In the Alley

by Brett Rutherford

Somewhere in Union City
on a pot-holed side street
I stumble upon a crime scene.

It is not yet seven. No one
has entered the alleyway
that fronts the auto shop.
No one has seen her, naked,
flattened, it seems, by tires
that crushed her this way
and that. Her toothless mouth
is agape in the permanent “oh”
that must have frozen there
as she knew there’d be no mercy
from the circle of attackers.

The thing her mother told her
never to show to strangers
now greets the pigeons, the clouds,
and the imminent sun-rays.
She is so torn it seems
that dogs, and not a pack of men
had been at her. Her legs
are still apart, her shoes
might be some blocks away.

Running this way at midnight
she would have found no shelter.
The chain-link fence, the ripple
of the closed and corrugated shutters
gave her no place to hide.

They had all the time in the world.
No one would hear her. One by one
they did as they wished with her,
then, lighting one another’s cigars,
they left. The moon watched
and sank, too shamed to speak.

Next week, the men will take
among themselves a collection,
a pay-day self-tax for future pleasure.
Down at the pink-lit adult arcade
they will purchase another
whose toothless mouth will never
refuse them, whose legs
are always open, whose breasts
remind them
of one another’s younger sisters.
There is a place on her back
where you pump the air in.
With luck she might last
an hour in the parking lot,
before she’s done for,

hissing out her last,
late night’s love-doll,
inflatable woman.

 

More Creepy Poems Than You Can Count

 

My huge collection, Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems, contains all my dark and creepy work up through mid-2019. Like Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," I have expanded this work like a huge ball of string. Vampires, Golems, werewolves, mummies and ghouls abound, as well as many dark things inspired by or about H.P. Lovecraft. This is the ultimate poetic story-book for things to read aloud around the campfire, or to frighten young children into hiding under the covers. The 416-page book is now available as a PDF ebook for just $2.99. And remember, every time a copy of this book is purchased, a demon gets his wings.

Order PDF Ebook

Van Cliburn's Triumphant Rise

One of the greatest recordings of the 20th century. Van Cliburn, back from Russia after winning the Tchaikovsky competition, got a ticker tape parade in New York City. This recording, made in Carnegie Hall with a live audience, shows what all the fuss was about. This tall, imposing young Texan rips into Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto, the Mt. Everest of piano concertos.

 

My First Typewriter

 

When I was in third grade, all I wanted was a typewriter. I was given one for Christmas, but it was a toy. You had to rotate a wheel to each letter and then strike a key. It was a cruel joke.

Sometime around fifth grade, with no prospect of ever seeing a typewriter, a camera, or a bicycle (let alone new shoes or eyeglasses), I saw an ad in the back of a comic book. Shortly thereafter I was going from door to door, taking orders for Christmas cards. I am pretty sure this is how I bought a typewriter.

My Lost First Novel

 When I was in tenth grade, I completed a novel. It was a science-fiction novel, almost 100,000 words. As an avid fan of Famous Monsters Magazine, I knew that its editor, Forrest J. Ackerman, was also a literary agent for sci-fi writers. So I packed it up, calculated the outgoing and return postage and was ready to send my first work into the world.

But I did not have the postage money. I had enough money in my pocket to have a couple of after-school five cent sodas at the drug store soda fountain. That's it.

So I carefully and patiently explained to my mother how to mail the package, and that I wanted postage inside the box so that Mr. Ackerman would not have to pay for returning my ms. if he hated it. She promised to take it to the post office and mail it. I assured her that I was soon to be a famous science-fiction writer.

She told me she had mailed the package. She wouldn't say how much it cost.

Weeks passed. Two months passed. Three months passed. Finally, I mailed a letter to Mr. Ackerman asking if he had received my novel. He replied tersely that no such package had come to him.

I despaired. It was lost forever. I had a dim carbon copy, and the original had gone astray.

I didn't try again. I wrote more short stories. I wrote two plays. And then I moved on to poetry.

More than a year later, I was at the kitchen sink and leaned forward when I dropped a knife. I saw something oblong, wrapped in cardboard.

I reached down. There was the manuscript for my novel, lodged between the sink and the wall behind it.

It had never been mailed, and my mother lied to me.

I said nothing. I just carried it like a dead weight on my soul.

I even repressed the memory of this, as of other inexplicable acts of negation, but then it came back to me, crystal clear.

Designing A Poster for Poets in Protest

 

I do not remember this poetry reading, but I designed the poster for it, and read there with poets from Ireland, Poland, Cuba, Argentina and the U.S. It was organized by Boria Sax and was an Amnesty International event. I did a couple of other designs and layouts for Amnesty, but it is a rather clouded memory (1980s).

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for Two Pianos

 Knowing that few people would get to hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Franz Liszt arranged it for two pianos. This striking performance has two pianos, plus a timpanist to put Beethoven's percussion back in.

Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet

 Shakespeare has inspired many works of music. Among the top ten would have to be Tchaikovsky's symphonic poem, "Romeo and Juliet." To show that Romanticism lives, here is a brand new piano transcription of that work, in all its gloom and stormy passion. I swooned listening to this.

Tchaikovsky Romeo & Juliet Overture Fantasy arr. Sudbin

And to hear the original for orchestra:

The Sleep of Priests

 by Brett Rutherford

The bishop’s weak lung
wheezes at night
beneath the blankets,
not gone, not even
“disappeared” like those
arrested and vanished
in the time of strict
government. As soon
as he closes one eye
the air sac expands
and it blasts one note,
one drone
like the idiot half
of a bagpipe.

Don – don – don
Donde – donde – donde
Where – where – where
the unburied dead,
the unabsolved,
the ghosts denied
the moment of unction?

Don – don – don,
Donde – donde – donde,
one note from
dusk to dawn
in thirty thousand beats
of monotonous asking

where – where – where
our blackened bones,
our dust, our skulls
a-crush beneath some
concrete stadium?

Lung-bladder ghost,
Guilt’s bagpiper,
vacuum bag inhaling
his withered prayer.
No sleep for him!

He tosses and turns.
Some black-robed brothers
have helped the Government;
others have hidden students,
professors and artists;
others have waved two hands,
ten fingers wagging, heads
shaking no, eyes firmly closed.

Nothing, I have heard nothing.
I have not read the papers.
I will of course
light candles if I am asked.

How many sleep well?
How many sleep at all?
Which of them heard
the executioner’s confession
and said nothing in turn
to his own confessor,
passing it to God only
without a further thought?

How many imsomniacs
hear lung or heart,
ribcage or ear’s cavity,
or an ever-throbbing vein
that will not let them sleep,
echoing:

Don – don – don
Donde – donde – donde,
Where are the Disappeared?

Man of the Hour

 by Brett Rutherford

Those mouse-like men
     who ousted Gorbachev
while he was up in the air,
and far from the border;
oh, how brave they were,
belling the cat’s absence;
and then they fled
to their Moscow apartments,
under the blankets in a vodka stupor.

All knew the routine.
Glasnost had played itself
as the long arachnid trap,
predictable as tide or snow,
or a lesson in dialectics.

A liberal Spring, a little thaw
to bring the poets and liberals out.
Then watch them, count them.
Make lists. Prepare the officers
for the sudden clampdown,
boxcars to the always-open Gulag.
All hail to Party chairman,
whoever that turned out to be.

But this time, it did not go
as the planners intended.
It only took one man, one
near the apex of power, to prove
that cycles are not eternal, hope
no poison beet on a string,
a false promise in a pot of borscht,

one man to say, “Not this time.”
Make no mistake: Boris Yeltsin
ended the Communist rule of Russia.
A great bear, a man without fear.
He did not need to be sober to win,
just a little more sober than
his cowering enemies.

No one knew how
it would all turn out.
That it came out differently
is what we need to learn.

The Plural Visitation

 

by Brett Rutherford

Now cut that out! I have weathered a lot

of discord in this urban arena:

the fenced-in barcarolle of neighbor dogs,

the rising and falling of conga drums,

the melodious yowl of cats in heat,

gunshots or backfires, airplanes and truck-horns,

the underground rattle-roll from tunnels,

the swell and deep shudder made manifest

by continental drift — somehow I have slept

through all of that. So now it is you:

The rag and wraith of a banshee I have spied

before (one blighted Hallow’d night I watched

one extricate itself from a tangle

of unyielding shrubbery), but that was

you in the singular, your lonesome cry

dissolving to a wisp of midnight wind.

This Brooklyn visitation is plural!

Twelve pairs of bony hands reach out to me,

from a hen-pack dozen of whirling shrouds.

Faces, if you can call them that, jut out

with insect eyes or blobs of black jelly.

Their twelve-part chorusing, from ruddy bass

to the highest squeak-screech of violins,

piles the diabolus in musica

and partners every howling note chromatic

with its half-step brother, an elephant

falling on every organ key at once.

All this, and on and on for hours, all this

from your wingbeats thrust into my window.

Who sent you? I am not even Irish!

Therefore, these whistles and yells cannot be

addressed to me, you howling telegram!

You have the wrong building entirely.

The errant Kelly, the drunken O’Brien, 

Leary with all his guns and bombs, have moved.

And why, I ask, come you in committee,

the way you dropped en masse for Spanish Flu,

or the starvelings of potato famine?

Oh, friends have died, and some died horribly,

but one by one they left me, unsummoned

by anything that tread night’s canopy.

When my time comes, I will see a raven,

a bard’s beckoning, a stately ibis.

