Chuck E. Chakra and a few other poems by Gary Singh | #thesideshow

CHUCK E. CHAKRA

One thousand plastic orbs with lives
of their own, separate, yet related,
multicolored chakras, bouncing
around inside a netted cage. Two
zombies enduring suburbia,
together they dive into the orbs,
they swim an ocean of hues,
navigator captains veering off the
wasteland track. In time, they will
transform those orbs into colors on
canvas, expressions on the page,
lectures on the literary stage.

Fire Sprinkler Shutoff Valve

Mach-five steering wheel
encased in faded concrete

potato chip pigeon bag
crumpled and torn

the door is open
for me to crawl in and hide

as crones eat a bouillabaisse
on the other side

For A.

Pretend

for one night.

Just pretend

you can be the earth

while fire,

air, and water

guide me along

every square inch

of your oceans and

your masses of land,

at a snail’s pace

toward that serene

balancing point

so you never

have to deviate

from your axis

ever again.

Just pretend.

FOR THAT GIRL IN THE COFFEE SHOP

As librettos propel her through the murder of Scarpia, she wants to be a soprano. When she enters the Stanford Robotics Lab, she’s a researcher, a coder, a thinktank pioneer. When she explores the structures of Zala Hadid, she fills out paperwork for architecture school. When foreign correspondents arrive at the slaughter, she begins to file story. At the edge of the world, where east becomes west on acid-free paper, she becomes the God of Small Things. When she joins the Surrealists in Paris, Berlin, or Serbia, she lies down with them, watching all the warmongers, carry on their silly pathetic lives without poetry.

Mountaintop Longing

For one hundred days
the bonsai grew
at a snail’s pace
its twisting trunk
the patience
I savored
while waiting
for you
to come walking
back up that mountain path.

Through May of 2017, Gary Singh is a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. As a scribe, he’s published nearly 1000 works including newspaper columns, travel essays, art and music criticism, profiles, business journalism, lifestyle articles, poetry and short fiction. His poems have been published in The Pedestal Magazine, Dirty Chai, Maudlin House and more. For 600 straight weeks, his newspaper columns have appeared in Metro, the alternative weekly paper of San Jose and Silicon Valley. He is the author of The San Jose Earthquakes: A Seismic Soccer Legacy (2015, The History Press).