Three Poems
by Paul Hostovsky
Curmudgeonly
I love the grouchy words--
peevish, irascible, fractious--
I am all of them--crabby, morose,
snarky and more. I hate the phrase
“and more.” It’s so American, so
manifest destiny. I hate all the increase,
all the excess, all the productivity--
the abundance, the stuff, the shelves
upon shelves. And the free
shipping. We’re prolific as fuck and I am
such an asshole. I’m surly, tetchy,
moody, nasty and gnarly. I admit it.
I revel in it. I’m querulous, captious,
and vindictive. And it's not just the adjectives I love.
I love the verbs too. Lour, glower,
growl and glare. And snarl. And more!
My stepdaughter gave me a T-shirt
with Grumpy on it. You know, Grumpy
of Seven Dwarves’ fame? I love it.
I own it. I wear it like a badge of
assholiness. Like a bellying flag. Listen,
don’t be an asshole if you can help it.
But if you can’t help it, help
others to understand the assholes.
Be an ambassador of assholes.
Wear it on your sleeve, on your chest,
on your boobs. Wear it on your belly.
Because you can’t be what you want to be if
you can’t be what you are first. So go ahead,
be that way. And if you don’t love yourself,
try loving the superabundance of pithy words
for describing someone as hateful as you.
Against Spring
The hounds of spring are on winter’s traces and I hate
a slobbering dog. All this mucus and affection
is making me sick, not to mention the ejaculations
of the junipers, oaks, alders and maples--I can’t
stop sneezing and I’m all congested. The erectile
tail feathers of the wild turkeys--the way the males
display them proudly to the females--leave the females
unimpressed. I, too, am unimpressed with spring
and all its fecundity. I miss the white lie
of the noiseless, atoning snow; the brown study
of the bare, ramifying trees; the long, cold, invisible
diapause of the insects. I hate to be a buzzkill but
the bees aren’t disappearing fast enough for me.
All these propagators and multipliers--the springtails
dropping their sperm on the ground and just waiting
for the females to come and pick it up--they can all
go fuck themselves. You can all go fuck yourselves,
you lovers of spring, you gardeners and joggers
and dogwood-huggers. I say there’s too much sex
in the world, too much fruitfulness, too much seed
on the wind, too much pollen in the air, and much
too much begetting on the ground. I'm getting too old
for this. I’m staying in and counting the days till fall.
Marine Band
He played that thing all the time: waking, sleeping, walking, riding his bike, reclining in the bathtub fully clothed, where the acoustics were the best, he said. And in the backseat of the family Buick when we were trying to have a conversation up front. It was annoying. If we turned the radio on to shut him up, he simply played along with it, the squeaky little shit. It never occurred to us that he was on his way to greatness. One of the greatest harmonica players ever: jazz, folk, rock, Latin, blues, country, even classical. The inventor of the chromatic playing style on a regular diatonic ten-hole Marine Band harmonica. But to us he was just the kid who sucked and blew and drooled a lot with that thing forever installed in his mouth, alternately buzzing like a beard of bees, chugging like a locomotive, wailing like a professional mourner, chiming like a bell, whistling like a blue jay, or a catcall, squeezing out the chords and major triads like an accordion, then bending one single note so low, so lonely, that it almost broke. The day mom lost it, screaming Put that thing away! I can’t hear—she was on the phone—she ended up confiscating all of them (he had one for every key) for a whole week. He wept and begged her to give them back—just one, please, I’ll play quietly—but she wouldn’t relent. He cried and cried, emitting these strange low animal noises and high keening sounds as though he had a blues harmonica stuck somewhere deep down inside him and was trying to cough it up. She hid them in the fruit bowl, under the apples, which she knew he never ate. I reached for an apple, glimpsed the shining underneath, the buried treasure he’d have killed for, and was dying without.
Paul Hostovsky's latest book of poems is PITCHING FOR THE APOSTATES (Kelsay, 2023). He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter.