Weebles

 

Remembering my dollhouse,

full of thalidomide Weebles, armless, legless

and sleepless as well--always upright,

awake all night wandering the rooms.

No use locking the doors or pulling the shades--

the entire back of the house open to flood and tornado.

The whole place an ossuary--urn your keep, Weebs.

And me, Queen of the whole shebang, a six-year-old Persephone.

No surprise, then, to find me in new adulthood,

still covered with the vernix of near-innocence,

living on tuna fish and rainwater, perched

in the henhouse on my hope chest, waiting.

That was when you appeared, rising like a helium balloon,

floating in place beneath the crude umbraculum

with a censer in one hand and a lily in the other,

in full Papal costume, my real-life Weeble-God. 

We fed each other party crackers and absinthe,

le fee verte, "The Green Fairy," faux artists in our henhouse garret. 

Our flock all turned from Rhode island Reds to common crows.

We are a House that cannot be toppled, like Weebles ourselves,

though the giant half-grown bitch beyond the open back wall

keeps trying to poke us, smoke us out, or otherwise tamper

with our great love and legacy--hers if only she would pause,

consider, and accept us as deities. cast in plastic and immortal.

_______________

for Word Garden Word List--Four-Legged Girl

Music: Van Halen Little Dreamer

 

I Confabulations 5:13-27

 My heart remembers, dear friends, the glad evening

when the davenport did receive my person even as a

mother cradles her firstborn. O happy hour! O time of bliss!

As I watched astonished, I was provided with a magical light

Which emanated--as if from the mansions of Heaven!--

as a glowing loveliness from a device with which I was blessed.

O wide screen! O splendor of high definition! My heart

remembers these wonders and even now, gladness fills me,

Despite the trials which befell me in the fullness of time.

I was given to behold wonders, and amazing scenes,

called "a game show" by the sages whose words were

handed down to me. My heart remembers all these things!

Lifting the golden cheesy triangle of glorious pizza to my lips,

my heart soared as I gave myself unto such debauchery

as cannot be imagined! The devil mozzarella! The imp pep-

peroni! My heart remembers, and quakes with shame!

Hear me, lest wickedness overtake you! Partaketh not of

spicy foods in the hours after the sun's arc has been completed!

My desires ruined me! My merriment furthered my misery!

My heart remembers my unwise and froward acts. O torment!

My heart remembers how I was robbed of any rest, my belly

filled with a burning fire, until I cried out, "Can there be no mercy?

Is there no Pepto in all this miserable and curs-ed land?"

The hours passed as slowly as wisdom to the mind of a fool!

Heed me well, my friends. In sooth, I made my prison with

mine own willfullness! My heart remembers the pleasures,

 the new wine (okay, Coca-Cola), and the mad revelry which 

laid me low, but my stomach remembers sevenfold!  O ruin!

__________

for What's Going On? What the heart Remembers

Music:  Rubber Chicken My Heart Will Go On

Chronics

 

In the rehab place where wasted hearts

sleep too much like buried creatures

the nurse dispenses dreams from a cart

and the worst of us become the teachers

If you're feeling sentimental

aversion therapy works the best

and for something supplemental

try stuffing newspaper in your chest

We the burned, we the bruised

nod in our not-quite present way

shock-shelved inventory seldom used

but trotted out on holidays

A waitress serves the plates--we break them

to wake ourselves like catatonics;

we choose a new mistake at random

we the dazed romantic chronics.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List--Warren Zevon

Music: Damien Jurado Kansas City

An Ecclesiastical Fantastical State-Sponsored Royal Catastrophe Depicted Using Origami and Interpretive Dance

 

Used to be, I couldn't get arrested in this town

even if I sent the cops the photos myself, along

with a menu of suggested charges. 

I should have known, even if only on

an instinctual level, when they held the funeral

first, ahead of my arranged wedding

to some rich-ass fake wearing a rubber nose

and glasses disguise. He wanted to experiment,

but I guess he didn't mean on him.

