Prose Poems with Commentaries from My New Book While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
From Pretty Happy!
A Preamble, Which Will Be Repeated Over the Next Eight Weeks to Set the Stage for What Follows
If I have and weaknesses as a writer, and of course I do, my biggest flaw is that I am lousy at self-promotion. I was taught by my WWII hardass father that any time you are praising your accomplishments, you are in fact diminishing them. In short, you should let your work stand for itself and shut the “F” up. The problem with this approach is that in a literary world where there are more writers than cockroaches, if you don’t promote your work in some way, it will only be read by your immediate family, and there’s a good chance they may even be too busy to take the time.
Why am I sharing this with you?
Over the next few months because I will be on vacation frequently, I am going to take the time to promote my latest two books of poetry and fiction: Shot: A Novel in Stories (MadHat Press, 2021) and While the Undertaker Sleeps Collected and New Prose Poems (just released this May of 2023, again by MadHat). See Amazon links at the bottom of this Substack entry.
One week, I will provide a sampling from my past books collected in While the Undertaker Sleeps; the following week, I will include a short story from Shot. Hopefully, this generous sampling will encourage you to buy the books, and to tell others about them.
The below prose poems are from While the Undertaker Sleeps, which includes all of my previous books and also a section of “New” poems. More specifically, these poems are from my first book called Pretty Happy! Looking back at the prose poems in Pretty Happy!, I can see that many of them were inspired by childhood memories of growing up in a working-class neighborhood in South Buffalo, NY—a few streets away from where Tim Russert lived, who I went to high school with. Many of these prose poems were also about my problematic relationships with the males in my family, especially my father and grandfather.
So let’s start here with the title poem, “Pretty Happy!,” which suggests a major theme in all of my work—that even if you feel “pretty” happy at times, don’t get too comfortable because there are always an assortment of catastrophes that may await you. In short, always keep the real and “metaphorical” bat mentioned below close at hand.
Pretty Happy!
I have no siblings who have killed themselves, a few breakdowns here and there, my son sometimes talking back to me, but, in general, I’m pretty happy. And if the basement leaks, and fuses fart out when the coffee machine comes on, and if the pastor beats us up with the same old parables, and raccoons overturn the garbage cans and ham it up at 2 o’clock in the morning while some punk is cutting the wires on my car stereo, I can still say, I’m pretty happy.
Pretty happy! Pretty happy! I whisper to my wife at midnight, waking to another noise, reaching for the baseball bat I keep hidden under our bed.
To children, even minor events and the actions of their parents are remembered in images and through scraps of dialogue, so that those events and actions almost seem mythological. Consider this as you read the following poems.
Penates
My father is omniscient. He says, “When I’m right, I’m right, and when I’m wrong, I’m right.” So he’s infallible, too. High above us, he rides his crane, his large, white eye illuminating our bedroom window. Or he slides under the door on the blue vapor of the TV. For lunch, peanut butter, or the tang of ore dust on outstretched tongues. Rats killed by pouring jagged pieces of glass around the foundation. “Seal their holes with concrete blocks,” my father says. At twilight, we burrow beneath the swing set. Mother should say, “Wait until your father comes home,” but instead: “If you dig a hole, you’ll have to bury someone in it.” Behind her, father’s sad eye blinks.
But the godlike qualities of The Father, also can become more ominous when juxtaposed with the sinister father figures all young men encounter. You could almost compare them to pirates.
Pirates
I’m agitated when I read of pirates. Growing up, I walked so many planks my feet were a mess of splinters. Supposedly, very few pirates made prisoners walk the plank, more productive putting them to work. But my Blackbeards needed that paternal loin tug one derives from the sound of a young, healthy male splitting the waves. Continually saved by mermaids, waterlogged, I persisted, devouring my share of limes, yet unable to please these master mariners, always more and more examinations: “Subtract the number of Ali Baba’s thieves from the number of Arabian Nights, then add the Voyages of Sinbad. What do you get?” Or “Repeat fifty times: ‘Making merry maps for mighty marooned mariners.’”
Insatiable they be, and everywhere.
