CYCLOPS-OPTIC

2011-01-09T07:03:00.000-08:00

Precious

2011-01-09T06:48:00.000-08:00

Precious

As a child you would

like to have been seen as precious.

That there was a moment when

all those eyes gathered outside the

maternity ward window came to

gaze down upon you

in your cozy bassinet,

and then… those words.

Each individual struggling to be

the first to utter them.

“Ah, isn’t he precious?”

And of course everyone

nods in agreement.

And that moment…

That precise moment…

That was very well the last time

you were ever truly precious.

Shortly after this you

came to crap your pants

for the very first time, and

there began your fall from grace.

Oh, I suppose in a way

you were still precious.

Simply lesser so with each full diaper,

or equivalent fecal mistake

on your decadent way to death.

I suppose there is

that moment before death

when it’s possible to be seen

as precious yet again.

Yes, when infantile transitions to senile.

Bookends to that span of life

in between where your every action

is rendered stark via brutal critique.

My mother told me to be careful.

That the lamp was indeed precious.

That it could not be replaced.

Something compared to which I

was not held in the

same high esteem.

I figured the message here

was that I could be replaced.

Indeed with only the slightest physical effort

upon my father’s part, and

another one of me

could easily be at hand.

The oil lamp in question

had belonged to my mother’s grandmother,

and after so many coveted generations,

had finally passed into her hands.

There was Grandma Mary,

and there was Grandma Mary’s lamp.

In many ways, one and the same.

Precious.

The lamp sat atop an upright piano.

A substantial bit of furniture.

Something you would think a small boy

could not shift in weight.

Something that one small boy

did in fact manage to do.

And there came that afternoon

when that lamp managed to

topple from its place

and cascade to the floor below

with a horrible sickening crash.

And somehow my mother knew.

Within seconds, she passed from kitchen

to slowly emerge into the living room.

And there she came to stand,

looking down upon me

and her precious lamp

which now lay in shards

there at my feet.

And me?

I am awaiting that

explosion of fury

I so rightly deserve,

and yet nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

There upon her stoic face,

a most eerie calm.

And then, after the pass

of what appeared eternity,

words come to emit from her mouth.

Without looking up from the lamp,

she dryly states,

“Get out of the house.”

Not an exclamation of anger, but

a simple sedate phrase:

“Get out of the house.”

And there, quickly making my exit,

I crossed the lawn to pass

deep into the adjacent woods

where I hid for a full two hours.

I was most certainly not precious

and knew it.

Years later my mother conveyed

how she fell to her knees and sobbed.

And why had she uttered those words,

“Get out of the house”?

It was because she wanted to save me.

That at that moment, her utmost desire

was to strike me with her fist.

Not something one does with that

which is supposedly precious.

A few years before this,

the woman who had given her that lamp

had fallen down a flight of stairs.

Someone we knew of as “Mary”.

The Mary who stood at the top of

those ill-fated stairs,

and not she who ended up

there at the bottom like a

shattered and ruined lamp.

Well, not so much in body,

but rather in being.

There within that mind,

this was tied to that.

String to strand.

A matrix of woven psyche that

had here been ripped asunder.

A multitude of broken strings

now wadded and wound into a

large misshapen sphere.

This synaptic string and that,

once having served specific needs,

but now all bound together—

compressed into a ball which

held no other purpose than

to roll across the floor and

careen between the legs

of each and every

mislaid chair.

As a child it is understood

that our minds have yet to mature.

That we’ve yet to be strung as it were.

That we are often incapable

of knowing what is best. That

we are apt to make mistakes

of which time may or

may not permit a certain forgiveness.

With senility there comes

this understanding

that the fabric of our being

has become thread-worn

and tattered.

And though for this we are often

forgiven by others,

it is something we sadly

will not forgive ourselves.

The last time I saw Mary

was at a family gathering.

Afflicted beneath the sledge of

multiple strokes, she was

wheeled into an adjacent room

and left to sit by herself.

An enforced solitude

for the fact that

the other adults

remembered her

for who she once was

and herewith could not bear

to see what she’d become.

As a child I knew no better.

Did not know that my

Great Grandma Mary

had become one who

was now incapable

of the simplest act of conversation.

For me…

For me she was still there.

I mean…

She was wasn’t she?

And there as I knelt down before her,

her random gaze

came to reflect that of mine.

Tears welled forth

from her long lost eyes,

as she came to acknowledge

one small boys presence.

And there from her lips a

simple phrase came to repeat

over and over.

“Let’s go.

Let’s go.

Let’s go.”

Again and again.

A mantra of brutal anguish.

And I wish I could have taken her

out through the door,

across the lawn and

there into

the distant woods.

Out to a place where

she and I could hide together.

For you see

out in the woods,

you can often

find

self-

forgiveness.

2011-01-09T06:45:00.000-08:00

Big Top

2011-01-09T06:35:00.000-08:00

Big Top

You might find this a bit presumptuous

but within moments of our first meeting,

I knew we’d become estranged.

Oh, it’s not that I didn’t like you.

No, there was not a single pre-existing bias

for what were we if not the

most complete of strangers?

Between strange

and estrange,

we were one and insane if

only for a moment.

Yes, I’d like to say I liked you

but unlike you, I unfurled a

fence of indifference.

Abandoning our uncommon ground,

I left it for you to raise the circus tent

which made up your mind.

Lions and tigers and bears… oh my!

Presently, another arrives

upon our shared street corner

to set up his own circus tent.

And his lions are more ferocious;

his tigers more terrifying;

his bears more unbearable.

Yo, and his circus comes complete with carnival.

And he’s smokin’ a cigarette, which is

almost as good as being a fire-eater.

Almost…

Lucky Strikes in a rolled up sleeve.

“Step up. Step up.

You look pretty tough.

Let’s see if you can ring that bell.

Close but no cigar.”

No cigar. That’s you.

Oh so you.

“Um… Excuse me bud

but could I um…

bum a cigarette?”

Dude is smokin’ and you ain’t

and somehow you figure you have just

got to get a little of what makes him

“the Big Top”.

So he throws you a fag

and it would be a pretty good trick

if you caught it mid-air

but you don’t ‘cause your circus is

sawdust and peanuts.

He knows it, and I know it.

And here with a crack of the whip,

some lion roars from your center ring

while we in the bleachers yawn in mass

as yet another painted clown

spills forth from a miniature car.

Here on this particular curb

there’s many a big top that

will roll up with it’s own unique

barking ring-master.

Each one his own Ringling Brothers.

Each one his own Barnum and Bailey.

Each man insisting that his tent pole

is that much thicker, and taller,

and more rigid than the others.

Each one thinking his stay power

will outlast that of all his contenders.

Each one singing the praise

of those special acts that

grace his center ring being.

You would think it would be hard

to set up tent on this urban concrete curb,

yet you’d be amazed at the ease

at which so many do.

This scrolling concrete beneath our feet…

This concrete that we share…

The same concrete

that stretches away

down to the men’s shelter,

some three or four blocks distant.

That place where Saint Francis of Assisi

pitches his tent and religion.

And again, this is a bit

presumptuous of me

but I get the feeling

you know that place

all too well.

There now,

giving your best impression as to

how a true Big Top smokes a cigarette,

I notice that there’s a prominent

indentation in your skull which

begins at your right temple

and wraps around to forehead.

This, the spot where the

lions crawled into your head,

or the portal from which they roar to escape.

And here with a flick of ash to the ground,

the beasts step to your brow

and bring words to your nicotine lips.

“I can kick six feet high.

They don’t know that.

They think I’m a pussy but

I’m not a pussy.

I can lift one thousand pounds, I can.

I could punch you in your heart.

Punch you in your heart…

You’re dead.”

Ahem…

“Hey Rube!

Looks like we’ve got a violent one here.”

Yes well…

I suppose you’re only trying to warn me.

Imminent threat duly noted.

Relationship estranged.

Ticket sales plummet, and you

wonder why your circus patronage

is so limited?

And as we part our ways,

my mind travels to that distant building

where you will pitch your tent tonight.

To all those men and all those beds.

Chock o’ block tents of testosterone,

each with its own circus calliope.

That every man there

lives with elephant trunks

full of memories

which try as he may,

he will never forget.

That every man remembers

some girl in glittering sequins,

who swung from bar to bar,

but never chose to take his hand.

That she would rather risk the fall

than fall in love with him.

This man who painted tears across his cheek,

and made a target of his nose.

Who crawled inside a darkened box

and was skewered by

one hundred piercing swords.

Who placed his head in the lion’s mouth

and welcomed the scars it left.

All circus acts these men chose

to inflict upon themselves.

And there with the fall of night,

each marquee dims,

flaps are drawn,

costumes are hung,

lions, tigers and bears are

ushered to their respective cages

and the circus goes to sleep.

And there in that slumber,

you would think these men

would be given a token respite,

yet through the night,

they are jolted awake by

the random roar

of some beast in tortured pain.

Sawdust and peanuts.

Such is the life of men

who as boys once dreamt of

running away to join the circus.

Men who arrived at

their coveted destination

only to find that

they now only dream of

finding a way back home.

2010-09-30T18:27:00.000-07:00

2010-09-30T18:19:00.001-07:00

Boy Meets Girl

Boy meets girl.

Boy asks girl for a date.

Boy seduces girl.

Boy and girl participate in

undone-undie,

under the cover,

unadulterated,

unprotected sex.

Boy oh boy.

Boy and girl have sex again.

And again.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Boy and girl are mighty damn frisky,

if you get my meaning.

Boy somehow manages to impregnate girl.

Boy does the right thing.

Boy pauses and thinks to himself,

“Who the hell come up with that phrase

‘Does the right thing’?”

Boy figures, “Alright, fine.

Such is my lot in life, and

there’s not a damn thing I can do about it,

um… ‘cept ponder whether

the person who coined

“Such is my lot in life” is the

same pecker-head who came up with

the guilt inducing sentence of

“Do the right thing.”

Okay, now hold on!

This whole morality play of words

is obviously from a

male’s pointy head of view.

That’s not romance.

Let’s let a woman tell the story.

Um… Girl meets boy at bowling alley.

Girl finds boy cute in a

whimpering puppy what needs

a bit of cuddle sort of way.

Hey! I ain’t tellin’ the story.

She is. She found him cute.

Go figure.

They spoon.

They swoon.

They croon.

They serenade beneath the moon.

They swap some spit.

He asks if he might be able

to see her the following night.

Giddy with anticipation,

she says “Oh, yes.”

And there that following night

he picks her up and right off the bat

asks if it’s okay to go back to his place.

Rewind. Re-roll.

Giddy with anticipation, “Oh, yes.”

Now wait a second.

In chapter three, page sixty-two,

sub-paragraph four of

the woman’s field manual on

sexual relations with a male homo sapiens,

doesn’t it openly state that you are

never suppose to go to the fella’s pad

on the very first date?

I guess her copy had a few pages ripped out.

Girl meets boy.

Girl ends up on boys couch.

Someone’s tongue ends up

in someone else’s mouth.

Don’t know whose.

Hey. She’s telling this story.

Not me.

He interrupts their moment of passion

and excuses himself to the kitchen.

From where she’s sitting on the couch

she can see him digging around

in the refrigerator.

Shortly, he closes the door

and vanishes down a hallway

to pass into view through an adjacent door

before disappearing into his bathroom.

And he’s in there a long time.

A very long time.

She studies the ceiling;

the wallpaper; the curtains;

the watermarks on the coffee table.

Presently the door opens

and he strolls across the carpet

to plop down beside her and

ease into her embrace

as if he’d never left.

And there again,

just as their passion reaches its crescendo,

he stands, pardons himself

and heads for the kitchen.

There again, his head in the fridge.

There again, the walk down the hall.

There again the open, close and click

of the bathroom’s latch.

To her utter amazement,

she once more finds herself

alone on the couch

rearranging her disheveled clothes.

And this time,

he is locked away in the toilet

for a good twenty minutes or more.

She’s at the point of slumping down

into the cushions for a nap

when she hears the door unlatch again.

Stepping from the toilet,

his eyes meet hers and she can instantly tell

there’s something very different.

Indeed, that which is there,

spreads from pupils,

outward to eye sockets and further,

to overwhelm his entire face.

In quick transition, a look of shock;

a look of fright; a look of anger.

And there from those lips

which had just been pressed against hers

come the following words: “Who are you?!

How the hell did you get into my house?!”

To this she starts to giggle and mutter a quizzical,

“er… What?” to his somewhat inappropriate joke,

when he overrides her with “Who the hell are you?!

How the fuck did you get in here?!”

And here she comes to realize

that there’s nothing funny

about his current ill-romantic demeanor.

Again she tries to utter a response of “What?”

but here is voice gets shrill and ever more frantic.

“I’m calling the police!

You better get the hell outta here, ‘cause…”

And here she suddenly hears

her own voice overriding his.

“What’s going on here?

Why are you acting like this?

I’m your date, god damn it!

Don’t you remember you and I

just now sitting on this couch?!”

It’s at this point she recalls his face

altering yet again.

Its mutating from extreme anger

to that of utmost pain.

And he begins to sob.

Not just cry, but sob.

He wanders over to the couch,

sits down, buries his head in hands

and truly breaks down.

And yo! If there’s anything

that pushes a woman’s buttons

it’s when the man she finds worthy of sex

turns into the man she wants to kick in the groin,

but then quickly transitions

to the man she wants to

hold to her naked breast and nurse.

A maelstrom of manic emotion.

A macabre and malignant mix

of malnourished masculinity.

A magmatic magnum of mother’s milk,

primed for manly mammary mastication.

Madness. Madness. Madness.

I think it was right around

this point in the story

when those of us on the

outside of the asylum’s gates

decided to phone in an observation.

“So… um…

You got the fuck outta there, right?”

And here a serene smile forms upon her face.

“No. Actually,

we’ve got another date this coming Friday.”

Ah…

The mysteries of amour.

Boy meets girl.

Girl meets boy.

Someone’s forehead meets

a meat-cleaver.

Not saying who. ‘Cause

you know…

Romance is always best when unpredictable.

Ah heck!

Who’s foolin’ who?

Doesn’t the boy

always

get the girl

in the end?

2010-09-30T18:18:00.000-07:00

2010-09-30T18:09:00.001-07:00

Combustion

That cars explode

whilst suspended mid-air

is an absolute given fact.

Drive one through a barrier

and over a cliff and

you just know it is going to be

enveloped in flames

before it hits the ground there below.

How do I know this?

Well hell… I’ve

seen it in the movies.

All I know is that if I launch my car

off a 500 foot drop, I’m

gonna open that door

and step out into the sky

‘cause I

sure don’t want to get burned. No.

Best wait ‘til everything reaches the ground

before I climb back in for

a nice clean painless mortality.

You know, I find myself trying to think

of all the cars I’ve ever been in that

spontaneously burst into a ball of flames,

and I can’t even think of one.

Don’t remember a non-spontaneous combustion either.

It may come down to my always having managed

to buy a good quality blast-free car.

Either that or I’ve lucked out and

the industrial mechanic for

every purchase I’ve made

forgot to install the airborne detonator.

Then again,

(and this is important)

I don’t know that I’ve ever managed to get

all four wheels off the ground at once.

I suppose it’s extra motivation

to slow down around speed bumps.

Might explain why my wife always screams

when I approach one at high speed.

