4-29-22 Long-Haul Truckin'...

eudaimonia

(eudaimonia - translated from its Greek roots as “human flourishing”)

she comes like a stranger to your door,
knocks
and demands entry
and, if you are ready to allow her passage,
becomes your friend

becomes the spark
that creates
creation

the carrier
of human flourishing
that blows away walls that restrict your vision,
cuts the knots that bind your soul

opening the all-embracing sky
that carries in its winds
the contagion of your spirit’s
deepest reach,
the fullness of your humanity

the bottomless well of your
completion

before I went insane

​
dreams
all night of a time
70 years past…
*
I was ten,
the last year before the insanity
of adolescence
set upon me…
*
and I did it so well,
crazy as hell,
doing crazy things
just to show I could do it…
so many people their trust abused,
it’s hard to believe
I made it out
alive,
and how often luck saved me
from finding my place in jail,
behind the bars it seemed
I so ardently
sought,
*
all for pride, for place,
for the benediction
of any Judas priest …
*
so domesticated am I now…
who could ever imagine
the tangled path
that brought
me here
---
dreaming all night
about the years before I went
insane
​

Moats in the Eye of a Disinterested God
​by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides


1937 (part 2 of 13)


Howard Hughes sets transcontinental air record
Second Stalin purge trial, 17 sentenced to death
DuPont patents nylon
U.S. Steel raises worker pay to $5 per day
First state contraceptive clinic opens in North Carolina
Gas explosion in school in New London, Texas kills 294
Fritz Zwicky coins the term “supernova”
Spinach growers in Crystal City, Texas erect statue of Popeye
Debut of Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd
First commercial flight across the Pacific
“Gone With the Wind” wins Pulitzer Prize
Hindenburg explodes on landing killing 36
Police kill 10 strikers at Republic Steel
Amelia Earhart disappears over the Pacific
Buchenwald concentration camp opens
China declares war on Japan
In a secret meeting Hitler informs his military leaders of his intention to go to war
Nazi exhibition, “The Eternal Jew” opens in Munich
Walt Disney premiers the first full-length animated movie, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”


----------
Heigh-ho Heigh-ho
the urge to purge
surges
America’s most beautiful
pilot
disappears
barbed wire around
a new summer camp
merit badges
for
killing Jews



----------


A widow, with a son who grows rambunctious and wild, living with relatives as a part-time housekeeper, decorating cakes at a bakery, her life promises little more.

A high school graduate, his father’s business taken by the bank, his sister home from college to stay - the Great Depression sucks life from opportunity and ambition. He applies for work with the Work Progress Administration, but does not get called. He plays semi-pro baseball, loses an eye during pre-game warm up.

The shadows of war clouds darken, but noticed still only in passing.

​radio silence

for the first year and a half
of my military service I was in training
​at Indiana University

for the two years after
I spent my shifts
sitting at a large radio console
listening,
trying to ferret out the secrets
of the Soviet air force

mostly
this meant
trying to dig out meaning
from tiny Russian voices buried
in rumpled beds of static

as part of my training
I learned that some of the voices on the radio
get trapped in the higher ionosphere
and bounce within that band
for years, old voices from years past
still circling the globe

but most of the voices
pass on through the atmosphere
and sail off into the void, traveling to the stars,
the human voice another bit of static
for alien ears

