Robert Knox - Poems

 
Robert Knox is a creative writer, a freelance journalist for the Boston Globe, a blogger on nature, books and other subjects, and a rabid gardener, who makes his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. A graduate of Yale (B.A.) and Boston University (M.A. in English literature), he is a former college teacher and newspaper editor, whose stories, poems, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications. His poems have recently appeared in Verse-Virtual, Guide to Kulchur Creative Journal, The Poetry Superhighway, Bombay Review, Earl of Plaid, Rain, Party & Disaster Society and Semaphore Journal. He serves as a contributing writer for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. A collection of his poems, titled "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty," will be published this year by Coda Crab Books.

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                   Sidewalk Madonnas
 
("Syrian refugees registered in Lebanon make up 27 percent of the country's population" -- Lebanese Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk)
 
Sidewalk Madonnas
Figures of endurance
Black-robed, mourning their murdered country
Childed, uprooted, dependent on the unreliable love of strangers,
charity: rain in a dry country
 
They appear, a flash of darkness on a street in Hamra, back to the wall in the busy light of the Lebanese day,
The mourner at the feast,
Face hidden, grief exposed
Speaking words of the world’s betrayal
distilled to an appeal we cannot hope to understand
The child you hold or sits helplessly hopeful by your side, or roams the unwelcome pavement hand outstretched,
irrefutable proof of your claim to our attention, our humanity
 
Our humanity is scattered, mere happenstance, thin as April sun in New England,
far from the Mediterranean blue of sky and sea
a mere trickle when a flood is needed
Where is your river, pilgrim of desperation,
your music, your song of the generations?
What rivers, borders, highways of death, bomb-shredded cities
did you leave behind with losses we cannot imagine?
Whose face will you never see again?
 
Women of endurance, caregivers, lifegivers from whom the future is born, oracles of devastation ripped from your country's womb,
Tell us of the future in exchange for the slender paper note we hand you
What hope do the children of earth have
When we turn our eyes from the republic of your grief
 
 
  
                          Sick
 
Being sick is the price you pay
for forgetting to be grateful for the
little things in life
Eating, for instance
Water. Would you like a sip now?
Not on your life. Can't risk it.
How about chocolate?
How long can you go without chocolate?
How much do you wish to avoid, once more,
the mad dash to prostrate yourself
before the throne?
the king, the power that holds sway
as you sway, sometimes, the kingdom of the body
poised for overthrow,
regime change by microbiotic subversion,
sick it is -- really --
the need to maintain some plurality (veto-proof, at least)
of the little creatures who
live inside, fighting the border wars that protect us
from downfall,
from the violence of extrusion,
emptying the insides outside
 
Let us adore them, these minute particulars,
Let us nourish them
Let us send them warm blankets for winter,
and phone cards to call home
 
Let us pledge the little sacrifices
demanded by a better world:
simply by giving up
sugar, chocolate, coffee, booze, lactose (milk and cheese to you lowbrows,
but also ice cream, yogurt, cream sauces, Fettucini Alfredo and all his masticating buddies)
the whole beloved tribe of simple carbohydrates --
Let me have about me only carbos who are sleek and fat --
(Where are these complicated carbohydrates , anyway?
Rotting neglected in my garden?)
 
I promise to do better
I will serve the good and the true,
abjure the rich and indolent life of the senses
I will practice moderation,
offering the things I love only the occasional peck,
brushing lips in the doorway,
bidding farewell before some momentous journey
such as a dark ride home on the blithering interstate
I offer these promises to the micro-millions inside
who keep me well and happy,
nourished, erect, and free of the all-night vigil by the throne of the savage god
 
And I know just how long
they are likely to last
 
  
               Parallel Lives
 
In one of those other universes
the awareness of which leaks in, at times,
when we're asleep
I am a reporter
(as occasionally I am in this world)
and have got on to a story
whose subject, import or nugget of truthiness
has on waking completely escaped me,
just as the story board data, information, plot lines and all recollection of those
other-worldly events so often do
And while I am able to deliver the goods
for John Q. Public (or X%&F#22 as he is known
in one of those other universes)
the consequence for me is somehow bad
 
Because (stay with me now)
the source, female,
human enough, I suppose, for an alien,
inhabitant of Planet MMCXIX in Glammagolblin Galaxy
... but, alas, that's all I remember about her...
now objects to my story's depiction of
her character, role in the events under consideration,
discrete particular actions (or perhaps indiscreet, appalling to the general),
state of mind, personal tics
-- having something to do, I fear, with a suspicious smell --
in the course of my bringing to public notice  
this now wholly-obliterated-from-memory
(mine, in this world)
burning issue, surprising new development, balanced sidebar, salient backgrounder, dark conspiratorial suspicion, pale slice of onion-skin gossip
for the edification of
John Q. X%(etc.) and his analphabetical ilk
 
The gentle she-creature is, human or other
in that last fading brink-of-consciousness incarnation
simple, heartstring-tugging, sympathetic, sincere,
all that I am not (certainly, at least not the last),
and my treatment of her has apparently
not only fouled itself with a scent of the Snark
but, worse, for after all who is she to me
(or Hecuba to her?; and perhaps she is not truly grieving
over old Priam; that being merely another something else I just dreamed up)
 
...but worse, as I discover, only semi-sleeping,
my true mate, domestic companion, and alter ear-go
has been poisoned against me by this
purported victim of unnecessary Snarking
and now believes that she is credible, sympathetic, and deserving of support,
while I, apparently, judging from the severe glance in her mirror-mind,
am no longer,
and plans to attend my detractor's silly self-esteeming public session
performed at whatever passes in these other-worldly venues
(Galaxy Gammagloblin, and all that)
for highly self-regarding suburban high schools,
 
in itself a despoiling of all we both hold holy
in this universe, the one I went to sleep in, or so I have always believed
 
and if it is so, or even so-so, as I have long since been persuaded
by explorers of the demi-monde of sleep, perchance to dreamboat,
such as Sigismondo Schadenfreude and his Jungmann
that in dreams we send encoded messages
to our self, that self we straight put on,
as we do a favored suit of comfy (or at least familiar) garments, a second skin, when
once we wake to find ourselves yet again
on John Q.'s Pedestrian Planet,
then I can only ask myself to look beyond
my waking snit and -- discover -- precisely-- what it is --
that I am doing wrong