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Ace
Boggess
Will I Perform My Role Well In The Last
Scene?
(question from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, Mural)
So the author of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
got to his feet, earned success “a published book”
then died two days later in a motorcycle wreck.
Beaten by black of night that filled his life, beaten too
by amber arrogance of light beaming its brighter passage,
he couldn’t follow the new road, but revved his motor,
launched toward serendipity & death. So, I’m wondering
what climax, falling action, & denouement’s slammed door
will shift staccato alleys I loiter in, or bars where
my sandaled feet tap-tap their beat beneath my ritual table,
hands gripping a pen or carting coffee to my lips,
eyes observing grizzled men in muscle shirts drink tap beer
from mason jars while white-bloused women talk among themselves.
I watch traffic patterns through the window, cars passing
like little deaths across my line of sight. I breathe stale smoke
that haunts the room like ghosts who never move furniture,
open doors, switch on the lights. An actor reading lines,
I wait each day for a story to rise from sun’s ashes.
I count hours to happiness & death, a Happy Death,
which was the title of the first book written by Camus.
He also died on the road, a wreck, but lived well &
kept an exciting mistress who must have smelled like
jasmine or vanilla, caressed his skin with fingertips soft
as spider webs, & with tender eyes watched him play
the tragic role in his theater of the Absurd.
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Ace Boggess
How Far Would You Go To Stop
That Crazy Craving?
(question read on the back of a Honeycombs box)
When breakfast cereal
makes me think of sex:
as though at dawn
I awoke from lotus sleep
with arms bound to a sea-sprayed bench,
eyes honeyed after dreaming lust
in incandescent shades,
scents of lilac, butter rum &
freshly broiled cinnamon
raving deep
in the imaginations of young men,
I know I have been gone too many days.
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