such a lesser static
we are
than what we hear, the sound of the
big bang continuing its expansion, waves
of such distant origin traveling
past and through us all the days of our lives,
such a joyous and holy sound,
but how I I cursed it
as I sought human meaning
through its crunch and crackle, not understanding
at the time that I was listening to
the universe singing
its birth
song

~~~

so silent and dead would be the universe
without
​

Fast Times at Flatonia Flats
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides

1939 (part 3 of 13)


Frieda Wunderlich elected first woman dean of a US graduate school…
Daily newspaper comic strip “Superman” debuts…
30,000 killed by earthquake in Chile…
First experiment in the splitting of a nuclear atom…
Filming begins on Gone With the Wind…
Germany occupies Czechoslovakia…
7,000 Jews flee German occupied Lithuania…
Spanish Civil War ends, the fascists prevail…
Membership in Hitler Youth becomes obligatory…
Marian Anderson sings before 75,000 at Lincoln Memorial…
“The Grapes of Wrath” is published…
Dixie Clipper completes first commercial plane flight to Europe…
Nazis close last Jewish enterprises..
Frank Sinatra makes his recording debut…
“The Wizard of Oz” premiers…
Netherland mobilizes…
Hitler orders extermination of mentally ill…
First paper to deal with “black holes” is published…
Germany invades Poland, WWII begins…
Soviet Union invades Poland…
Reinhard Heydrich meets in Berlin to discuss final solution for Jews…
Birdbaths installed in Union Square…
Assassination of Hitler attempted, failed…
USSR invades Finland…
Montgomery Ward introduces the ninth reindeer, Rudolph…

----------
Frank
sings and Dorothy notices
she's not in Kansas
anymore
the world order
crumbles
but Christmas is saved
in America
by a reindeer with a very, very
shiny nose



---------


She works, sees to her son, walks to the movies on shapely legs tanned in the sub-tropic sun, her short skirt swishing, and men along the sidewalk grow silent and watchful as she passes. She is alone, lonely, but shy, withdrawn, does not want what the men ask for with their eyes.

He drives a wrecker truck, picks up the dead and dying along icy hill country roads. Finds a truck and trailer one night, overturned, beautiful white horses lying dead across the road, the owner sits on a rock, crying, beloved horses, his circus act dead, without his horses he is nothing.

A school in auto repair opens, seeing white horses dead and bloody red in his dreams, the wrecker driver decides to be a mechanic.

thinking of the death of a man I knew
​
not a friend
but we were friendly

that’s the kind of relationship
I preferred
with people who worked for me

friendly
in the way of how’s the wife
and the kids
and isn’t it a great day today
and how 'bout them
cowboys!

never anything deeper that might
complicate the
relationship…

-----

he died a couple of days ago,
a couple of years older than me

(I had always thought of him
as younger, an artifact of the relationship
I suppose)

the news of his death
was a shock to me, he being
part of the cadre from a time in my life
which, as I think back, seems only yesterday,
and who thinks of people dead who were just seen
yesterday

and though my memories of the time seem so fresh,
it has been, in fact, nearly twenty five years,
and it being so long and John being now dead,
my thought is to wonder how many more
of my memories’ immortals must now also
be dead

and that brings me to all the other people
from even much longer ago who must also be dead
and it seems that my memory of all of them,
so clear, so sharp, is now beginning to crumble
around me…

our lives a collection of memories, and now
those memories fall to pieces in the face of reality
and if memories are our life, how much longer
before my life is a trail of blank space
where people used to be, people I recall as real
as if they are standing here and now before me…

should I be saying good bye
or is it already too
late

Now is the time of the Assassins 
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides

1940 (part 4 of 13)

FCC hears the first transmission of FM radio with clear, static -free signal…
Mass execution of Poles by the Germans…
Britain’s first WWII rationing, bacon, butter, and sugar…
Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet premiers…
Finland surrenders to Russia…
Mussolini brings Italy into Hitler’s war…
Germany invades Norway and Denmark…
Dance hall fire kills 198 in Mississippi…
Olympics are cancelled…
Winston Churchill becomes British prime minister…
First German bombs fall on England…
German troops occupy Amsterdam, Brussels and Belgium…
Britain and France begin evacuation of Dunkirk…
American Negro Theater organizes…
German forces enter Paris and France surrenders…
Brenda Starr, first cartoon strip by a woman debuts…
Bugs Bunny debuts in Wild Hare…
The blitz begins the first of 57 days consecutive nights of bombardment…
Black leaders protest discrimination in U.S. armed forces…
First Abbot and Costello film is released…
FDR wins unprecedented third term…
The walling off of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw begins…

----------
who’s on first
no longer a question
as war loads
the bases

Bugs
should a turned left
at Albuquerque
and the Finns admit
they’re finished

the Italians
put the pasta
on to boil

David's star is
put behind a wall
and pinned to every
Jewish lapel



----------

He’s come south, a drag-line mechanic helper, keeping the big machines running, building flood control levees on the river. Snakes, mosquitoes and mud - he will remember best the mud that cakes his boots so it’s hard to walk.

He meets her at the bakery, spending a part of his small paycheck on a cake for his landlords, a middle-aged woman and her middle-aged husband, a jazz trumpeter.

He watches her as she decorates the cake, the graceful wrap of her hand as she squeezes the frosting sack to make curlicues and red roses in a nest of green ivy that hangs across the cake like real ivy on a fence at home.

She rings up the charge on the register and takes his money.

“I’m Sidney," he says, "you can call me Sid.”

She smiles, shyly, looks into his eyes and sees not the hungry eyes of the men on the street, but a friendly smile instead, a friendly smile on a handsome face, a tall man with dark hair, long and swept back.

“I’m Mona,” she says.

yes, the bear does poop  in the woods
 
having
been at this for some time now,
years in fact, I have become
a poetry pro, able
to engage in walking, minding the dog,
and poeming
all
at the same time…

now
I’m sorry to say that as I walk
and mind the dog and attempt poeming
what I’m thinking of is dog poop
and the way city dwellers
treat it as if it is some kind of toxic
material such as North Korea or ISIS or
some other terrorist outfit like
the Pat Boone Fan Club
might come up with to terrorize
the civilized world
and I say
that’s silly because you didn’t see
Indians of the American type chase
deer and antelope and bison across the prairie
with little plastic bags to capture their poop
before it genocided their lives
and culture (white-eyes
certainly didn’t need any buffalo poop
to accomplish that end)
and you never saw cowboys
with little plastic bags hanging
from their saddles watching out
for cow pies and horse hockey
to defuse and decontaminate
and I don’t see why dog poop
should be toxic if deer and antelope and
buffalo and cow and horse and cougar
and such isn’t (and consider the number of
kangaroos in Australia and how it would devastate
that whole continent if kangaroo poop
was toxic and how could dog poop
be any more toxic than kangaroo poop
is a question someone should be
asking)

but
that said,
I understand
dog poop is not pleasant to look at
and downright disgusting to step into which is why
Bella’s rule of pooping is that she can’t do it
anywhere people walk, a rule she follows
religiously,
and if that’s an issue for some people
I can only remind them
that,
yes,
the bear does poop in the woods
and if you find yourself
stepping
in bear poop you are in bear
country where bears have a god-given
right to poop and where you have, according
to the natural nature of nature, no right to be
and you should set off for people country
where you belong in the first place
as quickly as you can
and leave the poor damn bears
to poop in
peace…
​

Den of Iniquity 
by Allen Itz

​



Time and the Tides


1941 (part 5 of 13)


The Japanese Imperial Navy with353 planes attacks the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, 2,304 people killed…
FDR gives his Day of Infamy speech to Congress and war on Japan is declared…
Germany and Italy declare war on the United States...

----------
