Early Covid and Black Humor

Three Prose Poems with a Link to an Essay on My Work

Apr 14, 2025

Coronavirus on black background — Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Although I have a new book of prose poetry forthcoming this spring, a little more than a year ago, MadHat Press and Marc Vincenz published my “career” book, While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems. Undertaker At that time I felt I was done writing a “certain kind” of prose poem, so it seemed natural to collect my previous books, along with new poems I had finished.

I was also fortunate enough to have one of the most significant authorities on prose poetry, Australian poet and critic, Cassandra Atherton, write an excellent introductory essay for the Undertaker, where she discusses my career and how it influenced the arc of the prose poetry in America. I have always had trouble taking myself too seriously, but she nearly convinced even me that I made, at the very least, a an important contribution to the genre. Atherton’s essay can be found on Plume Poetry’s site, a journal edited by Danny Lawless Atherton/Plume

Here are a few of my favorite black-humorish prose poems from the “New Poems” section of the Undertaker, which were all written during the shut-in days of Covid. Consequently, they often reference that viral nightmare and all the human folly it unleashed, with Death constantly in our rear view mirrors, threatening to do a Michael Myers on the roofs of our cars. Let’s hope the absurd Make America Healthy Again crew doesn’t bring us back to those times. As usual, my “I” in this sequence, though partly autobiographical, is a persona I use to satirize both human foolishness and even the narrator himself.

I hope these poems, which straddle the fine line between reality and fantasy, encourage you to order a copy of the Undertaker and support MadHat Press. Poets make little money on their work, except for readings and fellowships, but all the great small literary presses (and there are many) need outside funds to keep going. They live off meager sales and state and federal grants, which I’m sure DOGE will eventually cut.

Enjoy!

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A Covid Respite, with Thanks to the Delphic Oracle

I was almost banned from my senior prom. It was during my pre-Covid, pre-toenail fungus days when I had decided to stop wearing underwear and could still think in Latin while having a sex act performed on me in a phone booth on a rainy night amid a cacophony of apian shrieks from a nearby zoo. The performance artist was a cute rich girl, who, for at least a month, had been receiving terrible verse poems from me. She wore a short white dress, mottled with palm-sized red hearts—one cut out to reveal her navel, which had a mind of its own, intent on staring down tuxedoed boys with a disdain fueled by cheap wine and a few tiny blue pills. The other girls hated her. There were speeches, many sad songs and silly dances, everyone trying hard not to stare at her navel, knowing that image would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Lucky Strike Lanes

I was reading my favorite dog-eared copy of A Journal of the Plague Year when a foghorn nearly took off my head, transporting me back to Lucky Strike Lanes. It was during my “heroin chic” days when I was as pale and pasty as an albino’s ass. I spent most days watching the National Geographic Channel and taking long walks around a polluted pond, not far from a neighborhood that had been hastily constructed after World War II, when soldiers had returned home so full of hope and testosterone. I had no loyal companions on these walks. Just broken beer bottles, orphaned sneakers, and abandoned underwear—all spotting the shoulder of the road like poorly hidden landmines. Lucky Strike Lanes was a haven of sorts, a place where I could spend an entire evening searching for the legendary “Bowling Ball with No Holes.” I desperately wanted to make a statement back then, to transform myself into a flesh-and-blood metaphor that might change the world.

It wasn’t much of a life, you might say, but one just the same, and, really, who are you to judge?

Coach Johnson

I was a good coach. You might even say I was revered. But who really knows? You scrutinize people, make judgments, think you know them. The guy who pumps gas, the real estate agent with her furrowed brow, their eyes frozen in Covid terror like stars rooted in a winter sky. “There’s a certain sadness to it all,” I say out loud, then reach for my hand sanitizer, adding, “and yet I believe in the inherent goodness of my fellow man”—this baloney from a guy who squandered his life holding his hand over a flame, thinking at some point it might not hurt. Once upon a time I decided that for one year I would only date girls with the first name of Daphne, not realizing I’d have to time-travel to the 1940s to find them. I was focused on the dead-end alleys of the human brain, lost in the endless and depressing mindfuck aphorisms of French philosophers and one particular TM instructor, who burst into tears at my puja ceremony, then stole my white handkerchief and bolted out the door.

Old Man Still Howling at the Moon

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