Lorenzo Thomas

I’ve spent the last 10 years In other people’s offices Learning the alphabet of nods and eyebrows And pursed lips, straining for the purse Legs crossed in easy confidence Confident nervous gestures of assurance Approved blue suits And sudden dreamed-up lies to be delivered A net of thirty days and sixty days and ninety Insanely stretched past promise into years Next week, for certain Floated haphazardly on possibles As slight as handshakes, Firm as agreements of subjective verbs And got nowhere. This happy corner, sucking up hard-boiled eggs And polish hots The seidel sliding down the polished bar Clatter of friendly pool balls in the margin Not exactly somewhere, but a certain place. A regular’s dark hair and polished eyes Glow in the glasses lined before her face Smoking and berating the muzak “Jack, when you gonna get some country music?” “Country Charlie Pride?” Outside, it’s as bright as the important phone call I always pretend to await Setting up the lunch meeting at Stouffer’s Linen napkins and hope’s frozen green peas Set up another round of handshake laughter for the pictures “Hey sweet thing, when we gonna have that date?” The barmaid pouts a 1940s frown— It’s Arnie (reaching now to slap me on the back) A gleaming brazen polyester clown, Tuesday seems longer than the day before Since I began to organize my life around My Office I stay a little later every day. A little rain hangs fire in the clouds Next trip, I think I’ll bring the wife

The cruelty of ages past affects us now Whoever it was who lived here lived a mean life Each door has locks designed for keys unknown Our living room was once somebody’s home Our bedroom, someone’s only room Our kitchen had a hasp upon its door. Door to a kitchen? And our lives are hasped and boundaried Because of ancient locks and madnesses Of slumlord greed and desperate privacies Which one is madness? Depends on who you are. We find we cannot stay, the both of us, in the same room Dance, like electrons, out of each other’s way. The cruelties of ages past affect us now

The eyeballs on her behind are like fire Leaping and annoying The space they just passed Just like fire would do The ground have no mouth to complain And the girl is not braver herself She is beautiful in her spotted Leopard ensemble. Heartless so To keep her fashionalbe in New York Leopards are dying Crude comments flutter around her At lunchtime. She sure look good She remembers nine banishing speeches More powerful than this is the seam Of the leotard under her clothing Her tail in the leotard is never still The seam! She feels it too familiar on her leg As some crumb says something suggestive The leopard embracing around her Is too chic to leap and strike Her thoughts fall back to last semester’s karate Underneath, the leotard crouches up on her thigh It is waiting for its terrible moment!

The land was there before us Was the land. Then things Began happening fast. Because The bombs us have always work Sometimes it makes me think God must be one of us. Because Us has saved the world. Us gave it A particular set of regulations Based on 1) undisputable acumen. 2) carnivorous fortunes, delicately Referred to here as “bull market” And (of course) other irrational factors Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps, Our man in Saigon   Lima   Tokyo   etc   etc