Poetry: Selections From Jonathan S Baker

The Mythic Origins of Well-to-do Subdivisions

 

After a morning sun

knocks out the streetlights

yellow buses pick up the night

paperboys throw new days

garbagemen haul away the dead

God in his bathrobe and beard stubble   

drags out the fluffy white poodles 

to give it all they’ve got

little trembling cotton fists

clenched at the edge of the lawn

bearing down to drop 

steaming piles of the neighborhood

one morning dump at a time.

 

 

 

My Baby is the Goddess of Time and Death and I'm Her Mahatma Daddy

 

My baby is 100 miles tall and has three fiery red eyes set in each of her ten gorgeous faces.  Eyes that she rolls when I smack the sweet cheek of one of her five toned turquoise asses and I tell her to get her ten barefoot feet back in the kitchen and fix me up a glass of whatever she's been drinkin’.  My baby drinks blood red wine from a bowl til her tongues hang like vines and she swings her four arms keeping tempo for the world for all time. My baby knows what I like because she created my desires back in the beginning when there was nothing and I want what she wants me to want just the way that I want it til the ending when there's nothing.  My baby adorns herself in one hundred and eight skulls of conquered foes and a skirt of woven demon arms that hides just enough to keep me hopeful.  When my baby gets down, I just lay myself right in her way, and await the stomp of one of her fifty angry blue toes kicking my stupid pale face.  This is how we keep it together.  She'll laugh and I'll laugh and we forget to fight and forget to cry and we hold each other all the way to the Kali Yuga.

 

 

 

It's Just Like the Legends Say.

 

The gray lines are roads.

The blue areas – water.

 

One inch means one hundred miles.

We are cursed to wander

 

for blinding Polyphemus,

for making false idols,

 

for lacking faith.

North is upward.

 

The green is forest.

Paul Bunyun's shirt is red,

 

designed by ad men,

cartographers of  human desire.

 

The dollar signs are shops.

The crosses – churches.

 

The monkey house is marked 

with a red handprint.

 

You are here.

Here be monsters.

 

What you want is over there.

Celebrities’ homes

 

marked with stars.

The lines threading between them

 

are the paths of the planets

take note of the tides and your destiny.

 

 

 

 

 

Jonathan S Baker lives just above the frown of the Ohio River in Evansville, IN. They are the author of several books of poetry, the editor at Pure Sleeze Press, and the host of Indiana's longest running and most prestigious poetry series, Poetry Speaks.