Poems by David Lazar

Good Idea

I had one good idea in my life, and it turned out to be a bad
idea. I sit at the window and watch the plans we made roost,
leave their droppings and fly off to God knows where. It
wasn’t just talk, wasn’t just this and that and that and this, and
boom boom we’re in the money and the temperature’s always
82, and your suits look like they were made for you, and not
some monkey in Brooklyn. We thought about things and we
used our eyes. We had a guy inside who knew all the dope and
was married to somebody’s sister. We made sure our watches
were wound and running at the same time. We slept well
and remembered to leave our gaudy ties at home. We called
our mothers and said Hail Marys, loaded our guns, and even
checked the tides. Then all of a sudden it’s like you’re walking
into a wall of warm air, your arms get heavy, and you remember
the one little thing that turns a good idea into a bad idea, the
one thing that you know you really knew but just didn’t think
enough about. Boom, boom, there’s no money and the birds
might as well be heading for Capistrano, or any other place
where birds go on their way to God knows where.

 

 
From the Book of Noir Aphorisms
 
If you have to ask, you’re already dead.
Nothing gives away a bad conscience like the tell of a quivering lip.
She wasn’t the problem; she was the answer. That was the problem.
If you need a dark alley in a hurry, you have to know who to call and when. Why is always irrelevant, and almost quaint, really.
No one resembles you as much as some guy who took a powder yesterday. Just ask your mother.
Darkness is a trick of the light. If you don’t know that, you don’t know anything.
This town isn’t dirty, it’s in disguise. I’ll prove it: do you have any idea of where you are?
Gaudy patter isn’t a kind of wallpaper. Although, come to think of it, it is.
The only guy you should really trust has one eye or one leg. He absolutely must have one of something.
If you want to fence hot jewels, never give the stuff to Ruby Burns.
You’re going to take the rap and it’s going to be tonight. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a stiff about it.
Big deal, big combo, big sleep . . . . You have to start big to end small.
There’s no way out, no escape, no trick to the slippery math, no exit from the cul de sac, and no solution to the maze. So, relax.

David Lazar's recent books are Stories of the Street: Reimagining Found Texts, Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors, and the anthology Don't Look Now: Writers on What They Wish They Hadn't Seen, co-edited with Kristen Iversen. He is the editor of Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher and Michael Powell: Interviews. Forthcoming from Nebraska is Double Indemnities (collaborative essays). Best American Essays named ten of his essays "Notable Essays of the Year. 2016, Lazar received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Nonfiction. He is co-editor of Ohio State University's 21st Century Essays imprint. He created the undergraduate and graduate nonfiction programs at Ohio University and Columbia College Chicago.

---

---