Patrick Carrington
The impression I get reading modern poetry is that there may be a bit of a bias against humor, that many think a poem needs to be heavy and serious to say something worth saying. I think such a prejudice makes it easy to underestimate how much power is available through the side of one’s mouth. Like any aspect of poetry, I want my humor inventive, new and fresh. Shopworn jokes, like anything else with wear and tear at the knees and elbows, are best kept in a trunk in the attic. ________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Stairs to the Knickerbocker
The boys from the NYPD dropped Grandpa off
again, like a stubborn, runaway child.
This time, they’d collected him and his toys
from a subway stop at Time’s Square.
On the north end of the platform
he had a crowbar wedged in the crack
of a sealed door, below a sign
that reads Knickerbocker. He was
tearing it up pretty good, the cop told me.
The stairs behind it, if you could get at them,
lead up into a deep construction pit.
The hotel is long gone, but
the saloon in that old place was so hot
it musta burned a hole halfway to China,
Grandpa claims. And up top,
why, steam is belching from the sewer plates.
I seen it yesterday. That should be enough
to tell you dumb youngfolk
someone’s buried alive down there.
To see the hotel now takes a penny postcard.
Grandpa dug one out from under his stash
of Old Crow in the closet, waved it
in front of my nose—
When it survived Prohibition, I thought
we had really ourselves something,
he said. He swears he saw Jesus once
sipping whiskey in there,
celebrating with the common folk,
his bare foot healing up on the brass rail,
his eyes on the backroom
as the day’s take was divvied up—
Best get movin’, I told God. They’ll think
you’re a flatfoot and skin you alive for sure.
They got no patent on fuck-ups in Jerusalem.
They lynch the wrong guys here too.
That’s how old men wash down
each day’s bowl of misery,
with carefully prepared memories
to make it palatable, their way to interdict
the weariness and pain. And last night,
thinking about that door,
too cantankerous to let it be,
Grandpa had a brainstorm—
he lit a Cuban panatella and snuck off again.
In his robe and slippers. At midnight.
With a chainsaw,
and one sly eyebrow raised.
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Patrick Carrington is the author of Hard Blessings (MSR Publishing, 2008), Thirst (Codhill, 2007), and Rise, Fall and Acceptance (MSR Publishing, 2006), and winner of New Delta Review’s 2008 Matt Clark Prize and Yemassee’s Pocataligo Contest in poetry. His poems are forthcoming in The National Poetry Review, West Branch, Redactions, The Spoon River Poetry Review, American Literary Review, and elsewhere.