LOVELY MELITA

The bar’s empty but they’re open.  I manage to get a beer and look around at the exotic décor.  It’s a mix of new age Asian and early dive.  I learn they have a city wide special that entails a PBR pounder and a shot of Maker’s Mark.  They also do a variation  that includes a can of Tecaté with a shot of tequilla.

It’s that point when you have to make a decision and you don’t want a reputation for always erring on the side of caution.  This is the point where the evening many get hazy.  Will I even make it home alive.

A pounder of beer

chasing down high grade whiskey

the sun is fading fast

I talk with the bartender who reveals she is a lovely mix of Latina and Asian.  She’s wearing a Kurt Cobain T-shirt.  I ask her if she was even alive when Cobain played.  She was 5 years old when Cobain died.  Fair enough, Jim Morrison died 2 days before my 5 birthday.  We talk about music and the overworked air conditioner.  An old man crushing hard ends up tossing down 3 citywides before realizing the need to catch a train back home

Lovely Melita

giggling and pouring a shot

it’s love at first shot

https://www.postpoems.org/authors/georgeschaefer/prose/1098699

Cannibalized Haibun: Schaefer, George: 9798416456573: Amazon.com: Books

TIGHT BLACK MINISKIRT

Her in a tight

black miniskirt

hugging her

hourglass figure

me, scraggly unshaven face

reading a poem about

a radical armchair

my tie dyed shirt is

faded and oversized

even on my expanding belly

She tilts her head

as though examining

my every word

Her eyes are blue

leaving temptation

for comparisons to sky or sea

She doesn’t seem to mind

my balding scalp or even

the expanding waistline

or my eyes badly dilated

by consumption of weed and brandy

I raise and lower my voice

to correspond to the emotions

expressed in the poem

I flail my arms wildly

and nod my head

to accentuate the verse

I steal a momentary glance

into her blue eyes

for a clue

revealing what her

true intentions are

Nothing gained; nothing ventured;

the words of the poem

form on my lips

I seek her attention

through the grandeur

of my performance

and apparently gain it

her eyes follow the words

as they crystalize from

soul to open air

I glance at her nonchalantly;

a dirty poem calls

for an obscene gesture

now she’s either hot to trot

or totally turned off

We’ll know soon enough

in either case

She continues to devour

my performance with

intense eyes suggesting assent

I read my poem alive to her

as the rest of the audience

slips away into

some form of oblivion

In this rapturous moment

she is the sole receiver

of the poetry

and I bide my time

till the end of the performance

and hope we continue

the rapture late into night

https://www.postpoems.org/authors/georgeschaefer/poem/1094206

BEASTLY BUT BEAUTIFUL (flash fiction(?))

The assignment was to place Huckleberry Finn in modern day New York and write a short story.  I was a high school kid in the 80s and only spent a few field trips in New York.  Of course, I watched many TV shows and I did have my imagination. 

Mr. V didn’t cotton to me.  I was a dirty, wrong side of the tracks kid and he was a GQ preppie.  I figured I would just go balls to the wall on my yarn.  I set the tale in Harlem and had Huck running into prostitutes and drag queens and trying two kinds of Mary Jane (One a plant and one a Ho for the naïve among us.)

I turned in a completely uncensored tale fully expecting to be failed and possibly sent to the principal’s office.  I skipped school for fear of repercussion.  Then I learned that Mr. V loved my story and read it out loud for the entire class.  He had to censor spots due to complaints of two classmates.

I returned to class greeted with a smile from the first fan of my literary stylings.  The class discussed my story.  Mr. V managed to use the word beastly twice in a 45 minute period.  I did take it as a badge of honor—as he was talking about my poetry and fiction. Ït’s beastly but beautiful.”  They say don’t judge a book by its cover and I think 2 people learned a lesson that week.

https://www.postpoems.org/authors/georgeschaefer/prose/1100548

ANOTHER MISCONNECTION

I could not find you,

     my dear

You were hiding behind

Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park

     and I, um—

I was looking for you

along Belmont Plateau

in Fairmount Park in Philly

And my vision not

being bionic or X-ray

was unable to detect

     your presence

or lack thereof

https://www.postpoems.org/authors/fuche_bu/poem/1074085

THRU PERIPHERAL VISION: Schaefer, George F: 9798790939471: Amazon.com: Books

THE ELECTRIC JIMMY SWAGGART ACID TEST

It can be really intense when you take acid and I’m not talking about fake shit.  I mean reality and real intensity.  There was one time when I dosed with a few friends.  It was good liquid about 250 mikes a hit.  I indulged in two hits.

We were restless so someone go the bright idea to cruise over to Lambertville and climb the Devil’s Tea Table.  This was a small mountain in New Jersey that had a small rock formation at the top known as the Devil’s Tea Table.

So now you have 6 guys with heads full of acid climbing a mountain at sunset with a single flashlight.  Everyone made it up the mountain alive but it the sun had quickly faded into night.  It was time to head back down the mountain.  The batteries in the flashlight went dead on us so we were trying to use lighters.  The lighters didn’t provide much in the way of light.  The crescent moon wasn’t providing much help either.

There were points that it was real dark.  You could occasionally hear animals and insects and it was hard to see what you were stepping on.  It was a dangerous game played in the dark.  I remember almost stepping off a cliff.  A couple times tree branches sought for support were snapped by our weight.

There were portions of the descent, I was simply on my back sliding down the cliff slowly.  It was a truly life affirming experience.  My survival instincts kicked into overdrive.  I was like:  “ I want to live!  I WANT TO LIVE!”  

Let me get down off this mountain.  I reached a point that I didn’t care about the dirt.  I didn’t care about the bugs or  the poison ivy.  I just want to get down off this mountain.  We all used our voices to guide one another and we all slowly made our way down the mountain.

“I want to live!” and live I did.  We all got down the mountain alive and returned to a friend’s house.  We were all hyperventilating.  A couple guys left and went home.  There’s a couple guys from this night that I never saw again.

A couple of us dropped another hit and drank some more beer.  It was now morning.  The TV was on and somehow the channel we turned on featured Jimmy Swaggart putting on a hilarious performance.  He was pointing out all us sinners.  We were all in stitches laughing at his sermon.  It was incredibly funny at that particular moment.

To put it in context, I foolishly risk my life on a mountain for no good reason and return to this shit:  a flimflam preacher related to Jerry Lee Lewis going on a rampage.  It takes a strong dose of acid to be able to appreciate the subtle absurdity of the moment.  Kareem Abdul Jabbar was right.  The dilemmas life throws at us are often rather insane and absurd but at least now we can all laugh about it.

https://www.postpoems.org/authors/fuche_bu/prose/1064676

YOU CAN LIE TO ME

You can lie to me.  That’s okay.  I’ll probably figure it out and no one will really get hurt.  But you keep lying to yourself and that’s really an emotional and psychic cancer.  But like a portrait of Dorian Gray in the attic, you’ll keep the deterioration hidden from view.  You know the cancer is spreading but it isn’t visible so you can smile and I can pretend. And the pain and the depression continues and it deepens.  You refuse the surgery that can remove the tumor.  And the lies just get deeper but you’re only really fooling yourself and maybe some mindless social media followers who don’t care about your soul.

You can lie to me

but if you lie to yourself

the disease will spread

eating away the spirit

your internal organs first

Cannibalized Haibun: Schaefer, George: 9798416456573: Amazon.com: Books

https://www.postpoems.org/authors/fuche_bu/prose/1083264

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO DO POETRY AGAIN

I saw the best minds of my generation 

destroyed by blandness

MTV spoken word tour; sewn up vaginas;

dismembered penises, poetry slams

featuring dickless, cuntless verse

spewed by genderless eunuchs

all in the name of advancing pop culture

for lamebrained, gutless pansies

trying to rap out poems

to the underage audiences

running around pretending it’s deep

yeah, Henry Rollins,

16 year olds think you’re deep

but we falsify the nature of the beast

mindless infidels, staggering drunks

The feasts that were promise 

were never delivered by corporate—

yes, corporate MTV execs

pathetically trying to be hip

& failing miserably in the effort;

Timid poets pointing a finger at me

while I raise the finger at them;

All the yuppified, glorified culture

Jim Morrison wannabees and white boys

trying to rap like wiggas

without a clue about riddum

and the ever so sensitive—

ever so sensitive political correctness;

worrying about Bill and Hillary

or trying to eliminate sexuality

It’s all a crock of shit to me

Don’t have an alcoholic drink

make it water with a lemon twist

Try to create a giant rubber room

out of this glorious planet

so our Volvo’s and Saabs

can run freely in peaced

hide inside petty rhetoric

allow tv producers to think for us—

can’t actually expect us

to actually think for ourselves

figure out how not to offend

while pretending to be radical poets

those people cutting into my scheme;

but don’t think I don’t know it

only I admit it up front

that it’s 90% art, 10% pretense

or maybe the other way around

I just cling to my insanity

but it slips through my fingers

It, like sand beaches, is eroding

I am falling prey to the plague

but I try not to be defeated

try not to be like everyone else

It is a desperate, lonely plight

but not without its charms

as I keep the candle lit

and burn passionately through the night

determined to escape the fate

of albatrosses & other fallen angels

https://www.postpoems.org/authors/fuche_bu/poem/1082993

5-7-95