It continues to be a pleasure and sincere honor to have several poems appear at The Good Men Project (a site and, yes, project, I wholeheartedly endorse on creative and spiritual levels). I’m thrilled to announce that another cycle of poems is set to appear this month, and the second installment dropped yesterday (links to these and previous poems here). These two, “Ivory Liquid,” and “Minor League,” are situated squarely in the early-to-mid ’80s. Not sure how else to say it: as the teen years recede ever further in the proverbial rearview, it’s hard to feel anything other than appreciation, and a peculiar nostalgia for that naiveté experience and the hard lessons of life steal from us. And I can also say “old school” without irony and appreciate the toughness of our fathers, whose resilience we did little to earn or inherit. I’m grateful, now, even if I find myself celebrating weird rituals I used to ridicule.
Ivory Liquid
I can describe my old man by saying old school
but that’s a cliché these days, so I’ll say this:
think about the bubbly soap meant for sinks
in days when dirty plates got washed by hand
but also used in baths and to clean cars—
car wash, for these unsentimental men, strictly
a verb; the only exception applying to groups
of school kids charging pay-what-you-will
at a local gas station, all proceeds for charity
which always began at home—but usually ended
once this generation’s kids finally got jobs—
paying for things like shirts with alligators
and scented soap for leisurely showers
that made the bathroom smell like fake fruit.
Minor League
Or the time I watched the bartender some of us sarcastically called Babe Ruth pulled over right there in the parking lot, suffering the indignity of a sobriety check in front of strip mall traffic—paying the price for too many post-shift beers, some of the staff and a few of his favorite customers crowded up at the window, rooting for him like he was the star third baseman he used to be, scholarship covering his college until he dropped out anyway, a high school hero before that with its associated perks including cheerleaders, copied homework, and all the spoils of teenage nobility—and secretly hoping he’d get cuffed and stuffed right there, signifying a karmic check on his imperious stature, the king behind the bar who always called me Chief because he never bothered to learn my name, treating bus boys the way he’d treated sorority girls or teachers, never having friends so much as acolytes, everyone living to see him smile, no one daring to acknowledge he was too old to have a flat top and too young for the male pattern baldness creeping in like runners at the corners daring the pitcher to check their leads, and still so young and dumb I had no clue it was all already behind him, every day no matter what he did a diminishment, a bill coming due, an expectation not met, another reminder that only the least lucky amongst us receive their allotment of life’s luck during years when they still suffer from acne and jock itch, those early innings that matter most only as memories.
