Once Upon a Crime

Heroes who could name a dame’s perfume at first sniff

Gun molls whose stocking seams were always straight.

Cops were called flatfoots and all detectives were dicks.

Phones were in phonebooths or attached to a wall.

Have you ever owned a car with running boards?

*

Just once I would like to light up in a saloon again

with my own ashtray beside a tall Cuba Libre

in a joint with no TV on the wall behind the bar,

back when the homeless were called hobos and

kids roamed the streets till the streetlights came on.

*

Black and white memories—the past as textbook.

White and Black, like the keys on my old Royal

Upright that I could make sound like gun shots

on the page, if I hit the keys hard enough.

Distances.  I wonder sometimes about people who live their whole lives in the county where they were born, folks from around here, for instance, for whom their farthest destination was a road trip to the closest gulf coast beach town.  All the numbers on their speed dials share their area code.     How many of my places am I far away from?  How many home ZIP codes have I forgotten?  A half dozen states and out of the country a third of my life. So many people left behind.  I wonder about them, too, sometimes, try to imagine them appropriately aged.  Lovers especially.  There are telescopes now that can see the beginning of time, distances measured in compounded eons, taking fantastic celestial photos of what once was as seen through the clarity of the empty space around us.  And the music of the spheres?  Tinnitus—the sound of living alone. 

                                                       

I caught myself doing it again—

peeling off labels—not a habit

more an unconscious prayer.

*

Her name was Melody and she

was weird. If I touched her left

cheek she had to touch her right.

*

Don’t tell me what is inside.

I ought to be pleased to recall;

ingredients in unreadable print.

*

Every memory has a place attached

but rarely a reliable date, a time of

day perhaps, dusk on Melody’s porch.