CaLokie
GHOST
STORIES
a poetic libreetto
CONTENTS
A HALLOWEEN HAIKU
GHOST STORY
TO A COSMOS FLOWER
LET ME CRY,
PREACHER
A HALLOWEEN HAIKU
BOO!
Hey Jackass,
Jack off!
You sure as hell
don’t scare me
GHOST STORY *
I was
walking by
my house.
And all of
a sudden
I hear,
“Ghost!”
And I
looked
and I
see somebody
and I didn’t know
who it was.
“Com’ere!”
they say
and they
keep on
getting closer
and yelling
“Ghost.”
And then
they say,
“Where’re
you from?”
And I say,
“Nowhere,
I don’t
bang
no more.”
“Where
you from?”
Nowhere.
And then
I hear,
“Ghost!
I thought
I knew
you, fool!”
And then
they shoot.
BAM!
And I
could see
my body
on the
floor.
And then
they come over
and say, “See
I told you,
I fuckin’
told you...
STUPID!
See I
told you.
Fuckin
told you.
Fuckin...”
BAM!
*A found poem from Celeste Fremon, Father Greg & the
Homeboys
To a Cosmos Flower
I want you orange
like the Mexican Marigolds which honor the dead
and celebrate their lives
during Los Dias De Los Muertos but
I also want you yellow
as sunlight shining through your petals
like the life coming from our sun
I want the sky from where the sunshine comes
blue
the clouds which float by
white
and your chest high stem with leaves growing
in pairs along it
green
I want you
to stretch toward the heavens flexible enough
to bend with the wind
but strong enough to return upright
whenever it calms
I want your roots
sunk deep into Mother Earth
and intertwined underground in family love
while you fill the fields with an orange bloom blaze
I prefer you wild
like your ancestors who first grew
in Mexico
or mine who became known as Homo Sapiens
in Africa
I want
you as balanced as the Cosmos in which we live
and which lives in us
LET ME CRY PREACHER
Let me cry, Preacher.
Mama’s gone
and no resurrection and life sermon
gonna comfort me now.
That “How Great Thou Art” solo
was pretty
and maybe she requested it
but it ain’t her.
In her dancin’ days
if it didn’t have
that swing
then it didn’t mean a thing.
We all laughed with her the time
she fell on her elder behind
attemptin’ a jitterbug step.
But we all knew what she meant.
The sounds she came to dig
were whippoorwill calls, cricket responses
and hummingbird buzzing dives
to defend turf around her feeder.
Mama wasn’t too religious.
She never went to church much and when
she got mad, she’d often say “shit”
or take the name of the Lord in vain.
To be honest with you, Reverend,
the flames of your hell didn’t scare
Mama nearly as much as not
being able to feed her family.
At 15 I got religion and started sayin’
grace before meals. Mama said
she thought it’d also be a good idea
to remember the hands that prepared it.
I was too much of a pious prick to get it then
but today I see we oughta be grateful
for all the hard work it takes from farm to
kitchen to put our daily bread on the table.
Holdin’ everything in
when it’s gotta come out
ain’t never gonna do nobody
no good.
So let me get it out, Preacher.
Then you can talk about
wipin’ away all tears.
But keep it short.
Carl Stilwell (aka CaLokie) is a
retired teacher who taught for over 30 years in the Los Angeles Unified School
District and participated in UTLA’s teachers’ strikes in 1970 and 1989. He was
born during the depression in Oklahoma and came to California in 1959 and has
lived here ever since.
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