Be Good

 You know,

how does a person get to that place?

I mean,

you're born,

someone loves you,

you find a place in the world and take each step until

there you are,

looking like GI Joe,

blowing the brains out of a smiling woman in a mom-car

then sauntering on

like a cool breeze.

Bad as it was

bad as the lies about it are

bad as the blood all over the stuffed toys and the airbag were,

the thing that made me finally cry, and scream,

and not know how to contain what I felt

was the "before" image

of the pet dog in the back seat.

How does someone get up in the morning,

slip into their army man bullshit,

and go blow away a smiling woman with her dog?

Jonathan Ross, how did you get there

with a gun in your hand,

her death on your head,

and a pet dog rolling away with its dead mom at the wheel?

Stephen Miller Meets Adolph Hitler on the Tarmac at a Tesla Dealership

 

Ask the man

falling from a high building

whether gravity is a matter of opinion.

The ground will be

explaining things

shortly.

There are those,

bedecked with self-awarded

ribbons, who sculpt

with a hammer

and operate (on others only)

with a saw

and call it Vision.

Sipping from 

half-filled goblets

gilded with a fur of mold,

their soapy smiles house parrot tongues,

moonstruck by 

a slug in wolf's clothing.

Crows laugh

at windmills, and 

nobody is eating the pets.

Fearful shills leave poisoned sugar out for each other

and force feed it to everyone

but no hourglass

fills upward.

Ask the man

falling from a high building

whether gravity is a matter of opinion.

The ground will be

explaining things

with impactful clarity

presently.

________

I hate most topical poetry and almost never write it, but something came over me. For Word Garden Word List--Calling a Wolf a Wolf. 

Music: Emerson, Lake & Palmer Carn Evil #9

Farm

 

The butter is hard--

the biscuit takes it like a punch.

Eat your crumbs, child.

The milk expands, exploding the jug.

Cold cows care for nothing,

least of all the farmer's hands blue on the udder. 

This is agri-business. There are rules.

The clerk is here to count the kernels.

 No kindness from crows hard and polished as obsidian.

The vane is a zig-zag escapee

shouting "Freedom!" from inside the wind's mouth

where white teeth worry at fogged-up windows.

Automated fakes pass out promises

in Dixie cups, hats bobbing like generator vent caps,

a rooster in every head, erupting with cold words. 

Paint the chickens black and white

and dress them in freezer bags like crunchy raincoats.

Salute the magpie, child,

for luck, your ribs bent into a horseshoe and nailed

above the big open door

where our policies are performed.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Philip K. Dick

If God Had Meant Us To See The Sky, He'd Have Given Us Eyes On Stalks

Imagine my surprise, my perplexity,

groping around the living room while seeing the bedroom before me. 

Wherever I leave my glasses, I see what they see. They have abducted my vision.

Beware, junior. 

I can actually have eyes in the back of my head now.

Never mind the way I blunder into things.

Hello? Hi dear.

Oh, you say i forgot my glasses on your secretary's desk? 

Silly me! 

(That man-stealing harlot.)

Enjoy your meatloaf.

I made it by feel and it may have some unusual ingredients. 

Two forks? Pick one.

I always use the dog's dish as a salad bowl, don't I? 

Well, it makes a nice change anyway.

Ah! Thank you for bringing home my eyeglasses.

Now I can read your report card, junior.

And sign these divorce papers, dear.

Just give the meatloaf to Rover.

_________

for Sunday Muse #194.

The Broken-Necked Swan

The swan with a broken neck

lies half-in, half-out of the water.

Yesterday, hissing, spread-winged,

she ran at a child who stumbled backward and fell.

The bird then returned, stately and gorgeous,

to its pond, calm and fine as Fourth of July morning.

A man wearing wet shoes sits silently nearby.

Someone has already called police.

_________

for my BFF's flash 55 party.

The Becoming

If I become, in age, querulous,
hands worn to nubs from wringing them,
full of good advice no one wants,

please shoot me in the head, or

give me a gravy bath and leave me
in Wolf Country 

so that I may once again experience emotions beyond cheap fretting 
and vague upset.

