Jon Wolston's Poetry Archive

There he goes again,
lost in another blizzard,
talking to himself.

Now that you are invaluable to me
after all these years,
what’s wrong with telling you
when Nazis start making off
with your church bells
or locusts encircle your halo?
O where do the powers lie, my love?

We were driving to Gotham
under an overpass in Jersey
when I heard that Muddy Waters died.

The wipers caught my eye
and washed me clean off the screen.
All the rubber tires
made the rain sound magic.

(sung in the style of Loudon Wainwright and Harry Belafonte)

Now when your ass be draggin’ da groun’
Time to put da mutts in da pound
Buy a teekit, take a cruise,
Make some friends, drink lotsa booze!

HEY EVERYBODY GET ON DA SHIP
TIME TO MAKE DA VIKIN’ TRIP.

Two-Beers he take us up da Rhone,
So much food can’t leave it alone,
Don’ need hell to pay for sins,
Jet lag give your head da spins!

HEY EVERYBODY GET ON DA SHIP
TIME TO MAKE DA VIKIN’ TRIP.

Good Friday come, Good Friday go,
Da crew dey put on quite da show.
Vikin’ want to get your keester
Back on board da followin’ Easter!

HEY EVERYBODY GET ON DA SHIP
TIME FOR ANOTHER VIKIN’ TRIP.

I’m supposed to like France.
I’m going again.
I suppose it’s the food,
and the wine and the sin.

It can’t be the loos—
they are Stygian bogs.
Oh, what the hell!
I’m lovin’ the Frogs.

Seth tickles the keys.
Magic Dick blows a mean harp
on “Whammer Jammer.”

Dance-floor carousing
greets Peter Wolf”s catcalls—
T-shirts abounding.

In the spring of 1865,
Professor Agassiz and his young wunderkind
set forth in earnest
to assail the toehold
of Charles Darwin’s genius,
to best that dour intellectual
in the rank jungles of the Amazon Basin.

Rapt with expectation
regarding the finny denizens
of yon exuberant delta,
you bid adieu to Cambridge chill
and the smoldering coals of Old Richmond,
to charge headlong
towards a new birth of freedom
and spacious conveyance:
your blazing rendezvous with the sultry–
her steaming reach,
her star-eyed effluvia.

The camera captures
the President’s widow
where the British failed:

a far cry from your youthful daring,
your political genius—
fleeing the White House
with General Washington’s portrait,
its canvas coiled in your carriage,
just ahead of the flames.

Now, stark-eyed, poorer, discomfited,
ever in the same mournful dress,
you eye the living,
asking us
if we can keep the promise of our dear Republic
from the album of the dead.

He showed me a glistening
arrowhead of white agate
he found in high desert
and posted on his Droid.

I saw in it a Siberian fir
sighing before me under the snow weight,
and tent walls sagging
and the pole in the center
holding fast and true and straight.

I heard the reindeer mating
and the foals alive on the snow
and my people pulling through.

Our bus made it over the pass to PDX.
Our driver used chains just once,
for a few miles.
Where would I have been without him?
Could have missed our flight.