Hoe Boy

He carries so much shit in his head,
yet the afternoon is light, the sun
literal, sparkling white slivers
across the storefront windows
he walks history small town
sidewalks like a museum display,
the painted man evolving
on a pallid plaster wall.
A lawn or two to be mowed,
and he is thinking of the Hulk
in the desert, beseeching a
bodhisattva to amalgamate
the terror with the touch
of a cactus flower, sudden rain
to green the oasis. A neighbor’s
backyard garden, butternut
squash, slick rows of okra,
shadows that buzz in a fit
of execution. He has so much
shit in his head, he barely
hears the Murray, the whirring
of its cheap steel blades.

**

Hoe Boy Dreams

The ghost of his father waits
for dreams to haunt, exhausted
nights after work at the farm.
A year since he’s visited
the patriarch’s grave, he stops
mid-morning Saturday drive
from tennis, grass greener now
on the sunken ground, flowers,
fresh as always by the stone.
Four am piss, empty tomb,
numb, crawling under covers,
the single court at Teague Park
waits in sweat heat memory,
the old man, bald sensation
closing on a sliced backhand,
his happiness approval,
point, game, set, match; there is no
stop button on this program.

**

Hoe Boy Drives Through the Storm

After the Rowan reading,
the black night highway rain dance,
bourbon in a Dasani bottle,
all smoke is silent as the girl
he never played on that weekend
he had trained for a race instead,
not the Winston rock girls who
renounced their God watching
the church steeple through
the apartment window, fucking
in the eerie blue midnight shadows.
Basketball was his river then,
where time stepped away
from its ticking victims–
no man could go
without his belly button,
without the rifle shot
of the coach kicked bleacher,
and damn it, cheerleaders
were just clip on ties.
Tonight the highway tunnels
through the darkness, hell bent,
crazed as a man that
wants his dead son back.

**

Hoe Boy Sees Himself

dragging chains across
his own dreams, blood pressure
pill chains, can’t make eye
contact with the person passing
on the sidewalk chains, can’t
remember password chains, can
remember his father’s thrashing
arms, scabbed bald head, near
death chains, anxiety over his
most precious secrets chains,
pretender chains. Hoe Boy
takes a valium, rubs his knee,
fluffs the pillow, levels
a novel on his chest,
awaits the shriek
of the sudden train.

**

The Injury Takes to the Road

Hoe Boy sees himself in the Jeep mirror,
crooked smile, two-day beard, punching
the radio, refusing to think about bright
memories that only lead back to graves,
like seeing the motel that was there
before the one that’s here on the bleak
hill that overlooks the same gray highway.
Hoe Boy crosses the lake, horsing
through dazed traffic, crashes about
the ears, the eyes, stoplight running,
raging against the rage of the rage;
how many miles to mother’s farm,
mill town past house pocked fields,
great Canon towers, company pond,
gone. Camera shaky hands, he presses
over and over, duty to mother,
passes the old Landis ball field
where that Razz Miller dived for
liners in the gap, now drought dust,
October shedding our dreams again.
Hoe Boy swigs from a scotch flask,
bites a Vicodin and swallows
all the way to ruined menisci.
Where 152 merges with 150,
he stops, looks at the mirror,
smiles as he passes the pumpkin ranch.

**

Hoe Boy Fights the Power

He has to sleep because
midnight pushes him too close
to the haunting, doubts daunting,
to dew-slicked memories
where every hazy pretense
begs for a jury, or all
apologies. The blue night
is the great waiting room,
a bridge that burns above
the river, rats launched from
flaming landfill holes, wishes
only sleep can satisfy.

**

Hoe Boy Checks the Paint

The devil’s comin’ for your soul, Dean;
I saw you in the river of sky, wrinkled
and red, looking like Nixon or Poe.
Here above the dam, lightning spikes,
and I picked your Santa nose over
a rock; the bream are biting, they say,
but I don’t believe it. Every whistled
song is a part of the whole song. I
remember that from a book, and
your tree is turning like the maples
at Moses Cone, blood on the church
floor where Hildebran shot his
escaped slave. That kind of red
is what we have come to, Dean.

**

Hoe Boy’s Grieflets

Living out past dreams, goals,
the war for attention ended
when the old man died in his sleep,
after blindness, death shakes,
scratching at demons and nurses.
Hoe Boy sips Lagavulin from a flask,
his idling jeep rattles by the sunken grave;
he always just sits there, window down,
thoughts scrambled, unable to remember
a poem, refusing to say a prayer.

