The Greater Good
“Richard says, “Hey man, let’s dress up
like cops – imagine what we can do.”
-
Television, “Venus”
Imagine, indeed.
Aviator shades, shiny badge, jackboots,
helmet and gloves, over-sized cycles
purchased at auction, saddlebags filled
with all sorts of illicit and who would
suspect?
Who would
suspect, knowing
that power is always safe in such confident
hands, might and right and the formula
of allegation? Who
would guess that
something is other than it seems?
Who and why and how?
ride the back alleys and make trouble
for ourselves, let’s lie and cheat and
steal in the guise of the greater good,
let’s trade in fear and hope and trust,
belt to hip, hand to holster, aiming
for the night and making the most
of what illusion affords us.
To A Forty-Something
I'll leave you to luxuriate
in the room temperature of your
nostalgia now, to melt back
in to your well-thumbed books
and mouth along the words of
movie scenes committed to memory.
I'll draw the shades so you
can play your old music in
new formats, the sound ever
so crystalline, all the better
to catch the echoes of who
said what way back when.
I'll light some candles and
turn the lights low before I
leave, setting the mood for
you to once again reacquaint
yourself with yesterday, its
outstretched arms always ready
to receive you, its smiling
lips always ready to assure
you that things will never be
as good as they once were.
George Carlin and Richard Pryor Debating The Meaning Of
Life
I saw Willie Nelson and Ray
Charles
playing chess on a bus one day,
Brother Ray and the red-headed
stranger trading blows with pawns
and bishops and rooks, sharing
secrets
and telling tales, admiration of
the
mutual kind.
Greedily now, I want
such visions each day, random and
revelatory. I want to see
Neil Young
channeling the ghost of Otis
Redding
at the supermarket entrance,
guitar
case open and littered with bills
and coins.
I want to hear Nina Simone
sing on the steps of the corner
church,
her voice quelling the
restlessness
of the hottest of summer nights
followed by Joni Mitchell
serenading
us in the morning as our eggs
sizzle
in the pan with Charles Mingus
at our weathered piano keeping his
singular time.
I want to find Wallace
Stevens standing at the door of
the
local library reading my journal
entries aloud like mythology and
claiming them as his own as
obscure
Beat poets wait their turn to the
side while selling ice cream cones
and dog-eared chapbooks to bemused
passers-by.
I want to happen upon
George Carlin and Richard Pryor
debating the meaning of life in
some
upscale cafe, patrons wide-eyed
and
unsure, amused in the most
uncomfortable
of ways. And at the end of
the day,
I want Chet Baker at the foot of
our
bed playing us off as he steals
the darkness and anything else
within
reach, his muted trumpet guiding
us through such late hours,
unafraid
of where we'll find ourselves come
first light.
Eric Evans is a writer and musician from
Buffalo, New York with stops in Portland, Oregon and Rochester, New York where
he currently resides. His work has appeared in Artvoice, decomP magazinE, Tangent Magazine, Posey, Xenith Magazine, Anobium
Literary Magazine,, Pemmican
Press, Remark and many other publications and anthologies. He
has published eight full collections and three broadsides through his own small
press, Ink Publications, in addition to a broadside through Lucid Moon Press.
He is the editor of The Bond Street
Review as well as the proud recipient of the 2009 Geva Theatre Center
Summer Academy Snapple Fact Award.
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