Poetry: Selections from John Tustin

The Ballad of Karl Marx the Eternal Houseguest 

Karl Marx slept on the sofas of the wealthy.

The eternal houseguest.

He entertained the professors and the idle rich

With his stories of the proletariat rising up,

Holding hands and singing Kumbaya.

It amused some and the rest pretended

That they were not the well-fed professors

Or the idle rich

But a put-upon fruit-picker

Too tired to lace his boots just before dawn

But lace his boots he did.

 

Karl Marx spent a lot of time trying to rally the men who shoed horses

And the men who toiled in factories to rise up and crush

The mothers and fathers of the men who let Karl Marx sleep on their sofas.

Karl Marx never shoed a horse.

Karl Marx never toiled in a factory.

“The very idea appalls me” he sneered to himself as he sipped tea

On Friedrich Engel’s terrace overlooking the Arc de Triomphe.

He looked out upon it and dreamed of another revolution

Until he felt a chill and went inside to warm by the fire the servants stoked

So dutifully.

 

Karl Marx died, possibly while sleeping on a rich man’s sofa,

Of the undefinable malady “The Wretchedness of Existence”

Which, in all honesty, sounds like a philosopher’s excuse

To not show up to work in the morning.

I bet Karl Marx died with a dirty bunghole

Because wiping his ass

Was one of the few things

He would have had to do for himself.

Dark Dark Blue 

“I wish the night was really black

Like everybody says it is, like its supposed to be,

And not this dark dark blue

That it really is,”

He said to himself,

Seeing everything around him in the not-dark-enough,

Even with the covers over his head

And even with the gradual easing of the beating

Of his greasy little heart.

 

“I wish the night was really black

And not this dark dark blue,”

He repeated as he snuggled deeper under the covers,

The flames he couldn’t see even in the dark dark blue

Licking closer and closer

And the only sounds in the room

The ticking of a clock that wasn’t there

And the schlump schlump schlump

That was the throbbing of his shriveled

Little plum

Of an almost imperceptibly beating heart.

The Shadow 

The shadow spreads, slowly,

like spilled coffee or blood,

grows darker as the sun recedes

until the world is darkness,

the movements in the world

all phantom-things for a while;

the moon nothing but a joke;

a joke that laughs at you,

laughs that you need her light;

laughs at how little light

she deigns to provide you

and then the shadow swallows

it all.

The Silence of Vines 

I sit under the silence

of vines

upon which nothing can grow.

 

I squat in the dirt

with the insects that wait

for the fruit that will never plump.

 

They are listless:

they do not climb the vines

or me.

 

I feel that we are alike –

waiting in the dirt

for the fruit

 

that will never

grow,

then fall.

 

The vines continue to spread

out in all directions

and I am caught.

 

I sit under

the silence of vines

and I wait.

The Smirking Sun and the Last Sleep

Always deeper pouches under my eyes –

Day to day bags more fully packed

To better prepare me for my next, at last

Forever home.

 

The crabgrass spreading like white smoke

Across the timeline of fading auburn hair

Luckily not thinned,

I look from the mirror to the sky –

 

And I see the sun up there, arrogant with fire of near perpetuity,

Pretending it is going to be up there forever

And smirking while it shines upon where I am now

And that little patch of land somewhere

 

Where I am soon enough destined

To lie beneath in my last sleep.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals in the last dozen years. For a complete list of his publication credits click here.