Chicago
2006

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

Chicago
2006

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

Chicago
2006

Options
I suppose there comes a time
when you're sitting there looking at what's offered,
knowing you have to pick the cheapest thing on the menu.
It's not a matter of what you'd like.
It's not a matter of
"Gee, what would taste good right now?"
When it comes to making
your selection from the menu,
it's not the contents that your eyes are allowed to scan.
No.
Your options
are there on the far right
where the price list is located.
Starting at the top,
your eyes sweep to the bottom,
in search of a price
that matches the assorted change in your pocket.

You come to ignore values that obviously equate to
coffee or orange juice,
for what are those but luxury add-ons?
No.
Value can be summed up
to what on the menu matches
the weight in your pocket and yet
still fills that cavity inside your gut.

What truly amounts to luxury in such a life?
Is it solitude?
Absolute obliterating solitude?
Can there be any more than this?
No. There are other options.
With cavity half empty/half full,
you make your way to the exit,
where a cold wintry embrace awaits you.
Out there, solitude equals death.
An option you may not be ready for yet.

There at the end of the block sits the Open Door Mission.
There again, you will find options.
Options that come with prices.
Prices that have nothing to do with
the weight in your pocket but rather
the weight of your soul.
There at the Mission there are luxuries and essentials.
For you,
the main essential is warmth.
The luxury to have the stillness of one lone area
where you can lie down upon a cot
and pretend you
and your half empty cavity
are still you.
Your spiritual deposit... paid in full.
Yes, the check's in the mail,
though the balance of your faith account
may just bounce.

Until then,
there's the chilly walk from this exit door
to that one in the distance,
and in that interim solitude,
you may come to hope
you won’t be distracted
by all the exit options
beckoning along the way.

©04 Jack Hubbell

Omaha

A Real Bitch
She was a bitch…
a real bitch.
Fifi knew this,
but it didn't bother her in the least.
She had the best manicures,
the cuts,
all the best primping
but when they
[the opposite sex]
were about,
she'd lose all her culturing.
She'd incessantly revert
to lashing out with her nails
and slicing into their necks
with her sharp teeth.
Some of them liked it,
but not for long.
Yes,
Fifi was strange.
She was often to be found in leather,
and as a form of forced obedience to her
"masters",
could be seen on all fours
with a leash about her neck.
"Bark like a dog!",
they'd scream at her.

"I'm not a dog!",
she'd try to reply,
"I'm not!"
But all
that came out
was,

"Woof!"

©87 JDH

Omaha

Passion
They embraced passionately,
lips locked together,
and the world spun about them for
what seemed eons.
Unfortunately,
she had a congested nose
so that when he released her
she sagged to the floor dead.
"I must be going." he cooed,
and abruptly danced his way to the door.
Donning his hat and coat
(the one with the upturned collar),
he turned and cheerfully inquired,
"Same time tomorrow my love?"

As usual,
she had that same
expressionless
look upon her face,
so he poured her goldfish out upon the floor,
licked the dog,
and made his exit.

Outside
the rain was shinning.

©85 JDH

Schram Park,
Nebraska

Coyote
Out there, it’s a cold bleak winter, and
the landscape beyond the windshield
lies frigid beneath a smattering of desiccated snow.
That multitude of unique crystal structures
has been forcibly blown into tiny like-minded cliques;
a mimeographed array of symmetrical little snowdrifts
that stand in unison to bear against anything
daring to rise up from the frozen soil.
In this case, it’s row upon row of corn stalks;
all cropped so many months ago.

I am somewhere on an interstate
heading south along the west border of Missouri.
It's a long empty segment of I-29
which skirts past towns with misplaced names
such as Savanna, Oregon and Mexico City.
My father is driving and I,
mature though still his son,
am once again to be found sitting
silently on the passenger side
with my feet up on the dashboard.

Once again?
Was this something I did in the past?
There as a young boy,
the dashboard was not so easily reached.
No. Nothing like this moment,
for now with my present size,
the placement of both soles to the dash’s molding
compresses my thighs and hips backwards
towards my chest in a very uncomfortable fashion.
Painful, but I suppose it just seems the thing to do.
There, sitting there next to him,
I find myself thinking of,
of all things,
coyotes.