**

Hoe Boy’s Saturday Prayer

Give me the grit, lord
to grind out the hills,
to let what will roll
roll over me, and give
me the stones to live
without faith, without
curses. Grant me a fiery
sense of purpose,
love like an old truck,
and let my path cross
the grim days and the
gray nights, and may
I labor with the curious
and lounge with the
apathetic. Give me a
fist of flowers, a heart
that hammers, a rough
damn way to go,
a finish line I can see.

**

Hoe Boy at the Gate

A night when he needed salve
in the city Chandler called
the concrete shit valve of
the whole Mississippi, boys
with machine pistols beat
the news to the corner stands
and he staggered happy by
the ball park past Stan the Man
statue, “Country” Slaughter,
fresh from jazzy notes at
BB’s, black and white as
the keyboard, O for that
Oliver Sain’s sax, or the
tenor that stopped by for
a water to croon a sweet
rendition of Redding then
leave like Otis out under
the cold heroin sky, angel
night, pitchers of frothy bud,
his colleagues from Scotland,
the mother head of bone
memories, story swaps
of surgeries, too late for
monsters, for alarming
shit valve auguries.

**

Hoe Boy Watches His Son

Tree and the nut, rage,
barely beneath the skin,
where religion swirls,
or its opposite begins.
Together they shamble through
mountain parking lot, past
college students keeping
their pure dilemmas in.
Hoe Boy lags behind,
unable to patriarch this
or any moment—watches
his child tolerate him.

**

Hoe Boy’s Death Poem

My cousin Alan is a grave,
his little sister, Julie too, in red
Rowan clay, golden leaves
tumbling from creepy oaks
into brittle fiery heaps.
The spin of this imperiled
ball, swallowed whole
by weather, dunked in fearful
endless slather gravity, matters
only my heart keeps me above.
Death was always the way
according to the phone call,
yet hardly a dropped dime
cooked in cranberry moonlight,
quiet as a snowflake on a tombstone.

**

Hoe Boy Pauses on the Lawnmower

He is thinking of silos
beside long dirt roads,
mountainside creeks
where gold might lie,
guiding a bull’s powerful
shoulders, pasture to pen,
the first time he wore
football pads, leaned into
a stance and locked
a scared boy’s eyes,
moonlight through the
Torino’s window,
soft white flesh of the first
girl he thought was the one,
a beach song he never forgot
even after college turned him,
these lonely unplowed fields,
wind ticking winter grass.

**

Hoe Boy on Death Row

He slips his fingers underneath
this ton of sin just so he can
remember them all again,
and who knows what has
this rope at his throat,
what woman or bottle
or broken prospect
come here or gone away,
red-faced, half-bald,
chin peppered gray,
in the corner, against
the chipped brown wall,
he can’t help but tap
a scuffed boot, Muddy
Waters, Hard Again.
Soon he is flying
over power lines
in the dark.

**

Hoe Boy Unstuck

People who pick up hitchhikers
are a strange breed—this is what
he thought as he jogged
the tractor trail through the lower field
into darkening forest, crunchy
yellow leaves, hidden granite chunks.
He thought of the fence salesman
who wanted to be a pro wrestler,
the insurance man who took him
all the way to his parents’ driveway,
the Baptist preacher who gave him
Amway cassettes, the bald headed
writer who looked too much like
his father, some silent weirdo
who caused a wreck when he
dropped him at the Winston ramp.
Climbing in fading November light,
toward the sunset, toward the finish,
he wondered would they be back,
thumbs out, bags shouldered,
thinking about women or jobs,
worrying in twilight,
buzzed and disheveled,
who would pick them up?

**

Hoe Boy After

Saturday’s chain sawed faces,
her hair pulled back,
she looks for a parking space,
his in hands, sick thinking
of smoke and eggs, wavy
lines of heat, worse days
ahead. The truck coughs
to a halt at a railroad tie;
she riffles through
change, quarters for
a paper. She hums
a Hank Williams tune;
he limps beside her.

**

Hoe Boy Starts His Own Religion

He has decided to shed his skin
in carbolic moonlight,
down by the fish pond
or over near the field.
There is so much he needs to lose,
slurred storm of memories,
derelict promises,
the clutch of the dead.
As it falls away soundlessly
next to the black berry briars,
he wonders how much what’s
underneath will sting.
In another dry week, someone
might find his forsaken skein
and wear it about his neck
when he goes to kill his lover.