We were such boneheads, we should have

used our noodles and not reenacted the battle 

of Hastings using pipe cleaner royals

but how were we to know they would seize

power the way they did? Now the cops are

accusing me of bags under my eyes

and deploying every trick in the book to

keep Melvin Belli stuck in traffic while some judge

throws the book at me. A best-seller! Is there

to be no end to my suffering? I am branded

with a red-hot haiku and shuffled off to Buffalo

where it snows all summer and there are no

book shops or street carnivals where a girl

could double as a stilt-walker or a ventriloquist,

speaking from on high this cautionary tale

about the dangers of poetry, Bunsen burners, and robed authorities.

_________

for Word Garden Word List--Tomb Sweeping. 

Music: Gong You Can't Kill Me

Wings & Anvils

 

September was vivid as a kiss

or a hard push back then--

one scarce, one common.

The smell of a new eraser, the pungent insistence

of a just-opened jar of paste, the grind of a sharpener,

or the sound of snubbed scissors cutting through 

construction paper--I remember them all.

I loved the school library with the soft edges

of books read a thousand times, the dark wooden

window frames, the rows of tables like boats at a marina.

September also meant doctor's waiting rooms,

the assault of hospital smells and rooms full of

us guilty damaged goons, our mothers' faces

as brittle as dropped plates. We're defectives and know it.

I remember. Here is my hat being thrown ahead,

out of sight, down the hall. Here is the boy touching his face

while staring at mine, afraid he might catch the ugly.

Here are the mimics, a circus of relentless clowns.

I remember all of it, though to look at me, you'd never know. 

That child rides on my shoulders and inside my mouth--

the one that could not make herself understood.

I was educated and the lessons were both wings and anvils,

the thorn in my flesh that God gave His stunned child.

________________-

for What's Going On?--"Education."

Image: The Broken Witness by MistiStudios, redbubble. 

Music: Morrissey November Spawned A Monster

Black Blooms

 

If black flowers gave the earth its bones

and with their roots made purpose for a heart

could they--in profusion--each bloom alone

when innumerable leaves keep petals apart?

I bring you black blooms

which in dreams were red

strewn on a grave

which must do for a bed.

If black flowers' heads nod with heat

as a lover's will when told it's over

will frost only make them more discreet

and scornful of the simple clover?

I bring you black blooms

which October will kill

with inevitable, merciful

pitiless skill.

If black flowers die in a devil's vase

will November lament it's empty sill?

And will I curse your indifferent face

like black blooms preserved in a frozen rill?

On Set Mishap 1928

 

I, Guinivere Golde, aspiring megastar and idol of millions,

was performing in Pharaoh and the Flapper, when the wildcat

I held

on a leash

suddenly and deliberately

questioned my method and acting choices. 

Clawed to ribbons and near death

(but still achingly beautiful and scandalously erotic)

I was loaded into the world's slowest ambulance

which was 

driven by

the studio head who was wearing a chauffeur's cap

and already having me written out the role I had given it up to get.

Does that sound fair to you? Does it?

So there I was, riding in the back with the EMT

(played to great effect by Basil MacNaughton-Redfield)

and also the offending puma, who had donned a tux,

answering questions

as the EMT

did a background and got my vitals, for which I am usually

compensated well beyond scale, but this fool wanted freebies. 

Prefacing all of my responses with "survey says..." and 

fluttering my lashes as if I had some kind of coquettish palsy,

I saw lights, smelled oranges, and heard bells as we sped on.

"Hospital admin says,

every time a bell rings

an EMT gets into med school."

Thus spake my healing angel as the puma looked on impassively.

I hate it when my rescuer--and there always is one--goes off script.

Then I coded, dying like a regular Carmen in my juiciest role ever.

A girl anticipates things like this, living in a rented shoebox,

living on saltines and gin, and sleeping in a murphy bed,

but now,

O Happy Day!

it was my death scene!

My name made all the trades and my wedding to the EMT was

covered coast to coast and broadcast breathlessly on radio.

