POEM ON MY 35th BIRTHDAY
When I was a kid
we lived in the country
and I would take long walks
on summer nights
to a small pond
by an old, unused barn.
I would take all my clothes off
and jump into the black ink
and stay out there
for hours.
I felt strange
coming back
to my mother’s house
television glowing
in the other room
as if I didn’t
belong
as if I had just climbed
from primordial sludge
with a secret
that I would spend my life
trying to speak.
THE WHALE
He's 55 years of smug blubber,
a bored heir of a lucky fortune
who can barely walk on the vestiges of his legs
floating in the lobby of the fancy hotel
like a giant aquarium.
He's waiting for another cabby,
a town-car or something, but I shark him
and drive him to the casino
where he blows
thirty grand a month.
It's hard to understand fear or humility
when you know you can eat
everything in your path.
His mate mooncows beside him
like a somnolent mirror image
on this sunny afternoon,
rays filtering down through the thick blue sky
into the windows of my cab
where the dust rises
like plankton.
His voice is a screechy violin
and I'm just another suckerfish
in his arm pit.
It's like I'm in an undersea vessel
that's gone too deep:
my ears plug up;
the crack in my windshield
jumps one inch
at a time.
Mather Schneider is a 40 year old cab driver from Tucson, Arizona. He is happily married to a sexy Mexican woman. His poetry and prose have appeared in the small press since 1993. He has one full length book out by Interior Noise Press called Drought Resistant Strain and another full length book coming in the spring of 2011 from New York Quarterly Press.
