William John Watkins

Because his ears peak
and the hackles still rise
at the sound of a fight,
his or not,
and because no bitch passes
however far downwind
without pulling his nose
into the breeze
to gauge the days remaining
between her and her heat,
because lame as a beggar,
he cannot run in the pack
with his sons
without running lead,
and because, out all night
and coming home wet
& matted with excrement,
he still expects to be petted,

The werewolf’s wife
is forced to conclude
that a beast grows old
but he never grows up.

©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS

The Federal Center for Controlling Things
wishes to know where I contracted poetry,
so those infected, or at risk, can be advised.
They have a list of everything that sings,
and since my name appears on two or three
of their cross-referenced indices, I am apprised
that I have been identified as dangerous
to the well-being of my contacts, who must be disclosed
to the bureaucracy in charge of my disease.
They warn me my condition’s serious,
and often leads to suicide in those disposed
to introspection and the vague unease
that poets, on the whole, spread like a pestilence
among the uninfected and naive
who think a truth innocuous because it rhymes.
Contamination is a grave offense
and I am given to believe
that, though my malady is no crime,
I still am subject to grave penalties
if I withhold the names of those from whom I got,
or those to whom I gave, this metaphoric flu,
and since I’m not the hero that I ought to be,
and though I know it’s something you would never do,
I write this poem leading them you.

©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS

I like to sit and watch myself go by,
I chose the safety of the passing crowd
and though sometimes I try to catch my eye,
a nod, a smile, but nothing said out loud,

no word of warning, hint of coming joy
that otherwise might slip beneath the crush,
something beneath the notice of a boy
for whom the world is always in a rush,

an old man smiling with an absent nod
that might be meant for anyone or none,
an ordinary thing but slightly odd
a detail that might come back later on

years on perhaps, but still so sharp and strong
I’ll know it marked the moment things went wrong.

©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS

First the vampires came with their pups
waving their ticket punchers and their straws
and flittering around the room bat guano crazy
from the sugar rush diabetes put in my blood.
Then the zombie kids with their melon ballers and ice cream scoops
for carving out just the brain truffles where all the concussions
pounded the gray meat soft and sweet.
Then the dwarfling boys, fingernail-sized, made a groin in my groin
until they hit the main shaft running all the way to the kidneys
and a chain of them, hunched and determined,
went up and passed back, hand over hand over hand,
the kidney stones they prize more than gold
while the dwarf girls clapped like they were engagement diamonds.
The werewolves cubs went last, clawing for marrow
till their muzzles were wet with red and white with bone chips.
And everybody went off down the street
singing and laughing and telling the late-comers
there was still lots left of me.

Then you came, kissed me, and made me whole again.

©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS (12/4/13)

We called her 3-C like her dad,
who said that she was “three cats wise”;
everybody thought she had nine lives
while all the rest of us had less than one.

She liked rough men and I
was never much for tough & tumble
even back at school,
so what I saw in her
she never saw in me.
Still, when she went afield
like Exobio majors are supposed to do,
I followed her to some blue jungle world
two light years out.

The Expedition took a liking to her,
everybody did,
but out of all of them she liked
an Expedition brat, born there
the same year we were born on Earth,
who served as Expedition guide.
He was tumble rough all right,
and full of frontier jokes
a twelve year old would laugh at here.
But she thought he was fun.
She called him Pikeling.
Anything but “Pike” from us
would put him in our face
until we got it right.
But she was three cats cute
and had so many lives.

“You want to go Up-land
when we go next?” he asked her.
“There’s poison “rocks” out there,” I said.
They laughed and Pikeling said,
“The bad ones have a reddish spot on top.
No danger there, unless you’re blind,
or careless.”

3-C said, “An Exobio studies alien life!”
raising a finger like our Exo prof on earth,
and made me laugh.
Ah, she was three cats curious,
and I was less than one.

So out we went
where rocks bite and blue jungle trees
can wrap you sleeping in a hug of death
like we were on a picnic in an earthside park.

A boy man raised by burly men,
Pike treated her like they were boys together.
Two days out, the way a boy would
devil his best friend with a fright,
he tossed 3-C a redless rock.
She barely caught it when it opened up,
all teeth and grizzliness inside,
and bit her on the thigh on the way down.
And when it closed again we saw the spot
bright red as new spilt blood.

She went quick, with surprise
still on her face, a smothered laugh
stuck halfway out her mouth.
Who would have thought so many lives
could go at once
and leave us none.

Maybe the “rock” was on its back,
or on its side,
the way they never lie,
according to our Exo prof,
who’d never been off Earth.

But she was dead the same for all of that.
And Pikeling looking at her, bloaty blue
already where the venom made her veins
distend to capillary depth,
picked up another red spot rock,
pressed it to his heart,
and died.

But not as quick as Three Cats Wise.
Almost rock-bit with disbelief, I cried,
“It was an accident!”.  He tried
an explanation but there was no time.
“We play by different rules out here,” he said.

I tell my students that when they come in.
I  tell them when they go afield,
“You young who think you’re three cats wise,
you young who think you have nine lives,
blue jungle worlds
will leave you less than none.”

©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS

1. Did a hair
floating in the sink
bring them up short, shaving?

2. Did horror well up
from the clogged drain?

3. Did they fish out nests
of the family’s hair,
matted and drenched,
without a hint of recognition?

4. Did they ever wake sobbing?

5. Did they strop razors
to surgical sharpness
without a qualm,
waiting for the screaming
to die down in the mirror?

6. Did false teeth in a glass
strike sudden terror into them,
those dentists with hammers
tap-tapping among the dead?

7. Did their teeth
ever ache without reason?

8. Did they ever wake sobbing
to the sound of sobbing?

9. Were there ever bones in their soup?

10. Did pepper ever feel like furnace ash?

11. Did the sausages in the pan
ever steal up on them and turn
at the last instant
into the stench of the ovens?

12. Did they get up abruptly
from their meals,
their burgher stomachs
suddenly sour?

13. Did they ever wake sobbing
to the sound of sobbing
and find it their own?

14. Did the windshriek
waiting for the trolley
ever startle them into half-confessions
there in the street
with no one to listen?

15. Did the squeal
of the trolley wheels
on cold rails
make them shrink back, afraid?

16. Or was a job,
after so many years,
just a job?

17. Did they ever wake sobbing
to the sound of sobbing
and find it their own,
and go back to sleep
without ever admitting it
even to themselves?

Like a miniature city made of glass,
this crystal quartz extends transparent spires,
rust colored at their base, shafts tinged with brass
as if inside the matrix stone some fire
raged out of sight and sent its telltale glow
up the clear prisms of the shafts. This stone
grew, layer by layer, flake by flake; no
other stone adds to itself, grows like bone
up the shadow ladder its electrons cast
beyond themselves as if the rock aspires
to something more than rock, some special flow,
something akin to life. In this clear stone,
the atom’s lattice could such beauty yield,
we could not bear to have it all revealed.

©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS

They said he was a wily man,
with much of the snake in all he did,
wherever he went for miles around
whatever the people had, they hid.

They hid their daughters and their wives,
their gold and all their precious rings;
they tried to hide their very lives,
for he was good at finding things.

He had a labyrinthine mind
that understood the secret mark
men leave to find the things they’ve hid
as deep as shadows in the dark.

He always came when times were bad,
He always came when things were rough
and though they hid the best they had,
they never hid it good enough

or if they did, they gave it up
for fear he’d use his secret arts
to raise the monstrous secret things
deep hidden in their heart of hearts.

©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS