Poem as Birthday Gift for My Girl
I also took her
out to dinner.
I’m not the beatnik
I used to be.
That is not to say, now
I know better.
I don’t. But I do
have a job today.
She not aged,
laughs the same
as she did years
ago when we dated
the first time.
Big-eyed, long-legged,
so foxy and with a halo
of hair that old, white
women don’t understand.
-Jason Braun
Loss for Words
When I traveled back in time
to stop myself from uttering
bourgeoisie at the dinner table,
I had to laugh. The word doesn’t
rhyme with family, and that joke
would be lost on them. What business
did that word have inside this walled
city of mark-down-bins, saved soup can
labels, and all the songs that have gone
out of style? So many stereotypes
fit much more snugly: three martyred
mothers, one stock car-racing in-law,
a little thug growing a dirt lip mustache,
and the superior but still broke college boy.
-Jason Braun
Electric Storm
I want to be your ampersand
and pop song-stop-you-in-the-drive-
way-to-listen, kissing you sideways,
recollection man. When that one
Beetles’ track about love
comes on, no matter who you’re with,
you’ll think of me twisting
out of shape to join you in a city
that made a molehill of me.
Let me be your plus one, or even
just the plus. Someone must headline
this show and when the curtain closes
you’ll string me around your finger.
You’ll send me off into the atmosphere
tethered to some point near, but not,
actually your ring finger.
I’ll be the key in this history play,
swinging in the electric storm between the kite
and you dragged out as Benjamin Franklin.
-Jason Braun
Understanding for Bankers
Security questions asking
the name of your first
girlfriend or boyfriend,
mothers maiden name,
street you grew up on—
this means something
different to the old and lonely,
the doorstep orphans, and boot-
less refugees. U.S. Bank,
don’t you want their money too?
Resist the urge to ask about
the number of cats in your household,
amount of tissue used per week,
height of stacked magazines
delivered discreetly each month.
-Jason Braun
Seeing All of Rome’s Underworld—
That’s in fact where the wallet was.
The gloved hand of some pickpocket,
brushing back his hair, then slipping
my money places I’d wished to go and see.
But for some things they don’t sell
passports. I keep an eye on backpack,
and ignore the beggars on this railcar.
I’m going home knowing I came close
enough to touch and be touched by a true artist.
-Jason Braun
Garden
There has been a garden
here before. This mossy
place, a palace for shoeless
mothers stepping out of one
overgrowth into another.
Stories come from the rabbit
talking run, chew, thump.
Mother knew what to whisper
into the elephants ear.
Alien in her own region,
here, she taught the roaches,
mealworms, and moths the song
of fishbone plunk. The bulldozer
taught us all supernova.
-Jason Braun
Check out this blog post I did for Jane Friedman
It starts like this: As anyone who has ever seen a heist film knows, it always starts out with a sequence where the criminal mastermind assembles the perfect team. Turning a graduate student paper I wrote—”Paradise Lost as a Primer on Office Politics”—and turning it into the 144th most downloaded paid business app was surly a heist or coup of sorts. This is how I did it, with no computer programing skills, and how you can do it to.
Chicagoing
All of fifth grade was going
overnight to Chicago. I didn’t
think the Field Museum
would be that great: dusty
bones of dinosaurs, the rotten eggs
smell around a sarcophagus, more candy
models of a nucleus. So what.
A tour of Wrigley Field: do they
call it that because of what’s stuck
under each seat? The Shedd is nothing
much. Just a large aquarium full of ducks,
halibut, and a few sad-looking box turtles.
Its destitute compared to Sea World.
And besides the bus rides with Mrs. Hettinger
singing and making us sing Frere Jacques.
I though all this and shook my little fist,
destitute. Me and three other slow learners
sitting with the substitute. We didn’t earn
the right go because of an F or a couple of Ds.
We prayed for someone to get sick
on the bus and for the driver to have
run out of sawdust.
-Jason Braun
In the Cards
Playing the three-card
Monty and hoping
happiness hides in the crease
of one of those folded hearts
or around the blistering
cigarette burn on a spade.
I’ll get my money by Monday
and get on with the getting gone.
-Jason Braun
Fable
He woke as a mouse
might. Lazily, still drunk.
Remembering the glue
paper trap from last night
binding his feet in place,
in spite of the throbbing
bass. Stop, squeak, shake,
and repeat. Calling for help
in an empty house might
stir the wrong neighbors
or a stray tomcat.
-Jason Braun
jasonandthebeast 