KIMMEL POETRY

IS EVERYBODY APPY?

I see you walkin down the street.
Right past everybody you meet,
'Cause you got your new device.
And you don't need no advice,
---- There's an app for that!

There's an app for everything.
What to wear, what to sing,
Where to do lunch, what to eat.
Just text ahead to save your seat,
---- There's an app for that!

Now I think we can all agree.
Phones are smarter than you or me;
GPS shows us just where to go,
Google tells us all we need to know,
---- There are apps for all that!

And apps just get faster all the time.
Downloads so fast they must be a crime.
Everybody's in such a godamn hurry.
There's really no time to worry,
---- There's an app for that!

Now everybody's plumb slap-appy.
Even grandma and old grandpappy.
Thumbin through their apps all day.
Thumbin those golden years away,
---- Hope there's an app for that!

Chorus
Appy days are here again.
Skies are all blue again,
Appy days are here again!


IDENTITY THEFT

Who took it?
Why?
Who'd want it?
It never did me
Any special good.

When did it go?
Where was I
When it went?
Will I miss it?
Will anybody?

Was it real?
The real stuff?
The right stuff?


LEE AND ME

Pickin her up and droppin her off
And bein daddy in between,
Smokin too much and startin to cough,
Livin a life I've already seen.

I see me in her eyes,
Even when she sees through me,
Wishin the lows were highs,
--- There's a lot of me in Lee.

She's buildin walls I built long ago,
Makin up the way that things should be,
'Cause it's hard to learn the things I know,
--- Growin up's as tough as bein free.

And bein free's arrivin face to face
And meetin who you meant to be,
Set in your ways and fillin your space,
And time, Lee, and only time is free.

I see me in her eyes
Even when she sees through me,
Wishin the lows were highs,
--- There's a lot of Lee in me.


WILLIAM WORMWORDS

Chain-linked words
Ricochet
Off the walls
Inside my mind,
Raising hell,
Vicious spleen-ventors;
Words are
Big for their britches,
Brassy, bodacious,
Words think
I can't think
Without them;
They pipe my tunes
And call my shots;
But I see
Words
For what they are,
Mere letters
Spliced together
Inside my mind,
My words,
Mined there,
Mine goddamnit.


MSBPAK

Sharp
featured player
finely drawn,
sketched in open space
akimbo,
self-sustaining
lissome woman,
grown from girling
and whirling
tempered,
into
the marrow
of her years.


POOF

and one day soon
she gave me
a box of stone;
inside, a marble heart,
polished smooth.
hers, she said
and my red heart
shot up
and out of sight,
beating faster,
faster . . . fastest.
i kissed her soft white belly
and touched her sweet heat,
fingers slick and slippery
with the cool, liquid jelly.
"i'm yours," she said,
"i surrender . . .
i must be the luckiest
woman in the world . . .
and only we can kill
this magic gift we've got . . .
you brought me back to life . . ."
but, ah, that was
ninety days ago
and love has panicked now,
all shot to hell
in the burned-out wake
of a christmas
from hell.
my days all broken now,
scattered and alone,
with no way to atone
it seems,
for the wrong
of being me;
no way to repent,
no way to retrieve,
the wondrous days ahead,
now already spent
before their time.
and i think and think
and ask myself,
over and over and over,
what can i do?
WHAT CAN I DO?
what can i do
with a heart of stone?


TOTAL RECALL

we heard the words of leonard c,
of john p and bobby d,
dancing through the years of reverie
like there was no tomorrow;
cash and cale, and god knows jimmy reed;
all my brothers,
all my lovers,
for each and every need,
with time to borrow.
but love grows faint and fretful,
and time turns out to be
a hateful thief;
here today, gone tomorrow
a reckless cavalier, ungodly brief,
its estate resentful, regretful
of all those days and nights,
all those sounds and sights
who slipped away . . .


WISH SHE WAS HERE

Wish she was here, snapping that gum,
Rolling her eyes over to see
Whether I'm properly annoyed

Wish I was there, on the eighth-grade infield dirt,
Tommy Kemp in the outfield grass
Crooning our corruption of the song from "Moulin Rouge"

Wish she was here with me in ritual bath,
Candlelight down low, water just right,
. . . A tape's old tunes drifting down the hall . . .

Wish I was there crossing home plate
With the championship run,
And all the beers and pizza afterward

Wish she was here up on the river,
Percy Sledge making us dance, dreamily
On that perfect cottonwood day





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MORE POETRY

RECOLLECTIONS

BIKES

Charlie and I rode our bikes all the way out to Hialeah that summer. Twice. Close to three miles and way out of bounds but we did it anyway. I was 10 and he was 10 months older.

We'd both gotten brand-new 26-inch Schwinns that Christmas so what the hell. It was hot but just as boring so what the hell.

