Ihor Pidhainy

COX Scores a Touchdown

With an explanation by XOM

This is a rather embarrassing moment in my mediocre existence. Late Night Office retreat, CCR’s lights are off as we were unable to pay our power bills. (It is a temporary situation with a blown fused we learned from the Advocate for Provost, whom had gone unseen since the Incident with the President). But in our department, we had spare lights and a corkscrew/bottlecap opener and a pile of essays to grade and interpret for improvement in the plight of the illiterate and obscure. We had the usual requisites in our fridge, and though the power was off, they were still cool. [But don’t you have a non-drinking policy on your campus?] Alas, because we are leant our office accommodations by the city, and because we would likely decamp for parts unknown, and given our salary and benefits, few would be willing to take away our places. [We tried to outsource to SE Asia, and they turned us down].

But I’m getting outside this story. COX was cozy with the poets, and it turned out he had a poet’s itch which he would scratch. At times he would share a line or two with BOY, but then went sour with this when GRL entered the BOY’s realm, and so squirreled it away in his office. (I suppose that the HOME was not the best place to keep such verse). BOY got curious and managed to weasel his way back into the good graces of our historian-practitioner, and so having got COX thoroughly lubricated, BOY and GRL ransacked his office. There were reams of stuff, but to avoid suspicion, he pulled a few sheets from a file titled “To be dismissed and dispersed as fertilizer for future poetry” or COX’s way to say these are not very good and I would never want them seen. Oh well, his shame is our gain. So, for the first time ever, we present COX and his endzone poetry.

Ps I supplied most of the titles

Questions on Odysseus and the Emergence of Synesthesia

“And how do the Lotus Eaters take hold of you?’

Silence. Apathy. One note above a snooze,

Cox surveyed the class from front to back,

was there any who might serve as a swain on track?

“Is it in the eating of the fruit sweet as honey

that poppied their cerebral membrane funny?

Or the Phagos nibbled on forbidden fruit

that had as much pop as the pope in a lottery shop?”

Sleepy-headed Danny raised his hand,

“yes heathen,” Cox roared on demand,

the boy recoiled with a spasm and jerk

Cox was grumpy, rude and being a jerk.

Finally Persephone brazened without shame,

“Doctor Cox, will any of this be on our exam?”

Did you hear who died?

The celebration of a mediocre band,

each member goes one by one

in their 70s, 80s, 90s and the centenarian drum

whose beat, thump-a-thump-a-thump,

plays behind a bass that could not keep time

unless he sang about a bird and the birds,

and a guitarist or two whose phrasing spelt

all the three and some of the four letters

that they knew all words possess.

they were a simple lot,

but their tongues were profound,

driven from continents far and wide

to end up on the doorstep next door.

I want to celebrate his passing,

but someone will put on their last

hit or their biggest hit or something

that sounds uniformly the same,

and I’ll just go a little insane

and want to torch their porch,

blow up their garage,

smear their white-picket fence

with gobs of colorful scrofula

detected by a detective whose greens

and red prove their not color-blind

is blent into the bleeding of another

Beetles tune or a Muddy Waters

or even doo-whop in a womp that

you never quite imagined before.

So let’s cheer this roster of remaining

octogenarians, may they live quiet,

peaceful, wonderfully silent,

meditative moments and days and months

until the years pass and we might

celebrate and look forward to the next passing,

mourning without too much grief.

Overcoming Cold, Hunger and Wet

Flu, covid, clap, crap

stuck in a shower

cleansed in thirty below

your engine will not freeze

in the temperate South

they lied to me, tied me to a post

stick out your tongue,

here come the flakes,

numerous and one,

boy let’s have some fun

but she died sad and lonely

the voices left unheard

the words were not hers.

I tinkle on the causeway

causing deadly delays

the flights to Pittsburgh or Seattle

cannot go off track,

what Jersey shore?

what California surf,

when the sands of time

cuts crusts from the coasts,

Midwest ocean front

some fantasy – do you recall –

Asimov or some such sci-fi peddler –

but you really got to go back to the Cretaceous

never mind the Cretins along the way,

they shifted homes and lands since time immemorial.

Presidential Pardons for burying Cox in the endzone

“It is surreal when we need to turn to the Sovietologists

to understand America,” fully professored Dr. Cox,

expounded to targeted audience, like an old man before his oncologists,

“This isn’t some sore sprung up like Jack-out-of-the-box,

and it doesn’t require the wisdom of our esteemed ontologists.

These perceptions are not secrets held steady in unkeyed locks,

nor should we retrace their roots by dictionaries and philologists,

we can do this work, despite suffering a million unnatural shocks,

we can gather the information as if bugs culled by our colleague entomologists.

Enough academic claptrap: Our president has brought upon our house, a pox.

He has double-dealt like a butt-sore addict to his favorite proctologist.

He is” but cut off mid-stream by security who descended like flocks

of seagulls, blocking his esophagus until the college’s otolaryngologists,

declared him stuffed on the spot, banned from releasing streams of TikToks

and given over to our school’s gaggle of phrenologists, optometrists and biologists

who weighed in, minutely, acutely, precisely, on his health from cap to sox,

“He is not dead, he is merely a product of modern society declared the psychologists.”

Thinking of Numbers and Emperors

Cox the Historian Ponders in Silences

What difference does a number make?

Take say — 17 died from beatings ordered by the Chinese emperor

on a certain date in 1524–

what should I say when that source says 18.

and a third corrects with harrumph — 23.

Words are magic, numbers superfluous.

Merlin mumbled and Arthur ruled

try to find the date on which either died,

was born, slept with their wives or lied?

But 17 is not 18 is not 23,

who croaked — or was misconstrued?

Was it a faulty finger roll?

Or a theorist figuring the emperor got off with ease?

(I lied because he deserved calumny, please J)

Was a body forgotten?

When the first count came was he only half-rotten

and lingered on a month or two?

So how were six more added through,

Suddenly slow after-effects of leukemia?

An ancient thirty-year blow to the head?

Quick is he really dead

Or suffering from anemia?

I work these riddles every day

the numbers never stay the same

I am certain I would like to say

I too have never yearned to play that game.

The Twins Do Vengeance

The cat does the weirdest thing

Is like

my babies do the corniest stuff

What do they do beside do-do

Not be

Cool drool drip-drop nasal shares

They be like twins

Ya know

The pair that work together

They be broke her real good,

Mama,

If you know what we mean?

Unheld Conversation between XOM and NAY

Crashing out on the couch in his sixties

a combo of half-digested Dylan, Donovan and the Doors,

burped up and out on the floor

the Japanese Maple skipped a decade or two

its leafery casting shadows over the cup of sensei cha,

chaste, she did not crash out, start a scene, but absorbing

bitterness in a feminine mode

she partook of the moment and promised herself

not to slither to his demands

not to cast a spell to control his words

not to do what she needed not to do knowing

he was breathing, rasping, grasping for some moment

in time, when as a child his mother loved him

and he could ignore the world of wonder

that basked in his light, his shade and not

where she stood ubiquitous, omniscient, apprizing

speech he must give, “I am sorry,” but not enough

and they would go their separate ways

without visitation rites bright against the background

that the Justicier of the Peace demanded sobriety

in their pursuits, of no children, of no bond, of

nothing consequential, but loneliness,

and a bit too much time to kill.