Some Wore Armor

 

Some wore armor,

those freshbread women

with plums for eyes.

The River God said,

a lot of good it will do you,

then sank down

into a water lily dream.

One went to him

holding a blade made of summer.

Some say he married her

but she never came back to say.

Some wore bracelets

made of fall leaves and owl call

with sorrows lined together like dolls.

The River God said,

one is wise, five are deceitful

and none can sing, or love.

Then the water iced over until spring.

The women went to the silent edge

bearing a robe made of crows and rushes

but when he didn't appear, then or at any other time,

they gave the robe to the morning.

Some wore armor,

but most wore willows.

They were freshbread women

with plums for eyes. 

_____

Blechface the Terrifying

Blechface, the terrifying monster, opens a Facebook account and starts posting.
She posts selfies that everyone hates.
She switches to kittens and makes scads of friends.

Blechface the terrifying monster is part squid, part insect, and part monkey.
Pervs she doesn't know from Adam send her private messages, which she ignores.
Facebook suggests friends:
Susie, Annie, Bob, Gerry.
How to approach them? By sea or by air? (By tree?)

Blechface the terrifying monster puts this problem aside, and works on her profile.
Interests:
mating, ingesting, establishing territory, poetry and movies.
Education:
?
Looking for:
mates, food, territory, poetry and movies about these topics.

One day Blechface meets someone on Facebook who seems to understand her.
He sees that she is
Blechface the Royal,
Blechface the Brilliant,
Blechface the tentacled sea mollusk, with exoskeleton and prehensile tail.
Blechface the Babe.

They arrange to meet.
Blechface the Coy insists that he come to her, and so he boards an Amtrak in Ohio,
and travels to her home in Galveston bay.
Imagine her surprise when he turns out to look so different from his profile picture!
She was expecting Sean Connery,
but he turns out to be Tabbyface, the Unbearably Cute Kitten.
She shrugs her tentacle and smiles.

"I will make you the happiest little puffball dude in all creation," she tells him.
"I will take pictures of you and make you a MEME."
He gets a thousand "likes" the first day on her time line.
"Pooky," she says, hauling him up into her tree.
"Foxy ladyyyyyyy," he purrs.

Blechface and Tabbyface, trending forever.
________

Aztecs

"If there are Aztecs in the hall,
lock the door
and hide your heart."

Such were the final writings of Anne-April Prilly
in 1967.

From that point on,
she did not write.
From that point on,
she seemed to have taken her own advice--
gazing blankly at the babies her friends continually had,
and failing to make the required noises.
"What about it?" she would say,
turning away and folding her arms
when offered an infant to exclaim over.

In 1967,
Aztecs could have been mistaken for hippies.
A search of Anne-April's hallway revealed nothing,
save for a newspaper, 
rolled up like a stethoscope on the parquet floor.

Through the unfortunate 70s and on into the 80s,
Anne-April remained unmoved.
Between her lungs, she tried keeping a sugar bowl,
but it was no use--
she was only hounded by collectors
who wanted complete sets, and not just the incidentals.

She also tried a plastic bear containing real clover honey,
but, nestled within Anne-April's warmthless bosom,
the honey spoiled
despite all assurances.

Finally, in 2006, Anne-April returned home,
using a skeleton key to get in.
She opened windows, bought art prints,
and even resumed writing. 
She tried to find her old friends, 
so that she could exclaim, if belatedly, over their children,
but the children were grown and scattered,
the friends wary, with medical alert devices around their necks
as if at any moment they might drop dead.

Naturally, Aztecs appeared once again in Anne-April's hallway.
Such dogged creatures!
She cracked the door and crooked a finger at one shirtless savage.
"In here, sailor," she said,
letting her robe slip off her shoulders.

She was old by then, but with angry gods to satisfy,
the Aztec wasn't sweating the details.
At least she had done her nails, fixed her hair.
Still, it was a dirty trick what she did next, snatching back her heart
with her last bit of strength.

