The Pearl (Janis Joplin’s Secret
Handsome Sailor Man)
for
Old Mike
a
Pearl was known to put
Everything into her performances
Her stamping feet
Her screaming ropes of radio hair
Her full-tilt titties,
her thunder
Storm of giant pain
After a giant one-night stand in
Frisco, Pearl
Woke up beside a handsome sailor-man
entertaining
A butt-length ponytail, perfect for
Pearl to grab
As she sank. His name was
Mike Newhart, and he was a sailorman
with no boat, being AWOL from war
And this Mike fellow blew a mean horn
in a hillbilly band
And Mike was attuned to the tides of
Pearl’s boiling blood
Her icy sweats, and her traffic of
tears
For that one giant night of love at
least, purely by celestial
Navigation, Mike guided Pearl and her
personal Titanic
Through becalmed seas with no mountains
of ice
To dodge in the dark
b
See the Pearl pull out of port
That last giant night of love
See the floating electric city
Of lovely lights glittering on the
surface of the
Sea
Hear the horn of the handsome
sailor-man at midnight
Hear the drumbeats at dawn,
Hear the cries of the circling
sea-birds
Mike, as a land-locked sailor-man for
the rest of his own natural life, carried
That giant night of love with Pearl in
his big heart
Until it stopped beating in a
Pittsburgh, PA, VA hospital some forty years hence
But not before guiding the Pearl under
a mostly imagined giant night sky of only faintly
Recalled constellations to a safe port
In a poem
Hidden Treasure
How could that boy have any kind of
life without you?
Baptist girl, blowjob girl, snake
charmer girl
No other diamond save you has ever been
discovered in the coal seams
Of West Virginia, is what you winked
and blinked at that boy
In the blue neon of beer joints
Your eyes scary and dark
Drunk with jukebox lights from that
joint across the river
Those were torches carried in your
condemned eyes
Your caves are cruel, and burn with
yesterday
Every bone in you burns for somebody
else, every feather
You told that boy you were born deep in
a mine, and abandoned there
Imprint of an ancient angel, so even in
blue neon
You can blink at that boy with eyes a
billion years old
West Virginia is the state of isolated
girls
Girls far up the hollows. Air full of
ashes and smoke, hills thick with snakes
Girls who would die for love
The hole behind your own life is your
daddy’s mine
Doorways full of darkness, caves of
forgotten children
How many babies are buried in your
seams, their names lost?
You are too secret to cry anymore
Among the dead of West Virginia,
underground
The old mystery hole knows no time, no
true memory
Since your daddy’s dead, crushed flat
as a pancake by the petrified trunk of a tree
Your girlhood flickers behind your eyes
In this old mystery hole, your daddy’s
mine, where dust
Of old-timey oceans hangs heavy as
ghosts
They used to send in canaries to try
the air
Try your little wings, honey, you joke
to yourself. Take a deep breath
Above ground, clouds like fat ghosts
float before the blue moon
A night long enough for many blue
moons, memory eating at you,
You look up at the blue moon from this
bent porch
Its scary old grin. This world looks
different from up there
All this cold blue. To live on the moon
would be lonely, small
Time to Earth’s big time, no beer
joints of blue neon. Tonight
You feel the moon pull and don’t know
what to make of it. You feel
Yourself spinning, dizzy on the porch,
giving, you guess, into gravity
Yes, you will tell that poor
son-of-a-bitch,
That boy you love who prays one man’s
trash might be
Another man’s treasure
Chuck Kinder is an aging
hillbilly-hippie poet-type who is currently sinking into his ever deepening
dotage like a Gulf sunset as seen through an empty martini glass in Key Largo,
Florida, where he is in awe of pelicans (who put him in mind of drunken pirates)
and palms, the only trees he knows with balls and wings, whose feathers rustle
in the warm Florida Bay breezes like secrets whispered by green-eyed long-gone
hippie princess beauties or fading memories of childhood tin-roof rains. In his
youth Kinder wandered West out of the hills of Appalachia on the lam from lawdogs for running moonshine with his outlaw uncles, and
then there were the armed robberies. He hoped to crash the Golden Gates of San
Francisco into the Age of Aquarius to become a famous Flower Child, an
enterprise at which he failed utterly, being a hard-core hillbilly boy raised
redneck mostly on road-kill and rage.
