Paper Pennants

 When I was a young child

my brothers had a hockey game

with metal men

and a marble.

Each team had

a paper pennant

like a challenge laid boldly

before the other teams and the larger world.

I liked the Toronto Maple Leafs

in their sweaters as blue as God's eyes.

The goalie's smile never faltered

though he was hit with the marble a thousand times.

In a dream

I see that goalie coming up the tunnel

in his blue sweater and big brown pads

fearless, changeless, continuously happy.

He takes to the ice

to tend his green mesh net

while we stare up from beneath the surface

like ads or circles or lines or dots.

When I was a young child

there were Red Wings and Rangers

Blackhawks and Bruins

a marble, a goalie, and tilted ice that seemed perfectly fair at the time.

_____

Snow Day

 

Bosco 2003-2014

Zacky, my spring-heeled dog, goes bouncing into the middle

of the flyers around the bird feeder--

his pure simple joy as he watches them rise.

his tongue hanging out, his eyes alight, defies the winter.

We have had snow, then thaw, then rain, then refreeze.

The world here is icebound.

The rain pooled almost to the doorstep, but the

still frozen ground could not accept it and iced over again.

The rinks have endured for two weeks now.

My dog comes to the door, exhilarated, certain

that his mama will be there to let him in for a cookie and a nap.

I am his open door, his open heart, his centering sun.

Someone I know has just lost her dog--

she is crying. I am crying for them.

Two to four more inches is expected here shortly,

while winter plays the immortal.

As I hold my smiling pal, I think of my old dogs,

Sundance and Bosco, and how much I miss them.

They passed.

Winter will pass.

I too will pass, along with all my stuff and memories.

Today I will sit stroking Zacky and watching out the window

as the snow falls and falls. 

Winter will have its day but will fade, as will 

presidents and peacocks,

blue jays and babies,

a constant falling, 

with all of us aboard for the ride.

(Detroit Michigan, 2/13/25)

_____________

Written for What's Going On? "Landscapes."

Music: Dave Grusin The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter theme

American Girl In Euro Kicks

 

After midnight on the narrow street

high on a memory magnolia sweet

like a magnet where you don't belong

smiling lady sings a lonesome song

Across the plaza, under the bridge

where the cognoscenti live

down where a butterfly becomes a dove

what in the devil are you thinking of?

No mashed potato, no lime and gin

where the crows get black

sleep on the foxglove, dream of a peach

on a honey stack.

Hands like a swan's wing, feet like a hoof

slip the landlord, sleep on the roof

and in the morning, fleece the mark

mix with the rando's who live in the park

No chocolate candies, no baseball game

where the crows count six

collect the cats eyes, call off the dogs

keep the licorice sticks.

______

for Word Garden Word List--William Wordsworth

Palilalia

 "Here I am back home again

I'm here to rest

All they ask is where I've been

knowing I've been west " --Tim Hardin 

One wrong move away from a coffin, I came back

glissading hell-for-breakfast down a ribbon road called Interstice 95.

I am become a Gypsy, I said. 

I am become a radio, broadcasting myself at some higher frequency.

I am a skull singing starlings out into the Void.

This is our tree, stay the fuck off it we say

with our

pugnacious

puny 

little 

beaks.

Sometimes dead is better, someone said. 

All I want is my Hudson Bay blanket.

All I want is a mother, not my  mother, but one like the ones in storybooks,

and not Grimm's.

All I want is some chocolate, and a Secret Garden to sit in.

There should be a glider.

I could cry there and let the salt make me a sailor.

I want to be kissed in a way I have not been kissed in years. 

I want to be anesthetized.

I want to feel good, reconfigured without the anchors and anvils.

I want to ask Jesus some things.

Pah.

I would like to thank the cosmic shillelagh that thumped me here.

I would like to be stitched up and sent home with a note explaining 

me to myself.

None of that is in the works, and a carny appears and loads me into a clock

as if I were boarding the Kingda Ka at Six Flags back in Texas, USA. 

"You little feral Pick-Me Girl," says the carny,

serving up big happy helpings of easy scorn.