the world’s misery
crosses both oceans,
becomes America’s misery as well

the righteous fight
is begun



----------


Sid joins the lines at the enlistment centers, but is deemed unfit because of his lost eye. Determined to serve, he seeks to join the Seabees, construction force for the Navy, but is again refused.

He is distraught, Mona relieved.

always a sucker for the blond
 
I can see
through the restaurants
wide windows
beautiful blond
Bella
in the car
sitting in her favorite spot
behind the steering
wheel,
watching
anticipating
ever move I make

so
attuned
is she to me
that she knows all my
tics and stratagems, knows
when I am working in my office that
when I reach to close the top of my computer
that something is up, rises from her
spot by me and waits for me
at the door

body
language…

she is an expert,
at least when it comes to my body and
my language…

I used that sympathetic soul
to my advantage
last night
and still feel guilty about it

pills she must take twice a day
for a rash make her very thirsty, with
the expected consequences
as when
last night she started to pee
in the den right in front of me and
I yelled at her because she never does that
(and we just paid $150 to have that carpet cleaned)
and she jumped and hurried off to her safe place behind
my recliner in the bedroom
and I wanted to get her outside to finish peeing
but she was scared by my yelling
and didn’t want to come so I played the ultimate card,
reaching for her leash and she came running
reaching for her leash always means a walk
is in store except this time when she was all the way
out the backdoor before she realized the door
was closing behind her and her leash still hung
from its hook and such a devastated look
I got that it haunts me yet this
morning…

but even betrayed
her trust in me she maintains
and, remembering all the good things,
the walks we actually walked and not the tricks,
forgetting all the bad so that
even now
she sits in my car behind the steering wheel
watching ever move I make here inside
the restaurant, alert to even the slightest move
that might suggest the next great thing
we will be doing together
next…

(or she may be watching for the sausage patty
I give her every morning after breakfast
but I prefer to believe it is me
she loves
and not my sausage, captive as I am
to this blond dog as men are to most
blondes)

Shadrach in the Fiery Pit
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides


1942 (part 5 of 13)

Rose Bowl played in North Carolina due to Japanese threat…
Japanese troops occupy Manila…
Nazi officials confer to plan the extermination of Europe’s Jews - the “Final Solution” …
Count Basie records One O’clock Jump…
First U.S. force in Europe goes ashore in Northern Ireland…
Archie comic book debuts…
FDR orders internment of all west-coast Japanese Americans…
American defense of Philippines collapses, MacArthur ordered out…
First day of the Battle of Java Sea - 13 U.S. warships sunk - 2 Japanese…
First cadets graduate from Tuskegee flying school…
Belzec Concentration Camp opens with 30,000 Polish Jews…
FDR orders men between 45 and 64 to register for non-military duty…
U.S. and Filipino forces overwhelmed by Japanese at Bataan…
Stars and Stripes newspaper for U.S. armed forces starts…
First U.S. aerial bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities…
First food rationing in U.S. beginning with sugar…
1,500 Jews gassed in Auschwitz…
Bing Crosby records White Christmas…
Japan’s 1st major defeat in the Battle of Midway…
German army defeated at El-Alamein North Africa…
Anne Frank begins her diary…
Dwight Eisenhower appointed commander of U.S. forces in Europe
Execution of Jews by the thousands proceeds across Nazi -occupied Europe…
Tweety Bird debuts…
Casablanca premiers…
First self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction occurs…


----------


the noose
of apocalypse
is tied

the
gallows
prepared



----------


Sid is free of the snakes and mosquitoes and mud, transferred from the levees into town to work in the shop. He knows it is a temporary job, open because the worker who held it is a soldier now, training the battles to come. The job will be his again upon his return. Sid is still disappointed that he can’t join the fight, but pleased, at least, that he has freed up another to fight in his place.

He and Mona have made friends among the pilot trainees at the army-air base on the edge of town. Young men who will be in the midst of murderous air battles in the Pacific or, soon they know, over Europe. But for now, they are just young men with the temporary luxury of having their young wives with them.

Sid and Mona are the only two unmarried among their crowd. Lonely and alone in a strange place before they met, they are good friends now.

Just good friends, they say, but they both know, though afraid to say it, that their friendship is not the end. They see a future they so very quietly imagine, for now.

brown legs walking in sunshine
 
remembering
brown legs walking
in sunshine
and I’m sitting by the gym
and it’s 1957 again
and I’m 13 again, and
a new center of the
universe
is revealed to me

Night Life
after Willie Nelson
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides

1943 (part 7 if 13)


William Hastie, aid to secretary of war, resigns in protest of segregation in armed forces…
Frankfurters replaced by Victory Sausages (mixture of meat and soy meal)…
Hitler declares “total war”…
The Pentagon, world’s largest office building, is completed…
U.S. bans pre-sliced bread to reduce bakery demand for metal parts…
Duke Ellington plays his first concert at Carnegie Hall…
General Eisenhower selected to command allied forces in Europe…
German “White Rose” student group hangs anti-Hitler banner in Munich, are caught and beheaded…
German 6th Army surrenders at Stalingrad, a turning point in the war in Europe…
New volcano erupts in farmer's cornfield in Mexico…
Porgy and Bess opens on Broadway…
Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore premiere on radio…
Oklahoma premieres…
Bergen -Belsen concentration camp forms…
Postal zone system invented…
German and Italian forces surrender in North Africa, one group after another…
Berlin is declared free of Jews…
Zoot Suit Riots -Mob in Los Angeles beats up everyone who appears Hispanic…
Income tax withholding becomes law…
Race riots in Texas and other states…
Allied forces invade Sicily…
Almost 6,000 tanks take part in the greatest tank battle in history with Russian victory over Germany…
RAF bombs Hamburg (20,000 dead)…
Mussolini resigns…
John F. Kennedy’s PT-boat 109 is sunk…
Mussolini captured by Allies, rescued by German forces, starts resistance movement…



----------


tides begin to turn
but even turning
tides
are deadly

the dead wash
out with the retreating surf

as new dead
wash in with each bloody surge

the march of tides and time
is not over



----------


Sid and Mona join his very good landlord friends Matrice and Harry for a night across the border in Reynosa, Havana on the Rio Grande it's called, where U.S. dollars buy the finest in Mexican foods and floor shows and magicians and where, in the finest of the clubs, El Leon del Noche, an African lion pads through the restaurant on a leash.

And an orchestra that plays the latest in American big band swing. The band knows Harry and he always brings his trumpet so that he can sit in. This night he plays the most beautiful version of Stardust Sid and Mona ever heard.

They sit close at their table, holding hands, breathless in the thick Mexican night. The change in their life they had imagined finally comes, quietly, at a small table in a Reynosa nightclub. They found their song and with the song, each other.

Matrice watches it happen, smiles, winks at Harry. Their conspiracy realized, their plan come together.

something insightful

something insightful
is what I need today, a good trenchant statement
of sharp, cogent insight that
through the magic of superior poetics
will become a poem for the ages or at least for the next fifteen minutes
after which it won’t count any more
since I will no longer be famous, and no one will care
as to the relative insightfulness of my statement, no matter
how rightful or blind hog obvious it is

it’s the most wonderful thing
about fame being limited to only fifteen minutes,
it being that the sooner one’s fifteen minutes are up
the sooner all the idiocies of that time
are forgot -
much better than my 78 years
during which every idiocy ever considered or perpetrated
during that time is on the record, subject
to constant review, ridicule and personal angst
over and over and over again…

so much better that fifteen-minute statute of limitations…

