Don't Clown on the Waitress

 

Don't clown on the waitress, fool.

She writes in hieroglyphs on a pad made of stardust.

One click of her pen can make you shudder and drool

sucking like a baby on a bread crust.

She takes breakfast orders; the cook creates worlds.

Order an egg and it evolves right on your plate.

Don't clown on the waitress; she's a woman not a girl--

in your orbit, never still, never simple, never late.

Don't pick at the sugar packets or leave your napkin in a wad.

You're going to have to finesse it--no menu, no calorie chart.

Museums will bid on your bacon, at auctions with a nod--

Don't clown on her, just appreciate that you cannot hurry art!

______________

for Word Garden Word List--The Rosie Project. 

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.

Butter Shoes

Exploring abandoned places is not for those too firmly anchored in the present.
One must wear butter shoes to slide across the temporal griddle.
Here, we have a record player inside a pink carrying case.
Over there, a cane and a broken mason jar.
And in the basement, a figure mummified inside a rolled-up rug,
stored carefully underneath a work bench.

Investigating further, we find mismatched dishes.
Red for the furious wife,
green for the husband submerged in murky dreams,
and yellow for the children churned by hand under a butter sun.

Afterward, we are hungry, for food and for the physical.
We slap each other playfully, clomping on peg legs across the wooden floor to the bedroom, 
where we hop like Russian dancers upon the griddle of our love.
You suggest we should buy cows,
Guernseys to provide us with milk and children already grown,

Who have their own houses devoid of plywood and yellow tape,
the emblems and talismans of our journey into urbex mystery.
_______

for Sunday Muse #84.

M'duza

M'duza has just finished doing my hair.
The chair spins slowly around as if I were the world and M'duza the sun,
albeit a sun that charges money for her not-inconsiderable skills.
"Have a blunt, "she says,
"And an apple."

"I don't smoke," I tell her for the millionth time.
"The apple, then."
Her voice is lazy as she leans against her station.
Blunt in her right hand,
arrows in her left.

She comes from a floral source, does M'duza.
Pistils and stamens and honey bees.
She makes fig jam, 
and stores her picks in a yellow box.
Her lineage is traceable to women whose feet stood in white ocean foam.

"I didn't bring any money," I tell her, lying.
"Money is the tool of the enslavers," she parrots,
"A chain around the neck of the people."
Then she takes a long drag and holds it.
I ask, "M'duza, why did the proletariat cross the road?"
She raises an eyebrow, lips sealed shut.
"To make that goddamned chicken join the fucking collective."
She laughs hard in spite of herself, blowing smoke like a New Year's dragon.

M'duza sprang from the halls of macadamia,
and is my favorite nut;
her shop smells of acacia and sage as much as peroxide and hair spray.
Me, I leapt fully-formed from the forehead of Zeus,
my father's daughter all the way.
"So, what now?" I ask her.
It's Monday, she doesn't have any other clients.

"Now we set out to find the wild nest," she says,
stretching her arms over her head in her typical elaborate gesture.
"We carry caramel babies in our honey-stomachs,
and start a colony of sweet clear-minded revolutionaries.
They will stick it to the man,
and always remember their mothers on holidays."

I parrot, "Holidays are a construct of the ruling class,
meant to distract the workers from their misery."
"Oh, fuck you!" says M'duza,ratcheting the chair up as high as it will go.
"Uh-huh," she says, nodding at my predicament.
And so, as always when I'm with M'duza, I leap. I am in mid-air,
without a thought in my head, true as a launched arrow.
________

from this word list.

3 fibonacci poems

My BFF Hedgewitch has decreed that we write Fibonacci poems, and so, naturally, I have applied myself to doing exactly that. Here are three: the first one is a reverse Fibonacci by syllable count, the second is by word count, and the third is a mirror Fibonacci by word count.

THE TERRIBLE HOUSEFLY

Behold, the terrible housefly--
followers crowd its
compound eye;
maggot
turned
Caesar.

COUNTRY CLUB CHRIST

Wonder
Bread
must contain
a tame god
bleeding a very thin wine
building bland believers twelve ways, Sundays before noon.

21

September
Gina,
do you
remember orange evening
in my little garage apartment
hardly big enough for birds, or a bed?

You were 36 and settled as high summer;
outside my windows, the moon
was your twin--
brightly lit,
silently
knowing.

_______

 

your kiss

Your kiss,
one of the last ones,
after I already knew that you had lied and cheated and played with my heart,

was still something I had to have.
I hadn't wanted to confront you on my birthday
with what I had so cleverly put together about what you had done;
I wanted one more day of being stupidly happy, first.

You put everything you had into everything you did,
and when you turned that on me, it was thrilling.
I'll never deny that.