I may be using a strained logic here

but I figure that all those exploding cars

that you see in the movies

were obviously sitting in

close proximity to a speed bump.

Those CGI guys just use some special affect to

mask out that bump at a later date.

I’m thinking that in an effort to save money on

pyrotechnics in all those Schwarzenegger films,

they probably shot them in

ever so anal residential areas.

ka-‘Burbs. ka-Bumps. ka-Bounce. ka-Boom.

I was once in my car

traveling down the A1-M motorway in England

towards the sprawling city of Milton Keynes.

My destination was a cinema multiplex

where they were showing a

new action flick with Arnold in it.

It was just at dusk and

I was heading into a sunset.

What was curious was that I was driving South.

So adding up sunsets—

the one in front of me and

the one off my shoulder to the right—

I came to the eerie equation of one sunset too many.

A mile further on and I noticed that

my Southern-most sunset was producing

a vast plume of inky black smoke.

This was either a new solar phenomenon

or confirmation that my rumored lack

of deductive reasoning was indeed sadly true.

At this point on the motorway,

the Southbound lanes were three across

and there just ahead of me,

a multitude of glowing brake-lights

competed with the glow of my polar solar fate.

A half-mile further on and

the chaos of competing red

split into two separate columns

as all the cars diverged

into the far left or right lanes.

There in the center lane

and facing us, stood a man.

A man silhouetted by a blazing sun

which threatened to engulf us all.

This man…

This man had driven his car

into the Sun.

Well no.

That’s not necessarily true.

His car was the sun.

No. Again, I’m misleading you.

This man’s car had burst into flames

there in the absolute center of the motorway,

and he, having escaped the inferno,

had wandered a hundred yards

up the middle of the

three lane expanse of road

to face the oncoming traffic

as it veered left and right in a

frantic effort to avoid him.

And there as I drove by

in what appeared to be

a certain cinematic slow motion,

I noticed the look in his eyes.

He was not looking at us. No.

He was in the midst of trauma;

of horror; of visual overload;

of that proverbial thousand yard stare.

Zero to sixty. Sixty to zero.

Step out before you hit the ground…

and survive.

The cerebral shred

of a fuel injected head.

And cars continue to swerve.

And tires continue to screech.

And this is all the action you could ever hope for.

But we have not a second to spare.

No time to pause in mutual PTSD consolation.

Why?

‘Cause we’ve got a date with Swarzenegger.

Oh, the brutal excitement!

The anticipation of all that pending violence!

The destruction. The decimation.

The deto…nation.

We get to see Arnold kick some doors down.

Snap some bones. Fracture some teeth.

We get to see him pump high-caliber lead

into the chest of a wide-eyed man who

really really really needs to die.

Hell. If we’re lucky,

we might even get to see some

cars blow up.

2010-09-30T18:08:00.000-07:00

2010-09-30T17:14:00.001-07:00

Nantucket Number Nine

It had been a day of killing.

A day of death.

A day of small lead masses

passing through flesh.

Projectiles careening off shattered bone

to penetrate piped organs

of non-musical note.

High velocity enforced deceleration

by way of visceral viscous entropy.

And as he loads their lifeless bodies

into the bed of his waiting truck,

he vaguely notices how their

core temperatures match that which

radiates from the blued metal

of his spent shotgun.

It is only a moment

but as in entropy itself,

that too soon wanes.

And there in his gunmetal eyes

the reflection of a lead-shot sky

shifts from grey to black.

And soon he exists as solo entity,

for here in the dark

there is nothing beyond himself.

Indeed, nothing exists which

cannot be seen at the end of a barrel.

His aim is to define

and there in the steel silhouette

of his lead bead sight,

they are game.

And what does the game define

if not him in return?

Man holds dominion over the animal kingdom.

He sort of liked the sound of that.

Made him feel… special.

Kind of like he was the chosen one.

King Dumb and his holy scepter

give unto that of wing, hoof and claw

the gift of light.

Successive bursts of ill lumination

via a spasm orgasm of twelve-gauge blasts.

Yes, well… here in the dark,

everything is black,

and what is your point of aim

if not the whole of blackness itself?

And here his eyes have grown dim

for his vision is that of man,

and man has held court for far too long

beside the luminous flame

there at the mouth of his cave.

From that flicker cast

across bison and elk, stampeding

there on his soot-stained ceiling,

to that which now emanates

from the mystic rectangle which

glows upon far distant wall.

Does man fear the dark?

Does he fear all those

undefined creatures

creeping forward from their

feral realm of sunless sanctuary?

Why… He is man, and

what is man if not incandescent!

They with their puny brains…

What is man if not electric?

What is man if not cathode, anode

and that spark which arcs in between?

And he fills the need to flow; to stream.

To leave his mark upon the Earth.

Brass teeth part before his groin

and passing through, he

emerges from dark into dark in

an arc of fluid release.

And there in that arc, he is a sensation.

A sensation of self.

A brutal self-realization of what he

as man has unleashed upon this Earth.

And he drops to his knees in a

momentary genuflection to that

which he cannot comprehend.

And he collapses to ground and

curls into a fetal position while

urine continues to spread from his loins.

There… There in the outer dark,

small irises open wide as

creatures edge forth and

bear witness to the fact that

man does indeed know pain.

Pain.

God made Man and Man made barbed wire.

And Man said to himself,

“You know, that was pretty good,

but I think I can do better.”

Man is subject to himself

and all that he creates.

Enveloped within darkness,

my father once mistakenly pissed

across an electric fence.

Oh, I would like to think

it was a somewhat appropriate

religious experience.

2010-09-30T17:13:00.000-07:00

2010-09-30T17:08:00.001-07:00

~~~Tapestry
That a honed edge of steel
might pass between the weave
of weft and warp is
no doubt a significant event.
That its extraction might leave a
residual smear of blood that
gathers upon fabric and
stains the surrounding fiber
is nothing if not equally traumatic.

And here I must ask, does it
really matter that poor Polonius
lies wide-eyed and dying in the dark
there on the far side of some
perverse perforation?
In the scheme of centuries,
does his over-dramatic death
truly resonate as lore worthy of
thespian regurgitation via
iambic pentameter?

“Oh, there is Uncle Claudius.
He is hiding behind the curtain.
Why is he hiding behind the curtain?
Shall I stab him?
What fun it would be
to stab him through the curtain.”

Who wrote that crap?
Wouldest thou shake-a-speared Polonius
and maketh him rise anon?
Poor poor sanguinary Polonius.
Thine spittle laden exhalation
growith most putrid and foul
with each dying breath.
Woe and alas but this meddlesome mind
doth ebb and give exit with a
gruesome grimace.
I mean really!
Who gives a rat’s bung-hole about palooka Polonius
or some hammy Hamlet’s bloodlet-o-rama?
Yorick this. Yorick that.
Your rectum alas o’ sin sensitive one.

There are those who would say that
something is rotten
in the state of Denmark.
Yes, well… it is Scandinavia.
Just look at the quality of food they eat there.
No real wonder at the fact that
all their carpets are soaked with vomit.
Oh, I hate to be critical, but in truth
the intrinsic décor of Danish dwellings
is in a very sad state of affairs.
Not a throw pillow in sight and I mean,
is it just me or does not
every other hanging tapestry
have some huge gaping gouge in it?

Please.
You think Martha Stewart runs around
hacking up the draperies?
No. Of coarse not.
Ya don’t clip yer toenails at the coffee table
and you don’t randomly stab
ornate wall hangings in search
of hidden adversaries.
Indeed, you would think that
every single Dane was in need of a
big ol’ Freudian timeout
with his nose jammed in the corner.

And there just now,
most rancid, most pungent, most
putrescent Polonius has died.
His visceral nature oozing forth to
spread across stone and
inch its way toward the ruin of
relic both radiant and regal.

Is Hamlet going to snap out of his
rapacious rapier rapture long enough
to move the freakin’ rug?
Just what is it with all this rabid disregard
of décor decorum?
Don’t they have the Antiques Roadshow in
rotten ol’ Denmark?
I mean, that shit’s gonna be worth a
wad o’ money some day.

Want to know why the Danish Kroner is
currently a tits-up croakin’?
Damaged goods. That’s why.
There’s not a single quality tapestry that some
doomed idiot didn’t choose to hide behind.
Caught screwing the neighbor’s wife
when her brutish husband
walks through the front door?
Well for the love of woven weft and warp,
don’t hide behind the damn wall hanging.
Whether you’re hiding there or not,
that is the first place
he’s gonna repeatedly skewer
with his stainless-steel stiletto.

I mean sheez!
If Hamlet only had the sensibility
of a certain Norman Bates,
you might still have a nation of
homicidal maniacs,
but the upside would be that
bloody shower curtains are
easily ripped down
and tossed into a dumpster.

Indeed, shower curtains,
as in Danish royalty,
are pretty much dime a dozen, but
a fine quality woven tapestry…?
Ah, now that…

Well what is that if
not to die for?

©2010 Jack Hubbell

2010-09-30T16:11:00.000-07:00

2010-09-30T16:09:00.000-07:00

~~~Beneath My Soul
That soldiers might die
alongside that of ants
really did not mean too much.
Death was death.
There was no privileged hierarchy.
Well, okay…
I suppose that since the ants
were actually alive to start with,
they should have counted
for a little something extra.
Oh, not that the soldiers were expendable.
No. I imagine I had spent a
good weeks allowance on them.
Yes, it’s true that each little action figure
had its own intrinsic value,
but since they were all made out of plastic
and came a couple hundred to a packet,
I really didn’t care when I
lost a handful now and then.
Indeed, like the beaches of Normandy
or the forests of Ardennes,
my back yard was literally sown with
the lawn-mown remnants of
little plastic army men.

I suppose you are wondering how
so many soldiers came to be lost
in these battles I waged.
Well to be honest,
more than fifty percent of those
which went missing were
due to the use of high explosives.
The remainder can likely be attributed
to my indifference.
I mean hell.
Soldiers were pretty darn cheap.
You just knew there was
a machine out there somewhere
perpetually reproducing them.
It’s almost as if the guy with
his finger on the plastic extrusion button
figured there was going to be some inherent loss,
so he just duct taped the switch
and left the war machine to
run at full tilt.
Fodder for the Fatherland.

The American soldier was almost always green.
Olive green.
This way you knew who the good guys were,
but in reality, they died just as easily as
any other hunk of colored plastic.
The bad guys were generally yellow to brown
or some shade in between.
I’d like to think that this choice of color
was some random selection of ink that
an early technician arbitrarily threw into the vat,
but another part of me understands that
yellow plastic equates to
something else yellow that
we were supposed to be hating at that time.
I can even remember getting
a couple of bags of plastic soldiers
where all the bad guys were red,
and I can only assume
that this was an attempt to
program and indoctrinate
us fine young patriots as to the
need to gun down and eradicate
the evil scourge of the red Chinese
and their heathen Soviet brethren.
Brain wash in full spin cycle?
Reverse Manchurian candidates?
Die! Die! Die! You commie bastards!

Yes, well…
Unfortunately, in my full capacity as
backyard supreme being,
there was a minor programming disconnect,
‘cause I mowed everyone down equally.
For what was I if not an
equal opportunity destroyer?

High explosives?
Well to a mere ant, a
fire-cracker is a pretty big bang.
Oh, and a thumb amputating M80?
It’s da ‘F’ Bomb thermo nuclear
mushroom o’ doom boom boom.
But now don’t blame me.
Blame it on the South Pacific.
Blame it on the Japanese.
Blame it on Iwo Jima.
Blame it on John Wayne.
Blame it on the fact that anthills
look a lot like sandy beaches.

And I imagine those ants
looking up to this mighty being
looming there in the sky above
and saying,
“Why are you doing this?
Why have you chosen we must die?”

Ah…
“Now I am become death,
the destroyer of worlds.”
Now I am become Vishnu.
Now Krishna.
Now Shiva.
Now J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Now one small boy
kneeling over an ant-mound
with a glowing punk in his hand.

I am not proud.
I have regrets.
But now listen: This was war.
And in war there’s this thing called
“collateral damage”.
Civilians die.
Ants die.
But I mean really…
How can you expect the minute mind
of a mere insect to comprehend the
intricate cognitive gyrations of a higher life form?
Perhaps you sympathizers out there
somehow attribute a group-mind of
synapse solidarity to these lowly ants.
Perhaps you envision them
looking up in mental-mass to see
nothing but the malicious intent
of a cruel heartless child.
And perhaps you imagine the ants themselves
holding cruel dominion over
all those tiny mindless microbes
existing beneath them.
Indeed, there’s a conceivable chance
that this entire spinning globe is
under the thumb of some vast
cruel and indifferent entity of whose actions
we will never be able to comprehend.

But consider this:
That boy has grown to the
man who stands before you now.
He has matured.
He has learned regret.
Why just the other day as he was
walking down the sidewalk,
he observed an ant crossing the void
into the path of this man’s next footfall.
And though it required a conscious effort
to alter a sole’s trajectory
by a mere few inches,
this he did.

Yes. No matter our original inclination,
it would appear we have some
innate capability for compassion.

One might even say there’s hope.

