Portland Taxis

Michael Benedikt

If were on Mars, and wanted to get back-to-home, I would 
Hail a taxi. There's nothing I like better
Than hailing a taxi, they have saved me many times
From the spectre of fiscal responsibility. From the bottom
Of a well comes my voice, hailing a taxi: "Get Me 
Out Of This Oubliette"! Beside the bed where I make love 
The business cards of taxicab companies are tacked up.
Taxicab salesmen surround my every motion
Hinting I'd be better off as a driver, but it's
Hailing a taxi I relish, not threading my way
All day thorough the midtown traffic. Buses won't do
Either, the exquisite squalidness and rash of
Public transportation is not the point, but
Something about in these little moving cubicles
Filled with me on demand. I feel crammed-in on a plane
Because there is no room for me to lift my arm, there,
To hail a cab. In a cab there's no room to hail
A cab, but then you're already in one, it's ridiculous
To even think of, unless you have the hots
For hailing a cab, thousands of cabs, as I apparently do.
    But then I
Digress, I wish a taxi would come, grind and screech
To a halt, and take me someplace, anyplace else, and get me
    out of this alluringly mind-boggling love-mess

Such as, to Portland.

From The Badminton at Great Barrington; Or, Gustave Mahler & The Chattanooga Choo-Choo, published by University of Pittsburgh Press (1980). Copyright © 1980 and © 1999 by Michael Benedikt. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The European Shoe

The European Shoe is covered with grass and reed, bound up and wound
    around so that it may slip easily over the wearer's head.

In case you are an aircraft pilot, you must take care that the 
    European Shoe does not creep off your foot, and begin to 
    make its way carefully across the fusilage.

The European Shoe pressed against the fugitive's nose, preventing it
    from imminent departure.

The European Shoe spends summers in delightful ways. A lady feels its 
    subtle and unexpected pressure the length of her decolletage.

Michael Benedikt

1968

The Beef Epitaph

This is what it was: Sometime in the recent but until now unrecorded past, it was decided by certain ingenious and commercially forward-looking cattle-ranchers in a certain large, modern Western nation which prides itself on being nutritionally forward-looking, that since people are increasingly nutrition-conscious, and increasingly insistent that "you are what you eat," all cattle on the way to market were to be marked with brief descriptive tags noting the favorite food of each animal; and also stating approximately how much each ate of it.

Michael Benedikt

1976

Of Seals, and Our Smiles

The last time they did any harm to anyone was probably thousands 
    of years ago;--therefore we catch them and cut them up into coats,
Their frolicsomeness, too, sliced up by contemptuous human analysis;
Yes, through the binoculars of the human in the dinghy, like a text
    beneath some mad scientist's magnifying-glass
The seals as they cavort, tend to scan like some pre-prepared,
    allegedly amusing, and gloriously convenient gloss which only 
    tells us

That the weak are only here on this our sad planet to be hurt.

The last time they did any harm to anyone was probably

Michael Benedikt

1984

Poems

Portland Taxis

More by this poet

The European Shoe

The Beef Epitaph

Of Seals, and Our Smiles

Poems

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Portland Taxis

More by this poet

The European Shoe

The Beef Epitaph

Of Seals, and Our Smiles

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