“My Literary Elite” and “Gas Station Purgatory”

By Charles Brooks

My Literary Elite
   
I reclined beside his fireside chair
to harass the maudlin ghost of Poe,
about marrying his baby cousin
and his sing-song, single-minded crow.
   
I walked a while with Whitman,
helped him strangle a gal with her hair.
I caught a college class by Faulkner
and was wooed by his educated, drunken flare.
   
Then Byron, the Shelleys, and I
made laudanum toddies to fire up our Fates.
Twain broke out his favorite cigars,
and made us laugh at our foolish human race.
   
Brooding in the back of Dante’s Exile Tavern,
I listened to him read of the damned.
Later Blake walked through naked,
muttering about a tiger and his lamb.
   
But it’s all just a literary escape,
these immortals the only company in my room.
I compose these lines in homage to them,
then, as the artist, sleep in ‘til noon.
   

Gas Station Purgatory
   
As some folks in here scream into cell phones,
it’s as if their teeth are made of some
unknown metal that clangs and clangs
while you try to be civilized in the urban jungle.
I am mute to everything else
but that infernal clanging and clanging
that clamored into my otherwise pleasant morning.
   
Nothing of any import,
it is an incomprehensible jumble
of nonsense they picked up from another,
even dimmer, friend-coworker-relative.
All of it vomited out in front of me;
I am seeing Sartre’s point in other people.
   
I have no delusions of grandeur, though-
I know that my most intellectual thoughts
is ignorant offal to another, more refined individual.
But in this gas station, stuck in line,
I am brow beaten by gossip and lottery tickets.
This clanging and clanging is the price I pay
for capitalism and democracy.

Charles Clifford Brooks III is a poet and freelance writer living in Jasper, Georgia USA. Along with writing assignments for several magazines, Clifford also contributes monthly pieces to the Pickens County Progress concerning political-social issues. He was inducted into the National Creative Society his senior year at Shorter College which sealed his fate as a man of letters.