Mike Jurkovic
Mike Jurkovic is the 2025-2027 Ulster County Poet Laureate, with published collections titled Circling Planes (Bushwhack Books, 2026), Buckshot Reckoning, mooncussers, and AmericanMental (Luchador Press 2023, 2022, 2020). He has also published Haiku collections Monet’s Bamboo (CAPS Press, 2025) and Blue Fan Whirring (Nirala Press, 2018). He is the President of Calling All Poets and Co-Chair of the Music Fan Film Series at the Rosendale Theatre in Rosendale, NY. He loves Emily most of all.
The Charming Ineptness You’ve Taken to Heart (POEM)
dates back to the autumn of 1882 when
in the crimson goodness of Trinity Church
the first of my forebears panned for poetry and gold
amid the gilded squalor Tip Sheet Jones moved about
the lower borough like the crackling new current
that lit up Pearl like vandal stars fallen from
God’s busy hands Through the roil and rumble
of a city divining he ran his book and wrote his verse
‘neath the Hanging Tree where the warm and waning
afternoon light was the golden cast of God’s smile
In his bowler and shabby frock he took his poems
to the hometown papers rashly establishing a
down-the-decades pattern of editorial rejection
down to me yours truly who as we speak
is weighing rejections one by one by one
When pennies proved few from Waverly readings
Tip took whatever poor boy gigs he could gather
grave digger sewer rat muck diver and wooed
almond-eyed Angelina Francesco into marriage
three kids and a lot of talk about better days
Workers not loitering living like thieves
Their children w/o factory fever
The Five Points w/o blood w/o cholera
days when the city no longer digested its own