by James Fleet Underwood

A Sort of Homecoming

Fucking you was like reading a detective novel,

like committing a crime sleazy in despair,

my accounts in arrears and something kinky on the way,

doing what any Joe would to get a leg up and stuck into you for that

final pot of rainbow score before the coppers came and

pounded their greasy mitts all over me.

That was the pulpy nature of our romance and we

stole a lot more than cigarettes and change from each other’s

pockets, groping our way up

and down the aisles of that afternoon train,

until whatever versions of the personas we still costumed in

were left raggedy and torn on the dining car table,

fingered by some perfumed patron who swallowed with her gin that

sugary pill of trichotomous lust.

That dame had her way with us and then some,

though it couldn’t end there, could it? Not with you tottering

in a chair under the swinging bulb grill of my

low rent gumshoe, rocking with laughter at your

more restrained role, yap clamped shut on the knowledge of the swag

tucked tightly in your loins.

Saginaw

There was that summer in the driftwood dunes of Saginaw,

when we hid behind the beach pit fires,

sooty playthings of a masquerade we picked up from the

dramas of the village elders, our souls agape and slinky,

too young of course to reckon in those mythic revels

that we were pushing off from one another and

out into those plains alone.

That was big country for the young to grow old in,

so we tricked ourselves out in the

garb and jargon of castoff books and manifestoes

penned by pool hall prophets and mystic men, peeling away in

revved up frenzy, a ragamuffin bunch of skull bare balladeers

gobbling handfuls of a candied magic to keep at bay the

bad juju creeping all around us.

I got vibrations from time to time in that place I called my

psychic badlands, of one or two who spun out on the highway,

fragments of their superegos blowing back upon them like some

meteoric hallucination from the molten rings of Dante,

and when the white eyed gang clamored round with charges of my

mental misdeeds, I grabbed my hat and stowed away

on a midnight freighter to Bangkok.

I don’t want to traffic any longer in this narcotic of nostalgia,

its soporific gloom, the melancholy yellowness that trims and

paints a vacant sign to pound into my yard, and I grit

and grind my teeth to say this, but our love and loss

of one another, the years we gave to all that pain,

will mix the salve to draw and close the

silence of our wounded circle.

Love Poem in the Color of Decay

It’s the bang of liquor hot on the back of our thoughts like a

bloodied sun exploding over the freeways of our consciousness,

kicking us off on the reflecting painted lines of night time’s

weird delirium, with a grinning death’s head forming in the air,

a spidery panic that at the bottom of the throttle is a place where I’ll

come up shaking from the floorboards, counting change and

sucking at the air for fumes from some faded celebration.

But who gives a shit for consequences anyway, right? And we

laugh at the filthy crawl and crumble of The Stones’ Cocksucker Blues,

the jam with Sugar Blue, my hand up hard and tight between your

thighs, windows rolled down and the slow folk gaping, unaccustomed

as they are to a gal like you turning up in beads and Levis, inquiring

about a pack of Marlboros and the loo, high as a kite you say on the

muscular smell of dirty American gasoline.

We smooth out washed and wasted over the Midwestern states,

the speed and rattle of our heads dusting the blacktop underneath,

the thousand miles or so counted on the odometer with the regularity

and ease of a string of Buddhist prayer beads, bringing with the edges

of the western desert a quiet that strips me of my gloomy introspection, a

decaying waste of doubt and self-recrimination that twists and turns inside,

pushed with less distaste than relief from the opened rear seat window.

It’s here we finally let up on the pedal, paused in a kind of space

devoid of temperature, the earth afloat and mum, the wild things of life

circling round the car, slow in step and barely breathing, and we pull

with arms into each other against the encroachment of the dark,

a destination seldom reached where even for the shortest second nothing’s

ever over, where nothing seems to die, where the last I’ll ever learn

and love of you is the glowing purple cactus flowers trembling all around.

Elegy

I don’t know shit about magic but I

threw my lot in with the abracadabra crowd anyway,

turned on more than a little at the thought of myself

stirring and stalking your lecherous sprite in that

ratty back lot they hawked as a graveyard.

The fucking I miss more than anything,

our matinees of motion profane, a couple of

hungry and horned up cherry town kids,

risen to glorious life in our reels of film, the

bona fide stars of a sticky and odd,

handmade and home grown blue movie.

I haven’t gleaned any signs that you warmed to my

invite, rarely prone in your life to the pokings of sentiment,

so respectfully, in silence, an end to these rites,

head bowed in remembrance of a sweetheart gone cold.

The Blackout’s Tour

You finally catch up where your feet are

leading, the unintended destination of a run down,

sold out beach town nowhere on the Gulf,

short of breath and balding, duffel bag rent

of poems and pictures, the blackout’s tour that begins

and ends on the boardwalk where you’re standing.

What is this waste you stumbled on with your

beggar’s kind of freedom, where you came to wanting

all the things you swore you never needed – four walls raised

around a brood, the rowdy shouts of dinner’s table –

when instead you settled for a bowl of rice,

a bedroll in a temple?

There’s a pod of pelicans coiling water’s sheen,

driving fish into the shallows with their wings, the snap

and splash against the surface slapping on the

empty spaces of your head – you

drop your clothes and walk into the sea.

BIO: James Fleet Underwood writes poems that navigate the borderlands between memory, myth, and the everyday. His work often traces the fault lines between love and ruin, past and present, and the strange beauty found in collapse. His poems have appeared in Porch Lit, The Raven Review, Grey Sparrow, The Orchards, The Tipton Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. X: @jamesfleetpoems

five poems

Links

Socials