Ink Ribbons

 

This is not happening, does not exist

any more than Bogie on the flat screen smoking Camels

and looking world-weary at the bar.

Bogie's dead, eaten up by cancer,

liver hard and beaten-up as a gymnasium medicine ball.

And yet, here I am, and here is my heart

like a twin engine monoplane on the tarmac at Casablanca.

No smart suit and fashionable hat for me.

I want my father's old fedora and his jacket I used to wear

because I loved him, and we both

drove my mother to razor blades like matching bookends

around a collection of Hem and pulp novels and every page

read to her like THE END THE END THE END.

This is prop whiskey, the gin is Dasani water but the lime is real.

This mood, though, it's the view from a blacked-out liner

at night and I can just make out the lanterns at a cafe on the shore

where they drink the real stuff,

spread lovely lies like butter on bread,

and the solitaries read James Joyce with their works in their pocket.

The off-duty ferryman raises his glass. To me? Not possible.

I am the woman with ink ribbons in her hair, erstatz ether bows

imaginary like the humming presses in a 1940's movie scene.

Edit out the brassy blonde coming through the door,

there's only room for one hard case here

with a PI license and a heart of paper, cotton, leather,

but never even around the corner from silver or gold.

So bottoms up, sobersides, please rush in from the rain I've drummed up

and say something nice. It's always 3 a.m. in these scenes

and I long for morning,

                                       and lanterns lit

                                                                 like my father's smile. 

___________________

for Desperate Poets "I wake up screaming: Desperate Noir." 

Image at top: Bing AI

Music: Billie Holiday Willow Weep For Me

Remember This

Remember this,
When dolls start speaking to you from the nest stuffed deep
inside your own throat.
Remember vanity,
as worked by hand in the lace hem of a tiny dress;
Remember never to seat a Gypsy next to a mark,
and to preside with grace, charm, and engraved silver service.

Listen to this,
she'll say, from between the feathers of birds hooked by wires
to dying Christmas trees in burning houses.
Listen to this--don't be a ninny and ignore this warning
when she chirps in your ear like broken glass--
Baccarat or Waterford.

Girls love cats, horses, dolls,
and attics filled with bird cages and unexploded ordnance.
Listen to the water fountain my ghost animates the flow of,
and line up your darlings along the window sills.
Seat the priest with the diplomat,
Arabian with alley cat,
and remember this, as the afternoon wears on:
I owe no explanations as to what birds think about dolls that talk,
and the girls who take them to bed
like said prayers.
______ 

Girl Detective

Girl Detective is a good old fashioned gumshoe.
She's worth it at twice the price.
Photographs have been sent to your wife.

It's the double cross, bait and switch, better luck next life.
It's the old switcheroo.
Why the long face, whatsamatta you?

She's got the juice, she's got the sass.
And if she wants, she punk yo ass.
Hands off the trench coat, jack, if you know what's healthy.

Girl Detective does evidence creatively.
And after her labors have come to pass,
See you in the funny papers. Pray for you at Mass.

Girl detective got the goods on your bad acts.
Let her tell you how things are.
You can start by washing her car.

Clothes may make the man, but
Dark glasses make the girl.
She does it for the love, never for the money.
Remember,
When she's good she's very good,
But when she's bad, 

well,

that's confidential, honey!
______

for Flipside's word list #11