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Ken Bolton and John Jenkins

Seven collaborative poems

Two Fraggies

     (A Line From Ted Berrigan) Inheritance

    There’s a badge my old dad has
    — he wears it on his beanie! A tornado-proof
            vest
    he’d’ve needed in the navy. “It now
            all mine is.”


     A Socialist Japan

A fine rain anoints the canal machinery
as I ride my bike over the little bridge to
             Social Security.


I have gone missing from the world
                                         for Toss

It’s a late Twentieth Century sort of feeling
driving in my car,

dead in the daytime, up at night
lively as a ‘wire’.

—   (My little joke.)  —

But it is curious, you’ve got to admit —
Does a hippy sleep like this?

Does my wife? an airhead
in some respects. Finally, but,

smarter than me. I
am her problem.

Not her only one. But major —
and abiding.

She sleeps easy.
I sleep awake, a nut.



Magnum Opii

I thought I saw Stella Stevens on
TV the other day. But it wasn’t.


No?
Yeah.


You know where she was born,
Hot Coffee!


Yeah?
Yeah, the other day I thought I nearly had a


flat tyre.


Nearly had one?


Nearly thought I had one


Yeah?
Yeah.


Hot Coffee?


Yep.



A mood


“Let’s go with the mood, if this
is a mood really,
& not just a way of proving
you can stay up late, and not watch television.”

Your glass gets empty
so you fill it up.

You fill it up
and it gets empty.  How bout that?


I like your hat.

Yeah.

Outside, there are clouds under the moon
but you can’t see them
so what’s that to you?
(It’s night)
(Reason you can’t see em)
The window
is too far
from your hand
to open
It sort of
hangs there
in the air anyway
and falls slowly,
later, around a glass
(that somebody filled)
and you drink it. You
think: who cares? And
that’s a mood. Or
something like it. Phew!
as Slim himself
might have said — or one of them other guys
Warren Oates or someone —
as you take off your hat,
and are glad,
You’re not bald.
Don’t laugh, it happens.
And you put the hat down,
over your drink, and open the window.
(Now you’re in an entirely new mood)
And There Are!
(clouds out there)
under the moon, a
bald moon. And there are televisions on

all along the street

and no one’s watching them,
except me,
breathing, one breath at a time
but a little heavier than I used to.
Clouds, one by one, under the moon
that the wind is blowing to bits.




’Nutter Thing


Pappy, I priv-el-ege my chicken
coop, fer’n it’s art to me,
Lands! Aigs ’n all, roosters settin’
purty as pigfat on rashers. I
privaleges that coop! Fore-ground it too.
Now why is that? Tell yer why:
     oncet, aged three, or four —
     or thereabouts — little anyway,
     out in the yard, I had this dream:
     caused by I stood on the rake’s pointy ending
     & it swung up ’n hit me. Bonk!
     Like to have divided my brain
     (reason, Jed says, I’m so pernicketty now —
     other times I got what that
     baiter of bears called
     “negative capability”. I black out
     &, after a few seconds tick past,
     a pinhole of light happens
     gits wider gradually — very gradual —
     & then I hear the birds & chickens
     & stuff, maybe the dog’s barkin’, or
     a plane’s flyin’ by overhead & the pinpoint of light
     is wide & is the whole day & I’m
     a-lookin’ up & the dog’s lickin’ me
     on the face & Jed, or one of the kids,
     is sayin’ Nan, get up. And I do —
     I go about my day!) Well, once
     this happened: I passed out
     & woke thinkin’ some giant bird
     was towerin’ above,
     its angry, wrathful eye & beak about
     to land like a guillotine
     on poor helpless me, or, like Sinbad,
     pick me up & fly away. But it was
     just a faint & it was just a chicken
     standin’ there, on my chest, probably thinkin’
     why had I stopped feedin’? — who knows
     what chickens think? I think they don’t think
     most days — & up I gets, & ever since
     (& I was only eleven — did I say three? three then!)
     I had a beard & this yen to be an artist.
     Little scene inside I made outa matchsticks ‘n’
                                   thistles —
     depicts John Wilkes Booth murderin’ Abe Lincoln —
     with the stage & curtains & actors & the rest of the
                                       audience,
     horror on their little faces & the gleam on Booth’s
                                                                    eye.
     Miracle. Like the cruelty in the eye of that chicken.


Pedestrian Verse


I walked down to the corner of my street
and turned where the bunting swayed, listless
a little. Then they kicked up! a breeze moved them.

The footpath had been chewed a bit,
to widen it,
by a tractor at one end.

Near the garage were a lot of little lights,
but it was daylight and they weren’t on.

I took a note from my wallet,
put it in my left shirt pocket then
in my pants, then back in my wallet again.

A nervous habit. I felt then
where it no longer was.
I do these things.

Feeling for it still now, with some urgency,
I had it in my hand as I approached
the counter of the petrol station — which doubles

where I live as a food and grocery store —
bought a stick of chocolate that I had
never tried on any afternoon prior to this,

simply on a whim.

The girls at the bus stop chewed and stared,
stared and chewed, and one of them said
What’s the time? When’s the bus coming?

I said, I don’t know. I’m from out of town —
I know nothing of what goes on around here.
I often do this.

It makes me feel young, because irresponsible,
or so I think.

I went round the block,
the bigger block, not the little one,
as I really wanted to walk.

I thought about what the girls had said.

Or the way they had said it. They had
addressed me
out of some slight curiosity. I wondered what I had done

to deserve it. I hummed a little song — “Tomato time,
tomato time” — to a Latin American rhythm, but I could
think over the top of it as it was unobtrusive,

in fact
it kept time with how I walked.

But once I rounded the corner
away from the girls’ gaze
my walk slowed and I gradually began, though I didn’t
notice,

to abandon the song.
“Abandon” —
heavy word.

Anyway, I saw a number of uninteresting things,
but this simply causes me to think, become more inward —
or irritated if I am tired.

One does, then,
blame the itinerary,
and think of it as tiresome.

On a day such as this, though, I did not
think it tiresome. As streets go, it is a familiar
and quite interesting street. That is why I walk it.

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