http://youtu.be/RGFytiWwsRo
(this is a link to a video that I created for this poem)
Ridgewood (Where We Wait)
We take the most delicious train
to the Queens-Brooklyn border to get here
Where everything is liminal, uncertain, undecided
Even the foundation, Arbitration Rock, at the house on Onderdonk
Was buried for centuries, dug up, and chucked on another imaginary line
The streets are on a grid, and the border on a diagonal
making a stair-stepping hypotenuse of the confused
A challenge to put your time to good use
even on the oz-like yellow brick road on Stockholm
You hear Poles on the street muttering “Marnowanie mojego
czasu tutaj” through the bachata dripping
from the apartments above the stores on Fresh Pond Road

Two of the best restaurants in the boroughs
Rosa’s pizza and Zum Stammtisch mark
the north and south borders of the hill where we wait  
During the seventy-seven riots, Ridgewood
seceded from her stepsister, broke from Boswijk and Breuckelen
-
There’s racism here like carbon monoxide smoke:
at the Ridgewood Y, a man sweats through his shirt
revealing swastikas pierced through the skin underneath
and the Romanian dentist down the street drilling
says “Cred ca am pierd timpul meu aici”
through the machinery scream and burning enamel
she won’t say this if you understand what she means

Walking past the 99 cent stores and the pharmacies,
remembering that there is good, fast, and cheap
But you can only have two of them at the same time,
Crazy Loretta, under her navy knit woolen hat
in her pink sweatsuit and winter coat, smokes
her shaking hand-rolled cigarettes below the train
trestle grinning with her jaw-jutting through
her inch thick specs.  She waggles her chicken bone fingers
saying, “Hiya honey” when you walk by.
If you are brave enough to stop and talk to her,
she’ll tell you that her nephew plays
for the Texas Rangers and her daughter
is a doctor and she’ll probably give you bedbugs
She’ll tell you, fascinated, like a child: “when you squish them - the blood comes out”
She’ll tell you the same thing tomorrow - Loretta forgets.  
In her mind, a phrase like green smoke from her youth
Ich glaube, ich bin meine Zeit hier

The playgrounds are packed with children
practicing how to swear, the girls huddled
reading Twilight like the Bible, and the boys
huddled reading the girls like the Bible
A woman yells to her son to come home a third time
and mutters “Creo que estoy perdiendo mi tiempo aquí”

Buried in Machpelah Cemetary less than a mile from my house,
is the place Houdini is still staging his greatest escape
He has a wide audience.  Sometimes I think there are more dead
residents of Ridgewood than living ones.  The cemeteries stretch
the borders of the appropriate spilling into Christ
the King high school’s front lawn.  Driving Cypress Hills street,
the Manhattan skyscrapers rise looking tomb-toothed parallaxed and
blurry through ephemeral sepulchres, stones, and cement angels pointing at the sky

On one of the stones it says simply: Videor perdo temporis hic
I think we are wasting our time here.

Wee ***** Waggles was the whitest whale
And from the day he was born he was a wiggler ~
He wiggled and waggled so very much
His friends called him ***** the wiggling jiggler~
You could always find ***** in a crowd of whales
As he would make the wildest waves as he was going~
Wilder waves than any whale could make
Most of all when he surviced to do his blowing~
Other whales loved playing with ***** Waggles
And they would swirl around in Willys waves so wildly~
Willys mother would always be watching him
As she wondered around swimming mildly~
And Wee ***** Waggles was so easy to watch
Because Wee ***** was so wonderfully white~
For Wee ***** was so wonderfully white
He could even be seen at night~
All the fish in the ocean how they loved *****
When ***** would wonder their watery way~
And they all loved Wee ***** so very much
They'd cry out "Oh ***** stay with us and play"~
Wee ***** Waggles was the whitest whale
The most popular whale in the water~
Mrs whale , Willys mum wondered just what
Would have happened if she'd had a daughter~.

Terrence Michael Sutton
copyright 1988

Luis drives around the block once more;
his car zipping, ripping,
as his thoughts
are surely racing.

We don't know,
but Monica keeps his keys in her back pocket.
She waggles her peaches when he drives by.

"Juicy fruit", Luis murmurs, then
shifts it into high gear,
spins out,
comes again;
his gravel strikes her hard
between the knees. Monica spreads

her branches, two twigs waving.
She shouts,
"Hey old man, why don't you come perch on these?"

It's a dance of disaster, and no plaster cast protects
those alabaster bones she bares so well.

