RUGGED INVISIBLISTS
by Gerard Sarnat
1. Northeast Corner
Diagonal from Planned Parenthood looms La Selva, The Jungle, a stark frankly named halfway house,
a bizarre menagerie strangled by slanted wild vine canopies.
Pirahnas and howlers, boas and sloths of all sorts and age, untended mindbodies angular to the universe, mostly shrouded in grays and blacks, droop in morose lagoons, swoon under monsoon thickets, doze daymares on the stoop.
A few seek asylum from the asylum.
Their Haldolized emptiness resonates with us slow walkers, breeds a strange acceptance; I feel kinship.
When they don’t take pills an insane three times a day, these endangered creatures end up in my homeless clinic.
Against protocol, once in a while I approach at my peril: some bite and strike out like aroused sleeping animals.
Today I contemplate speaking but don’t; attempt eye contact, fail.
A foxy skirt sashays by -- a split second of genital recognition. Yet to her we're all cuckoo, pitiable and wretched, or invisible, off the grid. Though sure I’m unseen, she scurries to the opposite sidewalk.
A gimp ibis hunched over walker hobbles toward Eldercare. Will that hyena lurks near the entry snatch her purse?
The bell tolls. Toe to heal, I’m called back to the center.
2. ogling aggregated aggravated pendemic event horizon idiotic idioms
oy if history does not toggle itself at least she sometimes rhymes:
straight-up well-healed gaggle of bitches’ve proper good toots
protected from misery of Missouri sooty meat-packing plant
hair-netted foreigners --- who are seen as backward
walking persons currently expendable as third
gloves, their dicks on our chopping block
--- by high walls debt and disease
within Daddy’s pointillist circle
invisible city mega-bunker
where her niche’s ilk
was protected from
syndromic surged
growth industry
dissed uncivil
distressing
pendula
of Gaia.
3. 2020 Do-si-dos 6.0
Summer solstice,
pass your partner
shoulder to shoulder,
circle back, take a turn
then switch; sit round out –
breezy invisible COVID dances
proceed, infinite variations on theme.
One matching set of adults,
whom we were in synch with
just last month, have now decided
you only live once. So, although very close,
traumatized by (in our eyes) their too tumultuous
contact with swirling outside worlds, they’re switched out
for less dramatic more copacetic folk to dine with on front deck.
On another hand, current apparent spikes down in L.A. County,
combined with her plus husband’s new ability to work
from home, as well as the children going to school
through Zoom, offer oldest daughter an excuse
to unmask what family of four’s wanted to do
for over a decade: consider moving back up
here to Northern California perhaps maybe?
6. Puer Eternis
Look 'em straight in the eye,
the punchy bowling league guy,
the spliffing bum,
the smug lug,
the pastel sweetie pie,
the garish drag king,
the amiably ruthless saleswolf,
the slick stubbled pop idol (wax, don't shave),
the dour genius,
the Schweitzers, the MKLs.
Hairy haunches hunched over hocking, reflections of reflections
know me better than myself, ape back in bedroom mirrors.
I fall asleep ‘til paroxysms of phlegm wake me …
Just returned from Burningman pagan space theater,
Black Rock Desert phoenixed week before Labor Day every year,
a mercurial techno-trance tyke
but no sociometric star superconnector,
I tried to boogie ‘til sunrise
feathered in Day-Glo, raving buck-naked on art deco cars,
yearned-to-be-this-way-since-kids,
no time to waste, no face to save here. Twilit Shabbes,
frizzy thonged prophetesses and fierce Old Testament seers
propel giddy seekers into back-to-the-future pestilent dust storms.
Except for one Electra beauty asked me into her tent,
at worst, I’m a klutz among seraphim
-- at best, invisible.
… Toggling stainless steel in dawn’s bathroom glass,
I scrutinize some absurd sunburned old man’s bloodshot eyes.
His febrile mug sags, bags hang, pitted nares take their lumps.
Stiff upper lip’s russet goatee manged to gray,
now grubbier salt than copper,
encases a slobbery fish-mouth engulfs a thermometer.
Bed pressing aches heavily again, my facsimile wonders,
Should I get a second opinion, see another doc,
or quit staring at the one not becoming any younger?
What is it ‘bout back-to-work blues make us whine so,
turn end-of-summer flus into such bummers,
more than March when one expects to get sick
-- with at least a vaccine's shot at salvation?
hide and seek invisiblists
ali, ali, oxen free,
logged into DARPA*’s Darknet,
my brain is a mess of chattering neurons.
as we play deep state
war games through escalatory ladders,
I am like a fish being cleaned with a spoon.
* Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
BIO: Gerard Sarnat’s a multiple Pushcart/Best of Net Award nominee. His work’s been widely published; including four collections; by Rattle, Brooklyn Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Gargoyle, New Delta Review, Buddhist Review, New York Times, Oberlin, Northwestern, Yale, Pomona, Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Penn, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Brown, North Dakota, McMaster, Maine, British Columbia/Toronto/Chicago and Virginia university presses. He’s a Harvard Medical School-trained physician, Stanford professor, healthcare CEO. Currently, he’s devoting energy and resources to dealing with climate justice, serving on Climate Action Now’s board. Gerry’s married since 1969, has three kids, six grandsons — and looks forward to future granddaughters. gerardsarnat.com