Reconsidering Liars

"Let there be light."
Did you think
He had it just lying around?
The sun, the stars....all made up.

Billy Robinson was an upstate New Yorker of Scottish ancestry,
a magician who reinvented himself
as Chung Ling Soo, Chinese conjurer,
ripping off most of his act from another vaudevillian.

His wife Suee Seen was really named "Dot." 
They weren't really married.
She was as American as he was.

Consider this:
"America" is a construct. 
You start with trees, bears and native tribes,
kill most of them, plant a flag and
Voila! America. Something that wasn't there before,
like a rabbit out of a hat.

You'll argue that it was there, just different,
like "your" card, now at the top of the deck every time,
fanned in the illusionist's hands.

Watch and learn, padewon.
Billy Robinson whipped lather in a mug and shaved off his moustache,
used greasepaint to darken his complexion,
threw on some bright Oriental robes,
and started banking the cash from the suckers who came for his act.

God would tell you,
ya gotta have a gimmick,
whether you call it Manifest Destiny or The Ten Commandments.
Billy's was a stunt he called "Condemned to Death by the Boxers."

Marked bullets were loaded into rifles wielded by stooges in costume;
the weapons were rigged not to fire,
but Chung Ling Soo would appear to catch the deadly missiles with a china plate.
However,
the sun and stars are slowly burning themselves out,
and the rifles became worn with cleaning.

Bam! Bam! And down went Billy, right there on stage.
"I've been shot," he said, in astonished perfect English.
You can look on Wikipedia today and find Chung Ling Soo's whole story.
Do you think that if he had stayed Billy,
kept his moustache,
and sold tam o' shanters in a shop all his life,
that anyone would remember him now?

Let there be light,
how ever it is made, and how ever far it has to travel
to get here.
________

Nydia

Nydia

It was a dark and stormy night, and I,
pale as a sugar moon,
stepped my inviolate and ivory self out into it.

All the ashes flicked 
from all the cigarettes ever smoked 
by every cabaret singer who ever was,
are small-town stuff
compared to Vesuvius' great burning wave arriving
at out tender bare feet
and above our perfectly sculpted, stupid upturned faces.

My name is Nydia--
I am both blind as a bat and deaf as a white cat,
despite any contrary impression I may have given

All those times we lounged,
and I seemed to listen raptly
to your cocky prating,
my lord and master, purchaser of all my various blooms--

Here I stand in the ignited whirlwind,
with my porcelain fingers wrapped around some random staff,
such that you fly to me in a jealous rage.

In a thousand years, when they find us,
cooked in close embrace,
they will say,
"Behold the low one,
who, by this high one, was owned."

It will be so cute, how you'll think it's obvious
what they mean.
_______

For Artistic Interpretations With Margaret.

 Nydia, the blind flower seller, was a popular character from the 1834 novel "Last Days of Pompeii" by English playwright and novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton.  Rogers depicted her wandering through the wreckage of Pompeii as the erupting volcano Mount Vesuvius destroys the city.  Her staff and acute sense of hearing guide her around the destruction.  Nydia, a slave, listens intently for the voice of her aristocratic master with whom she has fallen in love. 

Bulwer-Lytton is infamous for having penned the line "It was a dark and stormy night"

Redcoats!

Lambs, it's Independence Day! On this date in....oh, 1922, or 1654, or some time anyway, George Washington defeated Herman's Hermits at the Battle of New Orleans, and with Johnny Horton installed as the first president, our nation became free!

Don't quibble with me Darlings, I'm trying to explain what it all means. I can't be bothered with exact dates and trivia!

Now then. It's hard to imagine that we were ever subject to British rule. I mean, Cherubs, these are people who get excited to the point of rioting over a sport where the score is always 1-0. Trust me, Darlings, London is like a big elevator, where everyone is breaking their necks just to avoid having to actually speak to anyone else. And they're an island. Fiji is an island. Rhode is an island. No self-respecting country is an island. It's absurd!

And now, Darlings, you've got middle-aged duffers like Mabel Van Deusen's husband dropping their golf clubs and stuffing themselves into Revolutionary War costumes so that they can recreate the Battle of Bunker Hill in the park across the street from the 7-11 and the Instant Oil Change place. Why, last year, they sent a cannon ball through the Hyundai showroom window. 

You know me, Lambs. Forgive and forget, that's my motto. Never let the sun go down on an argument. Still, I feel so patriotic ordering escargot at Chez Pierre's, to support the French effort to sink Great Britain once and for all. I feel just like Nathan Hale, except with much more stylish shoes, and a better figure by far! Really, Lambs, what do we need stodgy old England for anymore? We're talking about a country that let a bald man wearing diapers kick them out of India. 

Oh all right, I'll stop picking on them, if you insist. But still! Thank Goddess we're not from some hellhole coal mining village in England, trying to survive by eating the bark off the hedgerows. It would be awful! If those English had any sense at all, they would have forgotten about Lexington and Concord, and established themselves in Las Vegas or Miami Beach. Or even right here in Pompano Beach! Then all we would ever have to say would be tut-tut, and here-here, and oh reeeeally. Life would be so simple! 

Well, I'm glad we had this little talk, aren't you, Lambs? But it still seems a shame, in a way. Well, Dears, I mean all of the struggle and kicking Brits off of the wrong side of the highway and everything, and yet you still walk around with your hair looking a sight. Is that creature who does your cut and color down at BoRic's English by any chance? Mhmmm. A mother can sense these things. I think I'll buy the entire chain and phase them into a line of washeterias instead. I'll put a little American flag in the logo! 
_________   

for those of you who insist on poetry, visit Coal Black HERE.