Sighted Unsaintly Saints
Strange specters haunt my dreams and
waking hours.
Last night I dreamt I saw David
Bowie.
He was hiding, sitting hunched over
and brooding at a government box of
orange juice
in a dreamscape high-school
cafeteria.
He had that Goblin King hair,
and was wearing a crushed velvet
purple caplet.
I touched his shoulder and he looked at me.
“Please come back. We need you!”
He smiled the slow, cat-like,
enigmatic grin of the dreamed and the dead and replied,
“I can’t. I was there with you while I was for
a reason.”
Dismayed, but not thwarted, I said,
“Well, then, the next time around?”
He nodded, his long, blond,
perfectly-coiffed-rock-star hair bobbing, and seemed to laugh.
“Next time around. Yes.”
It’s not the first time I’ve dreamed
of a famous dead guy.
I’d frequently conjure the ghost of Charles
Bukowski,
at eighteen sipping red wine
and reading a volume of verse
borrowed from my punk rock cousin,
sitting in an old green arm chair.
I followed his adventures down the
bottle
and in cheap apartments
like a quiet guardian angel
with my halo slowly slipping,
or like a nosy neighbor
with her ear against the thin and moldy wall,
or leaning out the window
to watch the old drunk stagger up the
street,
pressing crumpled, battered hat
against his brow and lanky hair,
face like a barnacled prow of a weathered
ship,
eyes that had endured the hell of the
slaughterhouse
and the slow purgatory of the
postman’s desperation.
After Hunter S. Thompson died,
for a week, I saw him everywhere on
my community college campus.
By the trailer that housed the school
paper
where I published my first poem in print,
to the fountain where I sat in a
short blue corduroy skirt
and tried to look effortlessly cute
while writing about ants,
to the elevator where I distinctly
saw him walking an iguana on a leash,
little stars like tiny suns orbiting his head,
some weird vision of my weird version
of a saint,
though no saints these crude dudes
living in my canon,
Thompson, Bukowski or Bowie.
Chani Zwibel is a graduate of Agnes Scott College, a
poet, wife and dog-mom who was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but
now dwells in Marietta, Georgia. She enjoys writing poetry after nature walks
and daydreaming.
Recent Publications include:
Occulum
Oct 2, 2017,
Dissident Voice Sept 24, 2017, HorrorSleazeTrash August 26, 2017, The Song Is August 9, 2017, Clockwise
Cat Thugwise Cat Issue 37 (June 2017),Sage
Woman Worlds of Faerie Issue 91(April 2017), W.I.S.H (Walking Is Still Honest) Press March 10, 2017, Provoke Journal, January 2017
Tags:
Poetry