Category: Poetry

You want to eat at a place
with a busy turnover, where the cook
wears a shirt and the wait staff
isn’t mopping out the sewer drains.
You’ve been looking for so long now
but on this dusty, shadeless motorway
there is an almost admirable
defiance; restaurants clinging
to the road’s edge like last year’s
Christmas decorations, their greeters
smiling through the 40-degree heat.

At last, you choose one with subtitles
and push open the 80-pound glass door
into an environment so chilled
it borders the erotic. The hairs
under the sweat-soaked parts
of your clothes grow rigid as you sit
in the dark and sip tepid water
from a glass you’ve ordered with no ice.
The photos in the sticky menu
are pixelated impressions, and the English
underneath is either Roget’s dreams perverted,
or his most perverted dreams realized:
Danger! Perilous Hotplate!!
Scorched Duck.
Orange Gropefruit.
No rabbit because of sore reason.

A single adventurous taste-bud cries out
for dog, but you settle for chicken
in the soup you’ve picked. When the waiter signals
that this is a spicy dish, you assure him
with your most sincere gestures
that you know exactly what you are doing.
And when the steaming pot is placed before you
you wonder, briefly, why they
would add cranberries to chicken soup.
The waiter backs away slowly
as you clumsily add bean sprouts
and the stir the pot; the dye, you think
from those scarlet little berries
turning the broth a fiery red.

copyright 2007 Rocco de Giacomo

As appeared in Catching Dawn’s Breath (LyricalMyrical Press, Toronto)

Romance is where blue-haired ladies
nibble at egg salad sandwiches, local
attempts at prairie sky hang from roofing nails,
and on the AM radio, the price
of canola is discussed as often as war.

It’s where the contents of our
sandwiches are applied with
ice-cream scoops, the trays
are mint, the linoleum squeaks
and slices of pickle are an extra 50¢.

It’s where spoonfuls of Borscht
paint our mouths red, our legs stick
to the seats, and our lips are as ribbon
smears on a white canvas : the words
I love you a tongue’s-breath away from
ruining and meaning everything.

C 2006 Rocco de Giacomo

As appeared in Tower Poetry Society and my latest collection, Catching Dawn’s Breath (Lyricalmyrical Press).

by Rocco de Giacomo

I didn’t like you, Bob
until now.
It wasn’t that
you always reminded me of Gonzo
with a head cold
or that
I always imagined your lyrics
scribbled out in purple crayon
or that
your duet with Janis
sounded more like two cats
making it
under a wicker chair
than two drunks stumbling
through the lyrics of last call.

It’s your fans, Bob:

The MasterCard malcontents
sucking back Evian water
between sets at the Superfitness,
digging out their wedgies
as they sweat
and swoon to burned memories
of free love
in the hot mud
of Woodstock.

The driver’s-side air-bags
crooning with their golf buddies,
shaking their nine-irons
at the complacency of kids today
and how
by god
by god,
when they were young
they went out
and they made a difference.

And the great
hippy
den mothers,
their teenage granddaughters
orbiting them like sour moons,
Chapters-bought, special edition books of your lyrics
crushed to their breasts,
all,
just waiting
-chins wobbling-
waiting for you
to die
so that they can just weep all over you
and like an episode
of While You Were Out
decorate your headstone
with Body Shop Bath candles,
patchouli incense sticks,
and empty, 2-litre bottles
of Maria Christina.

However,
in that Victoria’s Secret commercial,
I realized, Bob
that you’ve been waiting too.
Cast in a cadaver light,
you’re a lingering target
for that stray bullet,
that loaded syringe,
or one last hit of whiskey,
that turned Janis, Jimmy, and Jim
-those glorious letdowns-
into legends
before what they produced
became products placed
in an unremarkable world.

An empty highway,
an open stage,
a distant uncle’s birthday party:
you were all caught
in riptide of the right moment,
but only you, Bob
were blessed with the cruel knack
of survival
and in surviving
you fail
like the rest of us,
and you have to wait now
like the rest of us
for that long, slow death
that awaits everyone.

As appeared in The Antigonish Review No 141/142, 2005