This Train

This is the train that circles the sun,

set on a single direction.

Memory has no beginning on this train,

and though I've made my nest in the straw and dirt of an ancient car,

a home in motion never feels like one.

There is no deer trail here, only deaf rails.

The way behind no longer exists except in my longing.

The way ahead is obscured but always near,

like a huntsman and his hounds and so I run while lying still.

This train is containment and escape, a snake eating its tail.

I began helpless but grew strong,

believing the power in my body drove all motion.

I began foolish but wounds made me wiser,

and though I've been quick as winter light and now slow as March thaw,

the train keeps its pace and me with it.

I have leapt and spun in circles and still I rode the train.

Now I sigh and slowly sink to my straw, 

the passing scene softer but filled with phantoms.

My life has been pursuance of prey and sidestepping of traps,

but always, the familiar yet foreign, perhaps imagined

headlong terror of the train.

________

for Sunday Muse #151.

Air Strip

They are building an air strip in my back yard. 

An older guy who used to do bit parts in the movies showed up while I was reading a pulp novel in my Adirondack chair.

He said he needed a place to land his plane so could he build an air strip on the back part of the double lot?

Sure. Why the hell not?

He pays me six dollars a day in rent, cash money.
My dogs watch the work unfold,
or play with the guy's Boxer.
There is just him, his wife, his adult son, the Boxer (whose name is"Buddy"),  and an old truck.

Work progresses slowly. 
I collect my six bucks at 5 o'clock.

One afternoon about a week in, the guy stops by my chair, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief.
"I'm up in the air in my prop job, and I'm almost out of fuel," he tells me.
"But...you're here," I point out as gently as I can.
"Yes," he agrees, "I'm here, but I'm also up in the air in my prop job and really need a place to land."

The dogs play.
His wife and son lean on their shovels.
Inside, I have a refrigerator, a table and chairs, a tv.
I think I've seen the guy in something.

Right now, though, he's up in the air in his prop job,
looking down at himself building an air strip in my back yard.
"Good luck," I say, the way one does.
He nods, sweating and looking beat, then goes back to building his air strip.

I watch the dogs chase each other and try to think what can I buy with six bucks?
_________

for day 9 of my 39 poems in 39 days.

A Peculiar Blindness

"If I were blind, would you be my eyes?" --Todd Rundgren "Pretending To Care"

It's a peculiar blindness
so many of us have. 

There you are, little bug, looking for a place to land
never giving much thought to how you came so far.

That's why a breeze brought you me.
You think you are small, unremarkable,

but I can see your big glorious wings
spread out like an exclamation

right behind you,
in fabulous display,
plain as day.
______

for Wednesday Muse "butterflies."

17

Icarus, always out in the garage,
him and Dad fucking around with their wax wings.
Dad says, don't fly too high or too low, 
but Icarus has clay ears, he just wants to impress some girl.

What do I know? I'm just his sister.
He'd sooner listen to a goat.
Up, up, excelsior! Higher! 
First he is a feather, then he is a stone.

Here's what I am gonna do:
Men always miss the obvious.
I will fly at night when the sea is calm
and the sky has no distractions.

Up here, I can't tell stars from reflections on the water.
Is this my skin or my wings?
It's quiet--nobody heaving anvils of what-to-do my way.
Is it hubris to have my own heart?

I don't know whether I am rising or falling,
but I am in motion.
The ground or the heavens will open,
and I will glide in, Girl Astronaut, Queen of the One Big Try.
_________

for Ella at Toads.

 

Space

Never mind how I got here;
I'm here, that's enough.

Dear Joiner,
take your bell cow and your suit case and your squee face
and go back. 

This is my Carnival Library--
Shhhh, quiet in the funhouse.

"Aintcha lonely?"
No. 
At least, not for you.

I'm the zero-grav cartwheel solo warp pilot.
Rogue star
shining.
__________

A 55 for my BFF.
 