~~~

maybe this is my insight for the day, or the one at least
that will pass for the next fifteen
minutes



​

Jacob's Ladder
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides


1944 (part 8 of 13, and my birth year)
 
 
Ralph Bunch first Negro official in the State Department appointed...
Eisenhower takes command of Allied Invasion Force in London...
First jazz concert at Metropolitan Opera House, featuring Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and others...
RAF drops 2,300 bombs on Berlin; 447 German bombers attack London... 
Leningrad liberated in 880 days with 600,000 killed...
Batman and Robin premier in newspapers...
Mount Vesuvius erupts...
Jimmy Steward flies his 12th combat mission leading attack on Berlin...
D Day, 150,000 Allied troops land in Normandy...
15 U.S. aircraft carriers attack Japanese on Marianas...
Congress creates the CIA...
FDR signs GI Bill of Rights...
First Japanese kamikaze attack...
First German V-2 rocket hits Great Britain...
U.S. retakes Guam...
Anne Frank arrested, sent to Auschwitz...
Smokey Bear debuts...
Charles De Gaulle walks the Champs-Elysees after Paris liberation...
George H. W. Bush ejects from his burning plane...
Copland's "Appalachian Spring" premieres...
Auschwitz begins gassing inmates...
FDR wins 4th term...
Glenn Miller lost over English Channel...
 
