Four Poems Inspired by My Not-So-Innocent Childhood in Small Town America
VazamBam
By Vassilis Zambaras
1.
“Bell of the Ball, Raymond, Washington, circa 1950”
Take it from me, sweetie
Way back then, First Street
Was chock-full of taverns,
Booze joints and cathouses,
But nothing to lick
My Whores Galore—
Two suites of tarts
One flight above
Our town’s tastiest
Candy store.
2.
“Big Bang”
The gang was getting pretty itchy—
As they unhitched
Those dazzling diamond-
Studded belts,
She hitched up
That oh so plain Jane skirt
Above her comely head,
Above that heavenly body
The stars
Exploded one by one,
Four studs dropped dead.
3.
“Pulp”
curioCity kills Bloody Marys
maraschino cherries Pop guns
gang bangs poontang rat snitches
and Edsel squeals
cathouse beldams melt hams down
dog days nightmares ride hunchbacks
warning lights stop critters peeling
rubber dead in their tracks
cornered but ornery
disembodied vulvas bare back
their teeth like
the Cheshire cat.
4.
“Rancid in Raymond”
Back
On the corner
Of First and Duryea,
I thought he’d gone off
And said
Some foul-mouthed runaway
Kid named Cid took what was left
Of the bacon cross the tracks past Commercial,
And ran he did—
Brought the rich
Taste of it all
Back home to us
Nickel-and-dime bastards I swear
He did.
MELIGALAS, GREECE—(Weekly Hubris) 2/14/11—Four poems that have growing up in Raymond, Washington as background; as they are poems, they are nothing more than constructs of my imagination and should not be regarded as anything but that; however, poetic imagination does not exist in a vacuum and as far as these poems are concerned, I should hope they convey something of what it was like growing up “politically incorrect” in such a small but very lively town. Readers are kindly requested to read my column of April 12, 2010, where I give a somewhat clearer and perhaps more truthful picture of what Raymond was like back then.
Vassilis Zambaras
Vassilis Zambaras According to such reliable inside sources as The Weekly Hubris’s Publishing-Editor, VazamBam aka Vassilis Zambaras is all of the following, and more, in an order no one can vouchsafe as definitive: a publishing poet who writes every day of his life; a hugely successful father (and a not-so-very-successful local political candidate); a professor of English as a Foreign Language, with portfolio; a Renaissance Man of many skills, useful and not-so; a fount of information about his particular corner of his birth country; an unstable and utterly unique mix of Greek and American, American and Greek; and the man fortunate and wily enough to have made off with Messenia’s loveliest and most talented local daughter as his child bride. Besides being all the aforementioned, other more dubious sources have also reported seeing him hanging out at the corner of vazambam.blogspot.com—in the guise of a “new old kid on the blog, with an occasional old or new poem written off the old writer’s block.” Author Photo: Pericles Boutos