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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 15, 1999)
Delan Lonowski/DN iVlore songs about^ buildings Poems By Adam J. Klinker poetaster and destination man ^0j [AND SO YOU FRAMED THE SKY\ a humorous, but not at all elegiac sketch And so you framed the sky Thumbed nose to God, but does It matter? It is God, the Capitalist feeding trough for spiritual soulless Feeding thick opiated masses of Sanguine enmity on dollars and Cents and primordial screams in Tenfold babbles of Happy Hour Depression Destroy the mind and blot the sky And feed the body and etherize me, Too with horrific doses so I will forget And be obliged to remember Football dreams and decimated Periodic tables and laid-low Latin To be injected with the plaguish Pusillanimous peoples in posh pilot seats Air in a box escapes THE LONG HALL or A DiDACTiC EPiC et al (To be read as fast as possible) I’m in the long hall - Andrews, too hot outside and I’m in Jeans and a 50/50 cotton polyester collared prep-star polo shirt without The little polo player so does that count? Man look at her - those collegiate black Pants tight against her legs and hips and she smiles in her dainty white and black and gray Striped, tied at the neck tube. She with black hair and a caramel/vanilla skin of a nice girl Who spent her summer outside maybe not in the lifeguard chair, not that Dark, but in a garden or out reading on her West Virginia back porch in a plastic Recliner while the sunmoonstarsrain beats down. She goes into room 26 - across the hall from My room and shuts the thick oak door And then I can hear the reverberating, all-permeating static Sound of professors and students in harmony and their voices together Bouncing off of each other in harmony and disharmony, a fat kid with bad hair like me And a lost-arm book bag like Joe walks her tight collegiate beautiful black pants’ path and fouls it As he stoops to tie his shoe and crumple his bald newspaper. Then the jock, musclehead in jeans like me, dark and capped With a khaki monogrammed filial hat of open despair. A man with rolled Pants desertkhaki, a lost man, bald and carrying a no arm book bag and all of them oblivious To wild-hair, greeneye intent on their every move as they wander along in the basement like the terminal At Eppley, not the dome at Lindbergh. A girl leaves a classroom, a boy goes in a ballplayer I was a ballplayer once like me, and then too - not good but fair and lost in Pastoral conflict because my Dad never wanted anything I didn’t so that’s flashpan quick-quit When it was all over and thank Goodness because I never wanted it but this. He has a one-armer, a blue collar T-shirt and short socks all my favorites And ballplayers stick collegiate black pants tight to other Ballplayers and like me, he don’t much care for me, but football, what happens In this basement and toward that end, I cannot see the wall behind me, but like Joe says, God does And that’s fine by me. Latecomers don’t see class, like the kid in the bucket, peeking into Room 26 and Sheepishly lock-jawed walking away... Matt Haney/DN Oldfatber on Essentials Nos. 5, 10, 24 and 25 Electric heights in squalid stairwell dreams Where stuffy Glasnost luck wondermen traipse To steelysoft elevators and yellow Tiled watewalls that echo the sweet lament 'Of a slow prairie dream stark-skinny-run I sing ugly of terrible beauty To stop across the purpled other air And breathe myself to be seven-barred, tall INTERLUDE Spark up low from high and where I came to be in glass pastures Of fruit coffee and shoe bordellos that sting your fairyheaded Wastebasket blues with ignorant cherub hobnobbery Throw a latch to the toilet and up the elevator to sit smug smiling In the toxic playing card craze naze cloud of Russian roughage And the history of blanketearth as we have come to know airbooks Let it, let timespace surround and dissipate in debauched lectury nasal Pang of genius in fourth floor waiting or awful vending machine addicts To be left poring over an American bureaucracy they will stop Yes bricks and gold mortar to house the stretched colossus and Offer we, us, me a new thing to relate to the pained old and older that sit Stifled on either side to gaze in translucent wonderment at the Big Daddy bricks END INTERLUDE Steel antispires can see a broken light Though trees hide stanchion rumorcars on streets -That plunge and corollary conquer logico Against the diamonded velvet mass stream And scary sure, it is, what terrific Beacon true to nightdeWs and mistiness Seen yet through lean, aquiline Nebraskans Who sit in cardrooms with genetic license In life a stretching hacienda high Wholesing, beguiling anchor in the sky Away from her who had once so entreated * There and none the wiser that I exist, the wall behind me eiifsts, God exists - And He sees all, sees all, sees all in the basement of the long hall, long hall, long hall - Andrews. A beautiful red brick building is it, with great concrete pillars embedded-limestone and raised by black Frontiersmen and white anti-visionaries in a gilded age of room 26 From which emanates all the riches in The Long Hall, Andrews, Andrews, where the ghosts follow you on the 1st Floor on midnight blue evenings with three lights and a clock, out of the sarcophagus, endlessly clicking You hear your own footsteps twice or not at all or before you take them altogether and all alone and all apart Be inspired by the place And uninspired by the place and its antiunion with the rest Hear voices in the upstairs rooms and ominous wind-blowing beatback across The crowns of escaped engineers with two-armers and a bottle of Pep&r, See-the prayers and psalms and the Happy Sound of Teuton English and all this with flushing faces and black pants where those girls are in fine Supply and Who You Are (when noone’s looking). Is time motion? I haven’t gone far enough then, but all this in the long hall, Andrews. Shawn Drapal/DN Ml