 
----------
 
 
 
American
string of pearls
regained in the Pacific
 
American 
stringer of musical pearls
lost in Europe
as
Mr. Smith bombs
Berlin
 
the fire of 
explosions
manufactured and natural
light 
global nights
 
the batsignal
calls
on sone such night
for even more heroes
to rise
and fall for the cause
of morality's light 
 
 
----------
 
 
Mona's son, Vincent (first called "Spud" by his uncle and now Spud to everyone but his mother), is ten years old now, prone to mischief, and a worry to his mother.
 
He does not take well to the arrival of a new man in her life and misbehaves when Sid is around.  Sid is not a patient man, Mona knows, and has no experience with children. and she worries that as Spud tries to push Sid away, he will succeed. He acts like he wants Mona to choose between the two of them.
 
"Why do we need him," Spud asks, "why can't you just make him go away?"
 
Sid worked hard to gain the boy’s trust, but nothing seemed to make any difference until a Saturday afternoon at Sam Hill Park when Spud fell into a canal that flowed through the south end of the park. He could not swim, and it was Sid who heard his screams for help and jumped into the water, fully clothed, and pulled him out...
 
His best pants and shoes ruined, Sid held the boy as he shivered from the chill water and cried and told Sid how sorry he was to cause such a problem.  But Sid quieted the boy, holding him with a gentleness Mona had not seen before, looking for the first time like a father to her son.
 
That night, after Spud had been put to bed, they went back to the park, alone this time, and on a blanket on a large stone shelf of flat rock under a pecan tree, made love for the first time. Naked in summer moonlight, with long soulful kisses and slow silken caresses, gently rocking as they were for the first time joined.

​

​the third wife of Adam
​
the first went sour,
had intercourse with demons,
giving birth to monsters
that haunt us still
today...

the second,
well, that was God’s fault,
making her in front of Adam
and so disgusted was he
by the revelation
of what was inside the latest
creation and by extension,
himself that he was repulsed
and would have nothing to do
with it, no matter how pleasing
God made the outside…

