy

with James Joyce, draining whole casks during

their “alcoholic sprees”, remembering

Gertrude Stein wearing water wings

in the pool at Monte Carlo in 1925, 

but hell,

he had learned to love the Caribbean best, 

barefoot from the puncheon deck of the Pilar 

as it drafted the fishing coasts 

along the islands in the stream,

first applauding Castro’s victory over Batista,

then cursing it when he got wind 

that the new government was going to seize 

all the homes of the wealthy;

consistently surfing the maelstrom of personal calamity,

dancing with death countless times, courting it but never

consummating the affairs, laughing at it each time it was

jilted, especially in 1954 when he survived two plane

crashes on the plateaus of Africa, reading aloud

his own obituary in several newspapers.

Jesus, it seemed that he had never lived alone,

had been married continuously, first

to Elizabeth Hadley Richards (1921-1927),

to Pauline Pffeiffer (1927-1940),

to Martha Gellhorn (1940-1945),

and to his darling Mary since 1946,

yet here he was, just a solitary figure

wandering in pain within the landscape

of his life--wondering if there would be room

for all their names as sculptured script

below his own on his tombstone.

Sunday morning, July 2, 1961, he awoke

at 5 a.m. to watch the Idaho sunrise

over his Ketchum shamba, its intensity

helping him to sidestep his near blindness.

Saturday’s paper was open on the coffee table,

turned to the society page where certain items

were circled in red ink, two real pearls:

“Martha Helen Kostyra, 19, married Andrew Stewart in New York City” 

“Ana Vegas was just crowned as Miss Venezuela.”

He took out a large yellow legal pad and wrote

in longhand his final cahier:

miserable IRS tax issues,

FBI surveillance fears,

a never-ending plague of health issues, 

real sadness regarding his inability to retrieve

his old manuscripts and notes still locked up

in a dusty Havana safe,

the dangerous stranger in his morning mirror,

his disdain for his own critical success, especially

the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1953

and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954,

all those narrow-lipped asshole editors

at LIFE magazine who kept slashing

his latest article, informing Mary

that he had become “hesitant, disorganized,

confused, and was going blind”,

and all those goddamned forced visits

he had endured at the Mayo clinic, resulting

in twenty “electroconvulsive therapy” treatments,

followed by their diagnosis of him being

“released in ruins”. 

Shivering from empty prayers

and shattered dreams, he hoped

those bastards would not mention

that his father had committed suicide as well,

but pretty sure there would be no media

politeness mantling their reporting of this day,

no syphon of solicitous sympathy.

At 7:10 a.m., moving around like a wounded lion

in his basement, he removed two 12-gauge shotgun shells 

from his tattered hunting raincoat, 

opened his polished oaken gun case 

and removed his favorite Boss double-barreled shotgun,

struggling upstairs with it cradled in his arms,

pushing his black leather easy chair in front

of the large picture window in his foyer,

pulling back the blood red velvet curtains,

then twisting the chair around to face the front door

before sitting down in it, hearing 

the leather creak under him,

placed his trusty Boss butt-first 

on the white rug between his legs, 

pulled back the beautiful twin hammers

click-click, placed the double barrels gently

into his smiling mouth, and closed his eyes

in order to properly greet the great bull of Paloma

that was rushing huge down upon him,

and just before the goring he heard

the roar of the crowd rise up

like a cannon shot,

and then it was over.

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on Shawna's Flipside Records

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Foothill Fare

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Foothill Fare

When I was a teenager

I loved to go hiking into the mountains

with my grandfather, who was

a seasoned woodsman, hunter, fisherman,

and philosopher,

lugging 60 pound wooden packs

with several heavy hunks of fresh bacon

and canned goods in them, in a time

before lightweight packs, waterproof fabrics

and dehydrated foods.

We would always try to make camp near a creek

in those fondly remembered days when drinking

from its chilled ripples would not make you ill,

before the pellets and filters were mandatory--

just dipped our face into the rushing water

and gulped its rock-washed elixir. 

We would stake out a place between two trees,

scoop out a shallow nest for our tired bodies, 

fill it with a sprinkling of soil over the rocks 

and a bed of soft pine boughs to sleep on, 

tie a clothesline rope between the trees, 

and stretch a plastic tarp over it for our tent, 

holding down the edges with colorful boulders 

from the nearby stream bed.

We would stay up half the night, listening

to the brush snapping from the predators

and foragers in the dark, staring into 

a crackling campfire, its fire sparks dancing

into a night sky that was smattered with serious stars,

talking about politics, poetry, art, literature, history,

family and the future.

