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The
TWO BOOTS’
POETRY |
Timothy Young |
The TWO BOOTS’ STORIES |
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POEMS
This poem appeared in FREE VERSE, Issue
#80-2005, also performed with the HOMAGE TO WHITMAN This day, this arch of birch over the log pile, this large sky as blue as a sunfish fin, this pine grove as green as
a hunter’s coat. This bluff, this corn, this mud-wrinkled road where immigrant Swedes were captured by the hills, ravines,
creeks and oaks--by beauty. This melting snow, this thawing ice, this heart
of mine, twisting, turning, dangling, wringing, watching
and singing in the clasp of
beauty’s large fist. I eat
beauty, I breathe beauty, I rub
beauty onto my chest hairs. The loping dog, the horned ram, the sleek Ford
pickup, the echoing chortle of a
strutting tom. The taupe fields, the cut stalks. I love the curve of the contoured rows. The rattling maize leaves slice into my heart, the plum bush swings its thorns to my throat Beauty infects me. I accept the natural hypodermics, all briars and canes, nettles and thistles, dried and
dead and working. These skin strippers, these clothes tearers, the ones who wish me naked
with them. I love, too, these stinkpots, this manure bed, this nest of opossum, rank with winter refuse, this dormant pile of rot,
this embraceable torso, this limp cock. This stirring, cracking, shuddering heart opens
for them all. Come in maple sap, lanolin, wet resin, cedar
scent, birch bark, elder root, ash gatherer, tractor
hum, horse fart, skunk tread and
pocket gopher mound dust. Put me in your furry mouth, wrap me in your
diaper, bathe me in your silky hide,
scrub me with your stars.
The
Writer's Almanac for May 15, 2005,
repeated May 15, 2008
The Writer's Almanac for May 16, 2005 Poem: "Not Naked on the
Bed" by Timothy Young from Building in Deeper Water © The
Thousand Press.
----------------------------------------------------- TWO POEMS WHICH APPEARED IN THE
PUBLICATION—BLINK,
a little magazine of little poems Facts are like gnats… in half-light they take the shape of the head that attracts
them.
February-March 2005 issue
Vol.4, no. 4 Sarcasm is the razorwire a clever boy unrolls around his fear.
May-June 2004 issue
Vol. 3, no. 6 In November 2005, my old
friend, Cootie, died at age 55.
When he gave up drinking, married a second time and began to raise two
children, he said he wanted to avoid his old neighborhood friends. I honored that and did not try to find
him when he moved away. In 1983 I wrote the following short story which was
published in the literary magazine, The
Inkling. Today, I understand
so much more about the difficulties of the Vietnam War veterans who tried to
cope with their lives when they returned home, and I honor his difficulties
as a persistent drive for living and love. Cootie and I lost two other
veteran friends to suicides after they had returned from their tours of
duty. The story is a
truthful retelling of our younger days, yet the women are fictional. Physics and Jose Cuervo by Timothy Young for According
to Albert Einstein, if two men were to journey away from the earth at a speed
beyond that of light, upon their return the world would have aged more than
they. And, if they were
capable of enough speed they might even be able to see themselves
coming toward them as they returned.
This logical confusion of theoretical physics is understood by
physicists and a few tequila drinkers. A
tequila drinker can comprehend this concept even better than physicists,
since the physicists can only understand cerebrally. Time is a different existence under
the spell of Jose Cuervo. Known at times as “Joe
Queer” it has inherent, distilled ingredients which can carry two men
beyond the realm of familiar time/space and into a special frame of
benevolent communion, where they are again their memories, memories sharpened
so well that they are in simultaneous existence. Under
these benevolent circumstances Cootie and I left our campsite, eight miles
outside of Cootie
was a redhead, and he had given himself his own nickname years ago when he tried
to grow his first beard. When his
whiskers emerged they were soft and thin and as pale as moonlight on his
chin. His cheeks were naked. The fuzz above his lip never grew or
thickened, but Cootie was proud of his adornment just the same. He stroked his ‘spider
legs’ with his stubby fingers and if he went into a rage, as he often
did, he clawed that chin with intimidating gestures, some so obscene they
would frighten stones. He would
cream, “Cootie, cootie, cootie, cootie, I’ll give you my
cooties.” He kept that
name; none of us ever got cooties. In
a brawl he would charge into the first chest he could find, butting with his
head, pummeling the belly of his opponent with fists and stomping on toes
with his little feet. Cootie was
the size of a middle weight gone heavy in the midsection. Even as a teenager his body looked
like an old man’s, skinny in the legs, slouched at the shoulders and
swelled in the rear. He still
looks this way, maybe a little heavier over his belt. I was the perfect companion, gray
haired even then, studious and stupidly serious. Under
the spell of Joe Queer I know Cootie not as a brawler, or the carni pitchman, or the sewer repairman, (all activities
of which he has specialized knowledge,) but I know him as an idealist, a romantic
in the lovers’ sense. He
was the gregarious but intent youth who proposed marriage to Babs Horwath while unbuttoning
her jeans under the pine trees of Sweetie
Mallory turned him down while on a picnic at One
afternoon after swimming with the Krumberger
sisters, Cootie asked Rosemarie the big question. She jumped from the back seat of my
’62 Galaxie and slid between her sister, Dot,
and me where I thought not even sweat could find space. Later
that year, under similar circumstances, Nancy Krause, who I had believed to
have as much sense of the dachshund she resembled, refused him and all his
advances flatly and without compromise.
Cootie had pursued her for months. His demeanor was that of a pup off the
tit. He kept following All
in all, Cootie admitted to having proposed to thirteen girls who refused
marriage. And then the
fourteenth consented. So did the
fifteenth, the sixteenth, the seventeenth and the eighteenth. Five times he had plans made for a
huge wedding party that he said would last a month. But like the red sky at sunrise,
impending marriage to Cootie spelled trouble and each young woman eventually
sensed the coming storm and slipped away from him. Sometimes they went gently, others
screamed and howled and threw things, but not with the intention of hurting
him. Cootie was lovable. He was a true romantic who bought
flowers and wine, usually too much wine.
Before one particularly heartbreaking disengagement
he even sold his beer drinking buddy, a squirrel monkey who drank with him
when the rest of his friends weren’t available. Finally,
at twenty-five Cootie married a tall, raven-haired lovely who was seventeen
and not pregnant. She stood above
him at the alter while I looked on with sincere,
brotherly affection. Cootie
looked saintly, and Raquel, she looked lusciously sexy. The wedding party dance went well, for
awhile. The musicians were four
tough looking women with short-cropped hair who played Country-Western music
with an odd tempo. Between
ten-thirty and midnight four fist fights took place between the two families,
and when one of Cootie’s overweight cousins called the lead guitar
player a dyke, the band quickly packed up and disappeared. For a party that was to last a month,
four hours seemed disappointing.
The marriage was off to a bad start. Six months later it was no longer
starting, it was off. I
had been there with him, at each corner, into each tavern and after-hours
joint. We had been side by side
in kindergarten, too. I did not
go to I
watched the |
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