©2010 Jack Hubbell

2010-09-30T16:05:00.000-07:00

2010-09-30T15:53:00.001-07:00

~~~All’s Hollow Days
At the time it never occurred to her
that she might have been on holiday.
Oh, but this is not to say
that she wasn’t paying attention, for
with events such as these,
there are somewhat obvious indicators.
For one, calendar dates of such significance
always appear in red.
Red relative to an ulterior reality
forever rendered black and bleak.
Indeed, what was black if not life revealed
as a continuous loop of normality?
A perpetual scroll of numbered squares
which there exist both before and long after red.
But if perchance your mind had wandered
whilst black days blurred into a
certain grey nothingness,
there were always other ways of telling.

For instance, the awaited day might arrive
and the décor of your four-walled confine
would come to be adorned with
someone else’s ornamentation.
Doomed plants invade the home.
Suspect food of dubious origin
appears there upon your plate.
Ribbon wrapped boxes are gifted via relationships
which may or may not have warranted any
act of kindness whatsoever.
It was a phenomena which forever puzzled her,
but since the dividends were somewhat beneficial,
she never bothered to question them.

There were nights of visual violence
in which everything about her
exploded in a significant flash of light.
Again and again.
Shimmering chrysanthemums
which abruptly transformed
into massive black spiders that
hovered there in her waning sky
of ever dramatic dénouement.
She always preferred the dread haze
of a lingering spider to
any transient joy of spent illumination.

Then there were holidays in which
macabre costumes were donned.
Days where masked relationships
are further obscured via some
false façade which hangs before your
current visage du jour.

Such were these red-letter days.
Day after day after give and take
and take and take.
And soon holidays dissolve and meld
into hollow days.
All hollow days.
One after one into one.
Every day a mono-manic-indulgence.
Every day a celebration of selfishness.
Her friends. Her family.
Her mother and father.
They were her cake and she
would consume them all.

Hers became a life of
perpetual holiday a la cart.
Red: a gratuitous gala of she.
Red: a festival of self-infatuation.
Red: a commemoration of her
own rapt adoration.

That is, right up until the day
her parents told her to go.
Right up until the eventful moment
that all her days returned
to their original shade of black.
Right up until that day
she heard the door’s latch
snap home behind her back.

That black day her forever holiday
came to pass, and an
inconvenient existence which we
have come to know as “life”
met her there at the edge of the curb.

©2010 Jack Hubbell

2010-01-09T12:48:00.000-08:00

2010-01-09T12:47:00.001-08:00

Strung Souls
Unless you view this
ill defined world as others do,
with all they perceive it to offer…
Everything deemed worthy to submit
before your discerning eye might
well be dismissed as nothing more
than shadows cast across
a contrived backdrop.

There upon that featureless stage,
curtains perpetually rise and fall
and yet nothing of significance
ever crosses its boundaries.
That is, unless someone lifts a hand.
Unless an array of gnarled ligature and bone
falls beneath another’s thumb.

That some sad marionette
might stagger forth
under the influence of a higher power,
and there
with a buckling of joints,
drop to its knees in an
abject act of subjugation.
He with head bowed in forced capitulation,
while you in your velveteen chair
swoon in unison with the dark silhouette
of all those pathetic voyeurs
in some staggered array
falling away before you.
All while up beyond those Faustian footlights,
a frail figure shudders and sways
beneath the veiled yoke of
another’s tethered dominion.

There in the theatre dark,
you feel the leash of your
mind start to fray
as there upon stage some
automaton of angst
turns its splintered grimace
to you in the audience,
and there reflects the foul façade
of your own enameled face.
But this act of communion
abruptly unspools,
for there below a dour draped sky
of velour verisimilitude,
the mute marionette collapses to floor
in prostrate compliance to the
spastic machinations
of some unseen obscene
omnipotent.

And though those assorted strands
momentarily sag and sway,
you assume their taunts remain true.
That the imperceptible thread which
drops to that puppet’s
outstretched hand
is taut and free of entanglement.
That the one who tied the assorted knots
was free from divine distraction when
he was shown the ropes.
And while you persist in dwelling
upon the greatest of forever unknowns,
there upon stage that crumpled marionette
attempts to rise of its own free will.
Ah, but the gravity of its sutured situation
consists of such weight
that it simply can not prevail.

And here in your roll as rapt audience
you come to conclude that this…
All of this.
This soul in anguished torment.
That this is not entertainment.
That you as a distinctly empowered being
will not partake of another’s
dire derision.

And so you endeavor to rise.
To simply turn your riotous head
towards the waiting exit.
Ah, but there in that hollowed dome of bone,
a cinder strewn mind vainly goes in search
of some remnant of spiritual spark,
and fails quite miserably.
For what are you if not
suspended
mid mortal finality?

Was there ever truly such a thing
as an existence that came
without strings attached?

© 09 Jack Hubbell

2010-01-02T16:29:00.002-08:00

2010-01-02T16:29:00.001-08:00

Consuming Others
That I might live, others must die.
It’s a harsh reality but
I suppose I’m okay with it.
In the realm of morality, there’s a hierarchy of them
which are decreed spiritually insignificant
and strangely all those others deemed
significantly lacking in requisite spirituality.
Not exactly sure where I fall in that spectrum,
but between me and them what be
designated as ‘others’,
I figure I got the inside track
on where my loyalties lie.

I suppose I should define
just who gets the categorical labeling of ‘others’
but where would be the fun in that?
This all being a game and
everything involved being
some form of pretension, we are
supposed to pretend we are starving.
And starving being a precursor to death,
it’s relatively easy to stay focused.
And in part of that whole pretend scenario,
it really helps with the ‘poetic license’
that I haven’t eaten in almost a day.

Of course I am not a lone soloist
in this whole starvation experience.
Of those contestants in my
makeshift Donner Pass party,
there are seven men and one female.
Of the fact there’s a woman in our midst
is not supposed to matter.
We are a military presence and thus
androgynous.
Don’t ask and don’t tell us of your all too
emotive orientation.
This ain’t about procreation.
Ain’t about gender genitalia.
Is about life sustaining satiation.
Is about voraciously devouring others.

Okay, a bit of clarification may be in order.
My use of the word ‘others’
might just be a bit broader than yours.
You see, there’s the other seven living entities
in my immediate group
(all by law—un-edible)
and then everything else.
Half of which by taste are also un-edible.

That one girl in our group?
She has openly expressed that
she is a vegetarian.
I figure that for her this fact has cut the
remaining group of what’s edible
roughly in half.
On the previous night, we had to
slaughter by hand
a pair of rabbits and
butcher them.
Something of which
did not sit well with her. She…
She used to raise them as pets.
How would she as herbivore
last in such an unforgiving wild?

So there we stand at a stream,
refilling our canteens with
bacterial and protozoan
‘others’ laden water,
and carnivore that I am,
I look down to spy a medium sized snake
enter the liquid flow
and make for the far bank.
There mid coarse,
I easily reach down to grasp it by the neck
and lift it up to display before
my surrounding pack of fellow hunter-gatherers.

And here I am expecting adulation,
and indeed from the majority of my
Cro-Magnon brethren I receive it, but…
But not from her.
From across the stream, she
surges forward and there a few feet away,
raises her hands into clinched fists
and begins to rain them down
upon my upper chest and shoulders.
“Put it down! Put it down! Put it down!”
she screams again and again.
Tears well in her eyes
and her soft face contorts
in the most extreme way.

Oh, I’ve been slapped by a girl but
this is the first time I’ve ever been beaten.
Ah yes. Well… The fists?
The fists meant very little.
No. It was her eyes.
Their intensity.
Their passion.
The willingness to starve
so that some lesser entity
deemed insignificant by
we the humanoid masses
might continue to live another day.
And here her verbal assault alters.
“You got the rabbits! Put it down! Put the snake down!”
Again a maniacal mantra.
All in syncopation to the percussive rhythm
beaten into my chest.

And I let the snake go.
Let it drops to the water where it
shoots away and down the stream
before any of the other men can grab it.
And here now my onslaught of abuse
changes from female to male.
What a loser!
What a pathetic example of manhood!
And they turn away in disgust for
what have I done
but failed one of the ultimate tests of virility?

Am I weak?
Well isn’t that obvious?
I have let down my fellow man.
Flunked ‘Male Bonding 101’.
But hey! Let’s face it.
This is less about men and
more about me embracing my feminine side.
For men I will always put up the
pretence of accommodation,
but here’s the truth:
I love women.

To starve myself;
to waste away and whither.
I would die for you.
There at your stream,
I would release my grasp.
Turn loose my snake and
ease it back into the flowing wet
of which I just withdrew it.

I would do this for you.
I would.
All you have to do is ask.

©09 Jack Hubbell

2008-11-30T15:06:00.000-08:00

2008-11-30T15:05:00.000-08:00

~BirdSong
I won’t warble.
Won’t trill.
Won’t cluck, chirrup or quack.
Won’t gesticulate wildly with arms aflutter
while I sing some intricate song
memorized for the purpose
of making you notice me.
I will not sit atop a fence post
with feathered plumage aplomb
and pipe for your aural delectation.
I will not do that.

And yet there are those of you
who feel you should.
Those who delight in their self-professed
ornithologic repertoire of
onomatopoeia peacockiness.
Ah, but what do these dancing cockatiels
really feel when late at night
the cloth drops down
over their chattering heads
and solitary confined refinement
truly sets in?
Do they tuck their beaks beneath tufted wing
and come to dream
of one small boy who resides in
a distant Russian village known as
Kirovsky?
They upon their lofty perch will
never speak his cryptic language,
but then again,
who can?
Who? Who?
Yes, of course… it’s Russian.
But who speaks Russian?
Who?
Who speaks Russian to him?
The answer: No one.
No one at all.

No one calls out to him by name for
There is no name he has ever answered to.
But this is not to say that
he has not been named.
Indeed, we now know of him as
‘The Bird Boy’.

Born in 2001,
he was raised by a mother
who never uttered his name.
There in Kirovsky, Russia,
locked away in a two room domain
he existed until the age of seven,
yet not once
did he hear the sound of a human voice.
But for that moment
when food was brought
and set down before him,
there was no interaction whatsoever.

And yet,
this is not to say that
he spent those seven years in total isolation.
No. He was not alone for
he shared those two rooms
with a multitude of cages.
Yes, and in those cages
the mother kept birds as pets.
All those birds and one small boy.
She was fond of the birds,
but apparently not fond of
every pet in the room.

In 2008, the mother of 31 years
had raised this boy to the age of seven.
It was here that a inquisitive social worker
discovered the aviary and its
one special inhabitant.
Imagine that first encounter.
Now perhaps you assume that
the Bird Boy was mute and
completely lacking in vocabulary,
but no.
He did attempt to converse.
Words? No.
Chirps. Yes.
This seven year old boy
communicated by way of chirping and
the fluttering movement of his hands.
There in the cage cluttered room,
he attempted to convey himself by way of
the only means of expression
he had ever known.
For just who were his true siblings
if not an assortment of parakeets and finches?

Signing away her corrupted right of parenthood,
the mother released the boy
into the care of the State.
A supple transition from caged aviary
to the cooped captivity
of an asylum.

And there now on quiet afternoons
when the Sun comes to wane through
pale curtain cloth,
I imagine that moment when
a certain birdsong erupts to echo
down the asylum’s long lithium hallways.
There to emit through barred window
and out across manicured lawn
to the distant waiting ears
of a sparrow
who tilts his head
ever so.

©08 Jack Hubbell

2008-11-30T15:01:00.000-08:00

2008-11-30T15:00:00.000-08:00

~Ball Buster
She possesses talent.
No doubt about it.
And number one on her list of she-can-do-ables
is that she can get it up.
Especially impressive for the fact I can’t… get it up.
But let’s face it. She
has had a lot of practice.
Listen now.
There’s sophisticated hydraulics involved.
A knowledge of leverage and
just where to insert before
the fluid goes to work for you.
She’s got that in her head
and you just can’t beat good head knowledge.

I figure the ability to do all this comes down to desire,
but let’s face it:
I simply did not want to be a forklift operator.
Oh, it’s not that I’m impotent.
No. Rather, it’s that… relative to me,
this one woman would appear to have
an over-abundance of testosterone
pumping through her veins.

Oh, and not that she’s void of estrogen.
Looks can be deceiving.
I mean yea, she’s wearing coveralls.
Big ol’ baggy coveralls,
and anyone can be androgynous in coveralls,
but there comes a time in the day when the heat rises
and she chooses to climb down from the forklift and
peel off her outer layer.
And it’s here I come to notice
that she comes complete with all those
bumps, crevices and undulations
that estrogen is wont to bestow on the female form.
Formulation eroto-elation,
she’s got hormones moaning whore horrific.
But in a good way.
She’s Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’
except she’s traded in the half shell
for a mother forkin’ lift.
And there I am, just on the verge of major chub
when she opens her mouth and begins to speak.

And there from that beautious orifice
spews the most melodic of verbal diarrhea.
Yes, she’s the epitome of visual ecstasy
with a nasty ol’ potty mouth.
Revulsion? Ah, hell no.
She’s still a hotty. Just a
‘don’t do her wrong, cuz she’ll stomp on yer nuts’ hotty.

So of course I have to ask,
“You um… uh… ya ever beat anybody up?”
And there in her siren eyes a sparkle appears
for I have indeed touched on a topic that truly excites her.
And for the next fifteen minutes,
she on the verge of hyperventilation, tells me in explicit detail,
the best ways to punch another girl in the face.
You know, like if I was a fellow woman of ill intent.
“Cause the best thing… Yea.
The best thing is when you bring your fist down on their noses.
Not just in the nose, see.
Down, you know. DOWN on their noses.”

Well okay then.
I’ll be sure to let Martha Stewart know.
February’s issue was supposed to be floral arrangement
but stop the press! For now it’s gonna be:
“How to put that chump ass bitch down,
and make her stay down.”

And from here, little Miss Suzy Homemaker
dives into a story about her time spent living in the projects.
How there in the realm of fe-mano es fe-mano
she’d risen to the top of the fight club heap
and was the reigning brassier bruiser.
Oh, and this being the case, it wasn’t long
before she got jumped in a dark hallway
by a rival bosom beater
and her two troglodyte henchwomen.

With a somewhat disturbed smile,
she tells me of how she was backed against a wall
by the brutal boobed brawlers
and with fists reigning in from left and right,
looks up to see the rival leader standing there
with a raised baseball bat.
And there between the thumping thud
of knuckles to noggin and ribcage,
she calmly states,
“If you hit me with that,
I will kill you.”

And apparently the way she says it—
you know, sorta ‘Hannibella Lectorina’
—so disarms the hefty hit squad
that they abruptly stop, pause,
blink their heavy eyelids
and then simply turn and walk away.
And with that, Miss Botticelli’s
‘Venus on a ‘fuck you up’ shell’,
strides forward, grabs the baseball bat and… um…
rearranges the other girls mascara.
And there… There at story’s end,
she looks up at me as if she’d just said,
“And so I made a strawberry cake.”

And I find myself thinking of sorrowful things.
For you see, she’s told me she’s married.
Which of course means that there’s a husband.