Cradling it like a baby,
with bright red blood running down her forearms,
Anne-April was just glad to have found the thing she'd lost;
So glad, in fact, that she kissed the astounded illiterate brute
and meant it.
______

 

Harem Girl

They kicked me out of the harem.
One minute I was sucking on a grape, 
listening to Trixie tell Helen Keller jokes,

How does Helen Keller drive a car?
With one hand on the wheel and the other on the road.
How did Helen Keller ruin her nails?
Reading roadside signs.
How did Helen Keller burn her ear?
Answering the iron.

and the next, I was being dropped at the old filthy-ass bus station downtown
with my duffel and my backpack, like some parolee.
Inside, there were no pillows,
no peacock feather fans,
just hard plastic seats and a vending machine filled with crap like pork rinds and pop tarts.
I guess they weren't expecting a lady.

It's not that the harem was the greatest place to be, you understand.
When he calls you, you've got to act all swoony and glad about it.
You can't roll your eyes and go, 
"Right now? Well fuck a damn duck!" like I did.
You also can't get away with a quick hand job while flipping through Cosmo with the other.
I learned that the first week.
You've got to be engaged, or he gets all bent out of shape about it.

A word about those Cosmo articles--
you know the ones.
1,000 sexy secrets that will drive him wild!!!
If those really worked, there would be grinning goofy-faced men walking around everywhere, wandering into traffic with their shirts buttoned wrong.
There aren't. 
I rest my case.

It was this kind of thinking that got me thrown out of the harem.
I needed that job.
I'm the single mother of a six month old chameleon named Rainbow Happy,
and we can't eat wolf whistles. 
I will admit, right here, that I complained a lot--
about those stupid pastel paint jobs on the walls, like we were living inside an Easter egg,
and the way the eunuchs never knew the baseball scores despite knowing that I would ask every morning.
I couldn't manipulate charm them, cos they weren't really men anymore,
but they could sure sock away the pizza like a bunch of doughy, pasty-faced truck drivers.

This is all very difficult for me.
Here, take my duffel, all my dainties are inside and I can't lose them.
Maybe I'll catch the four-fifteen to Seattle,
or the five-thirty to Salt Lake City.
Do Mormons have harems?
I can do a great Marie Osmond.
Listen to me belt out "Paper Roses"!
A girl with my skill set should be able to land a new gig in nothing flat, don't you think?

Hey, it's been nice chatting with you, but I've got the highway in my blood, and all that hokey stuff they say in the movies.
Marilyn Monroe put it best:

Just because you fail once,
doesn't mean you're going to fail at everything.

Marilyn was smarter than people think.
She read books, she had a lot going on, but people think she was just blonde hair and great boobs.
Are you even listening to me? My face is up here, by the way.
I'm off into the great unknown.
Give me your email, I'll let you know when I hit Flagstaff.
I went through there once when I was thirteen, in May, and it was snowing. 
The guy next to me put his hand on my knee, so I faked a coughing fit and jerked forward.
He smashed his fingers on the metal edge of the seat in front of us;
it was just like breaking up a bird for Sunday dinner.
I got kicked off that bus.
They didn't understand the burden of beauty,
and I had to stand before a judge and explain my "violent outburst."
He told me I seemed like a nice girl and why don't we discuss this privately?
Well, I never look a gift horse yadda yadda.

But when he took off his robes and everything, he looked like a wookie,
and I couldn't help it, I started to laugh.
I got pitched out of his chambers and straight out of town,
like common trash.
No one in the modern world appreciates true beauty,
and so I wander like a mystic,
or a peculiarly hot-looking staretz,
searching for my place in life,
teaching when I can, loving when they agree to use protection,
and just trying to perfect my soul
so that they won't throw me out of Heaven before I've made any friends,
or gotten to try those little crepes that I hear they make up there.

I want mine with strawberries,
and not a man in sight.
________

At the Aviary

There is a woman screaming.
She snaps her compact shut and asks, "How did I get so fucking old?"

