I'm Coffee Girl from a pottery wheel warm and curved and hanging from a hook I know one trick, to distract the honest eye but every shell is empty. Choose me and you'll be sorry, though I'm sweet on my feet, I'm Coffee Girl when I fall I run out right before your honest eyes. _____ for Friday Flash 55 at VerseEscape, hosted by my fab BFF Hedgewitch.
After a storm knocked over the circus, Tom Thumb watched Boris the Strong Man set his Royal Carriage right side up again and said, "Fuck you anyway. I can't even handle cutlery if it is too heavy. House cats bump against me and I'm on the damn floor. When the storm came, I had to climb inside a steamer trunk and pull it closed over my head so I wouldn't be carried on the wind to Cleveland or Des Moines like a damn leaf. So to hell with you, Boris. You could take Yankee Stadium and toss it in the Atlantic if you felt like it." "Zees upsets you," said Boris, who was not really Boris but rather a Frenchman named Marcel L'Amoreaux. "I tell you some-sing mon ami. When I see zee tight rope walker smile and she scoop you up, zat make me so jealous! She not do that ever avec moi. So, Le fuck to you aussi." Then they were both sad. After a minute, Boris clapped a huge paw across Tom Thumb's little fairy-ass shoulders, but with care. "Leesun, my fren. In life, we all do what we can do." Raising a finger importantly, he added (from beneath his impressive mustache), "What we don' do ees do what we can't do. Dat shit make you fou. Crazy. So fug dat. Like, I never gonna be tightrope walker, eh? So why I worry bout dat? I don'. And you should not be the worrying about lifting heavy sheet. So don'." Tom Thumb started laughing so hard that he fell over on the ground and rolled there in merriment like a drunken pill bug. "You! A tightrope walker!" And then the real tightrope walker came by and, smiling her gorgeous smile, scooped Tom up and love-mugged him with noisy kisses. Boris watched them as they moved toward the breakfast tent. He shrugged, then looked up at the sky, wondering if he could lift it if he really tried. _______ Written for Words To Live By at Real Toads but my link was deleted for not being poetry.
I don't now recall who the wise soul was who said it to me, but they said, "Do what you can, not what you can't." I must say this to myself twice a week, and it lets me feel good about the cans and not fret about the can'ts.
Bloodorange, the Big Boss, assigned me to report on my own death, presenting a ticklish situation, both logistically and ethically.
Cockrobin, my first journalism professor, wrote "REPORT the story" on a blackjack and let me have it. I saw stars indicating the edition with my byline on it, Chickpea, girl reporter.
Now, Bloodorange and I used to be a thing until he undrowned his wife and family, up from the river, reborn. I'm a loose end, an extra column, and the new ace of a dying profession.
Bloodorange is as crafty as he is cheap, with two dicks that duel each other constantly, resulting in his slightly gassy, somewhat bemused expression, commented on by all.
Concerned for my career, not to mention my mortal flesh, I went to see Cockrobin, down under L Street where he lives in a funeral urn. I kissed him by way of interview, and he bade me live just to spite his rival.
Like any good reporter, I wrote what I could long before deadline, plumbing the morgue for basic bio stuff about myself, all news to me. Then I composed several endings and demises, stored in a cloud like akashic records. Oh how Bloodorange and I used to dance, but now one of his brats has killed me with a ball peen hammer, emerging from a high cupboard to bash my brains in. How'd the little darling even get up there? CHICKPEA, HOTSHOT INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST, BOUGHT THE FARM TODAY, DONE IN BY LOVE AND AMBITION. (Bloodorange hates vernacular, that's why I used it.)
The next afternoon, the newspaper folded, journalism died, and Bloodorange became a Hindu, reincarnated, single again, and using my skull for a doorstop at his ashram
Where the ideals are advertising revenue, and survival of the fittest. __________ for the weekend challenge at Toads: the news.
To kiss the winter is to kiss bone-lips--
to hold her is to make roots of one's fingers as one rolls in one's grave.
In my dreams, a succubus,
singing to me in crowsong;
an edge to open the blood borders behind my eyes.
Does all of this seem grim?
Let's do it on the hard wood pew,
and in the after-talk, soft and easy,
I will pull a bloom from the hymnal of my mouth, a song that has slept
and now stirs just to describe itself to you in octaves.
Once, dressed in scales of shell-pink and green,
I roamed the years like an exhaled breath,
searching for the dark-haired Queen of my dreams.
Summer found me gloomy, draped in leaf and binding,
and so she made a gift to me of her indifference;
In my hidey-hole I wove it into a flag, then burned it.
I kissed winter on her bone-lips then,
and breathed jet-colored smoke into her body--
from then on I saw her as Nubian, and beautiful as an animate jewel.
Cheshire Cat, she said,
behold now, nothing is left of you but your smile,
enchanted by me, the nothing of me, the waste.
Deep in my root-tangle, I imagined hanging gardens nodding with abundance.
Shocked with cold, I resolved to become a furnace, and fed my own flames.
As for winter, she knew a sucker when she saw one,
and laid down with me in our somnolent abatoir of illusion.
_______
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. _________
I saw myself in her, years ago, when I was a woman fallen overboard, sinking.
I was a ball of string unwinding right down to the speechless bone.
I shall be this girl, I decided, not thinking it was anything more than a wish. I shall have a border collie like this one, too, named Bosco, because...well, because of a certainty I could not have explained. He will be mine alone, unlike my spouse, unlike my child, unlike anything I do or say or move through, now. When the one who would soon enough trade me for madness asked, "What are you thinking?", I said, "I am thinking I will grow my hair long." Girl & dog on my mug have faded; alone among them all, this one has lost its paint, and gone faint. The company stopped making the tea it came with, and I have gone back to coffee, and my own skin.
Look at me, long-haired, though it is going to silver; look at me alone, back to being the poet, and look at the black and white friend at my feet.
I made my life from a five dollar mug. It's gone to white while I am a vivid red, waved in front of the world like a dare. ________
