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Noon, Sunday and a dozen regulars under 20 TV’s
tune in to soccer at Club 199, Mt Olive, New Jersey,
home of cheap lobster and lager and the Sunday crowd, regulars
who, without trying, remind me how easy it is to disappear
out of life, how you have only to choose one star,
one plane from the perfect planes on the tarmac
of the airport in Newark where the monorail’s blank
face reminds me of vanishing and where the baby
in the back seat sobs like she had a pin in her. We’re all fed up
with the dirty public floors and the news and the girl guard
with the metal detector wand who makes us take off our dusty boots
for her closer inspection but there’s war afoot
and all I can do as an airport patriot is to shut up and step out
of my ropers and not be suspicious of my fellow travelers
or question the voice that hums under the cello on the plastic
headphones, the voice that doesn’t instruct us
how to buckle up but to stay the course
even if we're blown out of the same tight boots
we so recently shucked. Where
does a voice like that come from, taking over
the airwaves between our ears, diverting us from the sight
of clouds piling up over the wing of this jet,
this gemutlich flying room, the mystery
voice that explains and explains and comforts us with lists
of places to stay away from, people to dismiss
but never says that all of us in here are tilting,
rising, away from the Hudson and the barrens, the ballgames,
the regulars, the wetlands and the pines.
I can just make out ‘beatnik,’ jammed in the back
of what I still call the ‘ice box,’ its delinquent expiration sticker
out of sight behind the Jell-O salad and the moldy fondue
Each day some part of our speech gets to the precipice
and tips out of the collective ken—yet another noun
that’s ‘left the building’, itself a cliché ‘going dark’ too soon.
But do I mourn these losses? No, Dude, I move on.
I mothball. I retire. My aim, linguistic slaughter. Outworn
language should be shucked from the collective
mouth, lost like ‘zoot suit.’ and ‘Okey dokey.’
War and exorbitant national debt? Last season. Trite.
they 'get your goat,’ We answer, 'See you later,alligator',
then stamp their sell-by date, November.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in East Texas with her husband, three cats and a very large Rottweiler. She has published both in print and on-line at sites like Riding the Meridian, Poetry Magazine.com, Conspire, The Astrophysist's Tango Partner Speaks, A Writer's Choice Literary Journal, 2River, Tinturn Abbey, Sarasvatzine, The Salt River Review, Mystic River Review, Gravity, Zuzu's Petals, and The Texas Observer. Her book, Reading Berryman to the Dog, is available from Jacaranda Press.