"THE BALLAD OF THE SICK DANCING BEAR"

I hunger for fame like a sick dancing bear.
I hunger for murder
that boils.
I hunger for a woman
like a brand of sweet
nobody remembers.
I hunger for love
like a starving country.
I hunger for destruction
like a bomb hungers
to be detonated.
I do not hunger for myself,
I am sick of myself,
I am gorged on myself,
I have gone rotten.
I do not hunger for lies.
I do not hunger for mind.
I hunger for smiles
that do not want something.
I hunger for kindness
not pity.

© Mather Schneider 2009

" IT’S A GOOD THING WE CAN LAUGH"

It’s a good thing we can laugh
about flat tires and bad checks and
leaky faucets and leaky lives.
It’s a good thing we can laugh
about divorces and sex and no sex and being
put through the wringer.
It’s a good thing we can laugh
about warts and death and murder and war.
If we couldn’t we’d surely
commit suicide.
If we couldn’t we’d surely
strangle our own mothers.
It’s a good thing we can laugh
about poverty and bad jobs
that eat away at people like cancer.
It’s a good thing we can laugh
about our own failures
our own faces
and this thing we call the self
that knows from a very young age
it will die.
It’s a good thing we can laugh.
If we couldn’t we’d surely
suffer.
If we couldn’t we’d surely
ache.

© Mather Schneider 2009

Poets are full of shit
like this magazine editor in the Poet’s Market
he says “Don’t send us family
poems, nobody cares
about your family but you.”
Then I order a copy of the magazine and find
at least 5 of his own poems
about his own boring family.

Poets are full of shit
like when the poet gets up there to the podium
and quite calmly and confidently and eloquently
apologizes for his paralyzing stage fright.

Poets are full of shit
when people speak
if they are not giving specific instructions
they are either lying
or making practiced baby gurgles
and sometimes I wish
we’d never learned to speak at all.

Poets are full of shit
they say they want to love
but they don’t want to love
they want to do almost anything but love.

Poets are full of shit
their promises are etiquette
and their laughter can be contracted.

People are full of shit
trust me I know
I am one of them.

© Mather Schneider 2009

"SNOWBIRDS"

The brightly plumed couple totters off
American flight two twenty two from Chicago.
They stretch their wings in the warm Arizona air
then climb into my cab
and I take them to their million dollar winter home
in the foothills.
They're about sixty.
She’s never worked, he retired early
from the family business.
They both sport golf course tans
and whitened teeth.
The woman has eye-watering halitosis
like she's been eating raw lizards,
the man is a pillow-faced imbecile
with white feathers and hollow bones.
“I was thinking of tea and sandwiches
on Thursday,” the woman says.
“Sounds good,” the man says.
“Maybe a guitarist,” she says.
“Not that last guy,” he says.
“Heavens, no.”
The pioneers tamed the desert
for people like this.
We killed the Indians
for people like this.
I drop them at their golden nest.
A brass coyote sits on their mailbox,
its head thrown to the cast
iron sun.

© Mather Schneider 2009

"THE WHALE"

He's fifty five years of smug blubber,
a bored heir of a lucky fortune
who can barely walk on the vestiges of his legs
floating in the lobby of the fancy hotel
like a giant aquarium
with his fishbowl eyes
and funhouse mouth.
He's waiting for another cabby,
a town-car or something, but I shark him
and drive him to the casino
where he blows
thirty grand a month.
It's hard to understand fear or humility
when you know you can eat
everything in your path.
His mate mooncows beside him
like a somnolent mirror image
on this sunny afternoon,
rays filtering down through the thick blue sky
into the windows of my cab
where the dust rises
like plankton.
His voice is a screechy violin
and I'm just another suckerfish
in his arm pit.
It's like I'm in an undersea vessel
that's gone too deep:
my ears plug up;
the crack in my windshield
grows a quick inch.

© Mather Schneider 2009

"STACY"

She’s a cab driver
about fifty
formerly a nurse
but got caught stealing drugs.
The DEA took her out in handcuffs
little Stacy five foot nothin’.
She was inside for a while
lost her nursing license and that’s
why she’s driving a cab.

But Stacy is far from an
aberration—
around here everybody
is nuts.

Stacy is a day driver
and her partner who drives in the night
is Kyle.
Kyle used to be a professional wrestler
named the Renegade

and he makes Stacy
look
like a saint.


© Mather Schneider 2009