THE SECRET LIFE OF REAL MEN
By day it's not safe
to leave the truck
even to pee,
unless you have
a sharp lookout
and park away
from the waves
of the tall grass
where predators swim.
But late at night when
you answer to no one
you climb the camp fence
and venture alone
into the dark Mara
to take your chances
amongst the stars
and the lions.
LOMA PRIETA
He never sleeps through
the tiniest quake since
the big one in '89.
The first pressure wave
tosses him toward the door
before he can even
shake loose the dreams,
before the shear waves
shimmy through the roof beams.
It’s just like that sound
in the dark child night
ever since he was born
when the first slap of meat
burrowed him under his pillow
before the squeal of tooth and bone
brought the weight of home
down around his head.
LIFE ON EARTH
Their mother once told me
if you want them to be
the kind of kids
who aren't fearful
you're going to have to stop
being so fearful yourself.
She said it to cut me,
like she told me
my fat was not sexy
while we were having sex,
I mean she told me
while we were fucking.
Until I stopped
being so fearful
long enough to leave her,
taking only the half that was mine,
the last half of my life,
half my kids’ childhood.
Mine.
At Six Flags my daughter
asked me to ride
the chair of death
to be dropped from a great height
what she thought was
my greatest fear.
I said no
and no
and hell no
and my stomach
knotted
flopped
leaped
until almost closing time
until almost to the gate.
I grabbed her hand,
I said let’s go.
One second
of courage
strapped
buckled
yanked
skyward.
We paused,
and for that brief still moment
we could see every single thing in the world
sparkling
like a carnival
until the brakes let go
until our bodies were released from our hearts
and hurled against our life on Earth.
PUNK ROCK AND DRUGS
I found a vintage bookmark
in an old volume of Bukowski.
Printers Inc. Booksellers in Palo Alto,
which dates this purchase to some time
during the reign of George the First.
A long lunch book-shopping, probably.
Waiting out the weekend crank jitters,
avoiding the Silicon Valley cube farm
hiding out between the shelves,
biding my time
until the train back to the city.
Sweating out the poison,
the bad breath and crotch rot,
the face-picking, the chewed-up tongue,
the sun too bright,
the pages blurry.
I didn't read poetry. Thought it was stories.
Grabbed it off the Bukowski shelf
without looking inside.
The title was punk fucking cool,
playing the piano
like a percussion instrument
Neubauten-style
until the fingers
begin to bleed a bit
in a Sonic Youth
kind of way.
Incapable of imagining
a future beyond quitting-time pints
and next weekend's gram of crystal.
If you had told me I was in for
marriage and children,
dot-com paper millions,
sobriety and suicides,
New Orleans, Katrina,
overdose, divorce,
and writing mid-life crisis poetry
in an Austin train station
with two grown kids
and a black president,
I would have said
I'm not really into science fiction,
mostly just punk rock
and drugs.
...
Ray Shea's writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Weeklings, Fourteen Hills, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. A native of Boston and New Orleans, he lives and writes in Austin, Texas.