Listen to a podcast of Lauren Hewitt’s “Billy Pilgrim’s Father Was an Optometrist”
Billy Pilgrim’s Father Was an Optometrist
Welcome to the Slaughterhouse, Tomboy
Drunk on Vonnegut and Stein.
if God were a doughnut,
The Eucharist a lifesaver, wholly and dusted white,
And, wine non-intoxicant. if:
if I give my power to the Universe
Each star, my telling
And lovers, black holes
And friends, Milky Way’s .
The Mexican villagers called my father Doctor Thomas.
When I doodle,
Talking on the phone
I draw spectacles, a pair of glasses. one after the other.
if it is an hour conversation there is five pair, There.
But, of course
There is no There, there.
My father fixed it so that poor people could see
Citizens called him benevolent.
Odd, he was blind in many ways.
Behind the vision
Drunk, and mean, and violently purposeful.
Goodnight, he’d say malodorous of the worm.
Don’t wet the goddamn bed.
Listen to a podcast of Lauren Hewitt’s “To Wake”
To Wake
dawn
Often I greet the day in the afternoon
In dusk I find its potential.
“Good Morning” means “I’m leaving now.”
Probabilities ornament wakening, slowly, slowly, slowly
Hidden stars leak from cobalt cracks
And understate a deepening sky
Drip like tears into blackberry jam.
Without the pitch-stick of night
The sun would not bubble up
To gasp the clean air of day
Teeter on the vivid horizon
Choose to swan above
As angel wings that grind coffee,
turn off a nightlight in the bathroom, or
hang-up yesterday’s work clothes.
An arc is a sun slot
a boomerang. a wing.
the shape between other curves,
the well-worn groove of the slipping day where
Points range from beautiful to ugly.
Markers in relative context:
tide
I walk a beach for sea glass
Irregular shapes of amber, green, gold
Smoothed by sand and surge,
Silk-like by salt.
Pieces of human debris at once litter and treasure.
For an hour I comb through rock and shell with no luck.
The sun slopes, the shore darkens
On the path to the parking lot
from beach to blacktop
cut through ice plant there’s
a half shoe lace, a gum wrapper, a cigarette butt and
a piece of glass
The shape of Africa,
Pointed, not sharp
Smooth, not polished
Coarsely translucent with blunt corners
Undaunted, I put it in my pocket.
About the author:
I’m the Managing Director of 42ND Street Moon, a professional (albeit small) theatre company in San Francisco. I’ve been a professional actor, a ski lift operator, a nightclub owner, a new opera producer, a car hop, a highway construction heavy equipment operator, an arts management professional. I feel tired. I have an undergraduate degree in Theatre, and a graduate degree in Nonprofit Management.