**

Quantum Hoe Boy

Because there is m theory,
an infinite multiverse
we cannot see,
the bizarre atomic world,
simultaneously,
dead and alive,
the cat yawns,
an arching comma
on the wicker sofa,
and dinosaurs rage
through the living room,
a man loves and murders
children he cannot have,
geniuses, fools,
even if gravity
is the smoking gun
when the tree falls.

**

Hoe Boy—the Forgotten

Yes, there was a marriage in the park,
with female ministers and ELP,
and the bride had picked flowers
in her hair, and a smile like one
of the Little Rascals, the endless
enigma of swan-necked girls
waiting for ice cream cake.
He read a poem just before the vows,
rambunctious and just about as
irrelevant as the future they’d find
together, on a Midwestern lake,
making their burlap art and raising
a roomful of finches till the genius
of her big tits wore off on him.
For a while the world graved up,
till the groove took and he became
what the palm reader on Emerald
Isle predicted, wiry haired
boy wonder crustacean
crashing his boogie board
on the bass drum beach, tenured.

**

Two Valium Hoe Boy

Night
the wind outside the window
come calling for him
though he is camped
inside
under the spell of lamplight.
Once he escaped on bike,
anteater slouched
over the saddle.
Then he ran desperately,
every day busting
the fact of his body
against the fact of a clock,
navigating Dickinson’s
violent punctuation
afterward, or a prayer
to the catcher in the red sky.
Night
the wind whistles with
fingers in its mouth,
a coach he remembers,
not a lost father
or a dead boss.
His fascination
with the evil out there
on the road, stopped
at convenience stores
for cigarettes or a
girl combing slowly
through her dyed hair
waiting.
Now
the treadmill roars,
and he marches,
the radio blares,
and he moves.

**

Hoe Boy Remedy

He feels that staggering sensation
that the years thrust upon one,
green muscle gone, nerve lost,
the doubled cost of every action,
and yet he is here in amber glasses,
brightening the darkness trail
through tangled forest leaves,
past old home sites now overripe
nests for copperheads, winter
briars dried in drought ground,
rock-lined, broken wino teeth,
steps shortened to climb
what rain has guttered out,
and he feels the cold breaths
rolling under sore ribs, elbows
that fly out instead of back,
the news that just getting started
makes it better brushing like
no more than a thought
past a season of scrub pines.

**

Hoe Boy Family’s Up

He goes online to be with
the people he hates the most:
poets like old girlfriends,
political tiraders,
unhinged junkie football fans,
disillusioned novelists,
commiserating teachers,
privilege masquerading
as every kind of con.
Old men, lonelier than him,
abandoned women, yearning,
bitter, defeated athletes,
he meets them in the midnight
theater of the phony,
and they lift their arguments
like glass hearts, like poker chips,
like bland communion wafers,
phantom brothers and sisters.

**

Hoe Boy Visits His Mother

They sit in the ceramic
tiled den, the old man’s ball game
radio gone, his stack of books,
the soft gray recliner sold.
They speak through a vacancy,
an awkward abandonment,
she about the church doings,
he about his new project.
In one portrait, Dad clutches a
bible, choked by clerical
collar, smiles, a younger man
than Hoe Boy, with hell ahead.
They drink Cheerwine on ice
in plastic yellow cups, watch
an Andy Griffith rerun,
the one where Barney goes away.

**

Hoe Boy without Thunder

He never wanted to be
an old man in a café
envious of young couples,
in light that catches laughter,
pretending to read a book
while he waits for a whisky.
He never wanted to limp
over rocks out the creek gorge
under a spell of laurel,
as his brain screams run, boy
before you lose the violence
to shove toward the finish.
He never wanted to lose
a woman’s sweet touch or to
live in the give up after
the yearn to combine is gone,
to dwell in the wrecked rooms of
dried up days, dreaming of bones.

**

Hoe Boy’s Lost Girl

December wind caught
under the eaves of this roof,
whistling after rain ran nearly
over the muddy river banks.
Distractions and mysteries
pinned in the barren trees,
the yard a checkerboard of needles
and cones cuff linked to dead grass.
Winter is after you have done left
the building, the occupation,
the confidence, the sleep,
the good, the mercy.
Gray stubbled chin, he rakes
the day’s paved edge over,
the sorrowful loss again,
she is under it all.