Charlie was the moron who lived next door. Actually a high-grade moron, IQ of 85 or 90, born to work 40 years on the International Harvester line. I didn't have any excuse.

But nothing ever happened, we didn't get hit by a car or kidnapped or anything. Nothing but the pickle episode. Twice.

The pickles floated in a big wooden barrel out there full of brine, in the middle of the hardware store. And they were hot. Four-to-five inches around and about as long, two for a nickel and spiced with God knows what.

We forked over the nickel and promised ourselves we wouldn't start on 'em till we got home. They had a reputation. That pledge lasted abut two blocks before we started chomping. And we paid the price, mouths on fire. And nothing to quench but to keep chomping.

There wasn't much along 62nd street then, couple gas stations, a store where soft drinks lived but we didn't have any more money anyway. Of course it never occurred to us to stop and ask for water at somebody's house. All we could think about was that jar of cold water in the ice box at home.

We didn't stop our pedaling fever till we got to the front door, tearing into the kitchen for that blessed water jar. We let our bikes fall where they landed in the front yard, strictly against the rules for new bikes, but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered but that jar.

We did that twice that summer. Like I said, Charlie was a moron. I didn't have any excuse.


IRAN

A year later I woke up on the dry desert floor of Iran, about halfway between Tehran and Esfahan. We were there to play footsie with the Shah, or vice versa, who was busy playing footsie with the Russians. It was 1964 and we were sunk deep in the Cold War and Mohammed Reza Pahlevi was playing the West off against the East for all he was worth. And considering all the oil beneath his feet that was considerable. To say nothing of the strategic crossroads he stood astride.

He stood there because we put him there. The Dulles brothers and their British brothers-in-crime had jerked the rug out from under Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in '53 and yanked Pahlevi back from wherever he was hiding out, plunking his skinny ass down on the Peacock Throne. Mosaddegh had nationalized Iran's oil industry out from under the Brits and was threatening all sorts of land reforms. He clearly had to go.

Instead of the Peacock Throne the Shah had his ass parked a couple rows up in some temporary wooden bleachers that had been dragged out onto the sand in the middle of nowhere to accommodate him and a couple-dozen of his henchmen. He was all decked out in his finest regalia, all his medals and ribbons on display. We were supposed to have jumped onto the flat hardpan right in front of him the night before, but there'd been a glitch.

The glitch consisted of two majors, one army, one air force, arguing on the runway back in Turkey about whether to proceed despite some shaky radar readings. Since the flight would brush within 20 miles or so of Soviet air space, there were good arguments either way and two MIGs would be keeping us company just in case. But everything looked better in the daylight and we took off the next morning, all the better to see the Shah, and in fact it was the only time I ever saw him.

We'd been prepped for the trip six months earlier by Operation Desert Strike, billed as the largest peacetime military maneuver ever, involving 125,000 U. S. Armed Forces personnel, deployed in the Mojave Desert along the California-Nevada Arizona borders. When it was over three weeks later, 38 of the personnel were dead, according to TIME magazine. Half had been run over in their sleeping bags in the night, oblivious to the rumble of the tanks, the rest, victims of heat stroke, dehydration, drownings, parachute malfunctions, snakebites and routine vehicle accidents.

And we thought 95 was hot in the Mojave. Child's play. 120 was hot in Iran. And cold, down in the 30s at night. And dry. Somebody said it hadn't rained in the waddy I was standing in for 17 years, which was not at all hard to believe. And there was nothing green --- nothing ---- in sight. Even the few scragglyass palms in the once-in-awhile so-called oases were dried-up and brown.

It wasn't unusual to get a glimpse of some skinny fellow, wearing 4-5 robes, herding a half-dozen spavined goats along the horizon in the middle of the day. 100 degrees and he's wearing everything he owns because it wouldn't be there when he gets back home. God only knows what the skeletal goats might be grazing on. Nothing green in sight for miles in any direction. Miles.


NASHVILLE

I was laughing so hard I could barely keep the car on the road, while Flynn was cranking the radio up to top volume. We were convulsing over Chickenman!, a hilarious weekday radio serial dreamed up by Louisville dj Gary Burbank, and a huge local hit.

This episode was nearing its end but our reception had grown steadily fainter and full of static, and we weren't even in Tennessee yet. 50,000 watts of clear channel power and this is what we got ? Damn.

We were rolling down I-65 headed for Nashville and somewhere just past Bowling Green I had to pull over anyway so we could catch the last lines of the day. Nashville was only 50 miles farther and it was clear we'd be there by 5 o'clock.

TRYST

Two o'clock on a cool Sunday afternoon, out of the way, behind the long unoccupied commercial building across the deep parking lot behind the row of strip-mall buildings, parked, late-model BMW, Lincoln Navigator, dark windows.

And the unmistakable cry of a woman climbing the stairs to climax, not loud, not histrionic . . . soft, focused, unhurried . . . sure of itself, taking its own sweet time . . .