My grandfather on my mother’s side was an important figure in my early years. Unlike we talkative and outgoing Johnson males, my grandfather, who I called “Butch,” was a quiet man, who was a naturalist, which was ironic because he worked in one of the most unnatural places in Buffalo: The Donner Hanna Coke Ovens. He was a great saxophonist, an all-star catcher, and a legendary fisherman. He also was extraordinarily handsome, looking just like Clark Gable, which accounted for my grandmother’s jealousy. The next three poems feature him, and then I’ll finish by with a couple of poems that fill out my often-dysfunctional family romance.
Extended Family Romance
“I was so fat my kids couldn’t wrap their arms around me.” People say things like that. “The answer always pales before the question,” is what my grandfather said. Something to sink one’s teeth into, like the smoked venison hanging in our attic. In the basement wooden birds appeared overnight. A squirrel’s tail tied to my handlebars. A gift. Woodworker, hunter. “He was so good-looking he should have been someone,” someone said. And grandmother in the kitchen listening to the dough rise, watching the long-legged alcoholic, who’d stand half-naked at the window when grandfather shoveled.
The Watchers
Grandmother’s nose is white from the icy window. She watches Bill, the overweight car salesman, unlikely heartbreaker, shoveling his driveway.
“He brings her home,” she growls, “and I go to have my pills and sees her, this young babe.” Grandmother’s pills guard the kitchen windowsill, brown, see-through plastic bottles of cure for head and heart, some turned upside down. “And that Marge makes the novena, too,” she says. “I sees her.”
Marge is Bill’s wife, pregnant with child and misery, expressionless as an inflatable doll at the young women Bill brings home. “Someone should call the cops,” grandmother says. “Marge takes Valium to get by.”
And I share her anger at this polyester prince, straining his flesh in knee-deep snow. I’ve seen him: a face weighed down by fleshy jowls, eyes too black to be real, a heart that’s in the wrong place.
Makes me wonder what they see in him.
Why we watch him.
Night Crawler
The last automobile of night passes. I exit, drop to knees on a wet blanket of dull blades—an advance accompanied by a thick silence, except for give and take of flesh and hole, opening and closing of tiny dark doors.
Flashlight in my right hand, night crawlers scatter at its bulbous eye. Or I am quick, with steady left hand catch them coupling, half out of holes, or damp noses barely breaking surface.
Strange creatures, rooted to ground yet aspiring upward, anonymous, soft-bellied fragments, night’s dark, dismembered fingers, I gladly suffer wet indignities of dirt for a handful of them.
Wake
A casket that couldn’t care less. The corpse. My father hanging from a branch of our family tree. Aunt Katherine digesting a purple fingernail, her over-the-hill orgasm just in sight. Not to mention my pugnacious cousin kissing everyone’s wife. Even the floral arrangements look forlorn, even the overflowing breasts of my cousin’s girlfriend, whom I would have loved if not for her glass eye. “Stay near me, do not take flight,” I whisper. But she lines up with the rest, groveling for a ride in my rich uncle’s Mercedes. I hang back, content to hear its heavy black doors open and close.
Easter, Circa 1960
Such a clattering of black shoes. Mine are very tight and have pointed tips. “Spic shoes,” my father calls them, which is fine with me, as I fashion my pompadour and place a gangster-style hat on my head. My cheeks are fat, my pants tight around the ass. A boy was stabbed yesterday. I stood with the older boys and watched, the arc of the knife’s blade like a silver fish rising for water spiders. The kitchen table glows with bowls of shrimp and hot cocktail sauce. A giant urn of potato chips gives shape to the living room. After dinner, my father argues with my grandparents, and everyone goes home. I take the chips to my room. Lie down. Click my Cuban heels.
Lover Boys
I saw the movie where Indiana Jones and his father make love to the same beautiful German spy, and I wondered if my father I could do that. Of course, she wouldn’t be a German spy. Probably just some big-hearted, fat-lipped donut girl with no self-respect. Or maybe just someone who was terribly lonely. She’d suffer, that’s for sure: in cheap Italian restaurants with my father, munching suspect meatballs and fish and chips; or with me, forced to confess every wet detail of the night the high school quarterback lapped maple syrup from her navel. Until that one inevitable morning when she’d scan the legal section of the Yellow Pages, or maybe just give up and leap off a bridge.
An absurd scenario? Perhaps. For one thing, my father and I don’t live in the same city anymore, and when we did, we couldn’t even share the La-Z-Boy without fighting.
(more poems will be forthcoming in the following weeks)
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories