DIAL POETRY FOR MURDER
fleet indian red
rummaging dustlike on the plain
buffalo hat
You get the idea. Me? They call me Fillip Flan — poet and private eye. So she said, “I want to raise your shamrock.” She opened her blouse. My shamrock rose. Salute. I kiss your clerical ruby wine lips. I said, “The night whines on its sad stem.” She put back her head, made a long curve egret neck and laughed. She kicked my shamrock hard. The night exploded millions of little white shards of pain. When they cleared, she was gone.
cry
friend rabbit
mold grows
in the carport
You get the idea. I get the pain. The note she’d left, rolled and jammed into my left nostril, told the story. Catch my husband cheating, it said, and you get five big ones. Cry the beloved greenback. I’m out the door and after him. I have to stop and hold the hall wall because I am overwhelmed and my mind is sent reeling by a sudden attack of trivia. Did Mao ever once in his life bite into a Three Musketeers candy bar? If so, what did he think of it? What’s in the cubic foot space 100 yards due north of the Liberty Bell?
bowls of fruit
floating sadly
in the rain
At the diner, Grace turned her huge mottled pimple face to me, got off a reasonable attempt at a smile and shoved the glazed buttermilk bar at me. I grimaced and tore at the sugary goodness with my cloud white recently flossed choppers. “Nuthin’,” she said. “I know nuthin’.” I could believe that. The snow that fell on the streets of Paris came down in tender flakes. And the night gripped me in its flaccid tentacles. Hart Highland was a dead body and I knew it. So did Lieutenant Storper of the PD. I could tell because he picked me up off the stool with his huge furry hand and turned me so that he might knife into my eyes his oaken glance. “Behold, poet,” he said, “you know something about this Highland thing, doncha? We seen his wife comin’ out your place of business. Am I right? Or no?” He squeezed my neck. Try to imagine a dark blackness. Got it? Now double it. Into such a place I fainted.
the heart can lie
cheat or steal
in cold summer
mists
I kicked open her door. The rage welled up from my knowing feet to my coldly calculating, yet not unattractive, eyes. “You!” she gasped as she slumped neatly onto a nice big fluffy cushion. “You know!” “You’re darn tootin’ I know!” The words were slit from my larynx. The moon outside was unaware. “But why?” I asked. Was it love?” “Yes,” she drooled, “it was love…..for you.” Oh, God. My shamrock again saluted and my lips came down, closely followed by the rest of my face, to meet her heather highland fields of singing clover with just a few daisies sprinkled about for effect. Her knee shot home true and again in my head the universe broke into a hundred billion particles of pain.
when the bee smiles grimly
you know
it is christmas
When I came to my senses, she had been in prison for three years. I visited her to see if she was still a vision before my now honestly bloodshot eyes.
wounded meadows
know the squat
of the chipmunk
We talked on the phone as our eyes grappled through the window wall between us. “What’s the answer?” say I. “The question was?” says she. And the dance continues. I put my hand to the window – – try to reach her. “None of the likes of that we’ll be havin’,” says the guard. Then he drives his nightstick into my groin.
the world
ow! ow!
the world
ooowwww!
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