Ron Stock Poems

This poem's about Aunt Flo and Uncle Jim,
he always loved her but she never loved him.
But they got together anyway when each was about twenty
and bought a ranch in West Texas, 'cause my Uncle Jim had a plenty.
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This is the true story of two passionate young boys: Jack, huge, broad-shouldered, dark, handsome, strong; Jimmy, small, quick, not very pretty, intense. The feud between these two begins in the second grade and brews like boiling poison in their hearts for ten years.
On the playground of an old stone school around a circle scratched in the dust, a crowd has gathered to watch these foes play a game of Cat's Eye marbles. Jack, on one knee, a large red Shooter marble between thumb and forefinger of his right hand, snaps it into the ring. When Jack's marble misses, Jimmy and his comrades cheer. Jack grumbles, and spits in the dirt. Jimmy kneels on both knees, takes a deep breath, fires his green Cat's Eye. When Little Jimmy's Shooter knocks Big Jack's last marble out of the ring and Jimmy wins, Jimmy screams with joy, then turns to shake Jack's hand. The last thing he remembers; a fist in front of his face. Jimmy awakens with blood running from his nose.
In the 6th grade at a country school of mostly brick and glass on a playground with but a few trees surrounded by fields of dry corn, Jimmy bounces out the front door of the long, narrow building at lunch hour, hears a commotion to his right, glances up, and sees Big Jack and several boys in a circle on their knees. They have a skinny blond-haired girl pinned to the ground, her white blouse up, her blue jeans down. Dirty little fingers are probing her secret places. Jimmy races to the office of the principal. Two male teachers yank the boys away from the helpless girl, who weeping, remains down, tightly curled, in a fetal pose. After school Big Jack chases Little Jimmy through one of those dry corn fields, but Big Jack is waaaay too slow and can never catch up, with Little Jimmy.
A year and a half later Little Jimmy is a baseball prodigy on a team where Big Jack thinks he should be the star. They are teammates, and Jimmy now muses, friends. When Jack invites Jimmy over to ride horses, Jimmy, excited, can't refuse. When Jimmy arrives at Jack's farm Jack offers him a horse. Jimmy says, "Thanks Jack. Where's your horse? " Jack says nothing as Jimmy grabs the reigns and climbs into the saddle of the glistening black stallion. Before he can get his feet in the stirrups Jack slaps the animal's rump. The big horse gallops at high speed on a well-worn path around a corner of the house. Jimmy, still bent over trying to get his right foot in a stirrup, glances up and sees a thick oak tree limb taking dead, broadside aim at his belly. He leans back. The big horse thunders through. Jimmy's chest and nose are seriously scratched. He's one angry,13-year-old boy.
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My friend, Melody, and I were sitting on the veranda of our casa overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Mexico as a long, sleek, white sailboat cruised into the Bay. In unison we muttered, "That's one thing I could never do, be on a sailboat for a long time."
An old sea dog I hadn't seen in 10 years, Captain John, was soloing that boat. So, when Captain John asked us to sail for three days down south to Zihuatanejo, we jumped high.
Getting to the boat proved to be an adventure. I was in knee deep water when a huge wave lifted the wooden dinghy up and dropped it onto my legs. My feet, calves, knees, and thighs slipped into the space between boat and sandy bottom. Melody swam out.
We pointed west out the Bay, around a buoy marking a reef, then south to Zihuatanejo.
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Melody and I live on a sagebrush mesa 12 miles west of Taos, New Mexico. On one side of our open, two-car yellow-pine garage is a nest with four beautiful Mountain Bluebird chicks. On the other side, another nest is filled with five baby Say's Phoebies. The two mother birds have been feeding these baby chicks for over two weeks.
The poet makes every decision in pursuit of a poem; what direction to drive, what hill to climb, what tree to kiss, what canyon to enter. It's June, I'm 3 miles west of our house on the crown of a rolling landscape of sage, juniper, and piñon pine. An occasional black volcanic rock dots the terrain. I'm standing on a wide, tongue-shaped precipice of mesa encircled on three sides by the deep Arroyo Aguaje de la Petaca, a dry riverbed with a narrow ribbon of sand winding through more sagebrush. The overbearing midday sun is at it's apex. I have patience for an overbearing sun. I have no patience for an overbearing bully. I'm looking for the body, bones, or whatever remains, of a murdered woman.
He, was once a cute, feisty, blond-haired little boy with a long straight nose and intense dark eyes, born and raised in St. John Baptist Parish northwest of New Orleans. She, a precious little girl with large doughy brown eyes and auburn hair from Horseshoe Bay near Austin. He, at 40, was a felon with cold eyes and a long record of arrest, including a string of DWI's. She, at 36, a former high school beauty queen and United States Marine, who for some unknown reason was attracted to dangerous men. He was a dangerous man.
Did he, have, an overbearing mother like so many serial killers I've read about; a Mom so twisted by the Word of Jesus she invented her own interpretation of Christian love?
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I knew the moment I saw her nude in a figure drawing class in Kalamazoo that I was playing with fire. I knew the moment I touched her thigh and felt that tear in the corner of my eye that I was playing with fire. What I didn't know, when Barbara left me for
Eric and moved to Aspen, Colorado, was that my mind would burn, and that my Ronald James Stock spirit, would turn, to ash.
