Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose newest poetry books, The Dark and Akimbo, are available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.

Rodeo

It’s the Saturday of the school bus rodeo. No one seems especially concerned that 4 th -grade reading scores are down – again. The school bus drivers previsualize the obstacle course. Their palms are clammy, but their hearts are serene. They believe absolutely in their own rectitude. I’m kind of an artifact, standing at the side of the road with my thumb cocked. If I ever get to where I’m going, I might chase the money or wear a yellow straw hat like Van Gogh’s in his self- portrait. Or I might even, as the song says, “shoot a man just to watch him die.’ Half an hour passes. The bus drivers compete in parallel parking and backing up.

Planet News

We treat the planet as our garbage dump, our latrine, our parking garage, our hostage. We slather it in chemicals, pulverize it with ever bigger bombs. We drug and date rape it, and when it pushes back with wildfires and superstorms, we see ourselves as the victims. Culture, so called, remains a convenient source of comfort. We phone scroll photos, play Xbox, stream movies while the oceans are brought to a slow boil over a low flame. None of us seem ready to change who we essentially are, a blind man on a crowded sidewalk waving a gun that’s about to go off.

Paternity

My older brother and I were the little boys sitting up close to the TV in the family room, absorbed in a weekly half-hour show called “Make Room for Daddy” – i.e., Edward Teller, Father of the H-bomb. One H-bomb possessed the destructive power of one-thousand Hiroshimas, just about enough to set the Earth’s atmosphere on fire. Yiddish speakers and pushcart peddlers had already vanished with nary a protest being registered. Humanity, in its false eyelashes and painted nails, was perfectly situated to blunder into an extinction-level event. Watch the skies. Shadowy music continues.