"Enjoy the ride!" he says, showing his teeth in a billboard grin.

FWOOMP!

My dog is glad to see me. 

There is lazy winter light in the window

and someone has left a casserole on the doorstep.

I am tempted to call someone but who? God?

She's a right canny doozy,

but my monkey body remembers warm flesh like rolls from the oven

and I don't think I can get up.

My heart is smashed

and the junk drawer offers no Gorilla Glue,

no note that can penetrate when hope goes deaf.

I sit and stutter and start to tell the dog 

all about this strange accident, this whole misadventure escapade

and, as it gets dark,

what I think it means.

__________

for Word Garden Word List #9.

Nutshell

 In a nutshell, meat and wings

and infinite other disturbing things

that rise and rule with iron fist

the little nest that crowns your kiss

Curse the summer, curse the tree

that swelled such nutshells patiently

gardener saw, gardener knew

even as those nutshells grew.

______

written for quadrille monday at dverse "crown"

image: syd barrett, a founding member of pink floyd whose life was derailed by mental illness. However, this poem is about whatever you think it's about.

Carrie Nation (or How I Became An Interesting Girl)

 I don't like it either, sometimes,

but there it is, like a cop 

parked behind a billboard

or

a funnel blowing the barn apart.

Now here's this guy,

He needs a drink before he spits it out,

termites working in every smile,

his suit already pooling in the chair.

And now I'm the one, the home town

you can never go back to.

"You've changed," is usually spoken with that face one saves

for finding out your sports hero shoots skag

or the sweet old lady next door has renters under the floor.

Rivers flow,

rats run up the pole.

Clocks tick,

clouds form and blow.

Carrie Nation knew it was true,

as Lizzie B. did, too,

that the most interesting person in the room

is always the one swinging the axe.

_______

for Sunday Muse #185.

Why I Stopped Reading Robert Frost

As I reach the bottom
of the bag
of some shit I used to like,
I realize
I'm bored,
and don't want it anymore.

It's like
when I was mad for what's-her-name
or
mad to be what's-her-name
and the tide 
was mad to go
first to
then fro.
What a waste of time.

So here
are my
seventy-five million poems
that lifted,
shifted,
expressed the flesh around these bones.
But today
I may
get up and walk right through the wall
and the me I leave behind
is just a stupid staring doll.

At the bottom
of this bag
is some shit I used to like.
Can you dig
can you see
the fish there riding on its bike?
in a lather
in a circle
with miles to go before it sleeps?
_________

for Sunday Muse # 105.

art by Samy Charnine.

Pilgrimage

On the freeway service drive, just outside of Detroit, we picked up His Holiness, who had his thumb out and a jewel-encrusted satchel over his shoulder.

"You should hide that thing," said Judy.

"Or swap it at Salvation Army for something, um, a little less conspicuous?" said Mel. "You know the Salvation Army has a store, right?"

"Very well," said His Holiness in his accented English. We couldn't tell exactly what he meant.

"You shouldn't be out here anyway," scolded Allie, who was scrunched between Mel and His Holiness in the back seat. His Holiness explained that he had come for us, not the other way around.

"I bless you tires, I bless you headlights, I bless you beautiful American noggins," he said, and did.

Much later, after we had let His Holiness off near Bad Axe, a light rain started to fall.

"I feel cleansed," chirped Judy, and we all laughed, but honestly, we were all glad to be close to Allie's house, her floor and couches, and some scrambled eggs scooped onto Dollar Store plates with birds on them.
_______

for Day 7 of my 39 poems in 39 days.

Cirque du Folle

There are other things we can do
in this time of dead clocks.

We can interview the air, jammed with blackbirds.
We can discard our clock-lungs,
turn our hearts to fragrant bowers. 

We can tightrope, half-awake
over the roofs of our old loves,

and fall into chimneys like bones into limbs,
fantastically existent, howling, dumbfounded.
_____

poem #5 of my 39 in 39 days.

for Friday 55 at Verse Escape, hosted by the incredibly fab Hedgewitch O' The Wilds.