Faced with a circling pack,
my concern over a sweater pilling
or
the neighbor's cat shitting in the azaleas 
will seem quaint and stupid.

I will rise up,
screaming come you motherfuckers, come
and I will be seen and considered
for the first time in years.
______

for Sunday Muse #96.

New Baby

Our new baby,
a darling of the Universe,
grows tusks and unionizes.
Now, feedings are disastrous, injuries frequent.
Now, everything must be negotiated, from emotional forays to bottle temperature.

An intermediary is sent in,
but gets into the baseboards
and turns the TV into a homing beacon for her bitchy friends.

All we wanted was a child,
a sentient bit of fluff to dandle and imbue with various undemonstrated virtues and qualities.
Not tusks that send dentists howling into madness.
Not wildcat strikes with their attendant rancor and bloodshed.

Please baby, we say.
Please be normal.
A telegram arrives, from our baby.
We are terrified to read what it says.
______

for "Different Perspectives" at Real Toads.

Babies In Prison

Babies in prison
become a problem.
The government is demanded upon
to show what they've got on them.

Meanwhile, infants behind bars
lie next to teddy bears with records.
The President arrives, with the skeletal warden
to investigate, harrumph, and mouth some several prepared words.

So young!
By a jury of diapered droolers convicted.
So done!
Like dinner, so some schmoe can get elected.

Babies in prison 
sit in swings for ten to twenty.
And politicians who admit their own crimes?
Sorry, we couldn't find any.
____

for Get Listed at Toads.

Internet Date

Out in one of those western states where nobody lives,
she clawed her way out of the dirt where I had buried her
during a desperate fit,
under a vulture sun.

Everybody out there has got a gun, and so did the lonesome rancher
she first kissed after spending the night in his pick up truck.
She fed him his own bullets like candies
and charged him for them, too.

Sweet girl.

She has your barbed bones, but her heart is a rattle gourd.
Out there, she got fat on the stupid and the slow,
then starved herself down to a focused edge.

Today, at the bottom of a drawer, I found the kimono I bought 
in the hopes that you would like me in it.
I never wear it anymore, 
not after the anthill ceremony you call fun.

Returning home, I took love out to the yard and chopped its head off,
fed it to silence, to injury, and to hopelessness.
It refused to die, but became something else--
this girl-- so I poisoned her with your every word and 
left her in the desert.

Now she's awake,
headed east,
one lung full of stacksmoke and the other collapsed and dying,

but still able to articulate her wild hatred and intention
for both of us.
_____

for Mag 278.

 

Love Song for Connie Corleone

You made a fine and unforgettable bride,
but your husband...?
We won't be bothered with him anymore.

Beautiful as you were,
it is you, now, who captures my greater admiration.

I love your hair tied back headache tight,
the widows' weeds, and the jewelry
heavy as freight on a delivery truck.

What I love most is the flock in your eyes,
the murder of crows,
the steel of the guillotine behind your smile.

Let me be your command, darling,
already carried out.
________

for Real Toads. The theme is "eyes". I have exceeded the 75 word limit by 7 words, but it wasn't personal, only business!

 

Hell Is Empty

You're right--
I failed to thank you for the pulsing crimson cancers you placed in little stiff formal envelopes
and then jammed into the heartwood of my bones.

I have been ungrateful
for your vigilance in doing surgery to my neck
with the sharp edges of your tiny Japanese fan,
that I might not succumb to pride.
How diligent you have been,
cut, cut, cutting just a hair's breadth each time,
but repeated so lovingly for so long
that my head now lolls 
and my new mouth is silent but lets my heart out in sprays.

I am abashed
that I have never properly expressed my admiration for your indestructible mask
that smiles within a flawless porcelain skin
while a roiling rot explodes underneath like a burst aneurism. 

All right. As you wish, then.
We shall pretend
that you do these things because you love me,
and that they do not murder my lit nerves with hammers and snake venom.
I will smile,
sick and struck with putrefaction,
lying worse than a waterboarded used car salesman when I croak out, "Mother,
yours is the very face of tender kindness."
You will blush and preen on cue,
but we both know you will never really be satisfied
with anything short of my complete demolition.
________

for grapeling's fantastic "masks" challenge at Real Toads.

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