We're sorry to call at such a late hour-- so we'll scoot in and snick the door
shut
so quietly.
Every Wednesday night since Goddess knows when we're canasta queens
but then you know we
have time to be.
We wear white dresses up to our necks and we like the jokers left in the decks.
Shh shh, go back to sleep. Don't come down the stairs-- or we'll disappear, tongues gone to cats, as if we'd never even been there.
We sense you more than see you when curiosity draws you down the stairs--
we hold our breath
and three our pairs. Curse you, damn you, disturbing our game with lights obliging us to disperse--
impudent meat bag!
We were here first! ________ For Marian's music prompt--Alice Cooper. Youtube doesn't want to let me include his song "Black Juju" but that's the one I wrote from.
I once had a dream that I was one of a small group of 1900-ish ladies who gathered regularly in a house to play canasta. We'd play our cards and get talking and laughing--waking up the resident upstairs in the bedroom. I remember very clearly that the house had beveled glass in the front door, and a narrow stair case rising up from it. To one side was the parlor with a fireplace and a table and chairs. All of us wore white. Anyway, when the resident would get up and start edging down the stairs to see what the voices were, we all had to stop silent and wait to see if they would turn around or come all the way down and ruin our game. You see, although only the resident seemed shadowy to us, we knew *we* were the ghosts in *their* house. And...it wasn't the first time I had dreamed of being a ghost in someone else's reality!
Greetings from Goon Island. If you feel ugly or are on the run from Sea Hag, climb into a cannon and have them shoot you here. You won't have to shave your legs, and everything is served Florentine.
Greetings from Goon Island. I must've got brained, I can't recall arriving or why. I am 8 feet tall, and tiny gals who would fit in a tea spoon always insist on standing next to me. I am Blue LaGoon, the mumbling nightclub singer with the flower in her hat. Doesn't narrow it down much, I know. Oh baby, what I do remember is being Eugenia the Jeep, arriving in a box with a printed message all the way from India. "I have magical powers" said my note, which I had written while walking through a wall just because I could.
Greetings from Goon Island. Here, when I try to signal "yes", I just fall on my face. When I try to be HERE and then . . . . HERE, I just go in circles until I'm dizzy.
Despite the kindness of the Goons on Goon Island, I wish you were here. Try to find a cannon. Watch out for Bluto. Elocution isn't everything, Toots-- try the sailor's semaphore, head for the horizon, and I will watch for you by the silent and singular light of the stars.
I have chosen "Popeye" (originally Thimble Theater) characters Alice the Goon and Eugene the Jeep, staples of my young childhood. I watched them faithfully on channel 9 out of Windsor, Ontario.
Alice the Goon was an 8 foot tall gender non-specific slave of the Sea Hag, who had threatened to hurt her baby if she didn't obey. We found out she was a girl when Sea Hag finally called her by name, "Alice." Eventually saved by Popeye, in later versions Alice donned a skirt and flowered hat. She only spoke in mumbles.
Eugene the Jeep was a creature from the 4th dimension, who managed to land himself here. In print, he was discovered in Africa, in cartoons it was India. He was mailed to Popeye in a box, with a note of introduction. Popeye's reaction? "Well, blow me down!" Eugene could walk through walls and jump from location to location in the bat of an eye. Eugene the Jeep didn't speak either, but he shook his head for "no" and bowed down and swished his tail for "yes." The military vehicle was named for him because it was small and maneuverable.
This is what it means to be La Bruja, the witch-- (swab honey on your ears before I speak, or they will curl like dry leaves.) It isn't like people think, from storybooks and bullshit they've heard. It's like this-- a candleflame-colored Moon rising through dreams and trees into night sky, and not nearly so distant as it seems.
If you are La Bruja, you must barter with every wild thing-- taking some of each, as they keep some of you. Sorters appear, you know the ones... made of hair spray and bibles, scared of the dark, rattling on about their birth right. You will kill them, whether you choose to or not; whether you feel good about it or not. Ah well.
There will be those who come into the trees, even into your dreams, to avenge what you've done while you were sleeping, walking the stick path, or baying at the moon. All I can tell you is, wear a long cloak, keep moving to the stone-feather pulse inside you, and know the Moon saves her favor for you, not dwarves or fools. ______
Alice stepped through the looking glass, but was stopped by security and searched; detained and taken before a magistrate for the contraband found in her purse.
They asked her her name, and she said it was Alice, this morning to the best of her knowledge; The gavel came down: "Guilty! Read the charge!" Now enrolled in penitentiary, not college.
A champion appeared, a man with a queer predilection for romancing minors; wrote her story for the press, claiming duress by the bumbling fools who'd tried her.
He got her released, and Alice was pleased to be gone from the matron, a sadist; now Kate Beckinsale plays her, and the studio pays her-- that's what the moral to that is! _____
From a sugar bowl womb, came the World's Sweetest Girl-- Me.
I'm like a vision at lake side, talking rot to the swans-- and oh how I do go on and on.
I am formed of the frilly, the feminine, the fine-- thanks to old Daddy down the anthracite mine.
One step, two step, three step, five; I'm made out of honey from an old bee hive. Work bee, fly bee, sleep bee, then sink that stinger if he tries it again.
Church on Sunday, Monday do the wash. See if it sticks or scrubs right off. Do you think I'm pretty? Everybody does--
ask around, ask Alice, ask sweetly, ask the swans. ___________
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.
_______
