Plots We Can’t Keep Up With Poems by Randy Phillis

Plots We Can’t Keep Up With

Poems by Randy Phillis

Copyright 2014 by Randy Phillis

Encircle Publications, LLC

Softbound, 30 pages,  no price given

ISBN 13: 978-1-893035-22-5

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Every so often a book of poetry comes across the desk by an author I have not heard of while the blurbs on the back cover do not really reveal much though the blurb writers seem to agree on memory, time and the bridge between past and present.

For these reasons I opened Randy Phillis’s Plots We Can’t Keep Up With somewhat hesitantly not wishing to be bored or stretched to my imaginative limits.  But I opened to page 1 and off I was on an interesting journey.  The opening poem is a bittersweet remembrance of a boy and his not so cool father, yet the memory affects his life with women in barrooms.

What’s a Boy to Do

As a kid I had a choice:

stay in the car or follow him in

to Ben’s, red lights

and thick smoke, sit at the bar

that came to my chin or

a booth if I had crayons and paper.

Behind the bar, the big mirror

floated the backs of bottle

over my forehead as Dad

leaned forward,

elbow propped so his cigarette

hung above his head, studying

the barmaid’s face not two inches

from his. Then he’d sit far back

and laugh, stretching carefully to ash,

and ask what went best

with pickled eggs.  All that was good

with beer he already knew.

Sometimes I’d stay in the car,

play the radio and dance

my fingers across the dash, clench

the hard cool wheel and jerk

until I understood he wouldn’t be right back.

Then I wandered the muddy lot,

floated bottle caps across puddles

and built solid homes for frogs.

Bored, I’d flatten my face

against the glass door for effect,

and finally drag myself in,

knuckles almost scraping across the stained

carpet and pull myself up beside him.                

Other days, sent on an errand by Mom,

I’d stop in by myself, blinded

by the sudden dark and drink

short cold Cokes on Dad’s tab.

But mostly, like now, I didn’t like

going in alone, reading all the signs

to keep my eyes busy, never knowing

what to say to the woman next to me.

A number of his poems are filled with booze

and/or death. In “Gone, Fishing” the opening

lines are “if it weren’t you who died/ it would have been me:”

While in “Directive,” the opening stanza is “When death unzips

me/let there be no struggle to pick a stone.”

Then again we learn in “A Husk Under the Gum” we learn  from “…on

Fridays, Dad at the bar,/Mom folded out on the couch…” that Phillis’s

parents were neither the most loving nor caring parents, or that perhaps

they are worn out from their week of work and whatever else they

did and their child was not No. 1 on their hit parade.

Then there is the title poem which opens: “Our neighbor’s wife has left him,”

There is not a lot of happiness in these poems, no matter who it is and perhaps

there are other poems and happier times for Randy Phillis. Nonetheless these poems

are well written, entertaining, maybe even captivating in their own (somewhat) depressing way.  

More importantly they present honest personal experiences and present poets with

a good lesson on how to write about their own lives.

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Zvi A. Sesling
 

Author, King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Street, 2010) and Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva, 2011)

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthologies No. 7 & No. 8

Publisher, Muddy River Books