Breviary

 

If you won't put wildflowers in my hand

don't leave them on my grave

I'll have the haunted hillside there

with oaks for palisades

around my bones and all my silent

reveries around

my life of soap and wax and flesh

I've left without a sound.

If you can't think me beautiful

like pennies on a sill

that catch the sunrise slanted light

which wakes the whippoorwill

or liken me to harbor water 

at the set of sun

then please don't give me tepid words

you'd say to anyone. 

If you need a holy man

with Latin on his tongue

to spin a mothball rosary

to tell you where I've gone

just leave me here the time of year

when winter's hardening

I'll curl myself in a berry husk

to rise in rainy spring. 

________

for Word Garden Word List--Madeleine's Ghost.

Hipster

 

Hipster is watching,

as you fumble along in life.

Every time you wear last year's ensemble.

Every time you post last year's viral meme.

Every time you use last year's catch phrase. 

Hipster is watching

as you turn bland and boneless as butter

tasteless as tap water

dreary as a rainy Monday in flyover country.

Hipster is watching

and is pained, 

but plays 

Ask Me Now 

flawlessly,

the keys reflected cool as cubes in a mai tai 

across his 

impassive

Sogreto

shades.

_______

for Sunday Muse #199.

top image: Thelonious Monk

His Ask Me Now is a notoriously difficult piece to play. 

In Age

In age, I dreamt myself a child again--
a blown leaf, my parents the wind.

Alone, I dreamt of family again--
my son a child, I rose and fell from the west.

Adored by a dog, I dreamt of dogs--
alive again, and my heart was calm.

In sleep, I dreamt of youth--
desire and sweetness came down from the hills.

In morning, leaves tap the sill--
dog and I raise our heads to the early breeze.
_______

for Micro Poetry at Toads. "Fill the empty parts."

Lady H. M. Ainsley-Billington--A Celebratory Retrospective

Lady Hortense MacFarquhar Ainsley-Billington, grande dame of the English stage, is celebrated as much for being as pale and sweet as a blancmange as for her operatic rendering of the timeless classic "When, In Momentary Slumb'r, My Love Doth Recline."

One can scarcely hope to catalog all of Lady Hortense's triumphs in this small space. However, no one will ever forget her command performance at Buckingham Palace when she gave a fist pump upon hitting every note of the impossible five octave "Bobby, Be The Bric-A-Brac On My Curio Shelf," prompting the attending Royals to initiate an instantaneous in-the-aisles hokey pokey break dance such has never been seen before or since.

A month later, once again lucid after an unfortunate episode involving character actor and sometime companion Fredo Pastalini and "just a smidgen" of Chinese opium, Lady H. wowed 'em at the Royal Albert Hall when she sang "My Boy Lollipop" accompanied by a revue of muscular and scandalously (un)clad male dancers. Pausing for a photo-op with Lord Hampstead, Lady H. confided that she was happy all the folderol regarding her tryst with "my little Hamster man" had died down, though of course her referencing it left Lord Hampstead seething and abashed while Lady H. appeared positively smug! 

Interviewed for this article, Lady Hortense opined that, in her view, today's "slipshod copycat noise" cannot hold a candle to the "passion and derring-do" of the electric folk emo metal which first launched her into the limelight. Pontificating quite charmingly on a range of subjects, she reminded this writer time and again of why Edmund Mumzet-Pagliatano bestowed, in Your Evening Calling Card that famous sobriquet "The Sublime Hortense" on our national darling, Lady Ainsley-Billington.  There is no other like her.
____

for Get Listed.

Blue Child In Motion

 "Blue...songs are like tattoos / you know, I've been to sea before" --Joni Mitchell "Blue"

When I was a child, I learned
that not much falls from a blue sky.
Bored by the blandly pretty and never satisfied,
I waited on storms like rescuers.

When I was a child I tossed
my minnow-thoughts to gulls I alone could see. 
By the cold waters of Lake Superior one summer,
I listened for my native tongue from every shell.

Later, I'm not sure I saw myself or my spouses at all
through the bottle glass I blew with every word.
From inside whales and outside of any map,
I did find saving grace in my own restless nature.

Now, it comes to me with the red sky at night,
that the Argo and the Dutchman fly
with my childhood gulls, and if I seem melancholy or far away,
it is because I am, and have always been

this blue child in motion on the electric air of my imaginings.
__________

for The Sunday Muse #61.

Finishing School

Susie brought a pineapple
or perhaps a hand grenade--
Bernice barks and continually tries
to spit in the lemonade.

Linda likes to play 
with matches
and to sprinkle her gruel 
with sand and ashes.

It's not that we want to disappoint--
oh mother, teacher, lofty god;
but Susie is violent, Linda is mad,
and I am feral, mute, and odd.
_____

60 words on the nose for Mama Zen's Words Count at Real Toads. I avoided using "thou" and "ye". You're welcome.

 

Still

"What matters most is how well we walk through the fire." --Charles Bukowski

The maple keys are falling, as they do every year.
I have taken to reading out in the yard,
while my new dog wanders.

My walnut tree, the one the winter nearly killed two years ago,
is green again, a home and pantry for squirrels.
It is Michigan cool, late May, but warming.

I don't dream of your body as much as I used to,
but my dreams are full of you all the same.
I line up these poems like dolls, a puppet show to please you.

Books end, dogs die, summer runs its course.
Stay, won't you, sweetheart? Call me when you can--
I will be here, spinning like a maple key, still your breezy northern girl.
______

For Play it Again, Toads. I chose Kenia's challenge to start with a line from a poet you don't like. I dislike Charles Bukowski, the idol of many. Too much booze, too much ugliness. I got the idea to write a very gentle poem about a very bold thing--making it through this life with some sort of grace.

In My Book

In my book,
there are pages and pages of you, babe.
I have organized my own alphabet,
and this is what it says:
"Oh yes, Mama like!"

In my Saturday,
there are no religious zealots,
nobody killing people, creatures, trees, themselves.
Call me shallow, I don't care.
What there is, is ice cream and trash tv.

In my closet,
there are only soft fabrics, 
pleasing colors,
nothing too tight or too young for me.
Everything smells nice,
cos of that junk I use in the dryer.

In my book,
things are moving right along.
It's Saturday,
there's sweet rolls in the oven,
and I've got the couch cushions arranged just so.
My dog is chewing on her blue crocodile.
All of this is necessary
if I am to engage the world and save it, the way I always do,

on Monday.

for Sherry Blue Sky's prompt at Real Toads.