And that there are nights when he says to her,
“Honey. Let’s not go to bed angry.”
That there are nights when they DO go to bed angry.
And that on those dark nights,
he lies there next to her with his eyes wide open.

Waiting
for the slightest
twitch.

©08 Jack Hubbell

2008-11-30T14:58:00.000-08:00

2008-11-30T14:57:00.001-08:00

~Absent Halos
There was a time
when you could tell who was a deity
simply by whether or not
they had a halo.
From shimmering aureole
to just a hint of glowing nimbus,
there was simply no mistaking
you were in the presence
of divinity.

Ah but which particular divinity
sort of depended on what page
from what book you were using to
anchor your current metaphysical
alter-reality.
As halo haberdashery goes,
the deity on the far side of the room
might just be Ra or possibly Horus.
Could also be Apollo or better yet, Helios.
Any assortment of baby faced putti or
sword welding cherubim.
Might just be Louis the Fourteenth,
but in his case that was less divinity
and more narcissistic Sun King
what with all celestial bodies
rotating in mass about his egotistic ass.

From worship of Sun to pantheon of
Sun signified shimmering bonnets,
you knew you were in the presence
of somebody oh so special.

And yet it must be noted that
over the past one thousand odd years,
reports of neon noggin sightings
have significantly dropped.

What was once sacred
slides into mythology.
Greek… mythology.
Roman… mythology.
Norse… mythology.
Egyptian… mythology.
Tele-Tubbie… mythology.

Nowadays, if you see someone
walking down the street with
a halo atop their head,
there is almost always a wire involved.
Whoa but it would appear that
true halos have sadly gone obsolete.
And if such is admittedly the case,
what suitable signifier of divinity
supplants our current visual requirement
for designating that most worthy of veneration?

I submit for your approval
the common white lab coat.
Ah yes… well…
I imagine you are in less than full agreement.
That that which denotes science,
from general practice doctor
to genetic engineer,
holds no symbolic power
worthy of devout reverence.
Perhaps you’ve come to the conviction
that white lab coats hold no sway
in your embrace of spirituality.
In that case,
retain the halo,
ignore the wire
and let your faith prevail.

But if you’re a lowly rat or
laboratory mouse
bred for experimentation,
what is the man in white
if not absolute godhead?

Yesterday
I read that a lab biologist
had taken a group of mice
and made them all alcoholics.
Why?
Because he could.
And then,
he would pluck a random
inebriated mouse
out of the mass of its
stupor soaked brethren and
force it to go cold turkey.
Why?
Because he could.

And the mouse goes into withdrawal.
The mouse gets a tad depressed.
And here the man in the sacred white coat
performs a “man in white coat” experiment.
Upon placing that alcohol deprived mouse
into a tall beaker of water,
he soon observes that it makes
no attempt to swim.
That the mouse would rather sink.

The report said nothing of whether he’d
therewith reach into the beaker
and save the drowning mouse.
Nothing of whether he
returned it to its cage and
gave it back its booze soaked life.

Did he?
Well, we want to believe so,
for that is the way we’d like to perceive our gods.
That everyone whose head
dips below the water’s surface
is saved.
Saved whether they desired it
or not.

Some
would call this
compassion.

But the mice…
These mice
beg
to differ.

©08 Jack Hubbell

2008-11-30T14:53:00.000-08:00

2008-11-30T14:52:00.000-08:00

~About a Book
The application of baby oil to skin
can be a wondrous thing.
As good for the giver
as the givee.
Yes, there’s a certain tactile delight
as one individual’s skin
comes in contact
with another.
No matter how young or old,
you will take pleasure.

And so, I find myself dwelling on this
as I stand before a dark display case
in Bury Saint Edmunds, England.
There beneath finger smudged glass
lies a book bound in
human skin.

And how do they keep that skin so supple?
Enquiring women
across the nation
really want to know.

I suppose that in this case,
baby oil is simply out of the question.
It may just be they’re using
Oil of Olay,
though that’s just a guess on my part.

Okay.
Although distracting, how ‘bout
a little aside information?
That is,
assuming you all want to know
how this museum got its hands on
a skin bound book.

It would seem
a few centuries back
this guy had a mistress,
and since she was of the troublesome
“make me an honest woman” sort,
he murdered and buried her in the Red Barn.

The Red Barn?
Oh yes, there is so much more
to this sordid story but
let’s just cut to the quick.
They found the body.
They found the killer.
And what with all them locals
being such a temperamental lot,
they hung him, and drawn and
quartered his misogynistic butt.
Took him apart.
Dismantled him as it were.

And
“Hey! You want souvenirs?
Got yer souvenirs right here.
You want thigh bones?
We got thigh bones.
You want big toes for your key chain?
We got manicured and non-manicured.
With bunion and without.
Wanna bind a book in human skin?
Today’s your lucky day.
We can do that at competitive cost.”

And so…
someone did.
And gosh golly gee willikers if you can’t
just walk right into a museum
and see it there on display.

Yup. Sitting just there next to
this fella’s skull cap.
And I mean real skull cap.
Grisly right ear and scalp.
But hey!
That’s macabre
and I don’t want to be accused of
dwelling on that too much
so let’s get back to the book.

Now what I want to know is,
is it a good read?
Did it say,
make the Opray Winfrey book list?

Did it get a plain ol’
Opray Book Club sticker
or did they splurge and
go all out for a tattoo?

And since we can assume that
this book’s been around,
does it have a little pocket in the back
for the library card?
And if so,
can you still check it out and take it home?
I mean,
what with a book of such high provenance
and overall lack of
epidermal blemish or unsightly scarring,
there’s got to be some substantial prose inside.

You just don’t go bind a book in human skin
and then fill it full of say…
you know…
the poetry of your current flavor to savor writer.
No.
You want something good
in a book of this quality binding.

Otherwise, there you are,
sitting down at the local coffee shop
when some stranger asks,
“Hey. What you reading?”
And there you’re
forced to respond,
“Oh, not much.
How ‘bout you?”

I mean,
this wouldn’t happen
with a book full of
my delightful verbosity, but
if you wanna fill a book full of
flavor savor poo-poo poems,
go right ahead.

No skin off my back.

©06 Jack Hubbell

2008-11-30T14:49:00.000-08:00

2008-11-30T14:48:00.001-08:00

~‘World of Men’
My childhood was a virtual cornucopia
of sexually deviant acts. Well,
that’s what you’d like to think.
How else to explain your perception of my
inherent depravity?
But naw…
It was all Opie and Andy Griffith.
All Huck Finn and Mark Twain.
All Haley Mills and Pollyanna.
That is except for haircuts.

Getting a haircut was perverse in the
worst possible way.
Not the actual act of getting a haircut per se,
though it goes without saying that
there was a brutal indoctrination involved when
those shears passed over your head.
Yea, your style options equated to
crew-cut, crew-cut, or on the rare occasion,
crew-cut.
‘Cause there weren’t no F’in way that
my dad’s son was gonna be no goll dang
long haired hippy and… um… sorry.
That was scarred Freudian psyche issue number two.
Let’s stay with the psycho trauma hiding behind
door number one, shall we?
Erotomania of the reprobate sort.

But now listen:
none of this soiled sanity occurred in the barber’s chair.
No. Though you fell beneath his blade of
follicular annihilation,
there was sanctuary to be found
in the swank leather upholstery
of that chromed pneumatic highchair.

Quite the opposite of
what was to be encountered
while awaiting your cranium buzz.
This was no beauty parlor.
This was a barber shop.
A mid Sixties barbershop.
Testosterone haven from all things estrogen.
And there while you awaited your
total world domination haircut,
there was an assortment of magazines to be perused.

Mainly mammary festooned
misogynous lust of bust
manly masturbatory
pulp pumping literature.
Just the sort of stuff an eight year old boy
needs to get his mind right
when it comes to acquiring an appreciation of
the delicate sex.

Considering men were incessantly motivated
to visit the barber shop whether their
noggins needed it or not,
it’s no wonder their hair remained so short.
Now I imagine you’ve got visions of stacks
of Playboys, Penthouse and Hustler,
you know, gynecological study material, but no.
Something altogether different here.

There at the barber shop
you encountered magazines such as
‘Stag’, ‘Inside Detective’ and
‘World of Men’.
And these… um… wait. Here.
Let me throw out a tether and
pull you into my mind.
Oh, not the red-light salacious cesspool
that’s there right now but rather,
the mind I possessed when I was all of eight years.

There we sit at the end of a bench.
There we glance down at the heap of magazines.
There at the top, a copy of ‘World of Men’.
There on its cover… ***

I am not making this up.
This is not fiction.
This is a particular boy’s memory
of one graphically painted illustration.

There is a swimming pool with diving board.
There are girls with skimpy bikinis.
Wait… there’s more. Much more.
There are Bikers.
Bikers with swastikas.
Swastikas on their sleeves.
Swastikas on their Nazi Biker helmets.
Swastikas tattooed upon their bared chests.
And there at the edge of the pool, you find
one maniacal Biker ripping open
bag after bag after bag of lye
and pouring it into the water.
Water which is now pure acid.
There on the diving board
yet another crazed Biker has carried
a screaming girl to its end, and
there she hangs mid-air…
mid-scream… mid… impending.

And you are eight years old.
And you like Walt Disney cartoons.
You’re particularly fond of Goofy
and the antics of his dog Pluto.
They… They were funny.
Slapstick funny. Painfully funny.
Semi-nude girls
being thrown into acid
by Nazi Bikers.

The barber could have left a gun
there on that end table.
A syringe full of heroin or crank.
A stack of rusty razorblades.
But…
But no…
It was just the latest copy of
‘World of Men’.
There it remains in my brain,
and now in yours as well.

©08 Jack Hubbell

2008-11-30T14:45:00.000-08:00

2008-11-30T14:44:00.000-08:00

~Small Talk
Okay, so it may come down to the fact
I was never very good at conversation.
Sure. I’ll grant you that.
But now listen:
I was all of nineteen years old and
being Midwest bred and raised,
I was pretty far from worldly.

You’ve got to understand that
on this particular topic,
I had no worthy opinions;
absolutely nothing of importance to say.
Perhaps… Perhaps I just looked knowledgeable.
What with the fact of my wearing a uniform,
it may have appeared
I’d automatically have some insight
into all things military.

If a manual exists on the fine art of conversation,
I figure there’s got to be a passage
about initiating discourse with
some element of small talk.
You know… Something mutually inclusive.
Common ground.
Common experience.
Small talk.
Yea. But this was not…
small talk.

And so…
I share a room with a man
who had entered only five minutes ago,
and there in that short span of silence,
I’ve certainly noticed his long hair;
his civilian attire;
the fact he’s a good ten years my senior.
And then…
And then he decides to engage in small talk.
He turns to face me
and from his mouth come the words:
“Have you ever killed anyone?”

You know. Small talk.
Being as I still qualified as teenager,
it was relatively easy to do a
body count in my head and
come up with a summation of none.
But of course I refrained from
answering too quickly.
As an expression of machismo,
it’s important to give
the appearance I’m pondering the
trail of bodies left in my lethal wake.

“Hmm? No.
Let’s see. That one guy?
I believe he managed to crawl away.
Um… And I’m certain she’s still quite alive.
Pretty sure that one bus load of kids
made it to the hospital in time.”

How fucking ridiculous!
But… with a somber face,
I simply returned his awaiting gaze and said,
“Umm… No.”
And no sooner did I reply
but did he quickly come back with,
“Well, I have. Yea. Numerous times.”

“Now aren’t you the over-achiever.”
Well…
That’s what I should have replied, but no.
I was nineteen years old, and
it’s rather difficult to dive into a conversation
about serial killing or mass murder
when you have no point of reference.

“I was in Viet Nam,” he continues. “Were you?”
“Were you in Viet Nam?”
This was 1979.
I… a young man, fresh out of high school.
This conversation was going to be a bit one sided.

“No,” I said. And to this he chimes back with,
“Well, I was.
Shot some gook in the face with a shotgun.
You ever shoot someone in the face with a shotgun?”

Pretty sure my response to that one
matched all the other answers I’d given so far.
And for the next thirty minutes,
this man I did not know,
proceeded to regurgitate
every violent homicidal act
he’d ever been involved in.

Why? … Why?
Why was I deemed worthy of his
sole soul repository?
Something to do with the fact
the cloth against my skin was olive drab?
That he’d spent the last five, six, seven years
with this orgasmic power point presentation
locked and looped there in his head and now,
seeing that cloth…
Seeing a certain insignia upon my sleeve,
there in his mind,
a door unlocks in some dark cranial corridor
and the bloody viscera splattered foliage
of some distant jungle
comes spilling forth at my feet.
The popping sound of rotor blades;
the buzz of an M60;
the thump of a mortar round;
the smell of white phosphorus
as it burns its way through human flesh.
All of this dying to get out of his head.
All of this dying,
a perpetual loop of validation
that he was most certainly alive.
Dying to be alive.
Dying to be alive.

And anything…
Anything less than the jungles
and hills and grasslands of Viet Nam
was a lesser form of life
and greater form of death.

Somewhere in between these two extremes
a man seeks affirmation,
and all he asked of me was small talk.
A faint nod of the head.
A hushed whisper of “I hear you.”

And here now, so many years later,
some post traumatic grandpa
shares the couch with his post traumatic grandson.
One of the two with his foot still buried
deep in a distant fetid swamp.
The other with his boot in scorched sand.

And were you to walk into that room,
all you’d see
would be two men
sharing a couch.
Just two men sharing a couch.
But there in between lie severed legs.
Severed arms. Severed lives.
Whilst severed dreams
lie buried and forgotten
in far distant lands.

Here are two men locked
in that moment of loss.
Both quite alive
and both quite dead,
whilst there in their heads:
small talk.

©07 Jack Hubbell

2008-11-30T14:41:00.000-08:00

2008-11-30T14:40:00.000-08:00

~My Physique
There comes a time
when you know you’ve attained your
perceived pinnacle of athletic achievement.
For me, the moment is at hand,
and I must seize it.
I will become a professional bowler.

Now I suppose I could have
taken up bowling
a year ago, but no.
I was different then.
I was toned.
I was ripped.
I was svelte.
I had just completed a season
touring with the
Chippendales.

I’m sure many of you are asking, “Hey!
Why the career change?”
Well let me tell you:
it’s hard work being a Chippendale.
Loads of physical and mental stress.
Listen: You wouldn’t know.
You haven’t done this.

For one,
it’s a sex trade.
Really.
No getting around it.
You can talk up the art side of it all you want
but those women could care less
whether you’ve just executed the
most perfect triple cabriole.
Deep down,
what they really want is
perpetual pelvic thrust.

And then, of course all those
late nights fading to dawn
as you sit there counting and stacking
thousand upon thousand of
single dollar bills.
It’s an ugly taxing business.

So I quit.
Just let myself go.
Traded my six-pack abs in for
a six-pack belly.
Hung up my G-string.
Gave all that baby oil to my best buddy _______.
Parked my butter butt in a barcalounger
for one whole year
with nothin’ but a TV remote in one hand
and a can of PBR in the other.

And yes, right about now
I feel I’m at my physical prime to
dive into the grueling arena of professional bowling.

But let me be honest here.
I’ve got a bit of a hidden agenda.
You see, unbeknownst to many,
professional bowling has its sordid side.
Indeed, professional bowling
is overrun with groupies.

Yup.
It’s all about sex,
and that my friends explains
why I look the way
I do today.

©06 Jack Hubbell

2008-11-30T14:32:00.000-08:00

2008-11-30T14:29:00.001-08:00

~Gorge Buoyant
I once ate a fly by accident.
Again…
I want to be very clear on this.
It was by accident.
I would in no way do this with malicious intent.
