Delmore's at The Dixie

Delmore’s at The Dixie.
 He drinks a fizzy Coca-Cola breakfast
Surrounded by magicians
In The Terrace Room.

Delmore’s at The Dixie.
It seems he’s in a hurry
He’s writing angry letters to the editor
Of The Partisan Review.


Delmore’s at The Dixie.
Like Dylan's at The Chelsea
And Sylvia's at The Barbizon
Throwing her clothes from the roof.

Delmore’s at The Dixie.
He stumbles to The Strand on Sunday
Looking for a book by Sigmund Marx
Called Das Oedipal.


Delmore’s at The Dixie.
He finds it hard to ignore the festive season
With an explosive- laden Christmas tree
In the bathtub where he bathes.

Delmore's at The Dixie.
Rockefeller is the reason
This broken bard wears grass- stained suits
Afraid to read his mail.


Delmore’s at The Dixie.
He tells Lou Reed, I won't meet Andy.
Then adds, And who the hell are you?
Don't sell out just the same.

Delmore's at The Dixie.
The bellboy says he's been talking about Trotsky.
Ginsberg thinks, This sounds just like Naomi.
Could this be fate that awaits all Dreamer Jews?


Delmore's at The Dixie.
Soon it will be over
He'll check out and graduate to God
From an Ivy-league hotel.

Delmore's at The Dixie.
He says in his best James Cagney:
To the destructive element
C'est vrai! C'est vrai! C'est vrai!


©Fiona Helmsley

This poem was published on Radius: Poetry From the Center to the Edge in May, 2015.

Contempt

She told me,
That while she was sitting out in her car
With her groceries, Before she realized
It was me, And not some stranger-woman
Coming out of the supermarket,
She had thought to herself,

"Skinny bitch, with your black leggings
And motorcycle boots, I fucking hate you."

She told me this, Like she was giving me some kind
Of funny compliment;
Like the old adage wasn't true,
Familiarity didn't breed contempt,
No, no, no,
It negated it.

 I didn't believe her.

　
©Fiona Helmsley

Big Pimpin

 

 

 

We pick up his coat from a Korean drycleaner who is well-known for menacing anyone who’s come on hard times with a broom.

Down the block, he sheds the plastic, and
drapes the coat across an imaginary puddle in our path.

The crowd parts;
extending a wrinkled hand,
he awaits my arrival on the other side.

“After you, m'lady,” he says,
“Know that what I can't give to you in love,
I plan on making up to you in grand financial gestures.”

Only two decades around the sun,

and I'm already hardened.

His daughter says she sees only madness in his wild spending,

while I see the dreams of which rappers often rhyme.

 

©Fiona Helmsley

Poem: Christmas Downtown

The parking lot at the liquor store was packed,

and the clerk at Staples badly needed a belt.
We could have hidden the presents in his butt crack.
At the A&P, a little old man held up the express lane,
buying a Santa hat, and two boxes of Milkbone dog biscuits with an expired coupon.
It's revenge of the people I went to high school with downtown.
My friends and I always held a special disdain for anyone who left town,
only to come back.
Holding my 93 year old grandmother's hand,
I push our shopping cart out to my mother's car,
and hear the muffled sounds of dogs barking behind glass.
I turn and see the little old man from the express lane,
he's wearing the Santa hat on his head.
“Ho ho ho!” he says to the two Rottweilers in the car parked next to ours,
and drops two dog biscuits through the cracked window into the backseat.
There are a lot of dogs in this parking lot,
and the little old man moves on.
"Ho ho ho!" he says to a poodle in a Mercedes,
but the car's windows are rolled up tight,
so he leaves the biscuit for the dog under a windshield wiper.
Watching the little old man as he goes,
my grandmother says to me,
"Fiona, I always enjoyed feeding the ducks so."

©Fiona Helmsley