I have walked past behind, accidentally, as far from the cars as possible, out of habit, probably miss a step but keep walking by, likely they never knew I passed.

I surprise myself by not even being jealous, savoring that sound, like no other, delicious, unmistakable, irreplaceable.

What a gift, what a treasure . . . sweet serendipity, stirring old memories, old times, young women . . . old women, now, as I am an old man myself, with no expectation of ever hearing that singular, lovely trill again, so beautiful, so singular . . .

Just from veering aside, slightly off the regular route of my daily constitutional, by pure happenstance . . .

You were right all along Mr. Berry when you decreed, "Roll over Beethoven" . . . I have had my own, singular, irreplaceable "Ode to Joy" . . . unexpected --- totally. undeserved --- probably, celebrated --- unreservedly, treasured --- to the end of my days . . .


DIMINISHMENT

It's no fun being diminished. The late Jack Kerouac hit the nail on the head when he said, "Nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody except the forlorn rags of growing old . . . " Forlorn rags indeed . . .

The even later L Cohen said it even better, certainly with greater economy: "When my friends are gone and my head is gray, I ache in the places where I used to play, I'm crazy for love but I'm not comin on . . . " As if . . .

Turns out these golden years are not so golden after all. They are as 'sounding brass,' which is in the bible, or somewhere in common (formerly) reference, whateverthehell 'sounding brass' is. I suppose it has something to do with the gold standard of sound, as in sounding false to the ear. And I always thought that standard was Maxell or TDK. Never could carry a tune but I could always tell when one of those tapes was stretched, dragging during playback.

Before I even went to school my sister's piano teacher pronounced me 'tone deaf,' sentencing me to a lifetime beyond the pale. Still, you can't blame the old bugger for doing his job, which was later backed up by the nuns in grade school. They always wanted everybody to sing, especially the notoriously reluctant boys, until they got to me. And I can still see them passing through our ranks, listening, pausing in front of me, motioning for me to not sing. And the funny thing is, I always liked that damn sing-song music. Must have offended the sisters' ears though. And that's just one of those long-ago diminishments I've had to endure.


WOOLLEY

Woolley and I were sitting in the Russian Tea Room next door to Cameige Hall drinking vodka — what else? We were waiting for Nureyev to show up, having long since given up on Godot.

Somebody must have said something about Rudolf being expected. It wasn't a rumor exactly, but something in the air. Or maybe we just dreamed it up. We'd had a few vodkas by that time, but no caviar. We never seriously considered ordering any of that stuff.

I was trying to explain the significance of my ode to the great Connie Hawkins. "His slow-motion grace hung in space like maybe a Nureyev dream" or something like that. I was trying to get the idea across, earnestly, maybe vociferously, because the waiter or maybe the maitre d, was hovering, unctuously admonishing us to be a little less rambunctious.

Maybe I'd been gesticulating, not to say flailing, around, trying to demonstrate the Hawk's superfluid moves to a non-player, certainly not characteristic behavior in the sanctified confines of the Russian Tea Room for god's sake, with people there trying to have a quiet, decorous weekday lunch. But like I said, we'd had a few vodkas.

Woolley was looking downright spiffy in his well-cut seersucker suit, befitting an author who'd arrived. No longer a "promising" author, Woolley had arrived, courtesy of a lead review in the Sunday Times a couple years back, and he'd gone on from there.

We were in the Russian Tea Room on his publisher's dime, waiting for Isabel as it turned out. Obviously Godot wasn't gonna show and as it further turned out, neither was Nureyev. But Isabel did.

Isabel was fashionably late and she had every right to be because she was quite fashionable. She bore that unmistakable east-side patina of somebody bom to wear fashionable clothes, like she'd grown up on Park Avenue,which she did. She had the finishing-school posture and bearing she was born to, a certain careless grace of someone always at home in the world.

Trying to remember how they met, but I can't really recall the specifics, Woolley a hard carbuncle of a guy from West Texas, Isabel silk smooth with all the advantages, as they say, bom to the manor. Woolley bony polio survivor, into Harvard on a theology straw, grasped just before it was too late. Isabel off to France and the rest of the continent for the matte-finished classics.

Paths crossing at some long-since-forgotten writer's conference. An American story. We had more drinks and skipped lunch, they had to be somewhere, and I absolutely did not. Isabel confessed to having ridden the subway once, couple of stations, on a dare. And the prissy East-Side subway at that. When Reid heard this he laughed out loud.

They left and I never saw either of them again. Woolley was already working at a Dallas newspaper and Isabel joined him a month later. They were married a month after that. Reid went down there to bless the union I guess even though he hated everything Texas, with the possible exception of Kinky Friedman.

Woolley and Kinky got to be pals, drinking buddies before Bryan got off the sauce, and when the Kinkster ran for governor there was talk of Woolley being put up for lieutenant governor but nothing ever came of it.




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