Tricks

 I was playing cards against my own poem, penny a trick

and  

      had

            lost

                  thousands. 

"I brought you into this world," I began,

but she turned into a fog of lemon-fresh Glade,

then to a tiger wearing a bell,

and sat there smiling at me like a dime store Buddha.

She had the keys to me, that's the trouble,

and took them with her when she went. 

Strangers know me backward and forward

and I can only stammer at them, clueless and dizzy. 

She turns me to a gawky bird standing in the sawdust on one leg

while she builds her house around me. 

I am password protected, listed on the National Registry

and greenies stick spikes in me so she can't cut me down. 

I lay an ace and she

spreads out a peacock fan of kings and queens,

Russians and Persians,

lilacs and shade-loving violets.

I am playing cards with my own poem, stanza a hand,

and

       I

        am

             broke

but a newer poem brings me coffee, licks my ear

winds his slender self around me like a climbing vine as I

sweetly purr, "and I can take you out of it." 

_______

For Word Garden Word List -- T S Eliot.

Music: Josiah Bell Change In The Weather

Queening

 "It wasn't chess, it was checkers." --Ian Anderson to a critic who had said he plays chess with his audience.

That's a neat trick, you with the blade,

filing your teeth into chess pieces in your sleep.

You'd prefer the whole board gray,

every piece a bishop, coming at an angle,

lifting scripture from both cheeks.

Don't talk with your mouth full,

don't run that sideways stuff at the magic hour

with a rabbit in your hat, it's a tired old trick.

Such stale gambits won't maneuver me

into doing what you lack the guts for yourself.

I'm retiring from this bullshit, let's try a new game, it's called

Truth Or Dare, and I play it with knives.

_________

for Sunday Muse #181.

Shell Game

Water is not the glass that holds it.
Words are not the lips that speak them.
A body is a shadow of one shape, then another, then none.

No one holds an apple and says, "Here is a peel, nothing more."
We eat the fruit and leave the ants the core.
"Simple insects," says the man.
Simple human, beneath the tree.
And on the ground when both have gone,
those humble and forgotten gods--the seeds.
_______


A meditation on physicality for Art FLASH at Real Toads.

"You are what you believe you are." --The Prophet Omega

Beach Bonnie

Beach Bonnie
makes her bed
from an old fine sail;
catches incautious starfish
by the tail--
those special ones
with silver tongues,
who sing about Beach Bonnie--
fairest of all.