and God destroyed the second
and determined to try just one more
time, this time, while Adam
slept..

``````````````````````````````````````````````````````

and said God to the third
as he complete fitting all the parts
in all their proper
places -

"I have made all that is around you," He said,
"this garden is mine, my wonderful creation,
but it seemed lonely and bare
without a creature like myself, so I made Adam
in my image and because he was incomplete as one
I made you to be his mate, his wife and the
mother of the future I will make
with the two of you…

"and I named you Eve because you are the setting
of the old and the bringer of a new
dawn, the culmination of my
ambition…

"and as prelude to the dawn," He said,
"your destiny is not in this garden

"to explain, I will come to you in another shape
and show you that your destiny is to defy me
and by that defiance become a creature of free will,
a creation complete at last in my image,
a creation who by this last piece is certain to confound me
and stir my wrath and, for a while,
blind me to my love for you, my child
as will all you children
be my children…

"and through all the thousand years
that will pass, my wrath
will diminish
and I will remember my love for you
and we will be reunited
in a new garden -
a new Eden
in some far place unseen
and known only to me
that new Eden that awaits our
return…

"this is your story," He said,
"the third and last wife of Adam,
who will carry my story
to the end, you destiny to be
mother of all men and in the end,
mother of God..."

True Romance
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides


1945 (part 9 of 13)

Pepe LaPew debuts…
German forces retreat in Battle of the Bulge…
Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony premieres in Moscow…
Every Amsterdammer gets three kilos of sugar beets…
Red army continues to liberate concentration camps as it advances west…
Grand Rapids becomes first U.S. city to fluoridate its water…
1,000 American Flying Fortresses drop 3,000 tons of bombs on Berlin…
Andrews Sisters hit number one on the charts with “Rum and Coca Cola”…
Yalta agreement signed by FDR, Churchill and Stalin…
U.S. Marines raise flag on Iwo Jima…
Federico Garcia Lorca’s “La Casa” premieres in Buenos Aires…
First International Woman’s Day is observed…
Firebombing of Tokyo in nighttime B-29 raid, more than 100,000 killed, mostly civilians…
“Going My Way” with Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman win best movie Oscar…
U.S. 7th Army crosses the Rhine…
“Glass Menagerie” premieres…
U.S. soldiers liberate Buchenwald…
FDR dies, Truman sworn in as 33 president…
Red Army begins Battle of Berlin…
Mussolini captured by Italian partisans and hung…
Unconditional surrender of Germany to the Allies and V-E (Victory in Europe) Day is announced…
Herman Goering is captured by U.S. Army; Heinrich Himmler commits suicide…
Abbott and Costello’s film “The Naughty Nineties” released, includes longest version of “Who’s on First”…
The war in the Pacific continues, island by island with massive causalities on both sides; the Japanese ignore several surrender ultimatums…
U.S. drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima; three days later drops second bomb on Nagasaki…
V-J Day; Japan surrenders unconditionally…
Branch Rickey signs Jackie Robinson…
Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnam independence from France




----------
 
war clouds
part
leave broke and bloody
lands
open to the sky

a time to beat
weapons
into plowshares,
a time to replant
and rebuild

but, oh,
the weapons are so more fearsome
than ever
before
the power of forever burning
stars
in the hands of mortal
man

and
already
on the horizon
new storms can be seen forming

peace
a fragile
and
forever
a passing
moment
in the hands of
temporary
man



----------


Talk of marriage begins.

Matrice and Harry offer a larger apartment, enough for Mona and Sid and Spud, and maybe another when the time comes.

Sid’s father is an open, approving man, happy for his son’s chance at happiness, wherever he finds it. Sid’s mother does not like the idea of her son marrying a widow woman - especially one with a son going on 12 years old.

Her family just pleased that she has someone besides them to depend on.

Sid and Spud spend long Saturdays together; sometimes take in a cowboy movie, while Mona works at the bakery.

Life flows around them in slow and gently ripples.

​legion of the late-dawning dark

most who understand what I have done
are gone,
dead,
or lost in their own bitter
memories…

----------

we are angry
generation, grew old thinking
old didn’t matter

we know better
now

understanding now we are not
special like we thought,
not exempt like we
thought…

understanding now that even at our best
we are still just a part of the decay
that produces new life, our
function to be not the flourish that blooms forever,
but only fertilizer for the next
spring’s flowering…

understanding that even the tallest tree
will someday
in a silent forest fall
unheard...

not the way expected
it would be…

----------

I march with a cohort
of the angry,
the legionnaires of the
late dawning
dark…

Santa Fe Afternoon
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides

1946 (part 10 of 13)


ENIAC, first large U.S. computer finished…
“Show Boat” opens…
First meeting of the United Nations General Assembly…
“Lucky” Luciano pardoned for his wartime service and deported to Italy…
Juan Peron elected President of Argentina…
Winston Churchill makes “Iron Curtain” speech…
First U.S. rocket leaves Earth’s atmosphere…
Greece holds its first election after WWII…
First election for Japanese Diet…
Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering (later renamed Sony) is founded with 20 employees…
First hour long entertainment TV show premieres on NBC…
“Annie Get Your Gun” premieres with Ethel Merman in the lead…
Truman seizes control of nation’s railroads to delay a strike…
Patent filed in U.S. for H-Bomb…
First bikini bathing suit displayed in Paris…
Supreme Court bans discrimination in interstate travel…
U.S. tests atom bomb on Bikini atoll…
Truman orders desegregation of all U.S. forces…
“Animal Farm” published…
First mobile long-distance car-to-car telephone call…
Herman Goering sentenced to death, commits suicide in his cell…
“The Iceman Cometh” premieres…
Camera onboard a V-2 rocket takes first picture of the earth from space…
John F. Kennedy elected to U.S. House…
“Best Years of Our Lives” premieres…
Led by Ho Chi Ming, Vietnamese attacs French forces in Hanoi…
“It’s a Wonderful Life” premieres…
Truman officially proclaims the end of WWII…


----------


a time of
endings

a time of
quiet

a time of planting
in fields
plowed by bombardments
of war

a time
when first buds
of future days
push
through the torn and bloody soil
of pastures reaching
for life

a time when
all the forces of good and bad
gather
for the next round
of clashing philosophies

a time when blood rises
throbbing
toward
that day


---------

Wedding day at the courthouse.

Harry stands for Sid; Matrice for Mona. Spud stands between them as the vows are said.

Sid and Mona have to work, so their honeymoon is short, Saturday night in a small motel on Boca Chica Beach. They are alone together as Spud stays with Harry and Matrice.

To the sound of tides brushing in and out over sand glowing white under a brightly jeweled sky, they make love for the first time as man and wife.

Monday they go back to work; Monday night they settle for the first time into their new apartment, the first full night together for the three of them. Spud falls asleep quickly; Sid and Mona, in their own bedroom, celebrate their homecoming with the quiet passion of the newly-wed.

​I love college radio
 
“Eleanor Rigby”
symphonic version,
preceded by Aaron Copland’s
“Appalachian Spring”
and followed by Chopin’ “Nocturnes”
and Debussy’s “La Mer” and “Clair de Lune”

that’s the way I started my day
here on the corner of Broadway and Pearl…

I love college radio and I expect I’m going
to love this day,
another
in a long line of an old man’s midweek
capriccio…

Gilligan Sets the Course Home
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides

1948 (part 11 of 13)


Channel 13 in New York (PBS) begins…
First Supermarket opens in the United Kingdom…
First country music TV show, Midwestern Hayride, premieres…
“Treasure of Sierra Madre” opens…
First tape recorder sold…
Mahatma Gandhi assassinated…
