Muddyboots The Gypsy

Muddyboots the Gypsy

Refuses to even comb her hair

And she swings out of her darkened window, easing herself down

To the garden path and away

From policemen and their batons.

October afternoons

Find her stomping through the corn stalks

Like some celebrated sunflower actress

Bowing gracefully to her fans.

Muddyboots the gypsy

Hangs around the Sweet Roll Bakery--

She's got a little money,

But would rather steal a cupcake from some pigeon on the steps.

She wants to sleep with girls,

And sometimes does;

But they always end up trying to give her their clothes

And, in the end,

Go back to their bibles and boys.

Muddyboots the gypsy

Pickpockets the moon and makes a pendant.

After that,

Whenever she walks by women or water,

They follow without a thought.

Muddyboots the gypsy

Goes stomping past the shops.

The women who come out of there

Feel nothing at all but the scorn they learn in church.

Their woozy husbands, though,

Eye her thighs and chase their tails

Like dogs.

She sits beneath a haunted tree on evenings in November,

While the starlings go quite crazy in the branches above her head

(which is really the uncombed hair above her head)

And the racket is deeply disturbing

To the reverend, already in bed.

Muddyboots the gypsy

Goes stomping through the corn stalks in a cloud of noisy birds.

Wherever she stands,

It always rains with the sun still out.

When she's finished her pilfered cupcake,

She starts to sing the "Butterfly Duet" to herself

And fingers the tarot deck hidden in her skirts

Along with the file she keeps for picking the lock on the future.

Oh, she is wrong so wrong,

And the biddies and cops condemn her

But just sometimes, she's so sweet and right,

Like the solstice come December.

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