Oh, I was noble and righteous and proud.
The next night I gave you one chance to come clean--
a chance you wasted.
So I broke it off, and told the world what and who you really are.

But what of that kiss, the one I remember,
the one right before you handed me the cat card, saying,
"I thought you should have some really good pussy for your birthday!"

You won't believe me when I tell you that your kiss sat in a museum
for years, in a glass case,
a forgotten exhibit ignored even by me.

Then the zoo took it over, because it had bitten someone,
or buckled her knees, or something,
and I heard about it from a friend, or a friend of a friend,
and by then I wasn't so proud anymore.
Being alone will erode a girl's confidence, and I have been alone.

No surprise, then, that the khaki-wearing student volunteer should find me
in the very early morning,
with my naked body wrapped around your kiss,
which still fit perfectly with my heartbeat.

Stop crying, she said.
Get dressed. You can't stay here.
It was just like the morning after I broke up with you,
except with no one to admire my backbone this time,
because
I no longer have any.
_________

The World's Greatest Lover

The World's Greatest Lover was holding forth at the bar,
with a woman poured over his arm on each side
like swooning raincoats.

He had pretty boys pouting near the potted palms,
and they rolled dice to see who would get
his cuff links and his legendary cock.

So softly that he had to ask me to repeat myself,
I said that he was nothing but a mouthy, well-dressed fraud
and that he knew nothing at all about love.

"Little seal with the red ball on your nose," he said, smiling benignly,
"keep clapping. I like it."

I introduced him to my acquaintance--
a not particularly pretty girl wearing carnival vendor jewelry.
In her bag she carried nothing but a paperback,
twenty dollars,
and her phone, which played "Beat It" when it rang.

A year later, I saw him again,
and he looked like hammered shit.
He stared right through things with a slightly stunned expression,
and did this nervous thing with his jaw,
but blessedly, he had stopped talking altogether.

I walked up to him.
It was easy; he was alone.

I said, poor sad little seal,
I see she taught you well.
_________

for Susan's challenge at Real Toads, which asked for a poem about love. I used one of the illustrations provided.

"When Limpid Light Upon Mine Eyes Shines Weary" by Pontificus Henry Bookfield, 1892

How blah, the blah of the Immortals,
When blahs spread ever blah-like
O'er sylvan blah and hellish blah alike!

Blahs, doth blah emblah us
To take up Blahian blahments,
Even as Blah himself did
In that oft-blahed time,

E'er blah set the human heart
Against its very blahhood?
Blah again, Blahnanians! Blahlujiah! Excelsior!

Note: Believed lost for more than three decades, a nearly illegible copy of "When Limpid Light Upon Mine Eyes Shines Weary" was discovered at the bottom of Lady Philpott-Tewksbury's handbag when she expired from split ends in 1933. Her nephew, Aldous Tewksbury Smythe, painstakingly restored P.H. Bookfield's legendary poem. Unfortunately, he died fifteen minutes after completing the restoration in 1976. The beautifully restored manuscript now hangs in the British Museum of Interesting Debris, where it can be viewed and admired by all.

A 55 for the G Man.   

The Evolution Of Genius

The genius who treated us like shit
Stood ringing the triangle he wore around his neck in order to call himself to dinner.

A lackey brought a wheelbarrow containing the genius's ego.
Here is a riddle:
Why is it that, the more he ate of it, the bigger it got?

He was then taken to the local hospital, where demon doctors surgically attached extra thumbs,
Leaving him even more exalted
And superior to us vacant, slouching apes.
Wearing leather collars, we performed tricks which were never good enough.
We were given no days off.
We limped, stupid and miserable, in his shadow.

The asshole genius sat crunching the bones of his lessers,
An eccentric habit the authorities ignored because, hello, he's a genius,
And we are apes,
If kind apes,
Capable of love, and labor, and suffering.

The fuckface genius is always correct, and we accept that in our dim way,
As we accept his right to go strutting among the gods themselves
While we fumble and fart and fail.

The genius who treated us like shit had the world by the short ones,
Endorsed and indulged because of his brilliance,
Celebrated and hip-deep in sweet entitlement until it all went tits up one Tuesday in September.

A bearded single dude, homeless, probably a fag,
Climbed down off a tree and poked the dipshit genius in the chest and said,
"What you do to the least of these, you do to me.
Titles and talent aren't a ticket to treat anybody badly."

Since he joined the monastery, nobody has talked to the genius,
But we hear he has a funny haircut and
Washes feet and
Lives in a little stone cell like a zoo monkey.
______

for Flipside's word list #6: leather, triangle, thumbs, monastery, genius, eccentric, demons, correct, vacant, crunching, strutting, hospital, slouch, surgically, limped.