Alan Catlin- Three Poems

 A New Life, Maybe

 He was the kid who used to live

 across the street none of us live on

 anymore.  What I read in The Gazette

 told me he was up for a Felony DWI‑

 what he told me was it was the third one

 in a year and he was facing serious time

 and it wouldn't be in County Jail where

 his father the cop could stop by and look

 at him as if he were the most disgusting

 thing on earth with a junior after his name.

 I always felt he was a good kid going

 in the wrong direction on dope and alcohol,

 he said he was off for good at the halfway

 house he was staying at.  At least, when

 he blew the 2.6 they caught him for,

 he wasn't driving up an exit ramp of a major

 highway as one of my friends was from college

 who might have blown more if he could still

 breathe.  There wasn't enough of him left

 to stuff in a plastic garbage bag, at least,

 junior was flying low now, keeping the yellow

 double lines in place instead of watching

 them jumping from one hemisphere to the next,

 the oncoming headlights closing in, too close

 to avoid.

 An Evil Genius

 I looked around for the camera when

 they came in. Their being here could

 have been a documentary news thing

 and I would regret punching out the

 camera man, later, for filming it when

 law suits started being filed. 

 These guys had to be invented

 by an evil genius working the Welfare Rolls

 in lower Albany.  It's not often you

 get guys dressed in stolen clothes you

 would have had to mug a bum for,

 that smelled as if they had been sleeping

 in the Albany Landfill for seven years

 with one eye open for the rats.

 I wondered what the cabbie thought

 when they told him:"Just take us

 to Rapp Road, we live by the Landfill."

 I saw the guy from Duffy's rolling down

 windows as he pulled out from the curb,

 cursing me every inch of the way.

 I didn't ask those guys into the bar,

 hell, it was the first of the month;

 all the thawed out crazies were on the streets

 with hundreds of dollars they would blow

 by Thursday.  If the cabbie  thought

 the Stenchmen were bad, they should have

 been prepped for the guy I would give

 them after last call, the schizoid, alien

 hunchback of Western Avenue.

 A Song Without Words for a Soprano Who Has Forsaken Sleep

          

 She was singing an aria from

 an opera in a language she

 didn't have.  The initial signatures

 were transcribed by a madman

 and had a logic that didn't

 translate into Russian .

 She was changing languages from

 month to month that year, the next

 one would be Serbo-Croatian,

 an idea no one would recognize

 in Cyrillic although she attempted

 to augment her voice with Vodka

 and caviar. What emerged was a

 vision of a dust devil bursting out

 of a fault line saying unknowable

 words that break the skin, forming

 caverns the bats of her mind would

 fill and breed in, spreading an

 otherworldly sound, once heard,

 no one would ever forget.