The three of us (with the puma) then staged a gala funeral on the beach!

So you see, I'm a star. 

Oh honey, you're not getting me into those ratty wings.

Who designed them, that ark guy?

Where's the phone, I need to call my agent.

(No reporters? Some tw0-bit burg this is.)

How long will I have to stay here?

I'd kill for a smoke and a publicist right about now.

Criminy. 

So this is Heaven huh?

What a dump!

______

for Word Garden Word List--13 Reasons Why. 

Music: The Hebbe Sisters It Don't Mean a Thing

AP Stray Cat Yawp

 

Think of a time when you embarrassed yourself

and the cold wet sand of your heart 

dropped in clumps down 

through your stomach.

Start there.

Fetch up a memory of raw-throated sobbing,

when you beat the sofa arm or the floor

as if it were responsible for the

wasp's nest in your heart. 

Open up, little glass, fill with it.

Leave pretty sunsets for painters or postcard publishers.

What we're after here is waking inside a coffin,

falling from height, the whole empty belly

lonesome lack of it all.

Don't shake your head like you don't know. 

The thing you cannot even think is the thing you have to tell.

Will they consider you crazy, the only one

who ever did/felt/wanted/made love to

that?

Behold the mute tongueless many saying you spoke for them.

The poet is the person who threads out their own veins,

stews their every experience, fears nothing,

stands on one leg on a high wire,

all because they can't not.

Otherwise, they would just be cross-eyed babies

waving bright toy telephones to nobody,

and calling it art.

_______

for Desperate Voicings

Music: DJ Dero The Horn 

The Boffin

 Of course, we all fumble at first,

doofing up out of our childhood like baby turtles.

There it is, all at once, 

the Sea of Love,

and we scramble for it, driven by

instinct

movies

pop songs

and our own bodies bolting away with us.

But that's kid stuff.

At some point we think we've got it,

that we've become some sort of love boffin

smug in the sugar bowl of partnered mid-life.

Look! No hands! 

Up on the two-wheeler and thinking NASA needs us.

Oh, little turtle, little turtle rules the waves. 

Hang your heart on the sawtooth coat hook a few times

and all that changes. 

You find out you married a Matryoshka,

a total stranger.

Big and slow, you're back out there among the hatchlings,

drinking too much

doing stupid things to your hair,

fumbling again, tangled in the seaweed,

wishing you were dead.

Oh little boffin, doofing up out of Love's trash can,

now you know how much you never knew.

What was it all for?

You'll find the answer to that when your own grown child

sits crying at the kitchen table, saying mom it hurts so much.

You'll reach out, try to wick away their pain, and helplessly say,

I know,

honey,

I know.

_______

for Sunday Muse #241. 

Music: Tom Waits Sea of Love

How To Do The End Of The World Cha Cha

 

Convinced of the End Times, Neighbor Jim

MacGyvers up a companion from old soup cans,

paint brushes, stereo wire and car parts,

A sort of Bride of Frankenstein to ease Armageddon 

with chicken pot pies and a surprisingly

avid libido.

One day she comes across the common alley

for a woman-to-woman, making certain things clear about

Neighbor Jim, my skank ass, and Fist City.

Watching her walk away, dragging her dinosaur tail on the lawn,

I envy her those spinal plates, round-so-round

vulcanized boobs, and blowy porn-model Medusa hair.

I'm saying she's dishy, in a home appliance kind of way.

There is a tender grace to the way she lights the candles with her tongue

as she and Neighbor Jim while away the evenings

Watching This Old House on the generator-powered tv,

waiting on the six trumpets of Revelation as if they were the Tijuana Brass 

doing a hotel gig on the last day of a bang-up Cancun vaykay.

________

for Word Garden Word List #12 (Richard Brautigan)

Remember The Alamo

 

"And now! What did we wish to say, that we were not able to say?" --St. John Perse

"Love is a stranger in an open car" --the Eurythmics

When love is a stranger, things can get twisted.

A girl can get sick, being the McDonald's drive-thru of eating shit.

