Power Trip
(first impression at a singles bar)
                      
Just met
but willing to bet
that when you turned nine
you knelt in the driveway
tying   red   green   purple   balloons 
left over from your birthday party
to the wheel forks of that shiny new Sting Ray
forcing inflated rubber to strum metal spokes
(oh music most unpleasing to married ears)
as you raced up & down the block like Evel Knievel
pretending you were riding straight into the sun
on a 4-Cam 80-horsepower Iron Head Harley
jet-black—with Captain America handlebars

pop     pop     pop

Still pretending?



What Dogs Know…

My dog always lifts his leg skyward—
never scores a direct hit on the ground:
an up-lifting ritual that our own species
is sadly under-equipped to understand.

Could this be intelligent design?
A nascent, albeit wildly alien art? 
The street you walk your pooch on every day—
is it a canine Guggenheim or Louvre?
 
How carefully dogs go about selecting media!
This rock/not that!—the third or fortieth slat 
of a 60-foot fence! What pizzazz dogs bring
to wood, metal, stone—Pollocking messages 
more puzzling to us than the ruins
on Salisbury Plain or Easter Island.

Only that exhibitionist cartoonists call “Fido” 
makes the whole shebang depend upon
a red fire hydrant. I’ve yet to see a real dog 
gush that gauche cliché, in the 35 years 
I’ve studied urinary arts.

Though once at Westminster (true story!)
a Great Dane named Monsieur Duchamp
managed to soil the judge’s designer footwear
while accepting a plaque for Best in Breed.

Doubtless a member of the Ashcan School
and follower of Lichtenstein and Warhol
(though Duchamp did a hell of a lot more to
that shoe than Andy ever did to a soup can).

The media, some wag said, is the massage.
As judge X found to her Guccied grief,
to dogs, a piddle’s more than mere piddle—
It’s a Happening!

And who can blame them? Every dog
day morning & bitch of an afternoon 
the faithful sniff their way reverently 
through the Stations of the Wolf…

for what urologists only partly grasp 
dogs thoroughly and thrillingly know:
the unexamined piss is not worth giving.



Liberty Street

“Hey, white boy! Who the fuck you think you are?”
the man shouted. He was staggering about
under the awning of  the White Horse Saloon 
on Liberty Street, in Plainfield, New Jersey— 
where, on a hotter day, twenty years later,
rioters armed with nothing but the shoes on 
their feet would stomp a policeman to death.

(For I was taking a shortcut through
what grownups called the colored section
on my way to St. Mary’s in July of 1948.)

“Where the fuck you come from?” he yelled 
as I drew near. I slowed down and began 
to whisper the Twenty-Third Psalm.
I tried to lie down in green pastures 
but before I could drink from still waters

“What the fuck you doin’ here?” he roared 
(so close now I could taste the whiskey).

“Goin’ ta Church,” I mumbled, keeping my
eyes on the ground (for, though only seven, 
I was wise enough to know: not Jesus, Mary, 
or Joseph—not even The Holy Ghost—could 
save me if things got ugly on Liberty Street). 

“Pray for me, brutha!” he thundered,
touching my sleeve as I bolted by.

                            *

Who the fuck do I think I am?  
Where the fuck did I come from? 
What the fuck am I doing here?

Questions smuggled in from another country—
kissing cousins to those Sister would pose 
over and over in Catechism Class.

I wasn’t able to answer them on Liberty Street
or anywhere since… not in black/not in white.   


© David Alpaugh

David Alpaugh is a poet, essayist, dramatist, and songwriter living on "Odin Place" in Pleasant Hill, California (the irony has not escaped him).  Literary Journals that have published his work include Able Muse, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Evergreen Review, The Formalist, Light, Modern Drama, Mudlark, Poetry, Poets & Writers, Rattle, Thema, Twentieth Century Literature, Wisconsin Review, and Zyzzyva. Links to his poetry, essays, songs, poetry readings, and YouTubes are available at his website: www.davidalpaugh.com. His poem, "Liberty Street," won a first prize in the 2009 Ina Coolbrith Circle Annual Contest.