Ray's Collected Stickies Poetry, No. II.

Dang, this one guy bought my "How Hangs Your Dirt" poem for two hundred and eighty bucks! It kind of tickled my fancy for posting more of my poems, so here goes. This is the second poem I ever posted here, as far as I can remember.


ALL THE HAPPY MEN

Here come the happy men
up the escalator from the subway.
They do not keep floating up
when they reach the top, however.

They do not/keep floating/at all

They disperse wide and to the left
and buy a Wertzel's Pretzel with Jalapeño Cheddar
or also consider looking at the orbous Mexicana
at the jewelry cart
where no-one ever goes.

There go the happy men
They blew through this place
The Mexicana has been looked at;
The gourmet pretzel sits on wax paper,
half-eaten,
on top of a trash can near the exit.
It looks like a sad greasy mess.

The morsel left behind
Unloved and unfulfilled in purpose
Who will care about
the morsel left behind.

Who?

The sad men.

- - - - - - -
—Ray Smuckles.


So, I wrote that one afternoon when I was down at the mall and it was around five fifteen. All these workaday dudes, from lawyers to bankers to students and clerks, got off the subway and kind of whipped through the joint like a ripple of nature. I people-watched for a while, and when I was on my way out I saw this one five-dollar pretzel half-eaten on top of a trash receptacle. For some reason that wasted food became the emblem of everything that is wrong with America. I ain't a big America-hater, but I do know that we could do a little better about wasting stuff. I felt kind of a pang when I realized that the pretzel was just going to sit in a landfill until diseases and a hyena ate it all up. A pretty sad way to go, if you think about it.

Okay, I will probably post more poems later. I've been going through them and I have some stuff that is sort of meaningful to me. Contact me about purchasing these poems.