Shaft opens empty shaft to hot wet ruts of pulsating flesh so exciting routine itself revolves around the torrid coils of mock conception spilling infant song, but birth and death of sordid love awaken splendid drives of self-esteem and rippling up from righteous breeding pools are springs of despondent challenges of lightning sparks of fear. But I have no fear or worth so weak as not to try and die for sacred cause so I shall be what we are told one soon shall be. I, shall be the Second Son of God who's come to save us all, and I, will not allow myself to fail even if it means my death, upon the cross, of modern time.
In Chicago, on Michigan Avenue, I, walked up to a little white-haired old lady in a lavender and yellow Easter bonnet and said, 'Hello, I, am the Second Son of God.' 'How nice, ' she replied, then removed a dollar bill from her purse. 'Here's a little something for your cause, Honey Pie.' I, never did take her dollar bill...
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My girlfriend, Jackie, and I had moved into the middle apartment of an old Victorian in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco near Golden Gate Park. The year,1970, and the Haight, after it's Flower Child Glory days, was no sweet garden, but a marginal neighborhood saturated with drugs. So our rent, at least, was cheap.
On a Sunday, at 10 in the evening, one week after we moved in, three friendly dudes occupying the basement apartment cranked the music up. It was party time. Loud party time. Extremely loud party time. So loud, the thin walls of our apartment were vibrating, vibrating, vibrating. We thought about joining the fun, but I had a long commute in the morning to my job as a picture framer down the peninsula. The gallery opened at 9 am.
We could not get to sleep, so I knocked on the door of the basement apartment and asked the men to turn the volume down. They did, for as long as it took me to get back under the covers. Now the music was louder. I knocked on the door again. Received the same response. Again. The same response. So I called the police and made a complaint.
Fifteen minutes later the cops showed up in force and spent an hour tearing the place apart. I fell asleep after they left. Early the next morning, before work, I walked down to see the apartment. The fridge was toppled; chairs upset; mattresses in disarray; closets emptied; drawers, upside down, tossed to the floor. Personal items scattered everywhere.
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Piggy Wiggy! Piggy Wiggy! That's how the boys used to taunt her. Poor girl. To their 8-year-old eyes she was the ugliest thing on planet earth. Short and wide, but that is not what set Carol Love apart. It was her face, cadmium red and round as a plate. Ears, thin pink potato chips. Nose, upturned, flat, with exposed nostrils. Mouth, as cadmium as her face. Hair, brown and wispy. Eyeglasses; a shame, big, heavy, black an' gray, sometimes sliding down her nose, but when not, those deep blue eyes magnified a thousand times.
The boys were all perfect, of course, simply because they were white boys in America. Apart from their teacher, Miss Pew, these boys were in control, and they never, let up, on Carol Love. Nor did the girls. So Carol felt left out and wanted to do something special so the kids would love her, or at least like her. On her birthday, Carol brought in Baby Ruth candy bars. 'Wow, candy in the middle of the day, ' the children thought, 'Carol can't be all that bad.' Poor Carol wasn't all that bad, but her candy was, filled with crawling white worms. Carol broke down in tears, ran from the building and hid behind a large oak tree in the far west corner of the playground. It took sooooome coaxing from Miss Pew before Carol Love would return to the classroom and continue her arithmetic studies.
This old, white clapboard country schoolhouse with a single bell tower had a blue front door facing south, and 3 tall, narrow windows on walls east and west. Just inside the door on the left, opposite a vestibule for hanging coats and hats, was an indoor pit toilet.
One extremely sweaty day, when Miss Pew, tall, lithe, blond, with soft green eyes, was standing in front of the blackboard, Carol Love asked if she could be excused to go to the bathroom. "Yes, " answered Miss Pew. So Carol wiggled out of her seat, waddled to the vestibule, then closed and locked the pit toilet door behind her. Next, she lowered her pants, sat, pooped, wiped, pulled up her pants. But like you and I, Carol couldn't resist taking a peek at her poop. She leaned over the saw cut hole in the worn wooden seat and looked down. And because it was a hot, sweaty day, Carol's big, heavy, black and gray eyeglasses slipped off the bridge of her nose and landed on top of the pile of human feces 6 feet below. The pile of caca was crawling with little white maggots. When Carol heard the splat, she thought, 'Oh no! Ooohh, ' then turned to the one person she knew, loved her.
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In 1976, in San Francisco, promoting The California Nuclear Safeguards Initiative, the first public referendum on the issue ever held in America, my crew and I painted 18,3-foot by 20-foot 'Yes On 15' canvas banners for storefront offices throughout the state.
Prop 15 was ultimately defeated in the June vote, but a week before, the California Legislature passed modest restrictions on nuclear power plant development. A start.
In June of 1977 I attended the first organizing conference of the Abalone Alliance, a potpourri of California anti-nuclear groups, in San Luis Obispo near the site of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, being built directly above the San Andreas Fault. The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, hosted over 200 participants who spent the weekend brainstorming on how to stop, with Mahatma Ghandi's passive resistance techniques, further construction of the plant. I became an active voice at this conference and was invited to read this anti-nuclear poem at the closing ceremonies.
Homo Sapiens Last Stand.
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When an author is standing in front of you, reading a poem or prose,
pull up your very own lounge chair, get comfortable, relax.
Now, leave your body behind, reduce your spirit to one inch, only one
inch, not two, set aside your ego, and stand on the floor near your
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