UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
JASON HARDUNG

D.A. LEVY WILL NEVER BE MADE OF MARBLE

I made love to a juke box in the ever open cafe.
Rode my bicycle through dreams deferred.
Gazed up at angels while I layed in the park
came to a realization of chinese fireworks and rich men
in airplanes are not the sweet after
taste of freedom we fight for.
The rockets red glare has become
an allergy symptom and can be cured with
prescription eye drops.
I clicked Jack Ruby's slippers three times
but they never took me home.
They took me to the streets of Chicago
where Wesley Willis jammed on the keyboard
head butted me and yelled
ROCK
demons in silk shirts tangoed in his head.
Took me to Cleveland when it was still
smokestacks belching into the face of heaven.
Twenty seven is the age of icons
Jimi Janis Jim Kurt Tupac.
D.A. Levy had a year to go
to have his own statue
for pigeons to rest tired wings
before they became some bird more glorious.
Like a bald eagle
or a swan.
I'm a meadowlark hatched on the Wyoming
plains singing alone
singing puffing my yellow chest
until I am heard
singing the song of myself
singing for mornings
the hope that maybe
today will be a little better
than yesterday ever was.


THOUGHTS WHILE DRIFTING OFF IN A KANSAS CITY BACKYARD
(For John Dorsey)

Lightning bugs have asses
like shooting stars. Sleeping
in a Kansas City backyard I
reach for them.
They disappear
and pulse again
seconds from fingertips
and miles away.
I want to ride in airplanes
with propellers and die
like Buddy Holly did.
In horn rimmed glasses twisted metal
guitar strings and broken glass.
I am a negro league star.
A Satchel Page fastball.
A long bus ride
to obscurity.
A stand up bass loaded from
the back of a minivan
up the stairs the cash only bar blues.
Black and white pictures on the wall.
Signed like shaved pussy lips in smokey basements
jazz club bops and blows notes til six a.m.
Barbecue teeth and wonder bread eyes.
White people pay for soul
and go back home.
Open box cars open
to The Paseo rattle and roll
gentrification sounds too much
like genocide
or gentleman.
The beats the beards the carma
bums. Binging
down highways desert solitaire
monkey wrench gangs
in John Dorsey jackets
gas fume mirages
fucking up the system.
Burning out like the ass
of insects.
We never
go
home.


Jason "Juice" Hardung's work has appeared in or forthcoming in THRASHER, DRIFT,
LANGUAGE&CULTURE.NET, MATTER, IODINE POETRY JOURNAL, THICK WITH
CONVICTION, RED PULP UNDERGROUND, JUICE PRESS, SUNKEN LINES, BLACK
BOOK PRESS, LUMMOX JOURNAL, ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE, FLUTTER POETRY
JOURNAL, GUILD OF OUTSIDER WRITERS, STRAIGHT FROM THE FRIDGE,
UP THE STAIRCASE, POLARITY, HEROIN LOVE SONGS, COVERT POETICS
and WSN ANTHOLOGY 2007. He is a co-editor of the FRONT RANGE REVIEW
and MATTER and also the managing editor of GER. He wants to learn more about
the craft of writing. Not just poetry, but every genre and is just trying to turn all the
years wasted splashing around the gutters of the west into something that can be
read and reread again and again. He is also part of the Beards.







© 2008 Underground Voices