"Cry me a river," says GorgeousCrazyGirl.
She and the World's Most Brilliant Unemployable Violinist are sitting on some concrete steps at the bird park.

"My fingers hurt," complains the Violinist. She has arthritis in her joints.
"Quit bitching, darling," says her companion, serenely.

A peacock calls.
oh OHHH, oh OHHH.
His spread tail makes the Violinist think of a Japanese fan.

"I played Tokyo once. They loved me. I played them a program of Bach and Vivaldi."
GorgeousCrazyGirl says, "Are they the ones who bind their feet? 
How do they get to their seats? They must be like Weebles."

"You need treatment," says the Violinist, sitting hip to hip with her.
"Treat me, baby!"
They kiss. There is nothing wrong with the Violinist's lips.

The Violinist says, "When I was young, I didn't know there were lesbians."
"There weren't," replies GorgeousCrazyGirl, as calm and smooth as new snow. "There were just dinosaurs, and covered wagons and shit."
The Violinist smacks her on the shoulder, then says, "Ow" and inspects her hand.

It has been a long time since the World's Most Brilliant Unemployable Violinist was able to perform in a professional venue.
It has been almost as long since GorgeousCrazyGirl has been socked away in the bin, or gotten her pretty ass arrested.
They are arcs,
moving in opposite directions,
together. 

GorgeousCrazyGirl is wearing a ginormous cowgirl hat, a white tee shirt with a quote on the front, and cut off jeans. 
Her bare legs could stop an army in its tracks.

The Violinist is wearing dark glasses and a Burberry rain coat. She might be attending a funeral. 
"What do you think happens, when we die?" she asks her friend.
"Don't be morbid, honey, "advises The Girl, untroubled as a blue sky in May.

Once, The World's Most Brilliant Unemployable Violinist was reasonably famous, financially well off, and as lonely as the last Great Auk, if it lived on a precipice surrounded by a shark-infested moat.

Once, GorgeousCrazyGirl got her dinner out of dumpsters, and believed the wacky shit her head told her. She didn't have a nickel, or a clue, or command of her own mind. She knows what terror is.

There is Aleve, and Wellbutrin. 
At the bird park, most of the birds are paired off, making babies like Detroit once made Packards.
"They have wings. There's nothing to stop them flying away. Why don't they?" The Violinist is looking up, into the April sky, as if it were the steps to a stage.

"Maybe they like it here," suggests The Girl, as zen as a zebra in a hay factory. "Maybe they have everything they need."
"You really are awfully beautiful," says the Violinist, playing tenderly with The Girl's long black hair.
"That's the rumor," she says, wearily.
"No," the Violinist continues, "you would be beautiful in the dark. To a blind person. With no hands."

GorgeousCrazyGirl snorts loudly, then laughs, a sort musical braying. "You're crazy."
"So was Mozart." The Violinist looks quite young when she smiles.
Then, they are intertwining their fingers and saying nothing at all, 
and everything;
like rests and notes,
which, together make peacocks and people go oh OHH...
oh OHH.
______

Dedicated to Dana, wherever she is; the first charming crazy girl I fell in love with.

I bear this in common with The Girl: I frequently wear a ginormous old cowgirl hat.

Linked to Real Toads Open Link Monday.

The Nanny

I'm the nanny.
I'm not some sawed-off Jap bitch, trailing cherry blossoms,
smiling like she just heard the Holy Haiku, even as she
slips your pearls into her pocket.

No.

I'm an American girl from Sioux City,
with a crew of younger sibs I practically raised myself.
Our mom was a goth who got old,
sitting on a tombstone on weekday afternoons,
reciting Baudelaire from memory
while I was left home to field calls from the school
and to fix French toast for a screaming pack of snotty-nosed midgets.

I loved them.
I did.
I do, still.

My employer calls herself Hecate, what kind of name is that?
You wouldn't think it to look at her, 
with her no-nonsense, wash-and-run short 'do
and the Blackberry and the Bluetooth
or whatever all that crap is,
but the woman could get knocked up just by standing in the moonlight.

