Episodes of Sea and Sky

 

Often,

I sleep on a tightwire

with a balancing pole

rising

falling

like a pair of oars.

Often,

I am busy organizing,

counting, ordering

items

that only

exist in my dreams.

High,

wearing shoes with grooved soles

making my way to a 15th floor window

all  I 

so want

is to get it all down 

on paper and set in boxes.

Awake,

it all reduces in an instant

to pointless nonsense.

Ah me.

Impossible

and silly besides. Sometimes,

someone loved me--they're gone too.

Often,

this splitting of my mind

is like an updraft out of my everyday skin.

My useless

looping tasks

give me purpose, and comfort

and favored faces alongside.

Often,

morning makes off

with these impossible pufferies

and I

rise

but it feels like falling

very fast, from height.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Let the Right One In. 

 

Music: Bronson Know Me

It's Complicated.

CaveMAN: "Find mastodon, kill mastodon, 
eat mastodon, fuck wife, sleep.

CaveWOMAN: "Find masto--
hey, what are those flowers called?
They'd look nice on--
is Zug allergic?
Find masto--
Fug doesn't like mastodon. Mammoth, then?
Find mammoth, kill--
wait.
Mammoth goes straight to my hips.
*sigh*
Did I pick up the furs?
Dammit, cramps!
Okay,
find mastodon...
______

a 55 for everybody's favorite primitive, the G Man!

Hell Is Empty

You're right--
I failed to thank you for the pulsing crimson cancers you placed in little stiff formal envelopes
and then jammed into the heartwood of my bones.

I have been ungrateful
for your vigilance in doing surgery to my neck
with the sharp edges of your tiny Japanese fan,
that I might not succumb to pride.
How diligent you have been,
cut, cut, cutting just a hair's breadth each time,
but repeated so lovingly for so long
that my head now lolls 
and my new mouth is silent but lets my heart out in sprays.

I am abashed
that I have never properly expressed my admiration for your indestructible mask
that smiles within a flawless porcelain skin
while a roiling rot explodes underneath like a burst aneurism. 

All right. As you wish, then.
We shall pretend
that you do these things because you love me,
and that they do not murder my lit nerves with hammers and snake venom.
I will smile,
sick and struck with putrefaction,
lying worse than a waterboarded used car salesman when I croak out, "Mother,
yours is the very face of tender kindness."
You will blush and preen on cue,
but we both know you will never really be satisfied
with anything short of my complete demolition.
________

for grapeling's fantastic "masks" challenge at Real Toads.

. 
 

Review of "Mother"

Mother by Linda Ann Rentschler

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Here it is, The Worst Novel Ever Written. I only read it all the way through as a sort of exercise in endurance, and to see how laughably awful the writing could become. Here's the answer: really, really awful.

Rentschler is the Queen of hyperbolic, cheaply emotional scenes populated by cardboard characters from central casting, described in utterly talentless prose, as they act out plotlines that are so unlikely and/or boring that to read them is to experience a massive die-off of brain cells. You know that completely talentless housewife at the local adult ed writing group? It's Rentschler. No, strike that. That's unfair to the housewife.

I don't know what weird time warp Rentschler lives in, but while her story is supposedly set in the present (the book came out in 2007), her college students listen to their music on "albums" and cassettes (!) with nary a cd or a mp3 to be found. Her two main characters meet at a luncheonette, over cherry Cokes. Wait, it gets better. The grief wall in the student union has pictures of deceased celebrities, but they are all old, like John Lennon, JFK, and Marilyn Monroe. The only "new" name she mentions is River Phoenix! No Kurt Cobain in Rentschler's world.

The whole book seems more like 1957 than 2007. Even while on her big adventure of taking time away from her family to (gasp!) smoke cigarettes and (shock, horror!) stay up past midnight and (facepalm!) have a tarot reading, her main character keeps lapsing into musings about housecleaning and casseroles.

All through this novel, everyone is always bursting into tears, falling down, having conniption fits of wild emotion at the drop of a hat. This includes women, men, everybody. Also, the main character, Mary, relentlessly treats everyone as if they were eight years old. For her son's eighteenth birthday, she and her young friend brainstorm and hit on party hats, noisemakers and cowboy napkins. Then Mary runs out and buys him a puppy! Lord above.

Like I said...Worst. Novel. Ever.



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