Mike J with EmilyMonahan
The Charming Ineptness You’ve Taken to Heart
dates back to the autumn of 1882
when 
in the crimson goodness of Trinity Church
the first of my forebears panned for poetry and gold
amid the gilded squalor Tip Sheet Jones moved about
the lower borough like the crackling new current
that lit up Pearl like vandal stars fallen from
God’s busy hands Through the roil and rumble
of a city divining he ran his book and wrote his verse
‘neath the Hanging Tree where the warm and waning
afternoon light was the golden cast of God’s smile
In his bowler and shabby frock he took his poems
to the hometown papers rashly establishing a
down-the-decades pattern of editorial rejection
down to me yours truly who as we speak
is weighing rejections one by one
When pennies proved few from Waverly readings
Tip took whatever poor boy gigs he could gather
grave digger sewer rat muck diver and wooed almond-eyed
Angelina Francesco into marriage three kids and a lot of talk
about better days Workers not loitering living like
thieves Their children w/o factory fever
The Five Points w/o blood w/o cholera
days when the city no longer digested its own
The Whereabouts of Heaven
I was building a skyscraper when Iran out of sky and cozied up to the
whereabouts of heaven Above
our false hosannas Way up in the clouds
where no one speaks but sings beautifully
Above the movement of money Gunfights
and late stage cancer Grade school body counts
and shots per round Up there in the blue beyond wonder
where tomorrow threatens no one where angels woo the glade
Red Knots
subspecies flies the equivalent of the moon and back
in its lifetime Now it faces extinction as we over harvest
horseshoe crabs for the terminally corpulent Tell me again
how we are not to blame for everything dying on this planet
Please tell me again It wasn’t clear the first time
Eleanor’s Purse
Eleanor’s purse held many things.Everyone’s prone to the shivers and yips
she says, curating her bag
w/a passion few possess.
This here’s for bloating she’d puff,
holding a change of face and coin
one small vial, two orange pills,
three sets of sixty, four counts of felony,
five minor headaches, six Christmas trees,
seven separate somethings.
Eight triple ply, nine bold remarks,
ten turtle doves, eleven assorted mints
twelve novellas, and
stuck in traffic each day she’d insist,
no stranger to the truth but not quite kin.
she’d note, handing you a hammer.
Screaming Jay Hawkins and Me in Our Prime
I'm lost in a parking lot on the left coastw/an Afghan Kush and Grey Goose buzz
when Screamin' Jay Hawkins
jumps the Sierra's screaming:
What can I do w/eighty-six kids
'n each momma wantin’ my jam?!
Get in motherfucker! I salvo,
kicking the gas like a mule bucks gravity.
w/an oft-subpoenaed legend in my car
doesn’t faze me. Hell no! I expect these things
from time to time: the brain unhinged,
the whole world gone batshit.
is no more nuts to me than
dumping poisons in the ocean to my left.
Its vast sky full w/the moans of our daughters’
womb engines, pumping out pilots, privates, and warlords
no one believes can win anymore.
the irreversible future
We ooohed and ahhhed at the sixty-four World’s Fairand the droids that would take away our work and
give us more time w/the kids. More time to smoke. Read n watch.
Drink n fuck n fuck some more. Raw metallic arms did the work
of fifty men w/o unions and overtime. Hulking huge brains
sprayed pretty light and reasoned our equations.
The atom had no blowback. The Wonderful World of Chemistry
was just one pill ahead. We marveled at modems and picture phones.
Big oil gave us dinosaurs. The Happy Plastic Family heartened us all.
Different trips. Same monkey. Disney ruled the air.
Weather stations under the Arctic ice
would correct the world’s climate.
(that we could see) They were less sad and frantic
than those to come.
No one homeless. No one alone.
Jet Packs - oooh. Space stations - ahhh.
Deserts were farms. Dark robots picked the fruit.
w/o Jack (for the darkness did just dawn) We ooohed and ahhhed
zipping on the monorail carrying
our radiated nickels and dimes.
Or were they pennies? I forgot the poor.
Wisconsin cheese! 3D led to 4G. Five.
They say we don’t need six.
Marty’s 81
Marty’s 81, has a parched, post-pneumonia coughand the shits from diverticulitis. A blood clot in his leg
he can’t afford the apixaban for
cos you can’t survive on a pension and social security.
Lives w/his daughter in a shit-lorn town in the Hudson Valley
that everyone struggles to avoid lest you’re
driving through in a funeral procession
because his third wife Peg, a beautiful girl, a very smart girl,
took to the booze n the old farm house they’d rehabbed
somewhere in shit-lorn, Pennsylvania.
28 years. He counts. 28 years.
Played Carnegie Hall as a child
and sang doo-wop w/the mafia boys
back in Bensonhurst. Bought his first Vette in ’59.
A turquoise baby that stole your breath
while Sal The Snake stole your wallet.
Shows me pictures on his cell phone.
His whole life in his hands. In the hands of strangers.
The old stone house he restored w/Joan, his second wife
who had five kids and took on my three.
Plays piano for Saint Margaret’s
down the road in shit-lorn at the intersection where
the light don’t work. The ’62 Corvette. The ’65.
People were worth something then he rasps,
cold phlegm seizing his pipes.
Shows me his cousin Maury’s place up in Saratoga.
Raises horses and runs a marina on Manhasset Bay.
Maury’s the smart one he swears scraping his lungs.
More pictures of grandkids and horses, cars and pianos.
His fix-it shop in shit-lorn where
he still fixes vintage stereo equipment.
I take in a piece here a piece there he says for pocket money.
I tell him about my McIntosh w/the fried left channel.
Here’s my email, send me some pictures maybe I can help ya
he says. Served in the service but that don’t mean shit.
His son’s got his hunter green ’74 Vette until he can get
a place of his own. Pictures of his daughter’s daughter
who just turned four. Gonna start her on scales
when the cough’s all gone. Any day now, he says.
2025 Ulster County Poet Laureate. Published globally with little reportable income.
Buckshot Reckoning, mooncussers, AmericanMental, (Luchador Press 2023, 2022, 2020);
haiku collections Monet’s Bamboo (CAPS Press, 2025) Blue Fan Whirring (Nirala Press, 2018) Circling Planes due early 2026 from Bushwhack Books. 2016 Pushcart nominee. President Calling All Poets. Co-chair of the Music Fan Film Series, Rosendale Theatre, Rosendale, NY. CD reviews online All About Jazz and lightwoodpress.com Featured poet: London, San Francisco, Seattle, LA, NYC, Albany, Baltimore, Philadelphia.
He loves Emily most of all.
Substack: https://mikejurkovic.substack.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mikesjazzpoetryjournal/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIaBbZUXlzmQ0lj2DCg3ydg/videos?view=0&sort=da
