Marcus Slease
|
BATHTUB
I’m not very good at washing my feet, it is a long way down there. But in a bath it’s alright. The shower is out so I keep taking baths and my feet are getting cleaner and cleaner. It’s automatic. My new step sister called me drunk from Belfast at 1.30 AM today. she tells me about all the drunk men in her life. Her father (my biological father), her two husbands, and I remember all the failed men in my life and where I come from. When I was married my ex wife told me to show |
|
some emotion.
She kept saying show some emotion. I punched a hole in the wall and in the door and threw the Christmas tree across the room, and she said that was OK, I can stop showing emotion now. My new step sister’s son told me about all the dis- appointments in his mother’s life, and I said yes, I can understand, but I thought I cannot make up for it. Her son kept saying she needed someone who was not a prick. Am I a prick? I might be sometimes a prick. I do not like expectations. |
I have had
too many of them and I need less of them. I have worked hard to become a new life. They left the phone running and I could hear all the background noise of people drinking, and I just wanted to sleep, so I hung up and went to sleep at 2:45 AM. I dreamed about 3 very small men who wanted to kiss me. I felt obligated to kiss them. I was in a bathtub and when I kissed one the other got jealous, and I couldn’t kiss them all at the same time, my mouth was not big enough. I kissed them and they never left, they stayed there, inside my bathtub, taking up space |
in my water
and I just wanted to take a bath, get clean. I wanted the little men in my life to go away, but more came. I am not kidding. This is not for a poem. I am just telling you there were more and more little men piling into my bathtub, demanding me to kiss them, and kiss them right. There is a right and a wrong, but sometimes I just don’t know which is which. I was in a bathtub to get clean, and I don’t know how to get out. |
|
IMAGIN
ATION I have a seat on the train right next to the toilet. I can empty my bladder and read Bukowski. I’ve waited almost 40 years to read Bukowski. It was my brother’s favorite. I’ve waited until middle age after having read 100,000 other books of poetry and lived on 5 continents and had 166 jobs. The Bukowski poem is about flooding in L.A. I have never been to L.A. but I’ve lived in L.V. and there was flooding there too. It’s a desert full of lights. It’s a city that skates the surface. It’s like L.A. |
In the Bukowski
poem the rain in L.A. forced all the dysfunctional families inside and things got miserable with an abusive father. I understand the misery of childhood but the joy too, there was joy too, in the imagination. It is survival. In the poem, after the rain, Bukowski and the other children return to school and make up stories about what they did in the rain, stuck inside their houses with their miserable families. They all lied. They told stories, they used imagination. One told a story about god’s face at the end of the rainbow. Another of catching fish out the window. |
I don’t
see god’s face in a rainbow. I see it everywhere. And nowhere too. It rains in London and the wind blows very hard. I stay inside as much as I can. I am by myself thinking or trying not to think about what I am supposed to be doing with my life. what is my life? It is given to me. It is a gift. Now what? The train is starting. It is the best feeling when the train pulls out. I can write better on a train in the rain than at my desk. I am ready to read my life in a Bukowski book, but I am not Bukowski, there are many alcoholics |
in my family
but I am not one of them. I have other problems. Ready and read are almost the same. Am I ready made or a ready meal? I’m emptying my bladder on a southwest train to Reading, listening to Miles Davis It’s Ain’t Necessarily So. It starts off slow and then swings into action, like a train. There is a little creeping trumpet in the background, but it’s the drums that get in my bones. It’s the drums. I was a drummer and I feel it right here. The first stop is Clapham Junction, one of the busiest in Europe over 100 trains per hour on the off peak. Now it is |
Laurel Halo’s
Airsick
on my ipod.
Traveling on
don’t go away.
I am traveling
hard and I
don’t know
if I am
going away
or towards. I
am sitting
backwards
on the train
to Reading.
It has rained
for 4 days
straight
in London,
and I need
my own ark.
There is very
little horizon.
To write
while moving
is my way
of being.
Being what?
Just being.
Thank you
Bukowski
Myles
Mayer
Whalen
Brodey
Kerouac
Blackburn
Tea
&
Bellamy.
Airsick
on my ipod.
Traveling on
don’t go away.
I am traveling
hard and I
don’t know
if I am
going away
or towards. I
am sitting
backwards
on the train
to Reading.
It has rained
for 4 days
straight
in London,
and I need
my own ark.
There is very
little horizon.
To write
while moving
is my way
of being.
Being what?
Just being.
Thank you
Bukowski
Myles
Mayer
Whalen
Brodey
Kerouac
Blackburn
Tea
&
Bellamy.
|
E.T.
E.T. had just arrived and we were going to America. The spaceship in the Milton Keynes mall was spuming big puffy dream clouds. It was the time of the great spaceships. When I arrived in America they sent a teacher into space, and then it blew up on teevee. We were watching it in the library. I got greased up in America. First in Vallejo in my plastic cowboy boots from K-Mart, and then in Las Vegas where my mother, pregnant again, was in love with buttermilk dip and fried zucchini from a place called Carls Jr. America was about eating. We were starving for America. We took a drive down the strip |
in our donated
car, it was donated from a Mormon thrift shop called Desert Industries. The car was called a Nova and we going Nova driving down that strip in search of cheap steak and eggs. We knew if we ate the steak and put a toothpick in our mouth we would become more American, less alien. A steak and eggs. I understood the aliens, and the Russians were the aliens. The best Russian was in Rocky V. He was a big blond alien and he was powerful and I wanted to be him. I wanted to be the big blond alien. I lost my accent by age 16. Was I leaning into America or was America leaning into me? My body was made alien by my spirit. My spirit |
was more
important than my body. My body was just a vehicle, better keep it holy. I heard vessels and I thought about my body, a vessel. My body is a spacecraft for my spirit. Years later I learned where god lived, on a planet called Kolob. It was behind the sun, that big ball of heat. Just like me. The spaceship in the Milton Keynes mall had a song. It was Neil Diamond. He was singing about America, going to America today! today! Today I am in London thinking about America, an alien country, but a home country too. Just like my body. I traveled the world to move out of the habitual |
The habitual was
death, it was suffocation. Now what? I am sipping tea and trying to become less alien. I am slowing down and hitting 40. I am slowing down for the aliens. Who is an alien and do I want one? |
Marcus Slease was born in Portadown, N. Ireland in 1974. At the end of 1985 he immigrated to Las Vegas to become Mormon. He is no longer Mormon or a resident of Vegas. He lives in East London and teaches English as a foreign language. He has performed his work at various festivals and events, such as Soundeye in Cork, Ireland, The Carrboro Poetry Festival in North Carolina, The Prague Microfestival in Prague, and The Parasol Unit in London. He is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Rides (Blart Books, 2014), Spanish Fork (Country Music 2014) Mu (Dream) So (Window) (Poor Claudia 2012), Hello Tiny Bird Brain (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2012), Smashing Time (miPOesias 2011) and one mini novella: The House of Zabka (Deathless Press 2013). He is a founding member of UK poetry and art collective UPTIGHT.
