Hey Java Lounge Crew.... Thought I would say hi, and send a poem along I just wrote, here at the first anual Nebraska Writers confernce. A week study and writing of nothing but poetry, aw, life is sweet. Omaha is good, good readings, good people...two week and diging it..here is a poem for your pleasure/feedback....ps..Marc, do contributors to the CD get a free copy.

The line breaks, btw, did not hold here.

Liftoff

Summerset Maugham, where Is your Mr. Death?
The small-plot kale farmer/grain elevator operator,
sprawled upon the oleaginous, plastic bar could use this morsel.
His wife, stroking his boss in the back of their Aerostar minivan
is not blurry enough in the square photo pulsating between his fingers,
and the hundred pounds monogramming his middle
is not from organic red-leaf lettuce.
He cries on Mondays and Saturdays
and on Tuesdays and Sundays?
He practices licking the tailpipe of the van.

Cows float by the window as wind-spanked dandelion heads,
and I am not even certain about my own hands in Nebraska.
When Dean Young taught
the world was goofy and terrible, we believed him,
but this man here, dunk on Jim Beam and forlorn, mumbles,
why do we spend so much on saving the whales
when people are dying. Oh Dean,
today you are only 60% sage, your body torn
just off center, gum from a generous six year old girl,
or those Iranian Siamese twins, dissected by surgeons,
they blend like beets on a Caucasian counter-top.
They are dead.
The farmhand stutters,
the wind, the stillness of death,
the sicknesses of the soul.

And what of my mouth, that useless drunkard fly
drowning in molasses, crooked and silent,
or my ears like petty thieves in French films,
my words are turncoats, rotting arugula,
my love a wrought-ironed gate with spikes,
and July? My Cape Canaveral,
erect on the launch-pad, pogo-stick between my legs.
My hands find the knobs of his disconsolate, baffled shoulder.

July 16, 2003

By Rich Furman