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MUGGED
Stunned, like a mouse in the sudden
grip of a talon, I whirl,
arms raised nose high
to ward off the blow.
I’ve done nothing
but pay my bills on time
feed the cat when it’s hungry,
and this, like a scene from a B
movie: a cloud of steam
rising from the munched
tar of a broad street,
the dyspeptic face of a boy
half my age
with a grin large as a cleaver
demanding something I have
plenty of but do not want to part with.
Don’t hurt me. Let me
walk away uncut, my life
as it has been, virgin under the blade.
My hand, suddenly claw-like
and out-of-control says No!
It assumes aggression, strikes
for soft flesh going
straight for the throat.
Here I am. The boy’s neck in my hand,
his face under my grip
flushed red as the jeweled
lips of a whore. I hold him
there, my arm stiff as a waxed
deck of new cards.
It’s an all-night game. Knife cuts.
Blood deals.
I’ve got him where I want him.
I see my eyes
reflected off the skin
of a puddle, wide as a barn owl’s going, who? Who?
COMING HOME LATE
My
heel hits the pavement
and the toe follows slowly, dream walking
toward the house
where the woman wrapped in a comfortable quilt
sleeps in the room
where the cat curled on the trunk by the foot of the
bed
snores like a sailor rocked back and forth from port
to starboard.
Three kids ride up the street on bicycles.
I think of nothing
but the way I’ll stroke the snoring cat,
stand at the foot of the bed,
and watch the woman breathe beneath sheets.
I’ll linger there a bit longer if,
as it usually happens, the woman
is asleep on her stomach—sheets slid from her legs,
the nightshirt bunched in the small of her back—
greeting me with her upturned rump.
I think how after I’ve brushed and flossed,
undressed and slid in beside her, she—
without waking—will pull my arm over her head,
lay her face across my chest.
The
three kids ride at me.
The one in front stops short,
slips his hand into his waistband.
“Motherfucker,” he shouts at me, “don’t move
just give me your money.”
I
feel for an instant like a stand-in for a famous
actor—
illuminated while the lights get focused,
frame adjusted, the street hosed down
to make it look like rain—
knowing that when “action” is shouted
I’ll be away from the lights, out of the frame,
indistinguishable from the onlookers
and passersby who have no stake
in the scene and its outcome.
“Motherfucker. ”
The kid on the bike is calling me motherfucker
demanding my money,
and so I become an actor with a large part
in an action film with a one-word title like
Damned or Naked or Blood,
and I either give it up or run. So I
bolt from the scene toward the dream
of blue cool light waiting
in the front door draped with a lace curtain.
I run. And as I’m running—don’t ask me why—
I’m screaming: “Motherfucker, fuck you too. ”
I wish I’d just shut up and run,
but something in me wants to stop and fight,
fight and defend my right
to dream and walk without some motherfucker
screaming “motherfucker” at me.
“Motherfucker, run.”
I’m running.
“Motherfucker, fuck you too.”
I’m shouting.
“Shoot the motherfucker.”
I duck.
And wait. But nothing happens.
My
hands feel like inflated rubber gloves,
each finger numb and swollen as I fumble with the
keys,
the keys a blur, the kid still shouting, “Shoot him.”
I’m trying to focus, trying to crouch into the
smallest possible
target, until the right key miraculously
turns the tumblers and I slip like a letter into the
crack,
then slam the door behind me.
I
look through the cool glass at the three kids
as they ride off on their bikes, the reflectors on
their pedals
like puffs of sparks from a charred foundry stack,
random and irrational as the night sky littered as it
is
with that cosmic clutter.
What am I going to do—what can I do—
about it, asks the man staring at me in the glass
like a waiter waiting to take my order.
As if in a dream I turn, walk toward the stairs,
march up without making a sound.
Peter Spiro is a former resident of Brooklyn now
living in Oregon. Whether or not the experience in
these poems had anything to do with his relocation, we
can't say for sure. |