April 5, 2022

Jocko Benoit

THE ACTION STAR UNSCRIPTED

for Bruce Willis

You might think all that is left
for the action star with aphasia
is the syntax of car crashes, punctuated
by explosions. In his movies, he crossed
cities, countries, space and time,
but the gaps between letters are now
terrifyingly vast. People mistake
his stoic silences for anxious pauses.
But he can read his family by how
they move and how far away/close they are.
He can read the front pages of newspapers
which are mostly ads with pictures.
He can turn down the volume
of the world and translate eyebrows
into their pleas and diatribes minus
the lies words sell themselves into
just to be heard. He can apprehend
a skyline filled with aspirational,
virile buildings corseted with walls.
He is not a mirror fogger. He knows
philosophers’ language has been shaped
by their lovers. Where he had quips,
his eyes and hands reach out. He spends
a little more time watching murmurations
of starlings—those seemingly unscripted
split-second shapes he is sure
are telling him something.

from Poets Respond
April 5, 2022

__________

Jocko Benoit: “I’ve been a fan of Bruce Willis ever since his Moonlighting days. For a guy people say is a star but not an actor, he has managed to be in several very good movies. Rather than take a downbeat view of his aphasia diagnosis, I wanted to imagine a near future where he would discover all the other ‘languages’ that he can still comprehend.” (web)

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June 19, 2018

Jocko Benoit

SOMEONE WITH A MEGAPHONE

I tell my wife exactly what
I’m thinking, including all the
punctuation, and she returns the favor.
The police arrive and we convey
everything without embellishment.
They call in the S.W.A.T. team,
with the military standing by.
Someone with a megaphone suggests
we move things over to The Jerry
Springer Show and when we arrive
everyone there has decades of training
in honesty and clarity.

“I want to feel closer to you,”
my wife confesses. “Sometimes
I need to be alone,” I confide.
“I think our lives are the result
of the choices we make,” she insists.
“I think we can’t help being
who we are,” I say certainly.
“You’re both ontologically naïve,”
someone shouts out. Soon we are
mired in a Vietnam of cause and
effect, of whose pain is greater—
the woman with the poked out eye,
or the man with a microphone
stand entirely up his rectum.

Then I tell my wife that the chair
she’s holding above my head
doesn’t make her look fat and that
I secretly fear commitment and want
to spend more time off the computer.
The level of violence ratchets down to that
of our average evening. “We don’t need
to go to my parents’ more often,”
brings things down to prison riot level.
“I secretly love coming across one of your
sweaty shirts on the bed,” brings things
down to a hockey game. And with
“I’m really starting to enjoy science fiction
movies,” my wife lowers the tone
to that of a playground.

Springer wraps things up, shaking
his head at the most disgusting display
of lies he’s ever seen and tells us
if he sees us again he’ll run us over
with a bus. And I believe it will be
a silver bus, shining with the purity
of truth, except for the dried blood
on the bumper. But for now we go home
so ashamed it takes five days
of non-stop fucking to ease our pain.

from Poets Respond

__________

Jocko Benoit: “This is my take on the departure of Jerry Springer from the air. I remember walking into a TV repair shop years ago and asking the repair guy what he liked to watch, and he told me he was a big fan of ‘Mr. Jerry Springer.’ Gotta say, that was a conversation stopper, but this poem goes out to that guy and all the other people who got something out of that show that I never did.”

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