Poetry: Selections From Steve Passey

Nothing Going on In Heaven These Days (Nadia)
 
They say we can make it there, 
if we pray, if we obey, if we try, 
but I wonder what goes on in that place
and why we wait until we die.
I’d miss the sex, 
I’d miss the violence,
I’d miss the theft, and 
I’d miss the violence too 
(maybe I already said that) 
and maybe it’s just a place of peace and love and happiness 
but I don’t know any of those things 
and why do we have to die. 
 
I asked her, hey Nadia, why do you cry and she says; 
I don’t know why, maybe because he texted me 
and he said that he’d gone back to his wife, 
so please just don’t look at me, and I’ll be fine in a while. 
 
Nothing going on in heaven these days, 
just peace and love and happiness, and watching Nadia cry.  
There are bibles, books, priests, and preachers
and then there’s fucking Nadia underneath the bleachers.
Poets, prophets, lovers, seekers
and none of them in heaven, where there’s only
peace and love and happiness
and watching Nadia cry. 
 
 
 
Times are Different Now (Gloria)
 
In another time a man like would have ridden to war, 
and Kings would have awaited me. 
Now, a bad angel sets the table, for me, tonight. 
She told me that her mother told her that she’d driven two men to suicide 
before she’d turned twelve years old. 
The first, her mother said, was her step-father. 
Her mother had become pregnant by a guy who had gone away, so 
she went with a guy who was always sort of around, 
good in his own way,  
good enough, as they say. 
But things kind of fell apart, as they do these days, 
and he’d always suspected something, saying 
the dates just don’t add up right. 
She wanted child support. 
He said that little girl ain’t mine. 
The blood test said that he was right, that little girl was not his, 
but the courts said that he’d acted as her daddy, 
and that was good enough for them. 
He shot himself in the head in the parking lot of the courthouse, 
sitting in his truck.     
It's not like he had much money, anyways, her mother had said. 
Her mother went after the biological father then, 
tried to track him down. 
She found him alright, and had him served. 
He did not come to the parking lot of the courthouse. 
He hanged himself in the garage of the home he rented. 
Threw a rope across beam, stood on a chair and kicked it out himself, 
kicked hard against the courthouse traces yet to even come, without a word to anyone. 
He had a roommate, her mother said, a parolee, dishonest, dissembling, 
and she thought the man had come upon her father’s body and removed his wallet. 
Because when they cut him down, he had a wallet on him but no cash, no cards, 
and no driver’s license, no-nothing at all,
and no number to call. 
That was your money too, Gloria, her mother said, 
Yours and mine, 
so there, 
her mother told her, 
you drove two men to suicide 
before you were twelve years old. 
I always wanted to change my name, she said, 
I never liked mine too much at all. 
There is, I said, some sex in your violence. 
Good sex, yes, and even better violence. 
She laughed, and she said to me, again
that she always wanted to change
her name.
 
 
 
Some Songs Sound Better in the Car
 
An old man and his grandson 
blow by me on the highway 
in an old International pickup 
on a morning without cloud and 
it’s hot already and the kid looks happier 
than a rat eating shit out of an old cowboy boot and 
that must have made the old man happy too, and I am ten over 
the speed limit myself but I feel none of that particular brand of joy and 
it brings me to mind of the internet pharmacies and oxymetholone and other 
bought and paid for shit to make me feel big, to make me feel hard, and these days, these bright days, they will come and they will go and they are lonely nights without pharmaceuticals and I wish I was driving to Maria, Maria sitting on the swing on her daddy’s porch in her summer dress, with her feet and arms bare, but those days are gone and I understand that there are those that say that if you are freed from pain you’ll go straight back to the hurt and Maria, Maria on the swing, Maria on her daddy’s porch in that summer dress, that blue and white dress, and her hair so dark and her feet and arms bare.
 
 
 
 
 
Steve Passey is from Southern Alberta. He is the author of Alone on the Couch With a Gun in My Mouth (Anxiety Press) and a few other things, as well as hosting “Just Sayin” - interviews with writers and musicians, on CKXU.