Omaha
2006

Omaha
2006

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

Rockport, Mo.
2006

Black Leather Jacket
Rockport, Mo.
2006

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

Omaha
2006

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

Omaha
2006

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

Omaha
2006

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)

Council Bluffs, IA
2006

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)

Council Bluffs, IA
2006

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

Chicago
2006