Don't think she doesn't let me know it.
Don't think she doesn't hammer me over the head
with her fecundity.

Look, you, I play a mean game of Candyland.
You haven't seen me in action--
I can be so sweet, you'd swear my veins were full of Splenda.
I've got those good birthing hips,
and can lug two brats around and boss the rest
without missing a beat.

In the evening,
when she turns back into a fucking pumpkin,
it's "Thank you, Janet," with a certain unmistakable finality,
like I'd just finished bagging her fucking Yoplait and arugula,
not taken care of her children all day.

Swing that sledge.
Drive that spike.
Is this any life for a smart, sensitive girl like me?

Weekends, she's got her garden,
like having a functioning uterus makes her The Ultimate Earth Mother.
Look at the sun, how it revolves around her head,
her personal golden halo.
"Are you all right, Janet?" she asks, standing in the open bathroom door--
her door, her bathroom, her porcelain and Kohler faucets--
as I puke my guts out.
No one holds my hair;
nobody runs for the Kaopectate.
The kids stand behind her and stare, as if they'd never seen me before.

In my room, I pray to whatever benevolent or malignant gods there may be.
Hear me, I say,
but they don't.

Monday comes, and Hecate gets in her MKZ, swinging her heeled foot in last,
as if she were Carmen, expiring on stage at the Met.
A whole weekend!
The kids, the friends, her husband Dave with his golf shirts,
all of them expecting, needing, smiling as they shell her.

"Sweet pea," she whispers to Madison, the youngest,
"You want to be just like Mommy when you grow up,
don't you?"

That afternoon, I park them in front of cartoons,
which I am never supposed to do.
I am supposed to play them Bach,
and try to teach the six year old Italian.
Fuck this, I think to myself, fuck this, fuck this!
Emmy, always the little caretaker, stands three feet away from me,
looking uncertain, one shoe untied, and very quietly wonders,
"Are you having a crisis, Miss Jan?"

I laugh. She is so kind and so doomed.
That night, I call my mother for the first time in weeks.
"Stop crying," she croons in her oddly endearing smoker's voice.
"Baby, stop crying."

By July, I am back in Sioux City, and it is sweltering.
I have an upstairs flat,
and time on my hands.
Hecate and Dave promised to give me good references.
I hugged the children, kissed them, 
but I couldn't speak until I was miles from them, almost to the airport.

Mom and I order mocha lattes and take them to the viaduct
where the commuter trains pass over our heads.
We sit by the crap-choked water and pretend we are visiting Lourdes,
though whether as nurses or cripples, who knows?

Emmy made me a construction paper angel the day before I left.
She had it in both hands, and presented it so solemnly, it was hard to bear.
"Ciao," she said.
"Ciao, baby," I managed.

I am the nanny, or was.
I still have that angel,
and I have my mother, whom I have forgiven.
I ask her one afternoon, as the trains go by,
"What would you like, if you could choose? What would make you happy?"
"Why, honey, I'd like to meet Baudelaire, In Paris.
We'd have an affair, and he would write me my own gorgeous, dark poems.
What about you, baby? Where would you go? What would satisfy your heart?
Can you tell me?"

She has never spoken so tenderly to me before.
My throat is dry, as if I had not spoken for years.
"Maybe Florence," I tell her,
"In the Spring."
Then we are quiet,
and the last train heads west instead of east,
straight into the halo of the sun.
_______


linked to Dverse Open Link #79

Infirmity

Dr. Van Stiefer, a man alarmed by illogic
and disquieted by the slightest chaos,
opened his surgery on Carriage Road East
to very little fanfare.

That would shortly change.

As a medical student, Van Stiefer could barely contain
his boredom when faced
with the halt and lame.

At St. Cecilia's Hospital,
attendings had to stop the young man
from amputating in cases of sprained ankles
out of ennui and expediency.

But now,
now is his moment.

Dr. Lars Van Stiefer has a revolutionary idea.
He hopes it will alleviate, or entirely prevent
an array of difficulties and infirmities.
He will treat romantic love as a neurological disorder,
like tremors, or rabies.

