POEMS

by Kurt Nimmo

TIDES OF MISERY

No matter 
where I go they are with me--
the abandoned women,
the dispossessed children,
the unemployed and rumpled men,
I rent a place
and there they are--
screaming women in the street,
unshaven men parking broken-down cars
sideways against curbs,
resented children
playing in water-damaged card-
board boxes on sun-parched lawns,
I watch them
through my dirty windows,
the women seem to be
forever pregnant,
swelling and fat with
the tides of misery, 
while the men stumble drunk 
as they work on junk-
yard cars,
the children are ill-fitted
in bad clothing, they remain outside
past dark, neglected 
mistakes, half-
moments of pleasure,
these people are an endless procession,
a cavalcade of bad teeth,
alcoholism, and
debt, the vice of poverty
tightens, slowly crushes them
as the rich sun themselves in Monaco,
Barbados, and San Clemente,
at midnight you can
hear ghetto gunshots,
followed by silence under
a pale yellow moon,
the poor follow me around
from place to place,
an economic bacterium,
and I'm forever trying to escape,
clawing my way free,
but I can't and
probably never will.


WAITING FOR THINGS TO HAPPEN

We slept
on the floor of her
mother's house. I was 
unemployed. Everything I owned
fit in a cardboard box. She didn't
have a job. She would steal
these white pills from her mother.
The mother was a lesbian.
The mother was on white pills
for some medical reason 
or another. I wrote 
poems by hand in a red notebook.
The poems were very bad. I wanted
to be a writer. But I didn't know
how it is done. It would take
nearly fifteen years
to figure it out. We slept on
the floor. In the morning
the lesbian mother
would get in a big green
Lincoln Town Car and drive to work.
She worked as an administrator
in Atlanta. Her daughter
would steal white prescription pills
and sit around half naked
while the lesbian mother worked
as an administrator in an 
Atlanta office building. 
I wanted to be a great writer. 
I wanted something
better than what I had. But I didn't
know how to get it. Not yet.
I had to wait for something to happen.
Much of life is waiting
but I try not to think about it.
I wrote in the red notebook
and waited. She was half naked.
Here, she said.  Take one 
of these white pills. I did. I took 
one of the white prescription pills
and waited for it to do something.
We sat around on the 
lesbian mother's furniture. I had 
a lot to learn. She had learned 
too much too quickly. Even though
it had nothing to do with writing.
It went on like that for 
a period of time and then 
the lesbian mother
told us we had to leave.
We did. We left. Even though
we had nowhere in
particular to go.


MORTOS

She wanted
to kill me. I didn't want
to kill anything. We drove
along a country road
in Georgia. I lived there with
her and the lesbian mother.
Not only did she
want to kill me, but also
the lesbian mother--and, of course,
the father who had abandoned
her. I just wanted
to escape something,
though I didn't yet know what.
I'd learn that
it was me and everybody else
I wanted to escape. It would take me
a decade to discover this.
We drove along
in her lesbian mother's
big Lincoln Town Car. It was
a monster, a full eight cylinders
of potential death. She wanted
to kill something. All around us
lay the landscape
with its corn and scrub pines.
Almost beautiful, if not
for the situation.
She wanted to kill something.
She was a murderess. We ran the
Lincoln Town Car against
the landscape.
Escape was impossible.
Escape was a textbook definition.
We argued about something
and then she suddenly
grabbed the wheel,
yanked it toward her very hard.
The Lincoln Town Car
swerved to one side of the road
and then the other. It was
a good car, held its
own. I screamed. We both
screamed. What's wrong with you?
I screamed. Goddamn crazy
fucking bitch! She liked it when
I screamed. It helped to remind her
that she was not alone
in the world. I wanted to kill her.
She wanted to kill me,
the lesbian mother and the
father she did not know.
Beyond us the green landscape
was almost perfectly 
beautiful. We continued 
to move against it, 
murderously.


MISTER NO FEAR

In the rush
to work, I'm cut out
of a lane by a pickup truck
with oversized tires
and a sticker in the rear window.
NO FEAR, the sticker
claims. I brake
hard, pissed, and shift
over a lane. From there,
I can see the guy responsible
for the pickup truck:
a twentysomething male
with a Marine haircut and
a snarly expression glued 
to a pale hatchet face.
NO FEAR. Yeah, right, I think-- 
thirty seconds under the truncheon 
of a Serbian interrogator
and this little MTV consumer
would quiver like a bowl of red jello 
left out on a coin-operated 
vibrating motel bed.
But then this isn't
the Balkans seized with
torture and homicide, but 
America, the land of milquetoast
office workers and weekend
splatterball warriors.
Everything is, of course,
relative. Mr. No Fear in his
cartoon pickup truck
is but another gnat, yet another
annoyance. I switch lanes
again, to put even more
distance between us,
and move, as
always, toward
the job.