Pointless Channel

I have this idea in my head

that something like morning or

vista or river gorge

could never be a failure.

I can’t tell if I’m happy

or jealous.  Things bug me:

just trying to maintain contact

I get up early and drive

to a downtown café, which in itself

seems like a pointless move.

Then at the café

I trip about how someone left

a chair pulled kitty corner

for a foot stool.

Clearly no one straightened up

last night at close.

And mainly the music is too loud.

I saw the young woman working

singing along

to maybe it’s Billie Holiday.

She likes it.  She’s working

and she just wants to sing

and I’m just trying to maintain contact

but I can’t think in here.

And then even when a business

type guy steps up says hey

can you turn that music down?

I can only barely start

to feel the total beauty of that guy’s

correspondence with me. 

I barely see him

as the brightest spark of the current

moment’s manifestation—

a St. Francis in balance

between sun and moon—

before this static wobble

buzzes and snaps clear:

How rude.  What an asshole.

I Struggle to Live in Harmony

__________________________with the Forms

Just now sitting reading in a kind of puffy

orange recliner, a little felty or almost velour

—a recliner that appears embarrassing

-ly often in my writing—I felt

at first dimly then with increasing

urgency that I was being dive-bombed

by a swooping invader.

It swung out from the window then

attacked the pane and fell

then swung out from the window and

attacked the pane and fell again before

making one full turn around

the main atmosphere of the room

then snapping back at top speed

as if attached to an invisible bungee cord

past my face to strike the barrier and

stunned, stay. 

I feel the shock of past in this present—

the recognition of former shame

in the memory of a time when impulses freshened

into bright bursts of irrational behavior.

__________~~~~~~~~

Kept awake one summer night

by rodent scratch and peep in the duct work—

annoyed at the swampy light already like sewage

overflowing the East beginning to pool

on the skanky linoleum of the sky

I stopped trying to sleep and rode my bike

five miles to a twenty four hour Wal-Mart

on the outskirts of town.

I bought three mouse traps and rode back

through quiet neighborhoods with

instruments of death in a plastic bag. 

Traps prepared, I knelt and placed

my peanut-buttery hand

on the dusty duct cover.

Surprisingly afraid of being startled or God

forbid making contact—I felt threaded

by fine prickly vines like I

was a bramble in which raspberries of fear

might suddenly open

causing me to leap in huge tip-toed bounds

like a cartoon animal

crossing hot coals—I had to use

will power to control

my breathing enough to

pull away the duct cover and look. 

_________________________Nothing

was there__________but

an aluminum____chute with some dark

at the bottom and a small____gap

in the rough brown base board where

a smattering of plaster dust

covered the rough-cut edge

of the rose-colored carpeting

on which lay a small

clump of cured- and rolled-looking

leaves like a little half cigar

which when you look closely at it

you see has spiny limbs and things like

fingers on something between a hand

and a claw because that’s what

a bat has on the end of its arm-wing-thingy-things.

__________~~~~~~~~

In theoretical conversations I usually maintain

that fears are acquired but then

I sometimes act like a punch bowl of chemicals

spiked with a collective unconscious

symbology of evil unfiltered

by rational knowledge and experience.

__________~~~~~~~~

I quickly stood and leapt back away

dashed to the cupboard and withdrew

one clear plastic tumbler and one tea saucer. 

With nearly amazing dexterity

I captured the bat but not with so much

dexterity that I failed to wake it

by trapping its finger-clawed hand-thing

between the cup and the plate

which is what caused it to

burst open like evil curtains around an evil stage

that’s made of one bat’s evil body with

out-thrust arms legs and wings

to fill the space of the tumbler

lock eyes with me and hiss

with teeth that appeared not only sharp

but sharpened.

I managed to run and swerve through the blinding fire

of my terror holding the bat-tumbler-saucer

and making little sobbing sounds out

to the sidewalk in front of my house

where I set the bat-tumbler-saucer before

bolting back inside to look at it

through my front window.

There it was, a bat in a tumbler on a saucer

on the sidewalk in front of my house.

I heard a siren closing in.

An ambulance rushed by.

A garbage truck clattered by. 

It was almost morning.

People would soon begin walking by with curious dogs. 

Children would ride by on bikes, skateboards, and scooters. 

The elderly and/or infirm would pass by

in mechanized strollers that wouldn’t fit

between the bat and the edge of the sidewalk.

They would then have to

knock over the tumbler and set the bat loose

or go around the bat and risk the sharp

road-sloped sidewalk edge

or back up to the corner of the block

—if  those chairs even go in reverse—

turn and find another route to their destination

or  maybe just stop there indefinitely

and wait for life to decide

between the forward progress of an elderly and/or infirm

person and a manifestation of evil imprisoned in a tumbler. 

This was not over.

I still had to do more.

__________~~~~~~~~

I went quickly to the garage

and grabbed the plastic cooler I used

to bring beer to outdoor parties.

I carefully set the bat, plate and tumbler in the cooler

closed the cooler and carried it steadily

to the car, put it in the trunk

and drove slowly so as not to tip either the cooler

or the tumbler inside the cooler

out to the Wal-Mart actually

behind the Wal-Mart where

I thought there might be some dumpsters

and there were: three giant military-looking dumpsters

each at least ten feet high. 

I got out of the car

took the cooler from the trunk

and in one fluid motion

opened the top of the cooler and launched

the whole multi-faceted apparatus up over the high

lip of the dumpster.

Then I ducked quickly back

inside my compact car and

tore ass outta there.

I had survived the ordeal

and might’ve felt relief sweep over me

except that soon—though perhaps not

soon enough—I began to realize:

A) the bat might’ve already

suffocated—I never saw it fly free,

B) bats have advanced sonar systems

so if it wanted to return

to the home I feared it had made in

quote-unquote “my” house

it could probably do that

despite my efforts to relocate it in the suburbs,

C) bats are protected by environmental laws

and anyway they’re just fellow forms

of life trying to live not blood-sucking

monsters you idiotic worthless weak failure

someone should put you in a cooler

and throw you at a Wal-Mart and finally

D) with surveillance and increasing fear of terrorism

a man hurling a bomb-sized object into such a

patriotic-slash-capitalist symbol as a Wal-Mart dumpster

was likely to be detained in a matter of hours or days.

__________~~~~~~~~

Eventually, when nothing continued happening

I stopped wearing ball caps and dark sunglasses.

Through meditation I assimilated the experience

as part of my history.  I am not

—despite a flavor of the Olympiad

in that open cooler toss—

an action hero, world leader.  Nor am I

innocent—I have never been innocent—the blood

of the world was always on my hands

was one kind of biblical way I thought about it

—and I won’t always be courageous

in difficult times in fact

I may never face adversity with anything like dignity

and if I killed that bat

then that bat can only live on

through my life these words and all

this kind of adjustment justification

acclimation thinking lasted

until right now______++++_and now

__________________—though I’ll admit

bees aren’t as scary as bats—I’m proud

to say I’ve grown as a person

because just before writing this all down

I went and got a saucer

and a little clear Tupperware container

and put the saucer against the window

in front of the dive-bombing bee

which ambled very calmly

with a blind kind of trust in creation’s

amazing proliferation onto the saucer and I

covered it with the Tupperware

carried it outside

removed the Tupperware

and then stood there

watching it—a yellow-jacket

I think—black and yellow kind of bee

with two sharp yellow lines

for eyes although do bees have eyes?—until

it hovered up with a classic bee buzz

and flew off to live

with composure and grace

through the amplitude of time and space

given freely to us all.

William Stobb is the author of two poetry collections: Nervous Systems, a National Poetry Series selection, published by Penguin Books (2007) and For Better Night Vision, a limited edition chapbook published by the Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada.  Stobb's poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, American Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, and other journals and zines. His monthly column on poetry and poetics, “Hard to Say”, is podcast by miPOradio.  A graduate of the Universities of North Dakota and Nevada, Stobb lives in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he is Associate Professor of English at Viterbo University and where, with David Krump, he co-curates the monthly reading series at The Pump House Regional Arts Center. You can read more about him as well as visit links to his work online at his website.