This is not to say I feel any form of
affection towards flies
for I do not.
In fact, I despise the little buggers.
But let’s come to an understanding.
I am an overwhelmingly loving and
entirely lovable person,
and though I loathe flies,
I absolutely would not
consume one in any vindictive manner.

Yes, it is quite understandable
that flies have nutritional value,
but at this specifically stated
moment of ingestion,
I was not particularly malnourished.
I could easily have made it ‘til nightfall
without the sacrifice of his
protein sustenance.
Without a doubt, I
would have survived.

Being as I am overflowing
with raging hormonal butchiness,
it should be of no surprise that I once experienced
a wilderness survival school.
Yes indeed, by bug breathed brethren…
John Rambo and Yours Truly.
Mano-a-Mano with nary a vending machine
within a fifty mile radius.
Would I slit Stallone’s throat for the
last stale twinkie?
Does Boy George own a pair of pink panties?
You damn straight!
I am not to be trifled with
when it comes to cup-cakes.
Especially with them there sprinkles on top.

Ahem… Anywho…
This guy was throwing up.

Wait!
I just prematurely climaxed my poem.
Let’s back on out and
reinsert from another direction.

Today’s Survival 101 objective is to catch a trout.
Catch him, cook him, eat him.
And though them there fishy things
be a bit of a rarity,
all us men have easy access to worms.
Just dig on down into Mother Earthy’s womb
and they’re slippin’ n’ slidin’ a slimy squirm fantastic.

And this guy was throwing up.
Yes, well… okay.
Let’s just move on to the post poetic
oh so climaxadelicious cigarette shall we?

Not too many fish in the creek but
a whole lotta worms in the mud.
And a worm being high in protein goodness,
the instructor goads our designated vomitee
into swallowing one whole.
Swallow him live.
Swallow him down and be done with it.

Okay, let’s just jump to the
After-the-fact vomit vile-tastic.

He what did the puking tells me
that it wasn’t the aspect of
eating a worm that made him hurl.
No. Seems that one of the side affects
of swallowing a worm whole and alive
is that whole and alive worms
don’t like to be swallowed.
That they resist the urge to go down.
This worm…
This worm wanted out.

And I sorta figure this is the moment of truth
where the worm gets religion.
That he’s in there sayin’ “I hear ya Lord and
Imma willin’ to do whatever it takes ta get out.”
And there in the back of this fella’s throat
a disco mirror ball startsta rotating
and the worm startsta wigglin’.
And this guy, who by the way,
has decided he’s not having a
whale of a good time,
brings forth unto the creek’s sacred bank
a somewhat blessed worm.

And yea…
That fly I swallowed all those years ago…
Now that I think about it…

Sucker must have been a
god damn atheist.

©08 Jack Hubbell

2007-11-24T09:39:00.002-08:00

2007-11-24T09:39:00.001-08:00

Barb’s Beaver
Barbara is hanging by her knees
upside down on the monkey bars.
Oh, and I’d like to point out
she’s wearing a dress.
And here on this vast spinning globe
of which we normally stand upright,
there are magnetic properties
which translate to gravity.
And it is interesting to note what these
said properties
have done to the hem of Barb’s skirt.

Of course she and I and
all the other guys standing there studying
the manifestation of this earth’s affects
upon that at the surface are not
at the moment
contemplating aspects of Newtonian Law.
No. Such terrestrial force permutations have
yet to be covered
up on our classroom chalkboard, but
were the teacher to use what’s transpiring
up on the monkey bars as
applied laboratory,
he would be certain to have an
overly rapt audience.
Indeed, though the concept of gravity
has yet to be covered in our current curriculum,
we are fascinated.
This is precisely the sort of
illustrative science
that keeps boys alert and pumping away
at their normally tedious school studies.

Barb? Barb’s dress looks
kinda funny this way.
This likeness of Barbness is just… well…
unnatural.
Um… disturbing comes to mind.
Yes, we boys were being disturbed.
But… you know…
Not that we could force ourselves to
look away.
Oh yea. And I’d like to point out that
what with Barb’s current bodily orientation,
you could see her underwear
and they were… and…
oh my god!
You’re not going to believe this…
They were white!

Well okay...
Allot of girls wore white underwear back then,
but you see, that
is exactly my point!
Yo! You weren’t supposed to
see a girl’s underwear.
Oh, here now, so many years hence,
with post horny hindsight,
I will acknowledge there was
something of particular interest
underneath all that pristine whiteness
but again, that’s now.
Back then it was just about catching a glimpse of
bleached white cotton.

You see, there was no pudenda.
There was no punanee.
No P-U-S-S- Y.
Oh, this might have been about sex but
most certainly not the act of sex.
Intercourse?
What the fuck was fuck?

Upperclassmen… you know…
Fourth and fifth graders…
They’d informed us that
the correct lexicon for what we were ogling
was properly defined as “Beaver”.
Thusly elucidated and ever so below the hip hip,
we now knew enough to say,
“Wow! Look at that beaver!”
and “Yep.
That’s a pretty nice beaver all right.
Thanks for the heads up.”

Of course, it was a pretty surreal image
trying to somehow make the bizarre connection
between white cotton panties
and a big brown aquatic rodent.
Mighty cerebral stuff but
if our peers said “beaver” then
who were we to argue their eloquence?
“Beaver. Beaver. Beaver.” You know.
Sorta springs from the tip of the tongue
just like it was always meant to be there.

All of this brings to mind that time Barb and I
were out on the playground and
an argument ensued.
There came a moment when Barb’s anger
built to a climax and there
in an effort to demonstrate her disgust at my
inability to comprehend her
impassioned point of view,
she lifted her skirt
and with one hand doing a sort of
faux scratching motion at her um…
whited out area,
exclaimed, “Big Hairy Ape!”

I and all the other boys were dumbfounded.
We were rendered speechless at her
somewhat incoherent connection of
all that glorious white, and
a fur clad simian.
But… and this is an important point…
Barb won the argument.
She had used her crotch to dominate us,
and oh so dominate us she did.

Yes, but back here in the present moment,
Barb is currently hanging upside down
from monkey bars whilst we blithering idiots
stand there jaws agape
like the hairy apes that we are.

Oh, I’d like to think that years from now,
we as grown men will have changed.
That horizontal monkey bars
will not have transformed to
vertical poles on dimly lit stages.
That the act of a scantily clad woman
clinging to a chromed erection
will hold no sway over our manly intellects.

Yes, I’d like to think that.
I want to think that.
But… We are weak,
and that which hangs from poles…
strong.
No. No.
Never underestimate
the mind numbing power
of beaver.

©07 Jack Hubbell

2007-11-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

2007-11-24T09:32:00.000-08:00

Beating Dead Poets
(for Fun and Profit)

You may not have realized it but the literary rapture has already come and gone. Oh, and by the way, some of you didn’t make the cut. Indeed, you missed that divine A-Train Ascension to deity status. Missed your chance to sit just to the right of He who controls the almighty microphone. Granted, some supplicants make it, but of course there are all those lesser scribes left behind. Left to shamble from shadow to shadow; stage to stage; coffee house to coffee house. And just listen to their lamentations: “Excuse me. Um…excuse me. Could you put my name on the list? Any chance I could read tonight?”
I guess you could say that ‘divinity’ (or lack thereof) might be a metaphor for the performance poetry scene here in Nebraska, but it sure conveys a bitter assessment. And lo, but when you’ve come to accept your lot in life, who’s to say you don’t enjoy your sub-seraphim designation? “Dude! Listen. I didn’t even get on the list! I’m sooo far more ‘beat’ than you will ever be!” And with that, it’s pretty easy to grab your beret, bongos and bottle of sour grape, slink away into a dark corner, and self indulge a mighty fine whine.
Okay. Granted, that was a piss-poor ‘Beat’ analogy. Let’s try again.
Before I step too far into a critique of performance poetry, I feel it is important to acknowledge the existence of poets who have never stood before a microphone, and possess no intent at ever doing so. Poets who are perfectly happy to have their outpour of inner thought exist upon paper without delusion that anyone would ever care to utter it aloud. For instance, some single mother who’s only intended audience is the future eyes of that adult her daughter or son will one day become. Or more sadly, that office clerk who upon his death will have an entire unseen life’s verse tossed into a dumpster. A legacy destined for landfill.
At least those of us who once stood upon stage will have had our voices heard, but please note that, listened to is an entirely different matter. Whether our presence was actually noted by those at assorted tables, shuffling their own stack of poems, is the true gauge of just how truly visible or invisible you are. Am I the only one to note how you can walk away from the stage to a round of courtesy applause and still wonder at whether my words have actually registered?
Slam poetry versus straight open mic. There. I’ve said it. Lines are formed; factions joined. Oh, we stand there smiling at each other, but full well know that everybody in attendance has their pockets full of rocks.
Permit me a further caustic clarification by way of cold war simile.
Slam Poetry? Slam Poetry is like Capitalism, whereas with straight open mic, you’ve got Socialism.
‘Isms’ in poetry? Here. Let me elucidate you. You’ve got your poets. You’ve got your coffeehouse. You’ve got your alpha-poet and coffeehouse owner who in the tradition of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, come to the epiphany of “Hey! Let’s put on a show!” They let their presence be known and like bugs to a porch light, the tables are soon laminated with sheaves of poems all angled and arrayed perpendicular towards mecca. And yes, Mecca in this case is better pronounced ‘microphone’.
Will you get your chance to stand before that mic and face the crowd? Well, your name was put on the list wasn’t it? The Earth rotates and our Sun consistently rises upon distant horizon. You put your name on the list; your horizon at the mic is inevitable. Do you deserve to be up there? Well of course. This is Socialism. We are all the same. There is no good. There is no bad. This is not to say the audience won’t experience some amazing poetry transpiring there at the mic. It will. It will also experience mind numbing banality. It will experience excruciating discomfort. Some of that by way of a well written poem done well. Some of that by a very bad poem done poorly. It will be a manic depressive bi-polar roller coaster ride that pretty much mirrors life, and if you ain’t up for that, then you have to wonder whey you’re involved in poetry at all.
Now in contrast, walk across the street into the Capitalist world of Slam Poetry and everything is Rodeo Drive. Or perhaps Wal-Mart. Pick your analogy. Glitz or bargain bin, these poems have mass market appeal. This is America after all and by God, the customer is always right. At a Slam event, every poet is a commodity and that audience out there is all about assessing value.
“Ladies and Gentlemen! What would you give for this fine set of three minute stone washed jeans?” And there in the front row we have a query. “Um… Is that Kerouc denim or W.H. Auden? Bukowski or e. e. cumming?” And with a mighty huffing from our emcee, “Sir. Madam. If you have to ask, you can’t afford the ridicule. No matter. We must have your hyper-critical/knee-jerk/astute valuation NOW.”
And let’s face it: in the Capitalist world of Slam Poetry, for one poem to achieve value, some other commodity has to be de-valued, right? You won’t find Jesus or Buddha in the world of Slam Poetry. No meek inheriting the earth. No. This is the realm of Charles Darwin. Capitalist survival of the profit test. Wrap your easily digestible rabid revelation in a three minute package and pray that the stage upon which you display it will provide favorable lighting. Three minutes to shine with full knowledge that every second beyond that limit your poem is exposed to such brutal light, it wilts. At three minute plus one second, Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg succumb to entropy. Alas, a certain literary DNA spiral breaks down and dissolves, and there in the back of the coffeehouse, someone raises a stopwatch to proclaim, “Yo, dude and dudette! You suck!” And lo but Walt and Allen satchel their weighty tomes and slink away to hide in the shadows.
In their stead, the fruit of the MTV Generation send forth their token crank cased spark plugs of attention deficit overload to mount the aerie stage. Ecstasy-eyed splice hip-hop tongue tied, they deliver a 9.9 poem at two minutes fifty-nine, and somewhere deep underground Edgar Allen Poe cuts the string to his mausoleum’s bell, because he’s pretty damn sure he’s finally dead.
But wait… If I’m gonna name drop Poe, I might as well drop the name dropper of all name droppers: Truman Capote. Wasn’t it he who was not the one to sigh and bluntly lisp, “Um… That ain’t writing. That’s just shouting”?
Well pardon my slam.

©06 Jack Hubbell

2007-11-14T17:52:00.002-08:00

2007-11-14T17:52:00.001-08:00

The Man From... (Nantucket Part One)
Nantucket.
They have men there
who are incredibly popular.
Well...
one man was,
or so we've been led to believe.
It could be
that he wasn't popular at all,
and that, all this time,
we've been convinced that he was
because we expected this
anatomical aberration of his
to appeal to either sex
who perchance heard of it,
or worse,
encountered it.
Other than his own
auto-gratification
who else would truly benefit?
Isn't it ultimately
a visual scopophilic stimulation
that excites,
with little orifice penetrating benefit
after the initial six inches?
Anything beyond that would often appear
to inflect discomfort as opposed to
some hitherto inexperienced
plateau of pleasure.
The phallic truncheon?
Our icon of the supreme sado-sexual satori?
An ultra-appendage with trauma intent?
Ah...perhaps the misogynist in us all.
The misogynist in man...
The misogynist in woman...
Embrace the blade.
Sheath Nantucket.

©93 Jack Hubbell

2007-11-14T17:14:00.000-08:00

2007-11-14T17:13:00.001-08:00

Nantucket (Part Two)
Okay. I’m making a ruling.
Enough about this guy from Nantucket.
In my experience,
there’s nothing special about his attributes
or achievements.
Me?
Been doin’ that stuff for years.
Big deal.

Instead, let me tell you about
this man from Uttar Pradesh, India.
Dude was born with two
fully functional penises.
And what does he go and do
but request that one of them
be cut off.

Now I ask you:
Where’s the sense in that?
I mean, where will it all end?
As in getting a tattoo,
it could all get quite addictive.
Get one pecker lanced off,
think to yourself,
“Hey! That was pretty neat.”
And it’s not long before this whole
“cleaning house” aesthetic overtakes you.
“Well, if one less penis is good,
then two less penis’ has got to be great.”

This unique double eunich wannabe
from Uttar Pradesh
really pisses me off in a
non-stereo piss sort of way.
Double chomp chump!
Wanna one wang wanker!

Okay wait…
Let me wax romantic.
And really
this has always been about romance.
Admit it.
You know I was going there.

When you were a frumpy little girl,
didn’t your grandma take you aside
and tell you there would always be that
significant other waiting for your
tender knock on her back door?
But just think of all the female psyches
you will have tromped
on your way to true love?

Indeed, were it you who desired to go
the eunuch route,
why just think of all those girls
lined up around the block with their
pruning shears in hand.
It might just rival the national lottery.

But enough about you.
It’s this wanker times two in Uttar Pradesh
I’m trying to focus on.
Surely there was that moment
when his Gran Mama took him aside
and said,
“Listen Double D”
(as this was the endearing way
she was prone to address him),
“Listen, for every double digit One,
there a double digit Zero.
It’s all mathematics.
You can’t have One without One-not.
And of course you can’t have Two
without Two-not.”
And he slowly nods his head,
though on the inside,
he doesn’t have a clue
what the fuck she’s talking about.

And little does he know but
just at that moment,
there on the far side of the world in, oh,
let’s say someplace obscure like
Omaha, Nebraska,