Wrapped in the warm
prison of the bedsheets
a cold foot sneaks past
and dangles in the air at the
end of the bed

I shiver like sailors of old
in this cold wind that blows
across my toes

I wrestle the blanket
for the sleep it maintains
all elbows and thumbs
****** this way and that
restless wanderers of designer sheets

I shiver like sailors of old
in this cold wind that blows
across my toes

As I grumble
look to the clock
Four AM glares back at me
a cold foot wiggles
a cold foot waggles
Ode to be a cold foot
sorrowful tale to be sure

I shiver like sailors of old
in this cold wind that blows
across my toes

Since we were toddlers
We've had the move;
Something like a siddle,
The sway of balance
On the right/left shift.
But a siddle's for a snake,
A wiggle's for a worm,
And my dog waggles
When I return.

We stop, we wait,
Frozen, and confused;
We're a bit ticked-off
We can't pull this off
In a dance of decisive moves.

We've seen our share
Of waddling sops
Leave sidedoors
On Sunday mornings.
That's not what we do.

I've stopped a tot
From toddling,
Yet now I can't help you.

It's not a reel, a jig or clog,
It's like a line-dance of two frogs.
Then I hear Yeats' fiddler,
And I commence to be a widdler.
When you meet your doppel-widdler,
Don't look,
Don't ask,
Don't take long,
Just widdle past
To the fiddler's song.

4 stiffened, his joists are particularly long and gnarled lances
of pearly bleach. gradually skinless of bones lanky with hands
laid a scythe. he waggles and sheds surly mortal coils we waif
to dust in polite crumbs of rotting health
and his breath is specific. a lash of practical mort

In a world so full of muddled dichotomies and clumsy classifications,
Of spectrums and ranges and imprecise definitions,
Of moving targets and sliding scales,

What is a woman?

When your definition’s solid, sorted, and sold
Am I an archetype or anomaly in the sordid taxonomy?

Here are my chromosomes:
Two Xs to mark the swirling twirls of DNA
Properly paired to provide a guide for my curves.

Here is my body:
Ripe and rounded and ready for perusal
By those who find art in a classical form.
******* that are not perfect,
*** that waggles as I walk,
A waist that looks even better when I’m angry
(Hands on hips and arms akimbo).

Here is my ***:
Excited by the touches that evolution would predict.
I respond when kissed by stubbled lips,
When stroked by calloused hands,
When rocked beneath a man that biology would call
“The fittest.”
Our coupling is a pledge to survive.

Here is my womb:
A wonder of chemistry and medicine,
It has been occupied for defense against bearing fruit.
I have declared my selfishness to doctors,
To family,
To strangers.
I will not house another life
Because my own heart is sufficient.
I will not nurse another’s hunger
Because my appetites are wild.
I will not be a mother,
And you will not change my mind.

Here is my hysteria:
I cry sometimes when books are sad,
Or when commercials are touching,
Or when I’m angry,
Or hungry.
Or confused.
Or happy.
Or whatever.

Here is my meek and mild nature:
In the hand that covers an ornery smile.
In the hesitation before I swear.
In the blush of a lover surprised.
In the warmth that you must lose, not earn.

Whether I am a winning or a wanting woman
I am finished with apologies.
When all is counted/sorted/labeled

My tastes and brightest talents are as tame as I can bear.

It is like shaking hands with a bag of oyster crackers;
Joints sprained, ligaments torn, fingers fractured
And splayed off in several different directions
Like a weathervane that has had a rather nasty shock, indeed,
The whorls of his fingertips, the uneven rise and fall of the knuckles
Serving as a travelogue of a lifetime spent
In towns not quite ready for the big time:
Olean, Oneonta, Visalia, Valdosta, a dozen more besides,
A million miles on buses
Of uncertain vintage and roadworthiness.
Each scar and swelling, each uneven path
Between base and fingertip has a tale of its own;
The ring finger on the left hand first broken
By a Big Bob Veale fastball that was supposed to be a curve,
Later snapped again by Steve Dalkowski,
Who, drinking quite a bit by then
(When ol’ Steve had put away a few, he notes ruefully,
You didn’t want to hit him, catch him,
Or sit in the first few rows behind the plate)
Most likely never saw the sign
Indicating slider instead of high heat.
The index finger on his throwing hand?  
Well, that was from a foul tip in…Wellsville in ’59?  Walla Walla in ’62?
When you’ve bit up by the ball as many times as I have,
You tend to forget what you tore up when.
Ah, but no such problem with the right pinkie;
That was snapped one cold April night
Somewhere between Winnipeg and Duluth,
During a poker game when a backup infielder
Produced an unexpected and wholly inexplicable king
Seemingly from nowhere.

But those hands!  They were, in the lexicon of the scouts
(The same ones who labeled him
With the dreaded tag of “good field, no hit”)
Who trolled the sandlot parks
And high school fields of his childhood, “soft”;
Indeed, he could cradle a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball like an infant,
And, with the gentlest and most imperceptible of movements,
Turn the wildness of a nineteen-year-old phenom
Into an inning-ending third strike, and even now,
Two decades of bad lighting and jury-rigged equipment
Having turned the topography of his digits craggy and asymmetrical,
They seem as smooth and supple as they were at nineteen,
With all the strength and unsullied smoothness of youth,
As he grips and waggles an unseen bat
In the course of retelling
(In his one brief, glorious spring in camp with the big club)
How he doubled to the gap in right-center
Off none other than the great Whitey Ford himself.