Cliff & Clarity

At the cliff,
no Dairy Queen.
No airport.
No cinema.

Just the Confused,
with their dusty feet.

At the bottom of the cliff,
the No Longer Confused
in their matchless silence.

In between,
an empty space that is not empty.
Each entrant fills it (briefly)
with flight, adrenaline, instant regret, or transport.

As with all spaces 
of sudden clarity and 
illumination,
you cannot live there.

Just when you so want to tell the world
--yes, that recently rejected world--
what you know,

Here comes gravity the motivator,
solid ground the schoolmarm,
and permanence the principal

to shut you up,
lest you warn those wide-eyed others
on their way
behind you.
_____

 

The Illuminati, 20 Years On

Here I am,
arriving like a hailstone from the storm,
a little woozy from the impact
but still present enough to flash you my after-midnight smile.

We were a fantastic gabbling litter of girls,
crammed together in a Longaberger basket--
you were bound to love one of us, need another, fuck a third...

Have some of this pale lifeless shit I baked--
some kind of cornbread up to its eyeballs in ergot mold.
Spread out on the minor island of my rote embrace;
hold still and one of us will slather you in something resembling a genuine emotion,
purchased for a price on the trip in.

I love a reunion,
love to haunt the living and make them watch slides of long excruciating trips we took together,
the whole pod of us,
betraying each other, ourselves,
and making loud drunken scenes to remember.

Not like now, when remote-control Jesus
comes walking across the pool to scatter us into the hell we reserved for ourselves
without a thought,
when we were young and you believed you could illuminate us
with your stupid poetry
that cowered, pissing itself,
calling the mess it made, art.
_______

for the Sunday Whirl #143. The words were: illuminates (I dropped the "s"), scenes, haunt, impact, price, pool, litter, need, one, remote, storm, and lifeless.

Her(e) it is

Here it is.
The swing-footed pumpkin-faced fool of a mailman brought it
and laid it right in my dainty little hand.

Why, thank you, sir.
Now, put it out;
a girl can't live in a cloud of smoke,
and I never learned to choke gracefully.
Be a man,
throw yourself on it for me.
It's right there, under your nose where I slammed it
in one of my sudden fits of pique.
Bleed it to death.
Drown it.
Dress it red, and then, lured by my favorite color,
I might be tempted into having a look,
or even taking it in.

Why does everything I love, do this?
Tell me, mailman. 
Stop with the stamps and spit out some Golden Wisdom.
Look in your bag--
you may have been staggering all afternoon under the weight of something Important.
A lady doesn't like to be kept waiting.
Oh, leave it then, you ashy anthill. What good are you?
Never mind;
I'll handle this myself.

Oh look, someone sent my heart back to me,
postage due and damaged.
I have been feeling hollow, like a human celery stick sat up and rotting 
in a wrought iron chair
with a fork in its forehead,
nattering on about bullshit with the girls at the salon.

Now, I can do what I want.
I can run the place and scribble poems out of my skin with a jacknife,
the very epitome and pinnacle of suburban womanhood.
My heart restored, 
I can beat myself from within, minute by minute,
a clock-girl swaying with the systolic and diastolic of my pretty balancing act.

I would thank that mailman, but I can't wake him up,
and anyway, now the crows have been at him
and he can't see my Evolvedness or my perfect tits, so what good is he?
Besides, at this point in my life,
I only want women.
Now, I am the one billowing thick dark plumes,
going up from inside my own skin,
singing gorgeously, like Tarja Turunen or an emergency alarm.

I want what I have always wanted--
to please some Dark Queen with the poems from my tongue,
and then to crawl inside her and hum,
rocking, a second soul,
her name and my name twined like a caduceus,
and finally to be cured into the bend of her arms,
favored and desired,
not Venus On The Trash Can
ranting and waiting for delivery into something better than the mail.
_________

picture: Johanna Herrstedt

for Real Toads mini-challenge

From The Sky

From the sky--
crows and doves
descended, a gift--

assembling upon
my right shoulder--
my left--

birds who bore cacophony and calm--
finding purchase and place
at each far-stretched arm--

so that, when I sought you,
Goddess of Sky--
Goddess of Earth--

I came to you in pairs--
one part snow,
one part dirt.