His patients, beset with every variety of odd behavior,
will be brought in by stretcher,
sedated,
and he will bandage their hearts, tightly,
with clean bandages,
leaving only the tiniest new scar.

Good order will be restored,
and following a brief period of recovery, 
they can go back to work,
or to their wives and husbands,
ready to face life with new health and calm.

Dr. Van Stiefer is celebrated, feted, 
asked to speak before august gatherings of renowned physicians.
The dreary halls of St. Cecilia's fade into dusky memory,
and the doctor takes to his celebrity
with dignified grace.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Van Stiefer's womanly emotions
begin to wobble on their axis.
When the doctor arrives home,
without ceremony,
without display,
without humor,
she broods, and piles his plate with medical texts,
inviting him to use them as
supper or suppositories,
though she does not phrase it exactly in that way.

Unknown to him,
she forges a sympathetic connection with his nurse,
a certain Miss Pelby.
By the time they have lunched once,
been to the variety stage show twice,
and kissed a third time,
the wheels are greased for her own severe case of nervous illness--
that is to say,
Love.

No surprise, then, that Dr. Van Stiefer,
faced with the unfamiliar landscape of this domestic hiccup,
should have brought her,
the very next day,
to his surgery.

Was Mrs. Van Stiefer homicidal?
The doctor's own writings declare this an impossibility
in a woman of good background.
Still,
she was found in the waiting room by a medical equipment salesman,
with a bloody sleeve and a fit of the giggles.

Dr. Van Stiefer's esteemed colleagues,
arriving at graveside,
discussed among themselves what ought to be done for the new widow.
"Death by misadventure" having claimed her husband,
it was decided,
for her,
by these learned men,
that the prudent thing would be to recommend her into the care of the late doctor's nurse.

Mrs. Van Stiefer stayed on in her house,
under Miss Pelby's expert care
for the duration of her uncommonly long convalescence.
________

Thank you to Shawna for the word list!

Parasol

Down beside the willow water
Came the Reverend Wilson's daughter,
Looking for the one who loves to kiss her perfect face.

Across her shoulder, three times spun,
Her parasol to stop the sun;
White and new and edged with such a pretty ring of lace.

Back-buttoned dresses need a friend,
With eager fingers sweet to lend
A turn, a touch, and anything Miss Wilson might request.

The Reverend sent his man to check,
But all he found upon the deck:
A lace-edged parasol there tilted mistress-less at rest.

He dove into the willow water,
Fearful for the Reverend's daughter,
Who if she lost her breath, it came from quite another cause!

Presently, she came along,
Collected up her parasol,
Then, smiling, spun its lacy edge and walked back to the house.
______



 

Shit Poetry Fans, Weep As One!

Jennings Mulderhorn Strophe,
father of the modern shit poem,
croaks off.

Mazdas and Fiats barrel past him
as he lies helpless and beyond saving
in the middle of La Rue Merde.

The young Strophe could scald the soul
with his grim, fiery fables--
"Cockroach Floating In A Backed-Up Sink" 
won him legions of alienated young fans,
and made him the undisputed master
of random allusion.

Lifted from the pavement, and placed,
too late, into a waiting ambulance,
Strophe is already being eulogized.

Pen & Quill laments, "Like his poems,
Strophe's death would seem to mean something--
but what?"

Indignant, heartbroken female fans throw themselves,
and roses,
at the emergency vehicle as it trolls slowly away
toward eternal fame and routine embalming.

The women carry Strophe's later, softer works
close to their little valentine hearts
like brain-damaged kittens.

Oh, the sharp grief
for the loss of the adequate word at the right time!
His publishers immediately issue a luxurious, leather bound edition,
and advertise it in the coupon sections
of Sunday newspapers across the nation.

How tiresome a world,
without Strophe's genius for 
paint-by-numbers, derivative drollery!