some girl is born who is special
in a double Zero way.
And she grows to adulthood.
And she’s there waiting for him.
And… And…
Think of the PASSION to be had!
Think of it!
Visualize it!
Oh My God!

But nooooo.
Double Dickhead wants to be a
single dickhead!

And don’t we have enough of those already?

©07 Jack Hubbell

2007-11-14T17:03:00.000-08:00

2007-11-14T16:59:00.000-08:00

Nantucket Part Three
A phallus sea of cock-dumb nation,
this should live in the anals of history.
Or her story.
Depends on your pointy bit of view or
lack thereof of pointy out bits for viewing.
Confused?
It don’t mean dick!
Here, let me expound on the meat.

In 2006, Chinese surgeons
performed the world’s first penis transplant,
but… now hold on!
Don’t start getting your hopes up for
all those wee willy wankers you hold so endearing.
There were some short comings.

Turns out the patient and his wife
didn’t like this penis and
had it cut back off.
Wait…
Let this settle in for a bit.
Ponder.
Just ponder the heart rending story of…
What the fuck is wrong with these people?!
Don’t you think that if that guy
sitting over there had a choice
between living with what little penis he has
and having no penis at all,
he wouldn’t opt for the ‘with dangle’
as opposed to ‘dangle not’?
And yet… GAH!!!
This couple in China…
They jointly decide “Um… You know…
Were not entirely fond of this particular penis.
Would you mind ever so if you
took it back?”

“Excuse me sir?
You did not like the penis?
You found the penis wanting?”
“Well it’s just that…”
But his wife cuts him off, and
somewhat demurely interjects,
“It’s just that,
we thought there’d be more.”
“More?” queries the surgeon. “How so?”
And to this the unfulfilled wife
rolls her almond eyes and says,
“More. You know.
I was just hoping for…
more.”
And the surgeon thinks to himself,
“Why you ungrateful bitch!
That was a damn, damn, DAMN fine penis!”
[Note that he thinks all this in Chinese.
It’s not at all funny when you hear it in Chinese.
It’s actually kind of sad.]
“Some guy out there…
Some guy gave his all.
I mean, all that’s of importance
that any one guy can give.”

Oh, there’s a chance that someone somewhere
had one penis too many, but
what are the odds of that, huh?
And so… This Chinese couple…
They take that penis for a ride.
Take it around the block as it were.
And for a short time,some other guy
buried in the grave sans pecker
says, “Death is good.
Take my bat and
hit a homer little fella.”

But no. No and nadda.
She says, “It just doesn’t feel right.”
Okay.
So maybe I can see her point of view.
For her, there is an understandable desire
for “more” all the way to infinity.
That she might have a capacity for love
that only a NASA booster rocket could fill.
We can forgive her insatiable appetite for the
almighty mega-meat cleaver but… him?
To have and have not?
To be or not to be?
To have been a wheel absent pedestrian
and then gone 0 to 60, nitrous oxide,
parking lot to Autobahn,
pulsating penile piston plunging passion
and then…
“Nah. I don’t really care for that…
What is that?
Is that a Yugo? No.
Didn’t have an itty bitty Austin Mini in mind either
though, dang if it ain’t sporty and all.
Rather like the racing stripe
running down the length of it, but…
It’s just that the stripe sorta ends
before it really has a chance to get going.”

And then she steps forward and whispers,
“Since we’re talking in extreme metaphor here,
might I politely ask,
are there any Cadillacs parked back there in your freezer?
Don’t mind if that suckers got
a couple a hundred miles on the dial.
Don’t need no super charger under the hood.

No, as long as that engines got a bumpy cam shaft
that can provide the proper timing ala
thump a thump thump…
You know, get those tires to turn
one full revolution forward,
then I’ll license that pecker
and drive it home.
Might even drive it home repeatedly.”

Okay. So we know she has needs, but
what about the husband?
He’s no dummy.
He’s got goals.
Though he’s being a bit of a
non-dick about it all,
he’s got some ballsy intentions.
Indeed, we must admire his
Nantucket ear fuckit aspiration.

Me? Now, were I to kick the proverbial
don’t that suckit bucket,
I’d love to be there for him.
Indeed, there to fulfill his
phallic lick fantasy, but hey…

Rumor has it I’ve spent my life
driving nothing but a boring old Volvo.
Nothing too racy there.
But… (and I mean a big “but”)
What was mine was me,
and even in death,
I’d like to think I was
rather attached to it.

©07 Jack Hubbell

2007-11-13T19:52:00.000-08:00

2007-11-12T17:16:00.000-08:00

Nantucket (Part Four)
Okay. It’s been confirmed.
Via scientific research of some sort,
it was recently reported that lesbians
have more orgasms.

I’m gonna be straight up here.
I’m not happy with this.
In fact, I’m sorta depressed.
There is a hypothesis
floating around out there
that we on the male side of the
homo-sapien equation are
insensitive, self-indulgent assholes.
Yes. Some think that.
But I, Fabio that I am,
stand here before you on the verge of tears.

No… Wait…
There just now I started crying.
Oh, but you can’t see it cause we Cro-Magnon
do it on the inside.
Yes. We do it all the time.
It’s just that you are insensitive to
male muy macho emotive fragility.

Lesbians have more orgasms?
How could you?!
How could you do this to us?
Haven’t we always been there for you?
Is there no feature upon us that you
in any way find desirable? No?

And so there we stand,
fresh out of the shower,
toweling down our pathetic
insignificant extremities.
Blubbering fools
we pause to wipe
a large swath of condensation
from the fogged mirror,
and are startled at the sudden appearance
of that which we use to take such pride in.
And now?
Oh you little, little man.
You sad little vienna sausage.
Why, you do not even cast a shadow.
This… [sob]
This is what entropy does to you.

Listen men.
We’ve got to stand up.
We’ve got to rise to the occasion
for we as a
go daddy go go gonad nation
are on the verge of obsolete.
Our testosteroney lonely ponies
are soon to have no saddles cinched
to their buckin’ bronco backs.
What with the power of the genetic clone,
there will soon be no need for
our monkey bars to
spit spumy spermatozoa.

Pay heed to my somber warning.
Two thousand years hence,
the great mothership
(yea, you heard me… MOTHERship!)…
The mothership will return to this spinning nut
to find mankind gone!
Oh… Womankind yes.
We will have womankind.
And those of the mothership will ask the big question.
“So um… These men we’ve heard of…
Just what were they like?”
And the all important answer?
“Who? Whatzat? Oh…
The men you say. [sigh]
We kept them around for awhile to
change tires on cars,
but once we devised ways of transport
beyond big ol’ throbbing dicks-on-wheels,
we pretty much phased them
knuckle-draggers out of business.”

And yet the mega-mammary matrons of the
immaculate mothership
mull the minus of man mislaid.

“So these men,” they coyly ask.
“You have video?”
“Erased it.”
“You have photographs?”
“Burned.”
“You have sculptures?”
“Smashed them all.”
“Oh, but if you’re curious,
there are fossil remains
scattered here and there.”

And so off they go
to dig up a relict of man.
Pulling it forth from the musty ground,
they lay the skeleton next that of a pristine woman’s.
Much deductive analysis later,
they scratch their lofty heads and ask,
“What’s the diff?”
And the women of the Earth respond,
“Trust us.
There was a Yin and
there was a Yang.
This… This before you…
This was man.
And beyond what you see as
some lesser skeletal form, there
was a lot of meat to man. But…
Let’s just say we came to prefer our meat
that of the boneless variety.”

And this men is what orgasms
(or lack there of) did to us.
Lesbians prefer their fish
without those prickly bones.

©07 Jack Hubbell

2007-01-25T19:49:00.000-08:00

2007-01-25T19:48:00.000-08:00

Leo’s Libido
Much like dogs,
men will lower their voices
when they’re feeling dominant.
Nothing surprising there,
but you might find it of interest
that women prefer men with lower voices.
Especially during those fertile periods
of the menstrual cycle.
Oh yea, and scientists also found
that women preferred these baritones
when it came to brief sexual affairs.
This might explain why my friend Leo
scores more poon tang than I do.

In his youth,
Leo was what you might call a
feral child.
Indeed, the rumor on the street was that at
sixth grade he had already grown hair
down there
on his knuckles.

By second grade he was being asked
to use the men’s toilets,
as it was feared that other boys exposure
to his premature manhood
might cause deep Freudian psycho-trauma.

Baby-sitting for Leo became a costly affair
as it quickly became apparent
his parents would have to hire a third person
to be present as chaperone.
Oh, I see you raise your eyebrows in
confounded disbelief but
when at nine months in,
the third babysitter in row
found herself looking for
her own babysitter, well…
action had to be taken.

The question was:
how do you suppress the rampant libido
of a testicular dynamo
whose every sexual encounter
was the equivalent of
the Yanks hitting Omaha Beach?
Yank after Yank after Yank spewing forth
from waves of turbo charged
amphibious landing craft.
Every woman’s crotch was Normandy
and his phallus
“Operation Overlord”.

Sure, Leo could have been sequestered away
in monastic solitude but
what spiritual mandate of
celibate condom-nation
could hope to tourniquet
his copious fluid passion?

What was it?
What was it that finally curbed Leo’s feral libido?
If his dog was limited
to a defined array of fire hydrants,
what was it that gave us the short leash?

Was it his lifetime subscription to Martha Stewart?
No.
His I Pod hardwired to Barry Mantilow?
No. Then…
what was it?
I’ll tell you what.
At some point in Leo’s seminal life,
some evil son of a bitch introduced him
to poetry.
You heard me right. Po-et-ry!
And just what do you think poetry does
to a man’s sperm count? Hum?

YOU say Leo is the same growling dog he always was.
You say he lifts his leg just like in those days of yore.
That Leo Marks his territory
with every guttural utterance.
And yet all that flows from his pencil is ink.
The lead’s long gone.
This dog
is spade.
This dog
is neutered.
This dog is nutted.
Oh so eunich…tified!

And I?
Because I’m a lesser man,
I cry for Leo.
I sob.
I lament.
He that was in many ways bigger than life-size
(in more ways than one)
has shriveled away to nothing.
And I ask you:
What is poetry but low down squat to pee?

For the sake of all things testosterone,
take away his pen
and give that dog a bone!

©07 Jack Hubbell

2007-01-25T19:46:00.002-08:00

2007-01-25T19:46:00.001-08:00

Wood
I fall asleep in a weathered Adirondack
to awake and there find a leaf
has fallen into my lap.
Yes, on this spinning clod of earth,
once again, decay has found me.
Oh, not that I’ve been
running from decadence mind you.
Not that I’m running towards it either.
I know my place in the scheme of
all things entropy.

That Adirondack chair I’m sitting in,
could collapse at any moment.
‘Course, any moment
could stretch out to forty years.
It could also occur in the next forty seconds.
Jeez, with this looming doom,
how’s it possible I relaxed my guard
long enough to fall asleep?
Yet sleep I did,
and though I did not dream of trees,
I awake to find this single leaf,
just there; just so.

You know,
I use to wake up with wood in my lap.
Oh, I suppose that still happens
every now and again, but
when I was younger?
I mean almost every morning
I’d wake to wood whether
I was inside or outside.
Exposed or un-exposed.

It was alarming and sometimes embarrassing.
There were times you’d awake to
the gentle nudging of she who shared your bed.
And there upon her face…
wide eyed wonderment as she
pointed to your supine lap
and exclaimed,
“You’ve got wood.”

Yes, truly embarrassing.
All you could think about was,
“Where can I bury this wood?”

Of course, there were those times you’d awake
and swear that someone
had planted a tree in your crotch.
“How the Hell did that get there?!
Man o’ man.
I’m gonna need a couple of extra hands to deal with this.”
But no.
You’re on your own.
Solo o’ mano.

So you grab your axe and
proceed to whack at your wood.
A hard job, but
somebody’s got to do it.
Couple of hours later,
it’s finally down and
with a mighty shout of “Timber!”
it’s safe to be seen in public again.

So many years have past now
and I figure I’ve pretty much
clear-cut my entire forest.
All the mighty Redwoods are long gone
and all that remain are those
ornamental Redbuds.
Still, I covet them.
Never tire of gazing out
from all the shade they provide.
No matter the size,
I am never less than awestruck.

Would that you could pull up an
Adirondack here just beside mine.
Partake of my
last remaining woodland as
it hovers there
just above your head.
And should you fall asleep
to later awake with
one of my leaves upon your lap,
please do not be startled.

Just be happy it’s not my seed,
‘cause what with
all this wood I’ve come to find
throughout the years,
you just know I was bound to get a
nut or two.

©06 Jack Hubbell

2007-01-25T19:40:00.002-08:00

2007-01-25T19:40:00.001-08:00

Want
It moves towards me.
From a distance,
it is seeking me out.
It is desire of a sort.
It is need.
It is want.

In stark contrast against some
desolate landscape,
a small black period exists
there at the end
of a short life sentence.

Want.
Want makes a sound not unlike
that of a mewing kitten.
And Indeed,
were it that a giant eye
might gaze down from above,
it might observe a tiny jet black kitten
vectoring towards me
from a distance of thirty feet and closing.

I stand in a compound
some twenty miles south of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Having given you the locale,
you envision desert—
an extreme environment.
And this Arabian desert is the ultimate of
austere arid nothingness.
Again, everything here has a life sentence.
Everything exists to die.

The compound of which I talk
is actually a series of interlocking concrete villas
and sporadic courtyards.
All of this surrounded by chain-link and razor wire.
All of this surrounded by wasteland.
Here inside, each courtyard is its own desert.
Its own failed petri-dish.
But look, each miniature desert
comes complete with the luxury of
two or three withered palm trees.
The gravel, sand and hardpan between them
has been artfully raked into parallel lines.
If you must die here,
please have the common courtesy
not to fall perpendicular to
these precisely defined lines.

In one courtyard we eat.
In another we find the villas where
we eventually come to sleep.
In between are all the courtyards
that make up the span
between here and there.

Fully sated, I am passing from
what I am to what I will be,
there at my final destination.
Along the way, demands are made—
both by me
and of me.
In one of those many courtyards
I encounter “want”.
Here in this vast honeycomb of villas
live a multitude of feral cats.
How this came to be, I don’t know.
An act of god?

Don’t get me started.

We are told that in this colony of cats,
there is the existence of rabies.
We are told to have no contact with these
feral felines whatsoever.
We are told that.
And here in this desert
there is that which thrives
and that which dies.

“Want” does not exist
though some apparition of it
continues to move towards me.
Abandoned by its mother,
this tiny black mewing kitten
should have been claimed by the desert
one week ago,
and yet some life-form…
Some thing we know
which walks on two legs,
has passed this way before.

Something bipedal gave in
to that which we define as
compassion.
Something upright and human
came to the assumption that
we as a generic species
would all possess
this exact same compassion.
That we as a whole
would always be here
for this one small kitten which
has come to associate us all with sustenance.

Rumor has it that
we are all made in the likeness of our creator.
That all of us possess aspects of
his divine qualities.
Do we?

There now six feet away,
“Want” cries out my name,
but I?
I take two steps back.
I turn and walk away.
And for my final week in this forsaken desert,
I follow a different path home.

©06 Jack Hubbell

2007-01-25T19:37:00.000-08:00

2007-01-25T19:36:00.001-08:00

Umbilical
The culmination of the pregnancy
was something she thought
best described as
popping a giant zit.
That which had produced the swelling
prior to the popping
was deemed unsightly.
An embarrassing blemish.
That delivered to her crotch
some nine months earlier:
nothing more than…
bacteria.

Is it important to know her
state of mind at that exact moment of
infection?
No. Not really.
That which is irrelevant before the act
is just as irrelevant after.
All you need know is that she
is incapable of love.

And so, this excrement comes to lie
in someone else’s hands.
An easy afterthought,