Many years earlier,
when the distance to the dash
covered a much greater expanse,
the legs I had then, remained relatively straight,
and I, the younger boy,
sat on the passenger side
of a vaguely remembered maintenance van.
I was fast asleep as my father piloted us
through the late evening darkness
on a long stretch toward home.

I was startled back to consciousness
by my father's rough hand
reaching across from the steering wheel
to thump me on the upper arm.
This, and his voice bellowing that I should wake up
and see what's about to transpire.
As the sleep tore away and cleared from my head,
I could see that the same rough hand
was now pointing forward,
silhouetted against the windscreen
with its index finger angled downward
toward the obscured area just before the van.
The hand quickly returned to the steering wheel
and looking across to my father's face
I could see his teeth gleaming as he chuckled out loud.
I noticed that the van was accelerating at great speed
and highly curious as to what had generated such behavior,
I quickly dropped my legs from the dashboard,
and shot forward in my seat.

Pulling forward against the acceleration,
I looked down through the van's windshield
towards the asphalt directly below.
There, illuminated for a brief couple of seconds,
I made out the head, neck and gray-red mane
of a coyote at full run.
There, just before the front bumper,
I could see his hind quarters pumping furiously
amidst the twin beams of lights
that lit him from both sides.
No sooner does this all register in my mind
than my father's acceleration
overcomes the lesser speed of the coyote's
and it comes to pass beneath the bumper.

Sitting there,
looking out into the vacuum of darkness,
I feel the van convulse
as the under frame consumes, mangles,
and expels this one lone coyote out its rear.
I then slowly look back across to my father
and there his eyes are beaming
with the reflected illumination of our highbeams
shining far away down the highway.

A few years pass,
and I,
now a young man,
am out quail hunting with friends.
It's a cold Autumn day, and in transit
we are three across the bench of a large pickup truck.
It's a Midwest farm pickup so, of course
it comes complete with full mud flaps,
mounted tool box aft of the cab,
and gun rack full with assorted rifles.
In front of us yet another truck
hurtles down the gravel road,
its wheels kicking up a faint cloud of gray dust.
Suddenly, the truck begins to swivel back and forth,
and spewing gravel, comes to a skittering stop.
There, through its rear window, a flannelled arm
frantically points off towards the right.
Out across the field,
and no more than seventy yards away,
I now see what everyone is so frantic about.
There, traveling at speed,
a coyote has dared cross our path,
and is sprinting full hilt away from us.

From both vehicles,
every individual bolts from their doors and in turn,
empties the rifle racks of their contents.
Most of the other farm boys
grab medium to big-bore rifles,
but I am not to be empty handed
as someone throws me an
.22 automatic rifle complete with scope.

We are primal now.
For some reason, we know that we, in mass,
must kill this one lone coyote.
All erupting at once,
we spew forth tiny bits of high velocity lead
towards some four legged canine creature
we somehow now hate
to the point of wishing death.
I find I can’t be bothered to look through the scope,
for there is no time; no patience to be had.
Everyone else has already commenced
our group orgasmic outpouring
and I'm not to be left behind.

I don't know that I'm even aiming at all.
The barrel of the .22 is vaguely pointed towards
that of the object we so vehemently loath
and I find myself pulling and re-pulling the trigger
as fast as I possibly can.

Out there beyond the end of my rifle,
I see the dirt around the fleeing coyote
exploding upwards out of the
corn stalk stubbled earth and yet,
in spite of the lead projectile rain,
the coyote continues bolting forward,
upwards across the slope
and away from us,
apparently unaffected
from the contrary wishes of we,
the superior life forms.

Why am I doing this?
How is this moment, just now,
defining who I am as a person?
Have I not seen this action performed
somewhere; sometime
not long ago?

Years later,
I'm back to being somewhere on the I-29
and my hips hurt;
I'm tired, grumpy
and still these thoughts about coyotes.
Sitting there next to my father,
I think to myself
how you never seem to see them anymore,
or at least,
I don't anyway,
and just then…
amazingly at that precise moment…
I look off to my right
and see a single,
emaciated lone coyote
moving slowly
through the barren landscape
of this unforgiving climate.

