One must wear butter shoes to slide across the temporal griddle.
Here, we have a record player inside a pink carrying case.
Over there, a cane and a broken mason jar.
And in the basement, a figure mummified inside a rolled-up rug,
stored carefully underneath a work bench.
Investigating further, we find mismatched dishes.
Red for the furious wife,
green for the husband submerged in murky dreams,
and yellow for the children churned by hand under a butter sun.
Afterward, we are hungry, for food and for the physical.
We slap each other playfully, clomping on peg legs across the wooden floor to the bedroom,
where we hop like Russian dancers upon the griddle of our love.
You suggest we should buy cows,
Guernseys to provide us with milk and children already grown,
Who have their own houses devoid of plywood and yellow tape,
the emblems and talismans of our journey into urbex mystery.
_______
for Sunday Muse #84.
You have tapped into the forgotten like a song to sell a painting. I love this Shay! I will never think of a griddle quite the same. Wonderful and amazing as always beautiful poet Fireblossom Shay! 🤩
ReplyDeleteOH butter shoes to slide across the temporal griddle!!!!!!! Only you could write that phrase. The record player speaks to me, from those times when my little box record player and my records transported me into a more hopeful future. "and yellow for the children churned by hand under a butter sun." O!M!G! What are you TAKING and can you send me some? Smiles. I love the hopping like Russian dancers on the griddle of our love. Well. I love the whole thing. Superlative.
ReplyDeleteYou stepped into the past with such ease, I imagine being a child growing up like that and maybe for the better... but the mummified figure in the basement makes me think of who it was that never left.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first read the title my dyslexia read it as bitter shoes. The yellow tape puts me in mind of crime scene tape. A lot of darkness in this poem put forth in surrealism. I like this sad poem a lot. I will never look at a griddle or a rolled up rug the same again. I am glad your creative juices are flowing again.
ReplyDeleteThe shifts in this are awesome. Love the slick and ephemeral and the displacements.
ReplyDeleteOh, the mystery of a cold case murder. How delicious Shay! Wonder how this plays out when the case is reopened, which most certainly it will be. Could it have been one of the kids, grown and moved away? Man, I love a mystery!
ReplyDeleteAstonishing!
ReplyDeleteHaving a hard time catching my breath .... so many of your poems create the full gamut of emotion in me ... thank you.
ReplyDeleteI read this a few days ago, but reading it again I am struck anew by how you can take commonplace details as the germ of something that grows into a magic mushroom more mythic but more easily touched than a unicorn. The mummy in the rug, the children churned yellow, and the second line in particular(and its echo in the penultimate stanza) blew me away.
ReplyDelete