IT
For The Beatles IT was yeah, yeah, yeah,
IT was across the universe. Dylan found IT
in the captain’s tower between Ezra and Eliot,
or possibly in the tightrope walker’s pants.
Sartre tried to conquer IT with the poir soi.
For Nietzsche, IT occurred at least once every
eternity. Descartes thought IT was at the end
of doubt, while Raskolnikov found IT at the dull
end of an axe. Huck sailed IT on a raft. Dean
Moriarty thought the alto man had IT. Ahab
thought IT was a whale. James Brown found IT
in every muscle-twitch that provoked a rimshot.
As for me, I thought ITs chords sang somewhere
inside Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto. But
when we weren’t watching, the Buddha found IT
in every breath, in every in and out of this world.
Not For Sissies
The way you now use four
clumps of toilet tissue
instead of three
The way you place two hands
on the couch to push with
before you get up
The way you have to make
a plan about what to do
in order to get up
The way your back hurts
no matter how long you
do stretches
The way the tangy taste of garlic
wakes you in the night—cramps
more than your style
The way you know the first names
of the doctors and every corridor
in the Emergency Room
The way a dewdrop on a leaf
makes you think
of a tear
The way you wake up and check
your wife—wait until you see her
bedclothes rise and fall
The way you snuggle up to her
your hand on whatever you can
find that is warm
Funeral Mass
The altar boy’s shoes were caked
with mud He
was more like an altar man,
a mini-priest
in a hooded robe instead
of the usual cassock and
surplice Adorned
in his feces-tinted sneakers
he appeared to be
the avatar
of carelessness of proclivity
to sin
Those muddy shoes
alpha and omega
of what was wrong
with the Church
I once loved
Bedding the Pale Goddess
The question has always been, what to do
with the moon, bewitching in its many
profiles, ever changing, beautiful.
What do we do with it? We find a bed,
lie down, and shut it off.
That’s what we do with the pale goddess
of night, the pearl of the sky—ignore it
on a mattress. It had better be a great
mattress, a sublime mattress, one that
could have comatosed the Charge
of the Light Brigade, made the Roman guards
so drowsy they couldn’t find the nails, thus
changing 2000 years of history, or
caused Paul Tibbets to nod off, drop the bomb
in the Pacific instead of on Hiroshima.
It would have to be a mattress that could substitute
for the moon, but what could possibly substitute
for the moon? Nothing can substitute for
the moon. That’s why we dream. We dream to
distract ourselves from the sadness of sleep.
Ars Poetica—Kind Of
Do you know that you can buy coyote piss on
Amazon? Yes, dear reader, I’m addressing you,
putting you on the spot, something I’ve been told by
literary honchos never to do, but I’m doing it anyway.
It’s my poem.
Why, you might ask, am I’m buying Cayote
pee on Amazon? Well, dear reader, it’s supposed
to make squirrels, chipmunks, and rats think that
some teethy nightmare of theirs might savor them
for hors d’oeuvres or even a main course.
Squirrels and rats are eating my birdseed. Rats in
the suburbs? I ask you, dear reader, why did we
fight the revolution? We could have stayed in the
soot-covered, vermin-infested, streets of merry
ole’ London, gladly suffered the pre-Dickensian
miseries of our former countrymen, we didn’t
need to sail the angry and unforgiving seas,
endure the black-toe winters in Plymouth, and
exploit the good will of the natives, to wind
up with rats eating our suet and sunflower seeds.
What about that Coyote wee-wee? How do we know
it’s really from a coyote, and not just the frenzied
excretions of several drunken cowboys bloated from
a night at the Bucket of Blood Saloon with a little
Uncle John’s Sorghum Molasses added for color?
We don’t know. Do you see what’s happening? Can
you, dear reader, read between the lines? Our world
is going to hell in a KFC tub—the exclusive menu
du jour of our current president. This is our fate, dear
reader. How could anyone believe in a benevolent God?
*****
Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His ninth full-length poetry collection is Tragedy in the Arugula Aisle (Arroyo Seco Press, 2025). His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.