Oprah, Winfrey, pilled up  fat, grotesque, painted, eyes bulging so far out they’re almost leaving their  unbearable  bloated sockets,
twitching in orgasmically ***-deprived, relished childhood trauma convulsions.
Her  toneless limbs jiggling independently, marionette-style,
puppeteered by the corporate machine that let her birth Dr. Phil. Right there on the stage in all of its grotesque, ******, umbilical glory.
The doped up  brainless sock puppet she is, shrieking again
into the mic, goes gobs of  spittle
flying onto the front row , veins pulsing, trying to warn America about
these supposedly pandemic-level
teenage *** acts.
Every day some new hallucinatory contrivance
based on underage ****** needs
(the needs of the audience, not the supposed perpetrators).

The "rainbow parties" that never happened.
Alleged lipstick “epidemic” she’s describing is projected on the set like a grotesque, fluorescent slideshow.
Kids with rainbow-stained lipstick-smattered penises,
PTA moms wet and shrieking in jealousy,
moral panic levels off the charts.
Checking under their seats for free *** toy goodies.

The children!
Oh, the children!
Whoever shall save them? The poor innocent oversexualized children !

Wait, what? What are they doing now?
Cut to kids eating Tide pods, huffing ****** fluids, peeing in Jenkum bottles,    Cutting freon lines, riding elevators on top,
dying of meningitis ,   satanic panic repacked church lies.

As if the Tiger mom world itself were actually collapsing under her hysterical, warped, unrealistic, and utterly sensationalized quasi-conservative lens.

After all, her opening act was straight out of The Dark Crystal.

The grand     doilied skeksi         decrepit animated skeleton queen                                           ................................      (fanfare blares)

                                Judge Judy!               (  Rises from the deep)
her crypt desecrated...

   Unholy powers erupt.     Gavel lightning apocalypse raging beside her. ( Notice how like a Skeksi  she doesn't have any ears, but she obviously doesn't use them anyway. Her mind's already made up before the whole show begins.)  

                      And now  a  word from our heartless corporate sponsors .    Bass Pro Shops  ads play , followed by catheter adds and gun show spots...  The show fades back in  and  the  living room darkens  into abyssal sad lonely silence . The T,V, god flickers  on brainwashing away all thought and individuality .

Fat greasy shameless Walrus mustache of projection now known as Oprah's baby...

                        Dr. Phil,
... well, he unctuously slides across the set in his stolen Scarecrow used car salesman polyester Frankenstein suit,
repeating the grotesque ritual lines.
Behind the scenes, Rush Limbaugh masturbates his mental pull string.
And of course, out spews his catchphrase:

"You are fat!
You are ugly!
You are stupid!
And you are gay!
And that's why nobody loves you.
Admit it!
Admit that yer gay and you hate yourself!!"

And in the moment of ******, IT transmorphs,
spinal ridges straining and cracking,
human form melts,
face elongates,
eyes bulge,
skin wrinkles into leathery, vulture-like textures.
His torso hunches,
ribs jutting grotesquely,
spine contorting like a broken marionette string.
Limbs wiggle independently
like he’s got a dozen "Grand Ole Party" puppeteers fighting for control,
except he’s still tethered to Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh’s umbilical cord as it runs back into Oprah's unused, abandoned ******.
Ghostly, corpulent waggling hands behind the curtain, twisting him into submission, laughing with their hollow, gassy whispers.

Suddenly, Dr. Phil melts completely and rears up as Judge Judy—but not the human one. This is the skeksi-Judge hybrid: ****-backed, beak-faced, leather-skin gleaming, clawed fingers gripping the gavel
like it’s the source of all earthly justice and bile.
Her eyes burn like a thousand angry American flags on the 4th of July, grease-fried hate dripping from her every twitch. Back it turns into doily-adorned, hairsprayed perfection, nightmare desiccation... that could only dominate as... *** *** ***

Judge Judy-skeksi!

The seemingly ageless, eternal, hate-filled windbag of injustice. ****-backed, vulture-faced, robes fluttering, crackling with electric American ***** housewife wrath,
striking lightning into the pastel Sunday school conversation sky.
Praise her lord; he speaks to her directly, and, well, apparently
"W" Bush too... remember... it was God that told him, he said.