Wonderfully exhausted, I would stay tucked deep

into one of our Army surplus mummy bags,

dreaming of a utopian tomorrow, the very one

my Pop promised would one day dawn,

where true brotherhood resided

and actual functional equality reigned.

My grandfather would rise before the sun,

stoke up the fire, smile at my sleepy lump,

roll up and smoke a handmade cigarette,

and squat ready to witness the brilliant birth

of another promise of personal adventure,

then would grab a fishing pole and go out

to catch our breakfast. 

My nose always awakened first, smelling

bacon frying, and the twin blackened

Maxwell House cans of coffee

and navy beans bubbling.

“Get your ass up, Butch, daylight’s a-burning”

I would squirm out of the sleeping bag,

immediately shivering as I pulled on my 

unlaced boots, took a few cramped steps

toward the edge of our campsite and stood there

watering the clover and daisies, spicing up

the dandy dew bubbles with last night’s coffee.

He would cook on the open campfire, pushing

the hot coals under a cast iron blackened

frying pan sizzling with beautiful bacon;

when it was done he would pile it up on

a metal pie plate, then pour in his sour dough

and cook up several bannock hot cakes;

My first course of wilderness breakfast 

was a steaming cup of coffee, 

a thick bannock with bacon,

slathered in butter 

on the first day while it lasted,

and honey from a sticky jar.

As any great cook would do, 

he would just nibble at his breakfast 

as he flopped four brook trout

into the hot pan and fried them up 

in the bacon grease, and the second course 

was constituted of pan-fried trout and navy beans. 

This was more than enough grub to fortify us

for the next five miles of vertical trail, continuing

our climb up to a glacier lake at the foot

of several majestic mountains, where we would

camp in a huge meadow below the glacier, 

in order to reinforce our worship of the earth

and revisit our palaver about the many parasites

who inhabited and poisoned it. 

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

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Who Will Start the Rain?

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Who Will Start the Rain?

Day after day, month after month,

our mouths parched,

we wait for the rain here

in the Northwest, which is so odd

for us living in the heart of dampness,

having to experience, to grabble with

drought.

We were forced to dig deep 

in our worn pocketbooks

to pay for precious city water 

to sprinkle lovingly

on our divers lawns, trying so hard

to restore a semblance of green

to our thirsty world.

Dead grass is just a naked affront

to our esthetics, a brown dagger

plunged into the sagging gut

of our tenuous connection

to Herself,

who has ignored the nurturing of our rain forests,

let ripening tomatoes struggle on their vines,

let noxious dust pile up on our window sills

and the new cover over our redwood deck

where I am no longer master and commander

while gulping morning Asian tea, and staring

at another gorgeous petulant sunrise

that brings higher heat index, smog,

and bristling brittleness to another

day of damned dryness. 

Hope limps in on turned pages of calendar,

as we relit the furnace last night,

turned back the A/C, welcoming October

who is arriving with open autumn arms

and gently herding the Indians out of summer,

touching a few leaves with its Fall paintbrushes,

and making earnest promises about future

precipitation that it had better keep

so that our lawn thatching & lime-spreading

will go well, and happy weeds will expire,

and natural sweetness will boil up from

invigorated soil to help restore the balance

of verdant bliss long missing, and embrace

the shell-shocked yards and our heavy hearts.

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets MTB

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Skate Creek

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Skate Creek

I lost ten hours last week

and that missing time

transcends logic.

I had started off 

on one of my day hikes

in the Cascades, walking the trail

along Skate Creek.

I had started at 9 a.m., preferring

the loneliness of hiking solo, 

and after a few halcyon miles 

I remember an odd hum 

near a large cedar tree,

then an overwhelming sense of

tingling vibrations, and the next thing

I was fully aware of was sitting

on a wet log in a strange clearing.

It was late, the sun very low in the West;

glancing at my watch it was 7 p.m.

I began to be aware of things, like

my Mariners sweatshirt was on backwards,

both of my thumbs had large coagulated

pinprick bubbles on them,

my head was throbbing,

my body was quivering,

my right wrist had a purple welt

like a pain bracelet around it.

My mind was squirming like

a garden snake under a boot,

but I felt there was some kind

of mental partition between

my self and my short term memory,

then suddenly I shivered violently

as I recalled the dark room,

the large gray faces

and the terrible dead black eyes.

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over at flipside records

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