Dumb Bike Ride

            On Saturday I worked on editing an old poem and adding some verses to it. It used to be called “Fuck ‘em if They Can’t …” but I changed the title to “Abdullah”:

I’m out here on the bench

with my book and my pen

old Abdullah comes a long

wearing no coat and no shoes

just his white cotton shirt

and his trousers and nothing else on

There’s this greeting he’s taught me

it’s “Khuda hafiz” 

so we say it and then he sits down

There’s no pressure to talk

we just sit there and watch 

whatever might come around

Perhaps a little bit bored

Abdul takes out a coin

then he flips it and asks me to choose

I hate these kinds of games

but to please my good friend

I say “tails” and I hope that I lose

But it turns out I win

whoopee, we forget it

and move on to other things

He tells me he loves art

but that creative pursuits

do not lead to happiness

He says my ambition

of making a living

with poetry is a dead end

and that poets like Gibran

always end up alone

without any family or friends

A merchant by contrast

is never an outcast

and his family will never leave him

Then he invites me to come back

to his Pakistan

and I don’t know if he’s kidding.

He assures me he’ll pay

for my trip to his home

and he’ll teach me about business.

Then the wind blows beneath

my old winter coat

and I really consider it

It’s now rolling around

to that pale time of year

when the blue sky is colder than grey

The streets are now thinner

Their shadows get thicker

and the winds in my chest are at play

and there’s a leavening omen

as those winds start blowing

all my elation away

Abdullah remembers

our long buried coin toss

and says “We forgot to wager”

He says name your trophy

I say without thinking

“Give me your youngest daughter”

One might think I would know

it’s not his kind of joke

plus his youngest girl is fourteen

He gets up from our seat

insulted and leaves

and I never see him again

            I spent quite a bit of time on a new poem written in the style of William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and drawn from my first journal entry from five and a half years ago. It’s called “Daily Dumb Bike Ride”:

I slogged out on my dumb bike ride

westbound along the boring route

pedaling tedious beside a sky

that showed a yield of diverse clouds

above the lake especially

but none of that quite impressed me

I turned on Islington Avenue

and dragged my way past all those plazas

that are cloned anywhere you travel to

but found relief from the miasma

upon turning left on Norseman

to find an industrial wasteland

Past the Animal Eye Hospital sits

the Believers’ Christ Embassy

I mused that fundamentalists

are now mass-produced in factories

There was Global Cheese, Super Collision

Hot Rod Scott’s and Police Auctions

I passed a building that belonged

to a large franchise called "For Sale"

a company that seems to own

property on a global scale

though it doesn't seem to want it

which is Zen when you think about it

I went north and then turned east

and saw the towering tidal wave

of clouds of white and ebony

that’d been behind me all the way

and was now motionlessly smashing

the air above my home direction

Perhaps my father's analogy

that the horse loves the home trip best

holds true, because suddenly

there was nothing that did not impress

The Sputnik Vintage Furniture store

had Rocket Fireworks right next door

Then southbound I began to move

past a school that may have lost a “C”

but "Holy Angels Atholic School”

might have been its real identity

and maybe Atholic School daughters

wear their kilts just a little shorter

As I turned left onto the Queensway

the gravity that pulled me home

was that of the clouds that hung and played

over the eastern horizon

and which overwhelmed my senses

with their spectacular menace

            I read a couple of chapters of Frankenstein and made some notes.

            For lunch and dinner I had beans with toast and finished the last bread I’ll be eating for the next month. I had a few nuts and some soymilk and watched an episode of The Rifleman.

            This story begins with a hanging. A few hours later when the hangman is alone a man we don't see but hear declaring he is the judge, kills the hangman. A few days later the judge that sentenced the man to hang is shot by the same out of view executioner. Meanwhile Lucas McCain receives a letter with a newspaper clipping about the hangman being killed. He realizes that a notorious hanging judge named Zephaniah is the father of the man that was hanged and now he is out for vengeance. He is after Lucas because before the Rifleman moved to North Fork he had been part of the posse that captured Zephaniah’s son and it had been Lucas that had shot him in the leg. Zephaniah captures Lucas and ties him to a wagon wheel. On learning that Lucas has a son he decides that it would be poetic justice for him to take a son for a son. He plans on hanging Mark. But Mark is kept late at school to split wood as punishment for shooting spitballs. Zephaniah goes after him and tells him that his father has been hurt. On the way Zephaniah’s horse stumbles and he falls and hits his head. Mark takes care of him. Lucas manages to move the wagon he’s tied to enough to bring the rope close to some hot coals. He frees himself and goes to save Mark. Mark goes to a spring to get some water for Zephaniah and Lucas arrives just as Zephaniah aims his rifle in Mark’s direction and fires. Lucas thinks Mark has been killed but Zephaniah had just shot a rattlesnake that was about to bite Mark. Zephaniah realizes the error of his ways just before dying.