17-7

Runaround Sue Time Travels to 1559

Sorrowful, I lament while yet I can,

the hour I kissed her first on dance hall bench—

the laughing, flirting, cocktail-sipping wench

Suzanne, who stole my loyal heart, then ran

the streets of this corrupt and vicious town

to her eternal shame, with other men,

bestowing favors meant for me on ten

or twenty peasant rogues and rural clowns.

How could she trade my pledged and ardent love

For backseat grappling or a doorway kiss?

My fierce and fervent only wish is this:

To look on purgatory from above

while Suzanne howls in pain. Her only goal,

To let the cleansing fire restore her soul.

by Patrick Cook

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Patrick Cook used to work for the post office. Nothing so glamorous as carrying mail or serving customers at the window. No, he drove the forklift on the loading dock, emptied elevators, sorted letter trays. The mundane nature of the work is what inspired him to write poetry. It's the same instinct that drives a prisoner to cultivate a flower. Of course, parodies are a fairly low form of poetry, but who cares?

16-49

Lament of the Cactus

"Give up thy thorns,"
the great genius Burbank said.
"In the potted world
we've made for you,
you won't need them."

And the cactus surely knew
that what the seed-man said
was true, eschewed
its genetic predisposition
to be prickly.

A triumph for botanical science,
all agreed,
when they spied the spineless breed,
a cactus no more barbed
than a banana.

Yet this mellow prodigy
was a hollow victory, for without its spikes
the vegetable turned sickly,
a flaccid stump where angels
once feared to tread.

The swordsman of the desert was half dead.
The other half was weak about the head.
Which only goes to show what every cactus knows—
that the spice of life is all
that makes life prickly.

by Richard Schiffman

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Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist, poet, and author of two biographies. His poems have been published in Southern Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and many other publications. His poetry book, What the Dust Doesn't Know, is forthcoming from Salmon Press.

16-48

Karmic Laundromat

Though less than a dustball
in the lint filter of history,
he tumbled headlong
through the cycles of life's mystery
with a half-scoop of alacrity,
a tad lemony and olfactory,
but not a pinch of bleach
to leach the mortal stain,
which all must wear—alack—
upon a shirtsleeve or a brain.
Yet all was not lost;
his grimy mind he tossed
in the shuddering machine
of life's mingled joys and pain,
and he watched love's basket whirl,
the soiled thoughts slowly whitened.
The sudsy swill then drained,
the load spun out and lightened.
And when the time arrived
to dry his damp desires
in Spirit's greater fires,
he lugged the pile
across the aisle
and turned the dial to high.

by Richard Schiffman

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Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist, poet, and author of two biographies. His poems have been published in Southern Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and many other publications. His poetry book, What the Dust Doesn't Know, is forthcoming from Salmon Press.