Tears of a Klown

While reading Sherman Alexie's THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN, I became very emotional. So I wrote some free verse. Dig it. Poetry is like an ulcer sometimes. It sits in your guts and aches to be dealt with. But other times it floats in the air, like dandelion petals and dust swirling in the shafts of sunlight dancing across your room. 50 years ago I read some Walt Whitman poems, and I began to realize that poetry was not just the pervue of simpering girly boys with lace shirts and socks stuffed in their codpiece --no it was an expression as free as thought itself, a way to capture those fleeting bits of beauty, of pain, or insight that parade through our days. Here is my latest effort.

Glenn


TEARS OF A KLOWN

Like Palmer says,
“I’m an old man”,
Almost ancient enough to let my uncle
Pay me to reduce the workforce
By One;
Yet hell, not really old,
Not so old my forehead wrinkles
Are deeper than the tread on my steel-belted radials,
Not so old that I cannot
Make love to a woman, or chew a bloody steak
If I so desire;
More kind of young-old, newly old, barely old—
Still passionate, angry, sweet, powerful midst my weaknesses,
Very aware that there exists a plethora of moments,
Those throbbing gaps and spaces in my life,
Ready, willing, and needing
To be stuffed with my emotions,
my insights, my genitals, and my intellect.
Oh yes, to be sure
I still have eddies of ego and anvils of angst
To be served up steaming fresh, spewed out,
Spittle-showered and shared
With those strangers
Who hear me, see me, read me
And whom I may never meet.

But damn let us not forego or forget the other stuff,
The old man stuff;
Aches and pain, baggage memory, sense memory, lethargic colon,
Failing hearing, restlessness, sleeplessness, punctuated with
Vicious unprovoked attacks of CRS,
And most significantly
A tenderloin tendency to burst into old man tears,
Hatching a squad of hot droplets,
Or just a rivulet of sensitivity,
A bothersome streak of dampness down
My scarred cheeks.

You know I weep
While watching movies,
I cry while reading some touching prose or poetry,
I blubber when my wife reads aloud
Some love poem I have written for her
In front of family and friends,
I pry open the flood gates when my television screen
Is choked with hundreds of flag-draped coffins,
When I realize that our children are being sacrificed
Innocent and misdirected
To the pious Petroleum Gods, philosopher kings, robber barons
And politicians.
I really cry when my wife has a full-blown orgasm,
Or when I look at my grandchildren,
Or just at their pictures.
I even dampen up some when I stare
Into the beautiful brown eyes
Of my hundred canine-years old matriarch, Taffy.
Am I a defective facet of a man,
A true bleeding heart,
A poet whose poems are never read?
Yes. No. Perhaps.

Hope and faith never die,
They are just momentarily interrupted.
If there is anything credible
About those cosmic and metaphysical answers
I have settled for in my heart,
Then I can appreciate that age itself
Is but a callous construct, a measly measurement of men, by men,
But not of Mankind Prime;
Age is just a way of honoring the history of my husk,
And as I tremble and trudge through the turmoil of time,
I remember what many of my buddies learned to say to get through the day
While serving in the maelstrom of Viet Nam ,
Steeling their innards to the horrendous reality of war—
“It don’t mean nothin”,
Because of course it meant
Everything.
It truly saddens me today
To recall that as a young man, tough as Mailer, crazy as Vonnegut,
I held back my tears, cuz
I was no candy-assed faggot –that came later, finding a need
To conceal that part of my nature
Until my hair has begun to turn gray,
And yet another war has seized my semi-senility
And shaken it violently.

So just do it,
Weep old men,
Let your wise tears flow copiously
Over the wounds of this world –
For you have earned that right.
You have been given a gift of power, of retribution, justice, and closure.
Use it wisely
And may it serve you well
As you vividly remember
That whatever our place
In this new Millennium,
We all stand as equals
When day gives up its play
And night wants to mantle our melancholy;
Just as the sun disappears deep down behind and beyond the horizon,
Forcing the sky to explode with vibrant gold, yellow, and orange,
Causing the exposed bellies of clouds to fill up with blood red light;
Or just a few dark hours later, or perhaps earlier
When this mysterious blue orb rotates steady on its axis,
Unflinching, unstoppable, inexorable, and like magic
Saul reappears, shooting up the place with its rebirthed brilliance,
Like a spirit adolescent spraying and radiating his Spider Man shorts
Before his eyes catch fire
And his visual cortex
Turns raw righteous shards of lunging light
Into imagery, into beauty and all the rest of it;
So that we merely particles of sand
In the muscles of the great cosmic mollusk,
Can spread our arms, ready to meet and greet,
Like Crow with his dark wings,
Vibrating and ready to conjure up those colors within us
To perfectly match the music of the day.

Glenn A. Buttkus November 2007