were it not for the fact it exists…
there at the end
of an umbilical.

“Umbilical”.
Just what the fuck is that supposed to mean?
Are you trying to imply that
it has something to do with motherhood?
Nah. Nah.
Nothing more than an inconvenient tether.
Nah.
Fuck that shit!

And there at the end of an umbilical,
some bacterial life-form
cries out for sustenance.
A sustenance beyond the mere
gratification of nipple.
A sustenance of embrace.
To be enfolded into another’s arms.
Held beating heart
to beating heart.
The desire for an assortment of qualities
gathered under the heading of
what it means to be
a mother.

That which exists at the far end
of the umbilical
has a double X designate.
Chromosome string,
gene to gene,
they are one in the same female.
So very, very alike.

And yet… And yet…
That one which yearns
for nothing more than her mother’s touch,
is seen by the other as… what?
Diseased doppel-ganger?
Nine months of festering tumor,
now on the verge of being lanced.

On one end of the umbilical
is a life-form that once knew love
but now sees only an object of hate.
There on the umbilical opposite,
is that which knows
neither love,
nor hate.
She is a blank slate
in need of… What?
Does it come down to
sustenance?
There at the end of the cord,
a mouth opens and closes,
and with each transition,
the only emotion
it can possibly know
is expressly conveyed.
“Sustain me.
Sustain me.”

And yet… And yet…
The umbilical is severed,
and every external remnant
of mother/daughter
is cleansed away.
Two hands raise, lift, and lower—
mother’s womb
to sterile incubator.

“Sustain me.
Sustain me.”
And there in her mouth she finds it.
Love. Love.
Love is a dummy; a binky.
Love is a pacifier; a rubber nipple.
Love.
Love is right there at hand.
Right up until that very moment
when even your thumb
is denied you.
When even the love of you…
is brutally
taken away.

©06 Jack Hubbell

2007-01-25T19:30:00.000-08:00

2007-01-25T19:26:00.000-08:00

2007-01-25T19:25:00.001-08:00

Below the Belt
Ponder this:
Is it ever appropriate
to strike a man in his testicles?

Now, don’t answer too quickly.
I want you to savor the visual
you have in your head
at this precise moment.
There’s that which you men have pictured
and then that spectacle of testicle trauma
you women have oozing through your brains.
They’re not always the same.
You women simply have not envisioned
a sufficient level of violence.

Try again.
Get mean.
Make a face.
Imagine someone who really deserves it.
This is YOUR moment.
Nope. Nope.
Pathetic attempt.
Girlfriend:
You are soooo lacking in motivation.

Have I ever struck a man in the groin?
Why yes. Yes I have.
Here. Take my hand.
I will lead you to the dark side.
It’s just up these stairs.
There behind my eye sockets.
Nice big comfy chairs where you can
sit back, relax and soak in
all that ultra-violence.

Oh, and being as you’re sharing my inner eyes
and they being prone to disturbed cognizance,
please note that my visual acuity is quite crisp.
Everything is HIGH DEFINITION.
Indeed, I have refrained from alcohol
because I knew you were
gonna wanna see this some day.

Shhh… Quiet now.
The show’s about to start.
I’m getting ready to open my eyes.
I’m at this party, see.

Okay. Turns out the girl we were just…
Wait… Again,
note that I’m including you in this
as you are now part of the decision process
and therefore must share in the guilt.

Anyway…
Turns out the girl we were just hitting on
has a live-in boyfriend.
Big guy. He’s upstairs.
There’s children upstairs.
She just went upstairs because he’s upstairs
and there’s children upstairs.
Course you and I don’t know this is an issue just yet.
Up until now, he’s just a quiet bodybuilder
you’ve seen off and on at the gym.

The party’s pumpin’. The music’s blarin’.
From where we are all sitting,
you can see down a long hallway
to observe the two of them have come downstairs
and passed through a screen door
to stand a few feet outside.
All you can hear is the music
but there on her face,
you can see she’s screaming at him.
He says something.
She reaches up and slaps him hard.
He reaches out and shoves her with such force
that she flies off her feet
and lands hard on the concrete sidewalk.
You stand up.
You start moving towards the door
which seems a lot further away
than it did a moment ago.
She’s tough.
She’s quick.
Before you’re halfway down that long hallway,
she’s gotten up,
took off one of her high heel shoes
and brought its spike down on the top of his head.
Impressive you think, and pause for a second.

And then, in slow motion,
you see his fist pull back,
fly forward and there explode into her fragile face.
As you pass through the screen door,
you see her hit the ground again.
The red of her lipstick
has been obliterated by another form of red.

He turns to face you and from his lips comes,
“I’ll kick your motherfucking ass too.”
And for the next thirty seconds he tries to do
just that.
Me?
I try my best to keep you guys
from getting knocked out of your comfy chairs.

Let’s cut to the quick.
She gets up off the ground
in yet another attempt to attack him.
I go to shove her aside
and it’s at this point that he jumps forward
and puts you and I into a forward headlock.
There in our muffled ears we hear him mumble,
“What do ya think of that?!”
Yup. He’s got us pretty tight.
Now bear in mind that from this vantage point
(I with my eyes and you in your comfy chairs)
we can see two things pretty prominently.
There to the left,
and sprawled across the ground,
she with her face a spattered mess of blood.
There to the right and just within reach—
his groin.

At this point I will pause.

I’ve a question I want to put to all you women out there.
There’s a decision to be made here.
Being as you are female
and morally superior when it come to
choosing peace over violence,
all you have to do
is come to a group consensus of “stop,”
and the poem ends right here.

So what’s it gonna be?

Yes?
Fuckin’ A right,
I slammed the inner edge of my hand
full force into his tender nuts!
Felt his testicles part
as my hand passed through
to crunch bone to bone.
Didn’t stop there.
Nosiree.
Grabbed ahold of his junk and squeezed.
Not only that— I twisted.
Felt his squishy gonads
pass through the ringer of my finger joints
to pop out on the other side.
One this way. One that way.

Oh, and he went down.
Me with him being as I was attached
appendage to appendage
in the worse
hands-on gay experience
he would ever have.

And he commences with this gagging noise.
Now normally,
a gagging noise isn’t pretty, but…
this one was.

And I feel hands grabbing at me.
Pulling me away.
There through my eyes…
There through your eyes…
There on the ground,
you see a man curled up in a fetal position.
And you ask yourself:
“Did I make the right decision?”

Well girls… did we?

©06 Jack Hubbell

2007-01-25T19:20:00.000-08:00

2007-01-25T19:19:00.001-08:00

Absolutely Flaccid
Girls. Girls. Girls.
You want them.
We got them.
They hang from poles for your delight.
And if we only had meat hooks,
the slaughterhouse of your somewhat
sexually confused dreams would be complete.

Did I say meat?
You bet I did!
But not the other red meat.
Not the other white meat either.
Nah. How’sa bout some shade of meat
dead center them thar two
titillating tones o’ pulsating protein?
An exact shade of pink
smack dab your object of desire.
This is what you want, right?
Not to worry.
We’re flexible.
Just watch.
We can tweak our taunt to penetrate
all the way to the center of your
erect wad of George Washingtons.
And just look at the size of those pockets!

Have we paused to tell you
how much you’re appreciated?
Why you’re our favorite idiot,
and we will indulge your every whim
as long as you can sustain that there bulge of…
Just how are
all those Georgie Washingtons?

Oooo, I bet you’ve got
something bigger in there don’t you?
Something huge.
Andrew Jackson huge.
Have I ever told you
how sexy Andrew Jackson is?
Oh and you?
You so remind me of Andrew.
Yes. That look on your face is
dead ringer for the seventh president.
Why, Mr. President!
What big eyes you have!
Indeed, there in your ample pockets live
six inch after six inch after six inch of
flat dead presidents,
and as wooed as I am by your
exquisitely greased mullet and
Andrew Jackson potential, dare say
I can sense the presence of a President Grant
lurking there in your wad o’ sex appeal.

Like you, our eighteenth president was a man of
such insatiable appetite.
Plop your six inch Grant in my hand
and the three of us will take a stroll
to the promised land.

But no. What’s this?
It would appear your pockets
have gone lame duck.
No Grants or Jacksons.
No Hamiltons or Lincolns.
Not even one
single solitary remaining
Mister Washington.

Oh, I’ll grant you you’ve got six inches of
some sort of George there in your pocket.
Grant that you deem it worthy of
forty seconds of something.
But I regret to tell you that your
forty second George is
and never will be
a worthy President.
Your six inch of George
ain’t nothin’ but flaccid dick.

Indeed, we regret tell you,
that your George or Dick or
whatever vice you care to call your
concept of presidency… they
are just about worthless.
Lame Duck or
Lame Fuck…
Either way, it is time
for you
to go.

©06 Jack Hubbell

2007-01-25T19:16:00.000-08:00

2007-01-25T19:03:00.000-08:00

Aidan is a Fish
At the moment, Aidan is a fish.
She has fins.
She has gills.
Of course, what I see
is a small girl of four years
communing with one solitary fish that’s
been placed in a pitcher full of water,
but these are mere facts.
Nothing to be confused with reality.
No.
What’s real is that Aidan
is a fish.
So much so that it does not occur to her
that she cannot breathe underwater.
A ridiculous observation in her point of view.
Why would a fish dwell on such menial things?

At this moment I am a human being.
One of the adult sort, I sit with other adults
some twelve feet distant from Aidan.
We mature humans
relate just as mature humans
are supposed to relate.
We co-exist in the bodies we were given,
and yet…
As I glance over at Aidan,
a part of me wants to peel away
and join her .
Here at this table we discuss issues of
such heavy import
while there at Aidan’s table,
wondrous things are happening.
Aidan is a fish!
How can you not see the marvel in this?

Perhaps you envision Aidan
pretending to be a fish, but no.
That is an adult assumption.
Though we might see a small girl
there on her elbows,
mere inches away from a pitcher of water,
that… That is not Aidan.
No.
Aidan is in that pitcher.
Aidan is there in that water.
She is at one with all things aquatic.
All things piscine.
She is so much a fish
she doesn’t know that water exists.
There is no her inside water
for water simply is.
It eases through her mouth
with each subconscious gulp
to pass through her gills as mere…
…sigh.

Why waste her time pondering frivolities
when there are better fishbowl conundrums
to puzzle over.

Aidan moves to the inner edge
of the pitcher’s thick glass
and looking out sees a small girl
gazing in.
Far beyond that girl
a man sits at a crowded table.
Swishing her tail,
she nudges up against some hard invisible barrier.
And there in her piscine mind a question forms,
“What? What does that human desire?
He looks such an old man.
So old, yet surely he longs for… something.”

Isn’t the answer evident?
He?
He desires that return to innocence.
That forever sense of awe and wonder.
He?
He
wants to be Aidan.

©07 Jack Hubbell

2006-12-02T16:43:00.000-08:00

2006-12-02T15:47:00.000-08:00

From the sequence:
"In Memorium"
Omaha,
2006

2006-12-02T15:45:00.000-08:00

Big Bang-ish
I’ve got the Big Bang on my television set
and I want to get it off.
Not that I want to get off by
watching a big bang on my TV.
Not that by Big Bang we’re talking
John Holmes blitzkrieging the Kama Sutra.
Naw.
We’re talking the original orgasmic pop.
Absent prophylactic.
We’re talking the original sploosh of stars
spewed forth from the
great cosmic gonad of forever-was.

Back in them thar days of early creation, when
dinosaurs ruled the Earth and
every TV had a pair of
rabbit-ear aerials on top,
you could twist your select-switch
and tune off mid-channel.
Most programming back then
had to do with infomercials about
what you could be eating or
what could be eating you.
Pretty redundant stuff really.
In between Channel One and Channel Two
you’d find… Well…

Bear in mind, we Homo sapiens had
minimal vocabularies back then.
We looked at that TV screen
and came to the group consensus that
what was present there
might best be described as “snow”.
Someone at the back of the cave proffered that
it was a video presentation of microwave range noise,
but he was quickly stoned as a heretic.
So… “Snow” it was.
Course, centuries later we found that this
somewhat evolved dude had been right all along,
so we dealt with it by
writing him out of our history
and science bibles.

I am now happy to tell you that
what you see on the TV when you
disconnect that cable is a
video presentation of microwave noise.
And here now in the age of Cheeze Whiz
and mass enlightenment,
we are free to ask the following question
without fear of the inquisition:
“Oh Great and Mighty Oz.
From whence doth that micro-wavy noise originate?”
And to that a voice responds:
“Pay no attention to that old man behind the curtain!
The Great Oz has spoken!”

But being of the inquisitive sort,
you lesser beings
Google your question and push aside a
few thousand years of dogma by
simply putting your pinky on that ‘enter’ key.
And here I must interject,
what sort of world is this
when the Great Oz is forced to
genuflect in front of deities such as
Microsoft and Macintosh?

Anywho… I believe the gist of your question was:
microwave noise, liquid cheese in a can,
snow on top of your TV, and
if Britney Spears is still a virgin,
how did she get knocked up not only once but twice?
Something to that affect.

In a get-a-nut shell,
the answer is: “The Big Bang.”
That snow on your TV screen
originated at the center of the universe
from a penis the size of a Humvee.
The big Humvee.
Not the small one.
The big one give or take a few inches.
Okay… I may be exaggerating about
the size of the penis.
I’m known to do that.
If you want to know the true size,
ask that fella Adam.
Supposedly, his penis
was made in the likeness
of that original one
smack dab in the middle of the cosmos.

But now wait.
This presents a bit of a quandary, for
it would seem… rather… I mean,
as history has it:
Not only was Adam incapable of the Big Bang
(you’ve seen how small his fig leaf is),
he could barely manage a
little one.

Big Bang?
More along the lines of
Snap, crackle and… Ho-hum.
“Hey. What’s on TV?
Yea, and…
You gonna eat that apple or what?”

©06 Jack Hubbell

2006-12-02T15:36:00.000-08:00

2006-12-02T15:30:00.000-08:00

From the sequence:
In Memorium,
Omaha
2006

2006-12-02T15:29:00.000-08:00

Utopia
He stands in a depression.
What you would call his “low place”.
The altitude of that earth beneath his feet
will always be lesser than
your deepest elevation,
and he…
He calls this existence
“utopia”.
To each his own,
and he certainly owns this one.
Not that it’s something he purchased.
No, this utopia was
acquired.
An asset he never signed for, yet it’s
undeniably his.
A package deal with
generic label.
It was utopia in its most literal sense.
Utopia?
A word which translates as
“no-place”.
A noun which interprets as
“nowhere”.
So how do you get from the
literal translation of nowhere to this
perceived rapture of absolute nirvana?

Good point.
Good fucking point.
Should you figure that out,
he’d sure like to know.

Until then, he exists alone in his
stadium sized sinkhole.
And though a multitude of bleachers
array its steep perimeter
there will be no applause,
for he remains
a solipsistic nation of one.

Above his head black flags wave
and there on the loud speakers,
the late John Lennon
sings his sub-terrestrial anthem
of self-sustained nihilism.

It’s a somber tune.
The perfect libretto for
solo a cappella.
Not the sort of anthem
to put a tear in your eye,
but just the thing for explaining
why the one that’s there
will never leave.
Yes, John’s vocals serenade empty seats.
His melancholy melody drifts upon
stale silent air.
A sustained echo of woe
amidst a stadium with
far too many
oh so inviting exits.

“He’s a real nowhere man.
Sitting in his nowhere land.
Making all his nowhere plans,
for nobody.”

And what are such lyrics if not
to die for?

©06 Jack Hubbell

2006-11-26T18:35:00.000-08:00

Omaha
2006

2006-11-26T18:29:00.000-08:00

Omaha
2006

2006-11-26T18:21:00.000-08:00

2006-11-26T18:20:00.000-08:00

Aphasia
I have moments of confusion.
Moments when say…
I lose my train of automobile and
plain of existential what-the-fuck.
I stammer.
I stutter.
I speak in tongues with a mouthful of
depression compression suppress