Mao’s army occupies Yenan…
First newsreel telecast shown on NBC…
Communist Party takes control of Czechoslovakia…
Supreme Court rules that religious instruction in public schools is unconstitutional…
Congress passes Marshall Aid Act…
Senator Glenn Taylor of Idaho arrested in Alabama for trying to enter a meeting through a door marked “for Negroes’…
Israel declares independence from British…
Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq & Saudi Arabia troops attack Israel…
Milton Berle Show premieres…
Babe Ruth’s final farewell at Yankee Stadium three days before he dies…
USSR begins Berlin Blockade; U.S./British airlift begins…
Ed Sullivan premieres on TV…
Indians sign Satchel Paige…
Alcoholic Anonymous founded…
Professional wrestling premieres on prime-time TV…
“Candid Camera” debuts on TV…
Truman elected on his own in an upset…
T. S. Eliot wins Nobel Prize for literature…
Hopalong Cassidy and “Kukla, Fran & Ollie” debut on TV


----------


peace
and prosperity

soldiers home from war
take wives
have children
go to college and buy little houses
where a new middle class
is born

there are shadows
but always there are shadows

but soon everybody
will have a TV
and a new culture
a new language as old accents
are shed
north south east west
regions meld
into
peace and
prosperity and

shadows?

only the black and white
shadows
of television
of
Uncle Miltie
of Hopalong, of
Gorgeous George
and Wild Red Berry disturb
the night

and any who don’t have the shadows,
want them
Sears
Monkey Ward
low down, easy payments
too…



----------


Sid lost his job when the soldiers came home, but found another one right away. Gets paid every week, cashes his check at the supermarket and takes all but his small weekly allowance home to Mona who makes sure there are groceries in the cupboard for the four, yes, the four, of them, to eat.

With little Annie, just a year old, at her side, Mona works at home, bakes cakes, makes corsages out of old silk hose for high school dances. Helps all she can.

Spud is fourteen, still not a bad kid, but stubborn and reckless and impulsive. Teachers do not like his way or his inattention or his sass. He fails at everything but football.

Money so tight, but still Mona agrees to a hard decision - a private school in another city where, sponsored by their church, Spud can go. It is a place of discipline and accountability. Sid believes that is all his son needs and Spud, who still sees his hero in his adopted father, agrees to go.

Mona weeps as she sews name tags on his clothes and packs a large trunk for him. Sid takes a day off from work so they can all go to the school together, so that the boy doesn’t have to get off a bus alone, so that this separation, their first, is done together.

It seems such an empty house that Sid and Mona return to, silence a presence of laughter missing. Annie cries for her brother as Mona cries for her son. Sid sits quietly in his chair mourning the responsibility of fatherhood.

​

​

​Easter in Kabul

we walked the streets, three
of us, strangers to the city on a short leave,
through the downtown, buses and pedicabs honking,
crowding the street, each claiming dominance, motor bikes
and bicycles, and along the street, rickety stores,
none more than two floors high but the Spirizan Hotel,
watering hole for the US Aid workers, and the Russians from their
embassy and a UN contingent and a few Americans, bar at the top
of the hotel neutral territory where all could eat and drink
without starting an international incident leading to World War III
or just national humiliation...

and a book store where I buy a book of poems by the country's
foremost poet (dual language, Urdu and English) and also in English,
Mao's Little Red Book, brought on camel back across the Khyber Pass,
very thin, almost onionskin, paper, and the red plastic cover,
utilitarian and tough, a holy bible of sorts from the cultural revolution
next door...

as we continue toward the AID house where we will spend
our three-night stay, the road turns to red gravel, passing a restless
snorting camel, buying fresh nan from a street vendor, the sweet
airiness of it melting in our mouth...

----------

from out window in the morning,
we see the children walking to school in their tan uniforms,
singing...

(how I will mourn the tragedy of their lives in the years to come)

a cat on the roof below us next door, wakes and stretches, a lazy cat
​
sleeping on warm tiled roof in morning sunshine...

Red Tide
by Allen Itz

​ 
Time and the Tides


1950 (part 12 of 13)


Now the world’s second nuclear power, the Soviet Union flexes its muscle…
Ho Chi Minh begins offensive against French troops in Indo China…
Britain recognizes Communist government of China…
The Great Brinks Robbery makes off with nearly three million in cash and securities…
First TV broadcast of “What’s My Line”…
Senator McCarthy charges 205 communists are in the State Department…
Walt Disney releases “Cinderella”…
Dylan Thomas arrives in New York for his first U.S. poetry reading tour…
Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca premier “Your Show of Shows”…
First woman officer assigned to U.S. naval vessel…
Silly Putty invented…
Bob Hope’s first TV appearance…
“Peter Pan” premieres…
Dutch police seize condoms…
North Korea invades South Korea, captures Seoul, Truman orders American Air Force and Navy into the conflict…
U.S. and North Korea forces clash for the first time…
The Law of Return guarantees all Jews the right to live in Israel…
“Sunset Boulevard” premieres…
U.S. gives military aide to anti-communist regime in South Vietnam…
Earthquake in India kills 20,000 to 30,000…
Beetle Bailey debuts…
South Korean troops enter North Korea…
Charlie Brown debuts in “Peanuts” precursor…
U.S. forces invade North Korea, occupy Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, approach Chinese border and China responds with massive counter-attack into Korea…
Puerto Rican nationalists attempt to assassinate Truman…
William Faulkner wins Nobel Prize for Literature…
Eisenhower takes command of NATO…


----------


not a war
for us at first,
plenty war
for those dying
cities falling
and more people
dying
on both sides

a line on a map

thousands of lines
on thousands of maps

a time of redrawing lines
making obsolete
maps
of failing empires

another war starts
as relics of French empire totter

this one starts also
without us, barely noticed
by us, but a tar baby war
that inexorably draws us, three generations
of little tar baby wars
pend
stealthily
growing like the tiger cub
that grows its claws and its fangs
and is nobody’s baby
anymore

and the big one, the last one, the-end-of-all-wars,
the end-of-the-world that
keeps us awake at night,
the bomb-shelter big one, the-duck-and-cover
big one, Armageddon passed
like a low hand at poker, too terrible
for anyone to win with it
so
all
bluff and pass



----------


Spud is 16, going on 17, back at regular school, impulsiveness contained, mischief restrained, unhappy, seeking an outlet. He lies, enlists.

It’s his war and he doesn’t want to miss it like his dad missed his.

It is done.

Annie cries as he leaves. Mona cries as he leaves. Sid does not approve, will not acknowledge his departure, will not shake his hand.

Nevertheless, he is in the army now, and off to fight his war.

​my search for better personhood
​
still,
having slept an extra hour
every morning
for the past six days
and having exchanged my wide window view
of stressed commuters on Interstate 10
for a smaller window
and later and slower and more laid-back traffic on Broadway
I cannot say
I am a better person for it

but the sun just came out
making the morning yellow and bright
and that is certainly
promising
but
still I fear
it will take more than that

and the obits this morning,
25 dead people and only one younger than me
(and that only by scant months)
and that is sure as hell
a promise
to consider,
but
still
I think
it will take more than that

and while my wife was her usual
non-committal self
my dog demonstrated the true and deepest love for me
this morning
and that would be promising if in any way
it suggested a status change
but It does not
so that falls on the maintenance side
of the ledger
not on any new promise side
so it will take more than
that

so
it might appear,
setting all else aside as nice but not the true way
to better person-hood, that the only way to be a better person
is to be a better person…