Here, for you, my kiss--
partly sweet,
partly salt;

from the sky, I come flocked--
love me now--
love it all.
________

________

thanks to my Sista Poet Dani at Myheartslovesongs for introducing me to this song!

Envoys

There was Campbell's soup in the cupboard.
Velveeta cheese.

TV spoke the expected language.
Street signs were green.

13 years together. Innocents. Envoys.
Futures negotiable. Like toys.

As we bargained the trappings,
our Masters sacrificed us.

How fooled we were
by the familiar, my dear.

We didn't know how foreign we'd become,
or that the well-meaning die here.
________

Siobhan

Siobhan the neighborhood Goddess
makes cupcakes out of kerosene
and frosts them with a cigarette lighter.

What that girl won't do next.

It was nobody's birthday,
but still--
the mix, the bowl, the eggs with their soulful yellow eyes.

Siobhan picks up frequencies in her fingers.
If she boxes your ears,
you'll hear music.

Everybody out,
the food is on fire!
But wait...
wait...
the only way out is to overspill our sweet white skins.

Siobhan the neighborhood Goddess
is an Irish girl.
Cops and firefighters jump from every picture frame.

Now comes the miracle--
the little paper baking cups in their thousands
rise as fire birds!

Siobhan lifts her hands,
and they recognize their song
at once.
_______

image by laurent chehere. 

Pembroke

Pembroke, the predictive parrot
Is sensitive to seismic phenomena.

Even when his own cage rattles, and the ends of his swing jigger wild and spastic,
Pembroke's black beak remains constant in its expression of wry amusement.

Pembroke does not want a cracker.
He wants your finger, or, hopefully, two.

Pembroke the pedantic parrot
Can recite "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" in Portuguese, while swaying his body from side to side like a batshit lunatic.

The only time that Pembroke goes quiet,
Is if your house catches fire in the night;

He sees Mexican dancers in the bright orange flames,
And balls of smoke become marshmallow skulls floating in the air as if they were pinatas.

Pembroke the psittacosis-ridden parrot
Wants to mate with you and leave you great with baby birds.

He wants you to live with him in his shit-spackled world,
And to understand that, because he needs you, you must love him and never leave,

Even as he yanks out your hair to make a voodoo doll he'll call Mrs. Pembroke--
A monster he can drag around in the shredded newspaper at the bottom of the cage, captive and faded as yesterday's headline.
_____

"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" is a poem by Robert Browning, and can be found HERE.

Bigmouth & the End Of The World

Orbits decay.
Bombs go off.
No amount of dusting can keep it from happening.

When I was a kid,
We rode on yellow buses to see different junk.
They counted heads.
They said, "stay with the group!"
Teachers and moms kept a sharp eye on us.

Her eye is on the sparrow.
She sent us on this field trip,
Packed together like lunch for later,
You the pbj, me the apple.

Fissures in the earth open up.
Mad dictators push the button.

I don't think anybody is going to be able to line up, single file.

But still.
The life I was given, I have lived.
Chick In The Sky said,
"Be a woman, an American, a smart-mouth by nature.
Buck the tide. Do me proud. Go, girl. Here's a pen. 
Do it all from this little flesh jar I shall place you in."

There are germs that wipes can't kill.
There are voices in the wrong people's heads.

I have written poems until my notebooks tilt in stacks like drunks at the bar.
I have told those I love that I love them every day
Just in case of runaway trains.

Now,
Raise the hammer, I'm okay with it.
Crack the jar, I'll fly out and up,
A dragonfly
Perched once again in the salon-gorgeous hair
Of the Goddess.
______

for Out Of Standard with Izy