shun all conversa…tion.

Aphasia.
Aphasia is a partial or total loss of
the ability to articulate ideas of any form.
It is mostly caused by brain damage of some sort.
Pretty cool, huh?
Wanna be a poet?
Lookin to put together some creative word couplets?
Gotta get yourself a load o’ brain damage.
Aphasia on a hoagie bun,
extra cortex sans syntax and
hold the mayo clinic.

In my lifetime, I’ve been knocked unconscious twice.
That is, twice that I know of.
Could have been more or less more,
or less than that.
I’ll never be able to give you an
absolute response on that
since an unknown portion of my brain
is tapioca pudding.

I’ve been trying to ascertain
how the presence of brain damage
might manifest itself but
nothing comes to mind.
“Nothing comes to mind.”
Get it? Oh, I
do amuse myself at times.
Do you think brain damage is funny?
Well… Not the
railroad-spike-in-the-cranium mega-ouch part.
Geez! I’m talking ‘bout
all the silly things that transpire in the
funhouse reality that surfaces later.
Like…
Like when I come walking out of the toilet,
and let’s say aphasia steps forth
right about the time I was
supposed to have tucked myself in and
zipped up the ol’ fly.
Course, I wouldn’t know,
and after a good chuckle, you
stride across the room to
initiate a conversation with something
pertinent like:
“Hey Jack.
You ever been knocked out?”

This coded question would
instantly enable a
good portion of my brain to
jump the pudding gap and
communicate with some
other semi-functional area.
With this,
I would instantly zip my fly and then tuck.
Or is that tuck first, then zip?
Zip/Tuck? Tuck/Zip?
Frickin aphasia is a frickin curse
if you get my frickin meaning.

Ultimately,
the point I’m trying to make here is… um… uh…
What?
What are you looking at?

Is my pudding showing again?

©06 Jack Hubbell

2006-11-26T17:59:00.000-08:00

Rockport, Mo.
2006

2006-11-26T17:36:00.000-08:00

2006-11-26T16:52:00.000-08:00

Black Leather Jacket
Rockport, Mo.
2006

2006-11-26T16:51:00.000-08:00

Two Loves, Two Hearts, Two Bloods
Within a lifetime of Valentines,
will it have been said that
all the personal encounters
dealt to us throughout the years,
were optimistic or
pessimistic as to all the
intricacies of that
which we came to know of as romance?

Holding forth our court of
harlequins and jesters,
a myriad of stained somas
pour out their bosoms into the
Queen of Hearts
outstretched hand.
Shuffling through them,
all are reduced to characters as
two dimensional as paper,
for indeed they
are paper.

Of course Valentines Day
was always conveyed to us
through childhood and into our teens
as a time in which we were given
carte blanche to communicate some
deep and cherished kinship we had with
another human being.
All this and dare I say,
something called love.

As a young child,
having received a card from
each and every one of our peers
quite simply translated to acceptance.
Think back to your own self during this time period
and consider the trauma that
would have occurred
had you received nothing.

Perhaps now it seems minor,
but back then it was a
major psychological event.
Have things changed?
Do we as adults now shrug off such
petty adolescent pangs?
As adults,
it is now not so much about
receiving a card from someone,
but rather,
simply having someone, for
to approach such a holiday and be alone,
is a massive amplification to the fact that
we have failed in matters of the heart.
Everyone wishes to be adored
and to want it and yet not be,
brings us pain.
How can this pain be defined?
It is not easily done, yet
most of us know how it feels.
To verbalize it is another matter.
Strangely, we do all seem to know
were the pain originates,
and that place lies buried
there within our chests.

If upon being born,
we were never told that
throughout history the
heart was conceived to be
where our deepest emotions were held,
would we not have come to this conclusion ourselves?
Were it that only emotions
could damage such fragile hearts;
that platonic encounters
were the only means of their destruction.
Venus, goddess of love,
brings us not only rapture
but also visceral annulment.

And now,
via the passing of
one blood into another,
a living rust is conveyed to
a heart that desired love,
but ultimately got its valentine
from a tainted envelope.

©95 Jack Hubbell

2006-11-15T18:42:00.000-08:00

Omaha
2006

2006-11-15T18:40:00.000-08:00

Van Gogh Mono
Can I get a witness
to my mental fitness?
Does the wall
upon my clock
drip with paint?
Is my total being
what the Tic Toc Man is fleeing?
Does the harlequin
within me
see its fate?
Does the pendulum that's swinging
see the fluid time it's flinging,
'cross the landscape
that makes up
my mental state?
I see my world turn yellow
with a charcoal lifting halo,
for the arc
across the sky
has brought me hate.
Is rejection what I'm fearing?
to be shunned and pushed away?
I've got problems with my hearing.
Cut my ear off yesterday.
Van Gogh
hears
in mono.
Everybody samba!

©90 JDH

2006-11-15T18:37:00.000-08:00

Omaha
2006

2006-11-15T18:34:00.000-08:00

2006-11-15T18:32:00.000-08:00

Misdirected
So,
I was right all along.
But you,
sorely misdirected,
were left alone.
Yeah,
it was all that was left for you.
You were good at calculations and logic,
but when they gave you the order of,
"Right face!"
you always fucked up, didn't you?
You were so out of touch with
your leanings
that you thought Kruchev
was a neat guy!
Me?
I'm not perfect.
Strangely (though not amazing),
with my eyes closed,
I always swam counter-clockwise.
Something to do with the power of the stroke.
And speaking of strokes,
if I had one in my right hemisphere,
what would I have left?
I wouldn't be able to right, er. I mean
write this drivel.
No.
That wouldn't be all right.
No more "Bomb Hanoi!" politics.
Jingos away!
Everything would be left for me to reason.
Well, that most certainly wouldn't be right
would it?
What's left to say?

©89 JDH

2006-11-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

Omaha
2006

2006-11-15T18:16:00.000-08:00

The Snapshot
Through the screen door,
he crossed an open expanse
of glistening wet grass
to stand still
amidst the age old trees
of his youth.
From his pocket
he took a small instamatic camera
and pointed it at the stars.
His finger moved
and the strobe flashed out,
sending a pulse of light
into the deep and distant sky.
Happy with himself,
he smiled, dropped the camera
into the side pocket of his jacket,
and returned to his
insignificant little house.
One thing was not fully realized
(nor did it need to be).
By the time his negligible
strobe of light
reached the star he'd aimed for and
returned its faint flickering image
to a long absent camera,
he, and everything he had known,
would be long dead.
In a week's time
his snapshot would be back
from the local lab.
For some reason
the inky black blankness of the paper
does not bother him.
Perhaps sending the flash
was all that mattered.

©89 JDH (for Cleo "Bud" Hubbell
who died of cancer that year)

2006-11-13T16:44:00.000-08:00

Council Bluffs, IA
2006

2006-11-13T16:43:00.000-08:00

Flowers
"Oh yes! Yes! These really are the best.
By far the very best you've ever brought me.
Look...oh, just look at them!"
He did, as she picked them up
and held them to her chest so tightly
he thought she would surely crush them.
"Oh, flowers...flowers," she purred,
"Yes, I've had them before
but none so beautiful as these!

Absolutely none."
So extreme of her, he thought,
such emotions she possessed.
"I'll put them here...just here,"
and she glides across the room
to the mantle of a long disused fireplace.
Down from it she pulls an oval shaped vase
which she brandishes like and old lost trophy.
"Why that one?" he asks of her,
"What of this one over here. It's obviously much..."
"No. Of course not," she frowns,
"They must go here, you see.
All of my flowers...well...
they just have to go here."
She begins to place the flowers into the vase
but then stops abruptly.
"Oh, water...I've forgotten the water."
Off she scurries to the kitchen,
flowers in one hand, vase in the other.

"Well, that makes no sense,"
he whispers to himself,
"Certainly no sense at all."
"Surely," he raises his voice to reach her,
"surely you've got a better vase than that one.
I know I've seen better."
That's not the point," comes the reply from the kitchen.
"Not the point?" he murmurs
with a quizzical tilt of the head.
He moves to the window
and looks down to the traffic below,
"Not the point?"

Shortly, she returns.
He looks back over his shoulder
to see her arranging the flowers,
then back to the street
and the tiny people below.
"They'll go bad you know.
They'll all go bad---
eventually all flowers go bad and die, so..."
"Of course they will," she interrupts matter-of-factly,
"That's not the idea."

He turns to look at her,
somewhat startled by the directness of her voice.
Still arranging the flowers, she continues,
"For the moment," she gestures downward,
"this moment of time,
we think only of the beauty they bring us.
We shut the rest out. No...
rather we place it to the back of our minds.
Perhaps it's the knowing..."
she pauses to glance towards the window,
"it's the knowing that, yes,
eventually they will go bad;
that they won't last.
That all their beauty is transient.
This is what makes them so beautiful;
so essential;
so requisite."
He turns back to the window
and the multitude below
rushing to the end of their day.
Behind him the familiar voice continues.

"Oh, these...
these have got to be the most beautiful I've ever,
ever, ever had."
There within the glass he sees his reflection.
Try as hard as he may
he can't suppress the smile
that's slowly forming there.

©86 Jack Hubbell (for R. Patterson-Zeck)

2006-11-13T16:38:00.000-08:00

Council Bluffs, IA
2006

2006-11-13T16:36:00.000-08:00

Tweed Jackets
What you're looking for
is not here.
An old man, wearing
a tweed jacket,
stands next a ditch
with it
tucked neatly in his sweating palm.

Seconds from now
it will slip
from his grip,
fall to the ground,
and shatter.
All that you've waited for
will have been lost forever,
yet in the back of your mind
you'll realize
that there will always be
tweed jackets.

©86 JDH

2006-11-11T16:38:00.000-08:00

Chicago
2006

2006-11-11T16:22:00.000-08:00

Chicago
2006

2006-11-11T16:21:00.000-08:00

If You Don’t Move…
“If you don’t move, you won’t get stung.”
And he says this with such authority.
“And what would you know?”
I respond with a sneer.
Well, not with a sneer actually.
To be perfectly honest, I said nothing,
but on the inside,
I was seething with attitude.
And yet, seeing that
I was a young boy and
this was my father,
it was all best left unsaid.
I suppose there is a lot of
quality activities you can do as a sort of
father/son bonding thing,
but raiding one of my dad’s bee hives
was not one of them.

Contrary to what you may see in documentary films,
wearing body suits and mesh hoods is for pussies.
That which does not sting you
too many times,
makes you one bad mo-fo.
Okay, so I guess my dad was the bad mo-fo.
Me? I was keen to embrace my pussy side.
Damn it! I wanted my mesh hood!
Yea, and Kevlar body-armor woulda been nice too.

“If you don’t move, you won’t get stung.”
Don’t know that my dad
may have been making some
deep philosophical statement here.
“Okay ol’ man.
I’m callin your bluff.
We’ll just see who the pussy is!”

[Again, please note that this is what we call
one character’s internal dialogue.
I had already begun my
non-moving at his point by
non-moving my lips.
That is except for some
quivering present in the lower one.]

Look pa. Look. I
am at one with the landscape.
Absolutely stationary.
Why, I could be a great big flower for all you know.
Yea. And what do flowers attract?
Let’s just say that my entire body
was a stem rising from the ground;
my head, a crown of petals.
My ears succulent pistils; my
mop of hair, that irresistible stamen.

“If you don’t move, you won’t get stung.”
Well, hey pops! It appears that
a few of those bees
missed the morning brief.
Dare say dear daddy-O,
my dapper doo has been deemed delectable.
Yes indeed,
the USS Honeycomb Kid is open for business.
Minimal pitch and roll as Admiral Dad
has advised your landing strip
to remain [and I quote]
“Absolutely stationary”.
In absence of running lights,
please use the conveniently provided hair part
to guide your erratic descent.
The scalp zone is for loading and unloading.
If you care to load or unload,
please use the scalp zone.

“If you don’t move, you won’t get stung.”
I ain’t frickin movin’ dad,
but somethin’ in my hair IS!
I’ve come to the conclusion
that though arduous workers,
honeybees have the mental capacity of, say…
honeybees,
and I’m of the opinion there must have been
certain of these bees that
rode the short-bus to Honey High.
Pardon my lament pops, but this
non-nimble nitwit of nectar
now nudging my nappy noggin
need not nettle.
That is to say dad,
I’ve got a bee in my not so bonny bonnet.

“If you don’t move, you won’t get stung.”
Listen up maternal fornicator.
This here kamikaze commando
is currently in the process of
vectoring his payload of ill intent
towards MY precious cranium.
Stick your bowel movement mantra
up your bee brain butt, cause…

And then it happens.
There atop my head:
Slim Pickins drops outta a B52
riding a ten megaton bomb.
There atop my head:
A mortally wounded John Wayne
staggers into the Alamo’s gunpowder room.
There atop my head:
James Cagney yells
“Top of the world, Ma!”
and dies in a blaze of White Heat.

Yea, well… Some
non-moving movie metaphor
is being conveyed here
but I’m damned if I understand what it is.

But yo little buddy.
I feel your pain and am moved to tears.
You might even say I’m moved to perform a
“Sympathy for the Honeybee” dance.
Yea. Imma movin’ and
Imma gyratin’.
And all to the sweet musical accompaniment
of my father’s empathy laced
laughter.

Yea. Sweet. Sweet. Sweet.

Sweet as phuqin honey.

©06 Jack Hubbell

2006-11-11T16:12:00.000-08:00

Chicago
2006

2006-11-11T16:06:00.000-08:00

Upon The Floor
She falls.
She drops to her knees,
collapses to the floor and
I do nothing to stop her, for
this is where she needs to be.
There in her mind,
she is overwhelmed not so much with gravity,
but with an absence of all support.
This and the fact that
that which she loves most in this world
lies crumpled there on the carpet before her.

The sprawled lifeless body of
someone’s grandmother.
A grandmother I’d only recently met.
A grandmother
I never had a chance to truly know.

There on the bedroom floor lies a corpse
and yet, not a corpse.
A corpse is that which you see
lying off in the distance.
Something shrouded beneath a blanket.
Something you notice as you
rubberneck past an auto-accident.
A corpse is someone you don’t know
and never will.
But she on her knees would argue that
this most certainly is not a…
No. This is her grandmother.

Yes, ‘is’.
We have not transitioned to ‘was’ yet.
That is still hours away.
Right now, ‘was’ was twelve hours ago
when she and I began our romantic outing by…
stopping in.
A slight distraction.
A diversion from the dating norm. Indeed,
I am asked to participate in the adoration of
someone I barely know.

But listen:
There will always be time
to share another’s prior life in
a shared future life.
Man that I am,
my orientation at this moment is
less love and
more that of passion.
We can always return later.
Life is now.
Our life is just
outside that door.

And there as we prepare to leave,
grandmother and daughter embrace,
and faintly I hear the elder say,
“Couldn’t you stay?
Couldn’t you stay a little longer?”
And in that short sequence of words there is
such sorrow.
A sorrow that one normally applies to an event
after its passing, yet
here it is before.
In hindsight, I come to realize… she knew.
She knew. She knew but
would not tell.

And twelve hours later
they meet again on that floor.
One dead. One alive.
Their relationship the same,
yet different.
Here in the now, we see pass the curtain of
rose tinted perception.

We wish a poetic death,
yet see this
brutal reality.
No tranquility resides on her grandmother’s face.
She did not die in peace. No.
Instead we are all granted a
final perpetual memory of a
loved one’s grimace of agony.

My memories?
My relationship to these two women
collapsed on the floor before me?
I am insignificant.
A short sweep of the second hand
compared to
that which defines what it means
to be a granddaughter.
There in her heart she has
two decades worth of smiles,
yet they all weigh the same as
the final absence of grace
now on her grandmother’s
contorted face.

And there across the divide,
she reaches forth
to tug on a flannel sleeve.
And each tender tug has significance.
Yes, there in their shared silence
a dialogue echoes
out of the past.

“Couldn’t you stay?
Please.
Couldn’t you stay
a little longer?”

©06 Jack Hubbell