Again, no son of Celt or Eire sleeps here.

The cat is Siamese, for goodness’ sake!

So gather up your mealy, dustmop heads

and flap on off to somebody else’s

premonition of death, you silly birds!

The Jupiter-Saturn Great Conjunction

by Brett Rutherford

Goya: Saturn Devouring His Children

Two giants approach, their masses swollen
with age and pride. One, facing us, will pass
before the other, back turned in scornful
enmity. Rings peep like ears from Saturn
as Jupiter and all his companion
satellites take pride of place and orbit.

Back turned to Saturn-Cronos, his father,
Jupiter calls out in scorn: “You, frozen,
turgid in your ever-colder banishment,
you almost ate me once.” No answer comes.

He turns his eye outward, now, accusingly:
“You swallowed my brothers and sisters.
Have you at long last no guilt for your crimes?”
From icy outer rings a bell-tone stirs;
a moon peeps from behind the old planet,
but Saturn, as ever, utters nothing.

Though all was settled long eons ago,
there is no end to conspiracies:
Saturn has eighty-two satellites still
contesting the Olympian election,
clinging to lies and a tyrant’s coat-tails,
while Jupiter is the acknowledged king
with only seventy-nine companions.

“They love me,” boasts Jupiter, “and I, them,
while you have only courtiers bound by dread.”
Now, squinting at sun with his one red eye,
the king of worlds winces as gravity
ever so slightly tugs him back Saturn-ward

and the sullen, yellow-brown cannibal
shrugs, its face and brow inscrutable, its moons
ice-cracked with slogans braying how Jupiter
was not a proper god and the Olympians
were better locked up in their father’s belly,
a fit prison for ill-born imposters.

Nothing will come of the great conjunction,
for the gods as they are, on their planets
wage an incessant strife. Wait twenty years —
it is the same story told once again.
Avert your gaze from Saturn’s armory,
shun Mars and his war-cry. Venus, for love;
fleet Mercury for gods’ inspiration;
Sun ever-rising with beneficent rays;
Moon, the world’s clock with tidal urgings,
and Earth itself, shelter to demigods
and Muses: abide if not obey them,
and leave to Titans the terrors of war.

  

Where Is My Golden Butterfly

 by Brett Rutherford

1

I am deep into the unforgiving heart
of Latin Lucretius: De rerum naturum.
“Where is my golden butterfly?” you ask.
I close the book. Together we search
the tabletop, the floor, the window-box.
“Oh, it has fluttered off, and now is free.” —
“Keep looking,” you say, “for I fear the worst.”

Next to the pantry door, it hovers there,
now paralyzed, atop a dusty web.
“Set it free!” you cry concernedly.
“It is too late,” I say, “for even now
the black spider has already kissed it;
its orb and legs already spin its shroud.
Its wing-beat gone, it has no power now
to escape the poisoner’s cruel caprice.”

With broom I pull the whole mess down,
and do not chide your neglect of dusting,
as not just one, but twelve subsidiary
webs, each with its own arachnid tenant,
collapse into a nebula of death.
You do not speak, your trembling arm extends
a pointed finger to the out-of-doors.
And so your favorite thing, now dead-alive,
drops down into the ice-fringed compost heap.

 

2

My dreams, so many levels deep these days
are full of others’ unhappiness,
not my own memories in Freud’s jumble,
but all the sad domestic misfortunes,
work rivalries, the sting of sociopath
bosses, days jailed in false arrest, theft-loss,
the broken promises, abandonments,
the blame for crimes you didn’t even think
to do, but everyone assumed you did
because you are so not like the others,
cop-stopped, or grabbed by men in an alley,
when they barred the door, or showed you to it,
said things behind your back you full well heard.
This is what your dreams are made of these days,
not the good sex you’ve had; not one prayer
spread out like a Sunday picnic blanket.

I dream, ten levels down, and cannot leave.
Not one of these events happened to me.
They are spattered by other sleepers tied
in the webs of coma: they broadcast out
as their attendants turn them, fill their veins
with sugar and salt, air bellowed in-out
as their suspended-animation thoughts
cascade into the cosmos. Had I not
the strength of lucid dreaming, I would be
on the brink of my own madness.

Yet I have learned from this a truth profound:
the mind blanks over pain, and even death
and loss. The people have one thing only
that cannot be taken from them: their pride,
an angry wound whose only medicine
is justice, served cool and implacable.

As the rose before the buffeting frost,
the butterfly too beautiful to die,
is turned and bound by the indifferent spider,
all nature screams to me: unfair! unjust!

 

3

You have lost your golden butterfly,
and now I cannot read Lucretius.
I am thinking how good it felt, that one
small efficacious burst of power,
when I trampled black spiders underfoot,
and there seemed to be, for just one moment,
that … much … less … evil abroad in the world.