How To Drink Single Malt Scotch

Dear Cable Company,
I was cracking a 12 year old
double wood Balvenie when the news arrived,
it’s digital tidings sheer and edgy as slit skin,
blasting twenty plus and still counting bodies into my family
room. Some were disgusted by the smoky appearance
and the peaty smell. Others babbled about
retirement planning and hair loss.
I told them to keep out
of my scotch, that I prefer to breath
it in from a tulip glass because it splashes the spirit
onto the tongue. Riedel and Glencairn make quality variations.
I said I didn’t need them,
to consolidate my credit card debt. But they stuck, staunchly
bleeding trails down my glass, some streamed out louder,
especially during station breaks, so I threw water
at them but they wouldn’t come out of the carpet
which made the dog bark a bunch and the neighbor yelled
to turn it fucking down. Yes, you should stick in your nose
and gently agitate the glass but
single malt drinking is more rewarding when free
of distractions. That it numbs the brain is a documented
desire but it’s smoother without little murders
floating in it. And suicide bombers, demanding religions,
teenage sex with guns, primaries on different dates, and all that
money? Granted, I like to pair up with a plump
cigar but these awful things might be better kept silent.
The evening news should not need washing down and those three kids
that were drowned and their mother are messing up my hot tub.
You must understand this isn’t what I ordered. I wanted Disney and MTV.
And someone else’s child is still missing. And I know it’s a lie
about not eating the sushi, oysters and dark chocolate I wanted
with my whiskey which is now oddly empty. Please
cancel my subscription. In the box you’ll find the body
pieces that remain, some toys made in China, a glass of rain
from the sunny weekend you promised, one emptied bottle of scotch
and those little dead bastards who claim they didn’t do it.
Please remit $70 for the scotch. I get giddy just thinking what my loss
in business will do to your day.
It almost makes one murder worth another.

m.r. kidd

Whiskey, Whiskey - Tim Hardin (mp3)


Whiskey Straight - Rocky Votolato (mp3)


All text, prose, poetry and written material are the legal copyright of "Michael R. Kidd" - © "Michael R. Kidd, ADG, LLC" 2007. All rights reserved. The poems posted here are copyrighted and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Too Unemployed to Buy Your Love This Year

Dressed in new shoes I stride
through the mall. Pants and coats
turn away from my ass looking to
time me out for the work I walked away from.

Perhaps I should have bought that better
suit in the shop by your office,
the one spun by immigrant hands and laid away
on funds I owe in windfalls.

Just ahead of me more holidays parade.
Down this long hall of same ol' shit,
I notice a gathering of viciously inane
bargains I'll have to pass
getting to the end of this long spree
with no transaction between us. Good,
because I look so rich in these shoes.

m.r. kidd

Gift Rocco Deluca & The Burden (mp3)

I wrote this poem three days after Sean Taylor's death. It is a statement of how incomprehensible loss can be and the indifferences one experiences in the wake of loss. I really am numbed by Sean Taylor’s death. It is true he was only a child. It is tragic. It is senseless. And as a Redskins fan, I am even, somewhat moved by the community expression. But in what direction is confusing to me as is the news. However, in contrast to the children we have sent to die in Iraq, I am so outraged. This country has broken apart and eaten the bones of my heart. It is nothing new, not even momentarily novel. The same applies for the parents that battered to death their child, and the man in Kensington who shot all three of his kids and then himself. What page was that on?

I read this poem a few days back to an audience. Some were appalled. A few nodded as if agreeing, and a few asked me questions I refused to answer. May be for that, I am a little sorry. It is probably why I write this now. Like this country, I have found I like to say shocking things but I don’t much like hearing them. Inasmuch, I will continue to sift for some clear expression, or truth, or maybe even escape from indifference. But that is my affair.


Sean Taylor is Dead, So is Saddam Hussein. George Bush is Not

What tired clichés, the unrusted corpse
the unready grave. But still he is
prematurely and forlornly, and he is
deemed, in his passing,
a more worthy,
esteemed person
of aesthetic significance.

I didn’t know so many
valued his part, took him so seriously,
with so many permutations,
the spitting silent gunslinger among middle field
foul mongers and ineloquent attitudes, “as if,”
blinking at the crowd
with hip rock-star condescension.
Or so it was the way
the Morse code of the press composed him.

Such was the image,
though it may be he was
just a rookie with a cause
nobody much cared for.
As they say in the bond market,
his craft, his purpose, was to prevent
success, to cause failure.
I do not suggest he was genius of any kind,
but I do think he was good
at what he did.

And the more I learn about anything
the more I respect that: being good;
skill, craft, savvy, knowledge of form.

After which comes passion, commitment.
A power to transcend the mortified page
of mutant sadness, over writing
the parents who beat their infant child to death,
eclipsing the sub-literate Idiot
of attention for every war crime
ever graffittied on walls in fields
of glorious gore.

That is art,

which resides in the tears of the beholder.

So, have I thrown a false note
or negative infective at his play?
An unwanted embryo hungry for oxygen?
An uncultured scamp and fraud
that both merit rage?
Can I hit so hard that flags fly and fall
begging a benediction
or, for fucking crying out loud,
comic interdiction,
mean or trill,
for some instant
replay expertly unencrypted?
If I dressed in pin or zebra stripes would I
find it? Shit, I don’t expect to. Not yet.
Maybe never, not now that Sean Taylor is dead.
Though I am only one of some
still questioning, at least I hope,
one of some bound to bear witness
to what lives on long
after the season has gone.

It’s a long bomb.

There. Did you catch that?


m.r. kidd

7 O' Clock News/Silent Night by Simon & Garfunkel

All text, prose, poetry and written material are the legal copyright of "Michael R. Kidd" - © "Michael R. Kidd, ADG, LLC" 2007. All rights reserved.

The poems posted here are copyrighted and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.