James Lineberger

James Lineberger is a professional playwright and screenwriter. His poetry has

appeared in Afternoon; Berkeley Poetry Review; Bluff Magazine; The Centennial

Review; Coal City Review; Disquieting Muses; Djinni; Duct Tape Press; Exquisite

Corpse; Gangway; Hanging Loose; Hayden's Ferry Review; Mediphors; New York

Quarterly; Ontario Review; Oxford Magazine; Pembroke Magazine; Poetry Now;

Poetry Super Highway; Prairie Schooner; Rag Mag; Snake Nation Review; Sonora

Review; The 2River View; Unlikely Stories; Verse; and Wired Art From Wired

Hearts. He can be reached at jdline@vnet.net.

Wop Bop a Loo Bop a Lop Bam Boom

If our every prayer

is a lie

if we finally come to see there's

no holy mission

to this life what is it that changes nothing

is lost

we still have to plunge on

and finish it somehow or other

because

who else can we be but who we are

(Lord have mercy)

like Little Richard down to performing

for $250 a gig

at some tiny club in Atlanta with only

about twenty customers

at the tables and he jumps out onto a little

postage-

stamp stage runs his hands

through his six-inch pompadour

and says I want

y'all to know you looking at the last

of the Mohicans

which wasn't far off if you think about it

but all the way back to where

he was Richard Penniman washing dishes

at the Greyhound station

he knew already that bad reasons

are good reasons to work

if they work and what's it matter

if you're barking up the wrong tree it's just

somebody else's poetry

like after Elvis was dead and gone

and Jerry Lee Lewis

drove up to the front gate

at Graceland waving his pistol in the air

and screaming

he just wanted to talk to the sonofabitch

(Christ have mercy)

the Killer knew then same as when

he married his thirteen year old second cousin

twice removed knew absolutely

we're all going out through the same door

(have mercy)

and if yours opens onto a view

of the cote d'Azure and mine on the Dutch

Buffalo Creek what difference

does it make there will still be some other fool

to come along

praising God for his tutti frutti oh rutti

and we won't even know

the song

Auteur

If there are no debts

left to pay

why is it I'm forced to replay

these deathbed

scenes over and over, editing

and reediting them with the patience

of an Eisenstein, bringing in a different set

of characters every time,

old friends I thought I'd never see again,

who reappear mysteriously

from the cutting-room floor, claiming

frantic messages

from the spirit world, or phone calls

from other "lesser" friends who've managed

to hang around and get reintroduced

in another context, whilst I, their director still,

try to control their lives all over again,

shoving them onscreen willy-nilly

as if to guarantee a looming closeup for each,

and somehow, even after cutting their

"big speech,"

reassure them of my love, a love so fragile,

so combustible over the years,

it's a wonder anyone can believe me at all,

but they do seem to, yes,

and to understand at last the real purpose

of this visit:

to rekindle, however briefly,

some flickering belief in our immortality

James Lineberger