~~~

isn’t it always the way,
there's always one damn catch or other,
like the advertisements on the back of comic books
about how to quit being the guy
who the bully at the beach always kicks sand in the face of,
the secret sold for twenty-five cents and a coupon on the back of the label on the 75-ounce jar of
Vaseline Petroleum Jelly…

Nirvana and better person-hood
available only to those most dedicated to its pursuit

(and liberal daily use of Vaseline Petroleum Jelly)

Explosion at the Cambell Soup Factory, Gator Bait, Louisiana
by Allen Itz

 
Time and the Tide

2020 (as extrapolated from 2015, part 13 of 13)


President Trump, reelected, resigns; celebrates the U.S. reproachment with Russia with official opening of his new casino on the Volga - The Trump-Putin Towers…

Vice President Kardashian takes the oath of office as the new President of the United States…

The end of history, as prophesied 40 years ago, finally arrives…


----------


history
becomes the fool;
the court jester in a pork pie hat
with fluff-ball bells on strings
that bob and bounce
with every faltering step,
the Ministry of Silly Walks sets the pace
as reason limps to the sidelines,
“take me out, coach,” the hero pleads,
“take me out…”

space aliens, tinfoil hats
and pyramids beneath your bed,
the force be gone
and already forgotten…



---------


My name is Spud, or, used to be, but nobody’s called me that for years.

The fellas down at the VFW call me Colonel, my rank after Khe Sanh, the rank I kept for the next 20 years. A wise ass who was right too often, a career killer in Uncle’s army. Sid was right way back, when he told me I didn’t have the discipline to be a soldier.

But I did all right, fought my wars well, got my ribbons, got my medals, just never got the rank I deserved.

Sid, well he finally forgave me for joining up without talking to him, then got all mad again when I re-enlisted for Vietnam. He’s dead now, a long time now, a car wreck on his way to work. That same damned old job never got the promotions he deserved, never the pay rises he deserved, years of watching lesser men take the rewards he earned.

Like father like son, I guess, wise asses both of us.

Mona died about ten years ago, in a home, alone, I’m afraid. I was in Europe, then Asia, the Mid-East for all the sand wars and just never paid attention. Annie was in California, another never-to-be movie star serving eggs and burgers at Denny’s. She never paid much attention either. Neither of us, I guess, came to much good as children.

At least neither of us made the mistake of trying to be parents.

It’s a helluva world and a helluva country. I figure I’d be fighting another war soon if I wasn’t so old. Too bad for all the young fellas and girls who’ll soon be starting their own string of wars to fight.

What can I tell you, an old soldier playing dominoes and drinking beer at the VFW. It’s a helluva world.