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 Jack Hubbell

~~~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

~~~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

~~~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

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

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

~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

~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

~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

~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

~‘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

~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

~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

~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

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