Portland Story

It is Portland, Oregon
In 2001
A little after the World's Trade Center
And it's my wife
Mi Sook and I
In our Portland World
On Burnside and 180th street
Escaping from Seattle
The Max train hums slickly and civilly
Through the drizzly
Murmuring modern pretense
Into what was a foreboding and cartilage
Of
Our bleak bleak bleak
Marriage life
Where only the digestion of a Friday
Papa Murphy's pizza
Rolling down each our respective bellies
Tumbling down to form 3AM shit
Gave us a little gastronomical pleasure
Or my Friday night stop at the
Multnomah Greyhound Track
For beer, smokes and satellite betting
But we were trying anyway
And we wouldn't start
Plunging daggers into each other for real
Until Oakland
Our walls are thin in the Burnside ghetto
The apartment is gaudy circa 77
I hear them through the walls
And they can hear me
Fussing and huffing and fuming
About my damn itinerant ESL teaching jobs
That weren't adding up to much
Anyway next door
We had a trim, sensitive, moustached man in his thirties
Who played acoustic guitar
On the weekends
The iconic harmless hipster
Unassuming
Unable to hurt a flea on a lamppost
I liked him
And his girlfriend was huge and loud
And had a voice that trumpeted
Though the porous walls
And we never ever would hear lovemaking between the two
But shouting
Her shouting
Riding him
Night after night
Pecking him
Clawing him with her words
He had probably committed some
Horrible act
Like staying late with his boys
Singing folkrock
He wasn't the type to be a player
This nightly mauling continued
Until one day he walked to Max station
Taking the shortcut between the trees
And felt inexplicably nauseous
And he matter-of-factly mentioned this
Later that afternoon when Mi Sook and I
Bumped into him on the porch
As though he were casually rattling off
The Trailblazers scores
The cancer took about a week
To noticeably tear into his body
The radiation treatment claimed his hair
And his girlfriend made him a knitted cap
To hide his baldness
It took cancer to stop her belittling and roaring
As she quietly became his caretaker
Until one day he vomited his last puke
Just couldn't get up from the bathroom floor
And died
His body pockmarked by the pecks of a hen
I hadn't said more than 200 words to the poor bloke
But I teared up
A lot
Maybe crying outright
Because I always take to the side of those gentle, quiet
Unassuming souls
My ex discouraged my from attending any memorial services
"I'm the one who has been sick, coughing and busting my ass
In the cabinet factory
Because we're living in this damn Portland city
The city that YOU wanted
The city that can kiss my sweaty tired ass
And this is the only job I can get while you're stand around in classrooms
Chalk-and-talking
Talking-and chalking
I'm the one who wears the health insurance pants
Focus on a stranger instead of worrying about
Your own wife's pains
Go ahead you!
Go head!
Go head"
So I went ahead and DIDN'T go to the memorial
To avoid the inevitable bashing
To the ears
And I listened to Wagner for awhile
Relationships with females
are often red hot cattleprods of hell
To the quiet ones
I hope he's in a better place
Plucking peacefully and undisrupted
In the void
Tonight I'll drink to him