Little is said about Strophe's "blue period",
or his heaps of paeans to carnal love
in which
no twitch
of anything truly erotic can be detected,
thus pacifying the church, and parents,
both of which endorse him for their fragile,
malleable
children to read.

Let us remember a man of letters!
Who better to speak for Strophe, than Strophe himself!

"Perplex-ed I am, when the crumb of life is to much,
And the mountain climb-ed behind us
Shrinks puny before my flaming love as I cry,
Your the one! Adieu!"

Jennings Mulderhorn Strophe
1926-2012
bringing shit poetry
to an adoring world!
_____

my word list was: sharp, indignant, detect, tiresome, luxury, malleable, fable, perplex, grim and scald. 

 

Boffo

The horror of living becomes too much for Boffo the Clown.
Smacked out on junk,
He plunges into a hellish nightmare world of
Pointy hats,
Seltzer bottles,
And furious addiction.

Children sense the clown's smoldering despair;
They are bold with unkind remarks,
And stomp on his toes,
But his enormous footwear stands him in good stead.

People seem bizarre and frightening to Boffo,
Groaning under the weight of their stupid pretensions,
Stuffing their phony, painted-on smiles
With inedible gobs of sickening cotton candy.

Boffo's life becomes a dull round of farce and fixes.
He is so sick of balloons!
Twisting them, nearly strangling them,
He makes another dog,
Another horse;
Once, he made a balloon that looked like a Cass Corridor whore,
The very image of his faded and vacant Linda.
The child threw it down, screeching ear-splittingly for Boffo to "do it right".

Another night, sitting in front of his mirror,
Boffo carefully places a neon green fright wig on his head,
And adjusts his bulbous, bright red nose.
He wonders,
"Are we really beautiful to God, as some say?
And if so, why then does He toy with us,
Setting us down in a chaotic and violent world?"

During the performance that evening,
Another clown, Bird Brain, trips Boffo while they are chasing the clowns' fire wagon with leaky, polka dot hoses.
Boffo falls.
The crowd guffaws.
Still face-planted, Boffo reflects upon the terrible schadenfreude that characterizes human struggle.

Back in his trailer,
The opiates sometimes make Boffo contemplate the Divine,
Though, just as often, he simply nods in front of some ridiculous infomercial,
Linda comatose and drooling at his side.
Occasionally, these ponderings stay with him into the next day.
Stepping into a pair of gigantic yellow pants,
Taking care to rig the suspenders so that the pants will fall down at the proper moment,
Boffo wants to know--
Is life just some sort of silly joke?
But then it is show time,
And he follows the plumed horses and the acrobats out into the lights.
_____


linked to dverse OLN

The Stone Baby

Blessed Saint Creola appears in a village where, they say,
A woman has borne a stone baby.

No suitable bassinet can be found, and so the stone baby is placed
In a wheelbarrow. Religious graffiti soon covers it.

The mother is unhappy. Her baby does not have babysoft skin.
He does not smell nice. He seems to belong in a quarry.

Driven mad by having to lift her baby with a hoist, she takes him to bathe
In the lake near Saint Creola's shrine, but of course,

He sinks immediately to the bottom. A tow truck hauls him out
On the end of a good sturdy chain; the good news is

That the stone baby has no injuries. No skinned knee, no
scraped elbow. Still, he cannot play with the other children

Out of fear that he will will topple over on them. Sitting by himself,
He is accosted by the village bully, who hits him, breaking his own hand.

"Beautiful Saint Creola," cries the mother. "I have given birth to a
Cannon ball. His own weight breaks his bed. What can we do?"

It is said by those who were there, that the lovely and holy Saint Creola
Took up the stone child in her slender arms, and prayed over him,

Turning him to a cloud, which disappeared into the open blue sky.
In time, the child's mother gave birth to numerous birds,

Unmatched in the perfection of both their feathers and their souls;
"Behold, I give you sisters to bear your spirit up to God," spoke the mother.

It is another miracle of the celebrated Saint Creola...
Birds and brother, wheeling upon the very countenance of the Divine.
______
for Ella's mini challenge at Real Toads.