on a rare evening not yet shot dead
my own whispered pacing fades across
the carpet through the lush echoes of
a vinyl caress to witness
another crossed out calendar box
on the kitchen wall,
a snake-line of black Sharpie
trailing behind

crumpled papers scatter and run low on heart
as somewhere in the walls symphonic voices from
old Berlin crush the soul of another son
of the silent age

too often, watering plants in the moonlight
feels like any other opaque lie
and fingers tremble over spilled ink,
inflamed pages, idiot remorse;
I can’t stand another sound
is all I hear in my rotten ears
and the last grain of time finally slips away
to reveal
the three hands of the clock gliding
in and out of life
in and out of sight
and in the heavy blink of your silken eyes
I realize I am finally tired
and I crawl to the waiting bed like
a dog into the hole where
he buried his bone
to sleep the good sleep I’ve
heard rumors of through all these silent ages

__________

Strawberry Fields Forever
(on childhood)

their house was made of brick
and the strawberries grew
in their fields like gasoline wildfire

the fields surrounded
the house on all sides, and they
went right up to the house,
built about a century
ago by strawberry farmers
now maintained by an elderly
strawberry farmer, his wife
who stared down from
the second story
window of that brick
house, and the farmer’s grown
son, who walked
around with some uncertain
handicap of the body
and mind

I picked as fast as I could
when the farmer or his
slower son spoke to my mother
or to other nearby pickers
or when the old woman
stared down
from
her window tower
watching us

but when they
were all gone
I ate berries fresh
from the dirt

no one needed
to wash those berries

they were stymied
with bugs often
enough, and were small,
but they were real
and they were raw
and juicy in the summer
sun
and I recall the sweat
of that sun falling
down on us
as we picked up
our full baskets (my
stomach also full)
and walked to the porch
of the brick house

the farmer’s son always
wore overalls, blue
jean overalls with dirt
scuffed around his
knees and ankles,
and he’d talk kindly to my
mother in a slow stilted cadence
as if he were reciting to a class
of students who might
mock him, but
we never mocked him

I knew he was just a strawberry
farmer’s son, and even then
as a child I realized
that being one was better than being
like most other men I saw in the world
—with or without the handicap

and sometimes the old
farmer was there, too

sitting on his porch
tired and talkative and
older than any man I had
ever seen in my life
and they’d take our few
dollars and we would
walk back to our car,
load the car, drive away

maybe we’d be back later
that month, or that summer,
sometimes we never
went at all
many of those summers
went by, the absent
summers, and I am glad
I have not been back since
the age of eleven
or twelve

I don’t want to see how
the old woman no
longer watched from her
window tower
or how the old man no
longer sat on his
porch in the sunlight
and I don’t want to see how
the farmer’s grown son
dealt with the banks or the funeral
homes or the land investors
or the neighbors or the
nurses at the hospital
or the whole world
crashing down
around him

I want to close my eyes
and look up from
the dirt, the rows of fire
engine red strawberries,
and see them there
all of them
and see my mother there
picking beside me
putting each strawberry into
a yellow bowl

put one
more strawberry
in my mouth;
never open my eyes
again

_________

The Night No One Went Home
(on childhood)

potshots from the gristmill
and away we go a’running

weedstalks tough like tire irons
thumping polecats skitter wild

in August, we dream of October
in October we dream of honor,
and we know a ghost is waiting

someone set fire to the gristmill
the summer after the shooting

the coupe still sits burnt out
amidst the wishing field of grain

the wind runs through that grain nightly
the moon watches with envy

children think they are alive
especially when they play dead

potshots strike the hollow oak
where we once thought of honey bees

and owl eyes in nighttime fevers;
the moon a great dying tilt-a-whirl

and this I promised to promise—
with a match left in my pocket,
I’ll wait for you come, Autumn
lest I burn it down alone

_____________________

as the sowing, the reaping
(on love)

fear oiled the mechanics of our love
and in the reproductive silence that followed, you opened
gifts a day early, wrapping falling to the floor
mingling with popcorn spilled from a paper bag
from which we each pulled greasy specks and chewed
in the quiet of October, red leaves stuck to the windowpane

the mistake too often made is giving small books
of poetry from unknown publishers from Portland
or Fort Collins or Montpellier or Louisville;
the first pages are fingered gently by each of you
a sense of wonder and worry thriving in the veins
the books are gone soon enough on trains and jets
never seen again, forgotten, unread, lost
always lamented over, wishing they formed a stack
in my study corner rather than a troubled mind

on most nights, those books were worth the trade,
other nights, though—not a page would I barter for a single
image of you against the dawn of that last day together,
pictures and pages in the fire of this heart’s eternal uncertainty;
curling black pages like their raven hair; gone gone

_______________

The Raped and the Loved
(on the theme of coffee)

the art gallery displayed photos of the raped
and the children they bore, hated, and one day
learned to love, women with long nimble weeping
fingers and toes, slender souls of nonpareil scar-tissue
that writhed and sang in a dirt-floor celebration
of militant reinvention, spring-loaded renunciation,
and the most unkind joy the godless world of man
and his guns and his machetes has ever known

they served coffee and European beer and someone ranted
midwest polemics and another of economic recoil, and many
a bitter word of oil companies retched across the room
as the ivory white smiles of the raped looked on,
their little reminders of a man’s murder-lust holding their hands
or sitting on their laps, or standing beside them, trying to help
carry the burden of the repellent world on their shoulders as the most
stunning blue light caressed the African skies behind them,
nothing at all like the disemboweled orange din hovering over our
American sprawl, where the machetes are dull, the smiles are
numb, and the raped and loved go equally unnoticed

Author Biography

James H Duncan is a New York native and is the editor of Hobo Camp Review, an online literary magazine that celebrates the traveling word. James has twice been nominated for the annual Best of the Net award and once for the Pushcart Prize for his poetry. He is the author of five collections of poetry and short stories and has appeared in dozens of print and online magazines around the world. He now resides in New York City where he works as a freelance writer and as a writer/editor at American Artist magazine, where he has published numerous articles on art history and contemporary realist painters. His website is at here.

Reflections

– on mirrors

now I pace the highway like a real ghost might
tipping the flask to my lips one last time
a quick shot of relief and then down into drive,
a shift, a release of the wheel

in the dark I cannot tell how the bed becomes a highway slab
my eyes never know, they flutter under skin
paper thin to the moon, reflecting now against my
pavement blood,  remembering my
knees against the backs of your long gone legs
wishing for reflection in the traffic headlight drone

JD

12 gauges of remorse

– on When We Two Parted

silence stains the lonely shoes
worn before the soul fell through

cat’s eye wallpaper, honest, peeling,
ever so slight of hand

a flick of the belt and a hush
from the stair, as the moon hides beyond

candle-lit nebulous reasons fly
from the roof into tomorrow’s tomorrow

reality is a loaded shotgun starry
night, hung beside the mirror on the wall

triggers painted red and a cat’s eye reeling,
ever so slight of hand

JD

Author Biography

James H Duncan is a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure. The editor of Hobo Camp Review, James considers himself a student of the road, where you’ll find him in late-night diners, local dive bars, and wandering train station platforms minding his own business. Apt, Red Fez, Reed Magazine, Slipstream, Poetry Salzburg Review, and The Battered Suitcase, among many others, have welcomed his work. More here.