She may cop an attitude, or hear the cop say

to his partner, "That chick might as well just shoot herself."

That stuff sticks.

When daddy and his strophe wife, the replacement who shoots up Thomas Mann say,

"We'd like you to move out," after just a month of nervous dumbshow confusion,

the mulligans are running out and the road calls.

Where else you gonna go, baby?

When love is a stranger, there are still poets, painters, 

failed academics, leering dittybops, locust nutjobs

and grandfathers walking with canes into

the roaring pandemonium of downtown San Antonio.

There are still stricken drunks on pulpit stools

to tell you, baby,

let's get out of here,

I know a slaughterhouse on the south side

where a girl like you could see god in fumed gold Krylon.

When love is a stranger and the bones bend 

like spines of books with pages knifed out 

to hold some lack-rent new straw man's works,

it's time to get knocked up with an idea,

blood out a new plan and join the shanghaied sailors

at the 12-step dock in the free lunch church downtown.

When some oxford-cloth fuck tells you not to come back,

You come back anyway, you find a new high,

you start scudding down San Pedro with no idea

and no wheels, but a sacred heart, a votive candle,

and maybe a shine-ghost mirage of something better.

Slide into the Olmos Theater,

start tatting together the film edges until you spill

out with the rest of the film buffs,

find a tarantula on the pavement on the way home and say,

"I will not die here." 

That's when you pick up some pride, some Spanish 

and some mom and pop Texican deliciousness

before doing the dishes to pay.

Hey chica,

it doesn't have to be this way.

New friend Jake tells me that til it rings my ears.

He buys me the leather jacket I was jonesing for,

and suddenly it's my world too,

holy fuck, I have the right to be here,

and I am walking down Alamo towards the cenotaph

thinking maybe being a live coward or dead hero

are not the only choices that I have.

_________

For Word Garden Word List #3, Grover Lewis. 

A Fool In Love Is Soon Made Wise

Vase so shapely upon the shelf

holding so lightly within herself

the finest faces all gathered to her

which start to bore and bother and blur

until she meets the one who moves her,

beckoning her come quickly closer

to fall so hard and tumble o'er

to spread her shards upon the floor.

_______

for Dverse poetics--the proverbial. Mine is in the title.

the artwork is Flowers In A Basket 1910 by Seraphine de Senlis 

Following the Fathers

 Fathers' throats fill with wind.

Stars bay like lost dogs

defending the edge of the world

from the shriek of memory.

Take my hand.

It is made of Egypt and empty windows.

I build monuments

to sparrows with royal souls.

I am dead, blown to the borders

of everything I am and was.

This little hill of baubles

is yours now to sell or sew into the sleeves of poems.

Mothers, strangers, mute myths of shadow,

leave me in peace at last. 

I follow the fathers with their wind-throats

a girl again, sung to, willing to be fooled for a kiss.

_____

a second poem for Sunday Muse #121.

Spraying For Aphids

A fondness for tomatoes is just more lies.

The leaves are ugly,

the stems weak, sagging like a tubercular outcast waiting for her next beating.

And "love apples"? 

Poets are dreamy defectives who should be drowned like cats at the earliest convenience. 

No.

I kill aphids because they are so smug.

They crawl around on their stupid stalks,

fat with sap,

experts on everything except what is that big brick thing with the patio,

what are seasons?

and what garden, what planet?

Aphids have never felt any ache and rush

at the sight of you, undressing.

They do not run into traffic like some inevitable idiot,

talking nonsense to the gorgeous grille that will kill them.

They do not bury their dogs or their children.

No aphid feels unable to contain the moment's misery,

and they don't--wise vermin--hope next time will be different.

And so, stupidly unwilling to bring myself to burn

these poems, 

these pretties, 

these pictures from a shoebox kept like guilty dope in a drawer,

I spray for aphids instead.

I watch them fall, from the noxious cloud,

never having felt or thought about anything at all.

The same heart-drop that wrecked me

at certain suitcases and closing doors overtakes me now as the aphids die.

