Ron Kortege

Lesson 27    Figures of Speech

Lots of my students are undocumented.  In the meantime, they work and go to school.  Carlos writes about his job at Taco Loco:  Black pants.  White shirt.  Keep your mouth shut.  Last night America wanted to play 8-Ball. Anybody?  Anybody?  Carlos picked a cue, ran the table.  America pouted, dialed its cell phone.  Carlos knew la migra was coming, “I asked the moon to switch its night light off so I could escape.”  Night light.  The girls called him poeta, loved him for a minute. Next week no Carlos.  Quien sabe.  Then I get an e-mail -- “Check out the irony, maestro.  Bus boy on a bus.”        

 

Six Haiku

Welcome, moon.  Orphaned
and rootless.  Hang that yellow
raincoat out back, please.

 

Daphne turns into
a laurel. Apollo gropes
her slender branches.

God likes hide-and-seek.
Adam and Eve giggle when
he says, “Where art thou?”

 

Kong wonders what New
York is really like.  He saw
so little of it. 

 

One swallow makes a
summer if the swallow is
fucking enormous.

 

I know we need more
tourniquets,  doctor, but that’s 
my favorite shirt!

 

My Last Boyfriend
after  Robert Browning

There he is posing by that black Mustang. 
Can’t you almost smell the seaside tang
of too much aftershave?  He liked that pic:
his last GF in high impact lipstick
and wearing less than very little
while he, aloof, oozed noncommittal.
And him in always spendy, stylish clothes
followed by a posse of essential bros.
He was cute --  vaping, holding up a wall,
entertaining with his graceful drawl
a throng of girls who bird-like came to hover
seeing what they might at last discover. 
That’s where we met, at Sonia’s Sunday bash,
him and his extravagant moustache.
He came on to me surprisingly shy,
like some poor fumbly kid in junior high.
I knew how to play that silly game
and offered up eventually my on-line name.
Of course he texted, and then we dated,
doing things, he liked to call X-rated:
Like I’m a cowering maiden in distress.
He rescues me and whoops! There goes my dress.
Or I’m  a floozie in a push-up bra,
and he’s a cowboy no scoundrel can outdraw.
Then last week I came home from yoga class
and he was on our Beautyrest bare-assed,
him and some bony sometimes model
smoking kryptonite and talking twaddle.
I saw my chance and threw a hissy fit
not that I believed even half of it.
She blushed, her eyes went here and there.
She hid one boob behind some Cinderella hair.
Jesus, they were perfect for each other.
I got out in time.  No fuss, no bother. 

 

Ron Koertge is the current poet laureate of South Pasadena, CA.  A fairly recent winner of a Pushcart Prize, he is still waiting for the pushcart to arrive.