"Two Poems by Kevin Mooneyham"

Two Poems by Kevin Mooneyham

[kibbinkev@yahoo.com]

Fuzzy Head

Black outside night
diffused through backstage light,
What's left of her
walks out the backstage door.

"Fuzzy head, fuzzy head,
rub my head
for luck," she said.

Off came the stocking hat
revealing
the most beautiful naked flesh.
More beautiful than any
breast, or hip, or thigh,
her still seeing, hearing,
breathing, speaking head
atop her sweatshirt clad shoulders.

I rubbed the freshly sprouted hair.
I rubbed tenderly --
I had need of luck.

She spoke, past tense,
mastectomy, chemotherapy,
radiation treatment.

I spoke, future tense,
arrhythmia, damaged valve,
surgery.

She told me
about a part of heaven,
slop bucket part of heaven,
where the souls of all
the cast off bits and pieces
go to wait
for the rest of their owners.
Arms and legs of amputees,
appendixes, gall bladders,
testicles, from all those eunuchs,
even mountains of fat
sucked out of the grossly obese,
and her breast,
and my aortic valve,
all waiting for the rest
of the soul to catch up
with them.

My heart part that art in heaven
waits to hear my name.

Clicking Heart

In the quiet upstairs room
He hears the well-timed clicking
Regulated not by gears or wires
Regulated not by weights or pulleys
Regulated by metal and ceramics
Regulated by chemistry and drugs

He's weary of hearing it
   when he falls asleep
He's weary of hearing it
   when he wakes up
He's weary of hearing it
  when he cooks food
He's weary of hearing it
   when he rides his bike
He's weary of hearing it
   when he reads a book
He's weary of hearing it
   when he listens to music
He's weary of hearing it
   when he sits on the toilet
He's weary of hearing it
   when he speaks to his wife

The heart has its own way
Don't like it?
Slice the chest
Saw the bone
Grab the organ
Fill it with metal
  with plastic
  with bits of flesh
Flood it with chemicals
Shock it with electricity
Overpower it with arrogance

After all the treatment he can
sit in his quiet room and have
a visitor over she looks
for the clock or the watch
finds none he doesn't need timepieces
in his existence when time
ended in his clicking
machine heart he begs
the question is he living
on borrowed time
but that doesn't seem
quite right yet he knows
his time should be over
he knows the clicking heart
is the price he must pay
to indulge in that
wonderfully American delusion
Immortality

"Click on," he cries,
"Click on you piece of
ceramic and scrap metal
from St. Jude Medical
Heart Valve Division
Click on model number
27AECJ-502
Click on till the day
I die."

Poems © 2000 Kevin Mooneyham, all rights reserved
appear here by permission

Author Notes

           My aim in life is to "do" poetry in every way I can find. Online, print, open mikes, slams, festivals, radio, video links, I haven't found a bad way to share poetry yet. With that thought in mind, I try to create work that lives both on the page and in live performance.

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