For William Carlos Williams

when you
finally discover
your old faded baseball glove

simply
resembles a toad
sitting on the side of the road

The Himalayan Birches

you smell her
shake & bake
& potato latkas
streaming up
the staircase

life can't be
as bad as
you think

shadows
& breeze
will overtake
the evening

Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain

i swear one day i'd like
to just flip on the fuckin tv
and there'd be simply some body
there sincerely apologizing for all of
america's atrocities of injustice and inhumanity
for slavery for the slaughter of the american
indian for chinese internment for not getting
into the holocaust quick enough for our slick
fucked-up entrance into vietnam korea iraq...

(there'd be no commercials
no commentators)

and he'd be
on there for

like ever...
like the weather channel

like some interminable telethon
for the hardcore

for the hardworking
junkie and criminal

Soul Survivor

tonight i broke down while listening to mahler
for he was able to evoke in only a couple simple notes
birth & death & life & childhood more so the core soul
key notes of childhood the earth & dirt river queen lit on fire
parked in the wilderness outside my window all of the bronx &
brooklyn & the berkshires rambling as a poet-philosopher-social-
observer from paris to italia to the coast of africa watching the terrible
slapstick comedians doing their song & dance acts on a ferry to sicilia
watch out or i'll wash your mouth out with sarcasm 'cause i'm a soul-survivor
combination of raging bull & brando love my blessed child when all that's left
is buddha brother of bodishivatta kentucky-fried dhammapada mama always
told me i was born at harlem-valley psychiatric behind the barbed-wire
on our way to pick up pumpkins stopping off at the red rooster...

Junk Mail

the new neighbors move
in and they welcome you
with barbecues and rumors

the first day you move in
the hag next door stares
your wife down because

she is young and beautiful
because she is not and has
a poor marriage and feels in-

secure and knows her husband
will be all over her and she'll
feel even more...

she tries to get you on her
side with fresh-baked
brownies and past

battles happening
to casually mention a little
later--"did you hear the dog?"

like some really bad build-up
to a terrible, futile riddle...to me
the ultimate parable to the suburbs

you knew right there
and then the first
day you moved in

Queer Commentary

while waiting outside walmart on some weekend morning
for my loved one to return (a matter of fact, she was in there
for tiki-torch lighting-fluid) i spy a whole bedraggled culture,
obese and repulsive, not scoping a thing around them,
addicted to their contraptions, such weak see-thru souls

a high school slash college girl sporting her sweats
which she has spent hours on to sculpt & mold in her own
private mirror aimed to perfectly accentuate her asshole and
then when she gets her targeted audience for her superficial
seduction (pretends to be offended and feign indifference)
like they're all a bunch of perverts and don't exist at all

(ultimately, what she has captured is "the illusion"
for adolescents and the young-to-middle-aged males,
for the raw and primitive status-quo, becoming a slave
to her fantasy world, of which she has become the ultimate
"consumer," and which the opposite gender desires to consume,
yet who's (de)formed superego knows there is a huge price in order to pay
for this item, and thus heretofore becomes an out-of-reach idol for them to log
in their frontal lobes for when they get desperate and down-in-the-dumps at home)

then goes casually to her cell phone...
which has become a part of her absurd and
acquired conscious-body-language-protocal
guys walk out with guns and fishing poles...

Toy-Representative

today i got transferred all over the place
when i simply wanted to ask a question
about a swing-set for our two year-old child
then got put on hold for what seemed like hours
to the song--"these boots are made for walking"
by the late-great psychedelic nancy sinatra
and when he decided to make his return
said something crazy in this mechanical
man-made voice as these days they find
it necessary to formally train them like
automatons all for the sake of political-
correctness and for litigious reasons--
"is this the customer who had the question
about the dorado swing set?" as i instantly
got defensive and over the phone (in)visibly
shaken and said something along the lines of--"huh?
what the fuck, i have a question about a swing set?"
(you know those husbands who just lose it all
and decide to drop their pants and take a dump
right on the lawn or those college coaches you
hear about these days over the radio getting
busted for driving intoxicated as well as naked?)
as these days they have these wonderful ways
of formally sedating and placating and patronizing
while this mechanical micro-manager during this period
had turned me distant and indifferent you know the part
about waiting all this time and being treated like some
kind of statistic when i just had one simple question
about a swing set me and my wife wanted to get
for our rambunctious two year-old son as the song
these boots are made for walking which i was really
starting to get into was constantly being interrupted
by some man-made mechanical-moron--"thank you
for your patience...the next toy-representative..."

Joseph Reich is a children's therapist who works in the state of Massachusetts; A displaced New Yorker who sincerely does miss dis-place, most of all the Thai Food, the Bagels, and the Smoothies on Houston Street... Has a wife and child and when we all get a little older desire to show them around Harlem, The Upper West Side, The Lower East Side, and boroughs of birth and childhood... Joseph has had works which have appeared in such literary journals as, Poesy, Dispatch, Falling Star, And Then, Graffiti Rag, Main Street Rag, Bouillabaisse, Decanto, Rogue's Scholar, Poetry Motel, The Beat, The Potomac Poetry Super Highway and Istanbul Literature Review.

Email: Joseph Reich

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