I realize I haven't changed them,

just stopped their motion.

There will be so many mocking Beefsteaks and Early Girls to give away,

almost begging,

as if they held all my mistakes and desires in their dumb meaty red hearts.

I will clutch the arms of near strangers, piping

"Take one! Take them all!" 

A pathetic madwoman for whom "no" has become an expectation, a way of life, a savagery,

like the gardening so many of us take up.

_________

for Sunday Muse where Chrissa presides, faithful dog at her side.

Courtship On The Edge Of The World

The girl whose face was time
was sought after for love, though she was immune.
Sailors dashed their splintering ships at her feet
and crawled the carapace of the rising moon.

Beauty is the star-marker, the sailors called,
and your visage the horizon we perish to unfurl.
She scoffed and said, my face is a mask
and you a troupe of clambering fools.

Behold, behind you, infinity spread!
cried the sailors as one, then fell down dead.

Dropping the guise, the girl confessed
my face is a cipher, the void my nightdress.
__________

for Sunday Muse #88. I have the flu so be kind, please.

Guanacos

At St. Catherine's

Master had a bowling ball in his throat.

A heavy fog drifted around our desks,

in our hair,

everywhere.

Ship's horns blew.

Some drowned.

I still can't identify the hypotenuse of a right triangle

or the bodies of the girls who turned to pussy-willows

during the long afternoons.

At night at St. Catherine's

I was in love with a girl who was not in love with me.

She spent her evenings stitching the windows closed,

while I fell in and out of clouds

like a blackbird in a storm in a book in my head.

St. Catherine's became a sea port,

then an art gallery,

then a candle wax manufactory.

It groaned under heavy currents,

the bricks ran in the rain,

then it caught fire and drifted into the harbor.

After St. Catherine's,

the girl who was not in love with me died

when her skirts became sails and sank 

somewhere off South America.

The guanacos  came down to eat her jewelry from her ears and fingers.

Then it rained but never touched the ground.

St Catherine's girls' choir

saved itself under my skin.

In the silent hours when my new love turns like stirred batter in my arms,

I can hear Handel.

Then I am alone except for the guanacos with their sorrowful eyes

who graze on the lichen in my palm, around my heart, and in this poem.

__________________________

Process note, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Some guanacos live in the Atacama Desert, where in some areas it has not rained for over 50 years. A mountainous coastline running parallel to the desert enables them to survive in what are called "fog oases" or lomas. Where the cool water touches the hotter land, the air above the desert is cooled, creating a fog and thus, water vapor. Winds carry the fog across the desert, where cacti catch the water droplets and lichens that cling to the cacti soak it in like a sponge. Guanacos then eat the cacti flowers and the lichens.

And: 
St. Catherine's Taffy is a candy made by girls in Quebec to honour St. Catherine, the patron saint of unmarried women on her feast day, November 25.^[1] St. Catherine's day is sometimes known in Quebec as "taffy day," a day when marriage-age girls would make taffy for eligible boys. Marguerite Bourgeoys, a founder of the Notre-Dame de Montréal and an early teacher at Ville-Marie, the colonial settlement that would later become Montreal is credited with starting the tradition as a way of keeping the attention of her young students.

Woke

The rooster was dead.
My bible was blank.
The sun went down and I opened my eyes.
Stars, you don't fool me;
I'm not some country fool headed down the cellar steps.

The Moon is the only one I can trust--
Don't you think I know that?
Roads go both directions, no use to set out on them at all.

Rain made the river drunk,
and the fields lay back like whores for it.
Here I come, after dark.
Here I come, half a teacher with a lesson long as willow branches.

I wasn't always like this.
I was a bauble on a string, thinking myself rare. 
Then you wrote your name on my skin in fingernail blood,
and after that I was rare, a horse apple in a blind man's hand.

The rooster is dead;
He won't be traveling anymore.
My bible is blank and open on the berm.
Stars, you don't fool me--
I'm woke as fuck
and have forgotten more mercy than you'll ever deserve.
______