Behind the curtains, unseen yet omnipotent, the two-headed hate blob that is
Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh, waggles a wet-slapping colonialist ******* of capitalist greed.
A now corpulent wraith of power and self-righteous, uneducated spite,
it squelches, turning knobs,
ashing its cheap cigar, it continues to pull strings, gurneys creaking,
laughter a vacuous shitstorm across the stage.
America cheers, unaware of the puppeteer,
and the nation, hypnotized, bows still,
loving, worshipping, repeating her hysteria,
while the gavel strikes, the lightning arcs.

Remember, it's all
"for the children!"
"Oh, the poor children!"
Whom all they want is to be left the fu@# alone by these twisted, sadistic, effed-up garbage human beings that simultaneously claim to cherish and love them, yet blame them for unreal atrocities they never even committed.

the bird pecks the acorn,
fighting through the casing's steel,
the bird breaks his beak and falls to the floor,
the rainbow of his wings failing in spiel.

the floor becomes a deep red,
the acorn waggles and girds in its success,
not realising that his compatriot he had spent all the moons with was long dead,
and it falls with the passing winds of distress.

It hit's the floor in the same place,
bouncing off the stone statue corpse,
the acorn stares to the bird's face,
knowing that it won’t peck anymore marks in its force.

the acorns rolls next to the bird in solemn shifting agreement,
knowing that it's barrier and breakdown is imminent for its bereavement.

It is like shaking hands with a bag of oyster crackers;
Joints sprained, ligaments torn, fingers fractured
And splayed off in several different directions
Like a weathervane that has had a rather nasty shock, indeed,
The whorls of his fingertips, the uneven rise and fall of the knuckles
Serving as a travelogue of a lifetime spent
In towns not quite ready for the big time:
Olean, Oneonta, Visalia, Valdosta, a dozen more besides,
A million miles on buses
Of uncertain vintage and roadworthiness.
Each scar and swelling, each uneven path
Between base and fingertip has a tale of its own;
The ring finger on the left hand first broken
By a Big Bob Veale fastball that was supposed to be a curve,
Later snapped again by Steve Dalkowski,
Who, drinking quite a bit by then,
(When ol’ Steve had put away a few, he notes ruefully,
You didn’t want to hit him, catch him,
Or sit in the first few rows behind the plate)
Most likely never saw the sign
Indicating slider instead of high heat.
The index finger on his throwing hand?  
Well, that was from a foul tip in…Wellsville in ’59?  Walla Walla in ’62?
When you’ve bit up by the ball as many times as I have,
You tend to forget what you tore up when.
Ah, but no such problem with the right pinkie;
That was snapped one cold April night
Somewhere between Winnipeg and Duluth,
During a poker game when a backup infielder
Produced an unexpected and wholly inexplicable king
Seemingly from nowhere.

But those hands!  They were, in the lexicon of the scouts
(The same ones who labeled him
With the dreaded tag of “good field, no hit”)
Who trolled the sandlot parks
And high school fields of his childhood, “soft”;
Indeed, he could cradle a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball like an infant,
And, with the gentlest and most imperceptible of movements,
Turn the wildness of a nineteen-year-old phenom
Into an inning-ending third strike, and even now,
Two decades of bad lighting and jury-rigged equipment
Having turned the topography of his digits craggy and asymmetrical,
They seem as smooth and supple as they were at nineteen,
With all the strength and unsullied smoothness of youth,
As he grips and waggles an unseen bat
In the course of retelling
(In his one brief, glorious spring in camp with the big club)
How he doubled to the gap in right-center
Off none other than the great Whitey Ford himself.

when ere sleep tries to soothe the sleepy eyes
i get the mirror from off the shelf
and start getting queerer, chasing myself
drilling thy far-out mien that no more is my guise

Alas!,emits the odd reflection,
A young woman with good intents
but needed direction

pardon my manners dear me,
i says, I've lost my taste for grace as you see
I'm no longer virtue's servant and devotee

pardon my treacherous soul that trembles like autumn's leaf
like a slice of iron between two lodestones of woe and grief

but, life waggles me up and down in ebb and flow
and nothing but moans, perfidy and malice To bestow
shall i settle for a crust of bread and a place to sleep in ?
shall i hold my tongue in pain and take a corner to weep in ?
I've been a gullible pawn in a staggering game of chess

pardon my weary soul dear me, i shall confess
not pawns who gentle but pawns who bow
nor who crown are kings  but they who blow
therein he who craves the crown full-blown,
cleaving all paths, must wrestle the burden
that dropped him down

You put your hand in the bag for a book
               and you pull out a rock
put your hand in the bag for some gum
             you pick up a stone
Your fingers clutch for cash
             and they rub against pebbles
your fingers scrabble for keys
             they grab up some gravel

You put your hand in your pocket for a rock
             and you pull out a book
put your hand in the sack for some cash
             you find it full of pebbles

Your fingers search for the stash
             they get glued up with gum
your tongue waggles for the keys
             you taste the gravel