From my left,
comes a few familiar words.
Something like:
"Look son.
There’s a coyote."

Yes, but this time
we pass it by.
This time,
it dies on its own.

©97 Jack Hubbell

Maple Street
Omaha

Coito-Frigo-Phobia
I guess it’s not surprising that
if you’re messed up mentally,
you could be unstable in
more than one way.
Yea, well,
he had some phobias.
Note that that’s phobia plural.
Oh no.
Not one.
Not one, but two.
But then it wasn’t two but rather,
two combined into one.

His therapist said
there was one phobia called
“Frigophobia”,
i.e., the fear of cold things.”
And then there was
“Coitophobia”.
Ahem…
The fear of performing coitus.
You know…
Sexual intercourse.
The ol’ in-out in-out.

Strangely enough,
he didn’t suffer from
each of these separately.
No. No, it was something
his dad had said when he was a kid
that acted as trigger for his neurosis.

His dad
(and I’m trying to be cautious here)…
His dad said that he, the son
was lucky to be around.
Lucky to even exist for the fact that
his wife, the son’s mom, was
“so damn frigid.”

Frigid?
Sex?
Sex…Frigid?
Women’s private parts were
freezing cold?!
What the fuck?!
Well, you know what?
That would explain a heck of allot.
Kind of explain why
a certain part of his anatomy did
certain things at
certain times.

Yes, ever since that first moment
when he as a young man had seen his
first attractive woman and that
special little part of him
sorta…
froze up.

You know,
just froze up absolutely solid.

Don’t laugh.
This is serious!
It was frozen.

Frozen solid!

Oh…

Oh, the horror!

The HORROR!

©05 Jack Hubbell

One Half
Omaha

Vacuous Existence
You have to have a certain
atmosphere to carry a proper conversation.
I’ve found that a mixture of
nitrogen and oxygen works best.
Absolute vacuum will get you nowhere.

Yes, you can stand in a vacuum
and attempt to talk until you’re
blue in the face
but you will have said nothing.
Oh, perhaps you will have
communicated something via a
vaguely intense form of body language.
Yes. What with all those flamboyant gesticulations,
the grabbing at your throat, and that distinct
bug-eyed expression locked upon your face…
just what will you have conveyed?
At tops, one self-centered topic of discussion
and beyond that,
dead silence.

Again,
in a vacuum,
you make a pathetic conversationalist.

Okay, so I will give you that one excuse,
but here we are,
give or take a few thousand feet above sea level,
and the barometric pressure looks pretty good.
Quite favorable air quality.
Yes, your skin now appears quite pink and rosy.
Indeed, I see your lips part.
I sense the rush of air over their
spittle spattered existence as
your lungs fill to maximum density.
And then, of course, that ever important
rise of the diaphragm as you
expel all that gaseous atmosphere
up past your larynx and out to us,
your ever enthralled listeners.

And yet, you say nothing.
Oh, I see your lips moving.
Yes. Most certainly notice that
you are trying to communicate some
concept you deem worthy of
great personal import and yet…nothing.
Nothing and more than that. Nothing.
It’s as if you are taking the air
and giving nothing back in return.

“Taking the air.”
Wasn’t that an old Victorian expression?
“Excuse me sir, but,
where did they go? “
“Them? Oh,
they’ve stepped outside.
Taking in the air, as it were.”

Yes, they (as you) were taking the air and yet,
providing nothing in return.
Taking: yes.
Consuming: yes.
Giving: no.
You and they:
one and the same.

Why it’s almost as if you were some
pompous politician
sitting in a high mighty chair
in a great hoary white house.
Taking the air.
Sucking in all our sustenance.
Devouring the world and
giving back nothing,
whilst the rest of us slowly
suffocate.
Us: cursed by your bloated yet
vacuous presence.

Do us all a favor.
If you won’t exhale
then at least hold your breath.
And there, while you turn assorted shades of blue,
just think of all the lives you will have saved.
Saved just by simply uttering nothing.
By all means,
cherish this self imposed vacuum by yourself alone,
and please let the rest of us
breathe.

©06 Jack Hubbell