21

When she was arrested, she was wearing her baker boy hat

with the love poem tucked behind the inner band.

She had her backpack, her phrase book,

her connections and her suburban background.

Oh say can you see her falling like a shot bird, blood on the golden feathers?

She came to skate and got the slew foot boot,

a thump on the back and a smirking salutation.

By the dawn's early light I had thought her the world's most beautiful marvel

as she slept and her skin invited my kiss like a host catching the swaying guest.

I thought her a brown Sahara where it rains every afternoon

and the sun is stupid with lazy contentment.

She did business in cafes and book stores, where so proudly we hailed

the baristas and glasses-girls who chose the books we couldn't read.

From a distance she looked like a mistake, a wrong detail in a genius watercolor,

a runaway from another time, heads together with some local joker.

Time thickens when you get bad news. 

It's like a heart attack that takes all week.

I wrote her a poem as she slept, and the poem had a silver tongue.

It was something about Morr0ccan markets and calling peacocks,

an opium dream I cooked up stone cold sober except for woozy desire.

I tucked it in the inner band of her baker boy hat, folded with origami care.

I thought she would find it later, a swami love-joke to make her happy,

never knowing I would leave the country alone from a cold airport

by the twilight's last gleaming, the departures flipping over like a folded hand.

________

for qbit's excellent Akhmatova word list. 

Word Garden Word List Prompt #1 (Fitzgerald)

 

Hello and welcome to a new prompt I am going to host here at Word Garden. Every Monday at midnight for as long as I shall dig it, and excepting major holidays, I will provide a list of words derived from a themed source. 

Please use at least 3 of the 20 words provided to write either a poem of any style or length, or a "flash 55", which is a piece consisting of exactly 55 words not counting the title. Variations of the words are allowed. Simply leave the link for your post in the comment section. Prompt remains "live" thru Friday.

This week's 20 words are all derived from the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here they are:

champagne

cigarettes

dark-haired

delirious

edition

feather

feverish

flabby

hotel

morning

mournful

pocket

precariously

sorry

tremendously

trespasser

unsteadily

Vienna

withering

________

I Linger In Dreams

I linger in dreams,

large as unspoken devotion,

warming a small world from its center with my body.

Brenda Lee, "Little Miss Dynamite"

whispers sweet nuthin's in the bowl of one ear,

her body a soft jukebox, my tongue coated with quarters.

Billie Holiday, "Lady Day"

sings desires, a pigfoot and a bottle of beer

to the spoon of my other ear like a sweet poppy mother. 

Above, jostling spheres, circular activity, temples, threnodies.

I linger in dreams, a small world warmed from its center 

with hallucinations, 

hagiographies,

harmonies.

_________

for Sunday Muse

The Next Voice You Hear

Poster,
please stick to relevant things--
the throes of nature,
the hilarious pratfalls of modern love, or
figures of worship in their august magnificence.

Stop this foolishness about hair styles,
haiku,
and what your husband does in his garage--
the world is filled with such horrors already.

Commune with your higher self,
fast, clear your mind and physical body,
then return to us and to your postings.

Tell us about your ex-convict grandfather
and the spotlight he keeps in the attic.
Give us stuff that works at the box office,
such as your journey from Jenny Craig to heroin and cult religion.

Reveal to us your unabashed embrace
of outre philosophies garnered from the complex and authentic human being you met at the bus stop.

In summary, cut the crap and give us
your True Self
in all of her shadows and lights.
Give us the hagiographic treatment, 
the old college try,
Pose for a picture holding a French visa open to show your patronymic name.

Otherwise, we unsubscribe
and banish you to a wilderness where only dumb animals and cosplay Vikings can survive in the late-winter rot of your usual content.

Regards,

MichiganSally52
________

from a word list for post #3 of my 39 in 39 days.

Autobiography In Miniature

It was in Oregon at the sliding icing end of the 70's.
A bus had brought me there,
barfing me up a block from a cafe where my boots dried out and so did I, more or less.

"Danny's" it was called. The goth chick looking out-of-it in the back corner claimed to be a succubus.
Whatever, honey.
We all suck at something.
It might as well be souls.

I scammed a tampon off of her and swore
that if I were still here by Wednesday I'd be a different woman,
open a kissing booth at the county fair or
marry a soccer star from Brazil and crank out kids.
I was certain it could be easily done, here on Highway 61.

So, how did I ever get from there to here, you ask,
spinning at my keyboard loom, all these poems and whatnot?
It was when I winged a napkin holder at my imaginary friend
there in Danny's Coffee Shop, Anytown, USA,
bruising her imaginary eye and changing the look of myself,
that I found The Way.

Blurring the edges is all I've done,
but the gray in my hair elicits assumptions
that I'm basically good,
can bake,
and have fifteen cats at home destroying the sofa.

You know what, Bo Peep? Two of those things are true--
Three guesses which.
______

From a word list kindly provided by *. I used most of them and gave the rest to The American Haiku Foundation.

Oregon

61

kissing booth

sapphire 

foursome 

keyboard 

cafe 

blurring the edges 

tampons 

bruising her eye 

candles in the rain 

soccer shirt 

Lady H. M. Ainsley-Billington--A Celebratory Retrospective

Lady Hortense MacFarquhar Ainsley-Billington, grande dame of the English stage, is celebrated as much for being as pale and sweet as a blancmange as for her operatic rendering of the timeless classic "When, In Momentary Slumb'r, My Love Doth Recline."

One can scarcely hope to catalog all of Lady Hortense's triumphs in this small space. However, no one will ever forget her command performance at Buckingham Palace when she gave a fist pump upon hitting every note of the impossible five octave "Bobby, Be The Bric-A-Brac On My Curio Shelf," prompting the attending Royals to initiate an instantaneous in-the-aisles hokey pokey break dance such has never been seen before or since.

A month later, once again lucid after an unfortunate episode involving character actor and sometime companion Fredo Pastalini and "just a smidgen" of Chinese opium, Lady H. wowed 'em at the Royal Albert Hall when she sang "My Boy Lollipop" accompanied by a revue of muscular and scandalously (un)clad male dancers. Pausing for a photo-op with Lord Hampstead, Lady H. confided that she was happy all the folderol regarding her tryst with "my little Hamster man" had died down, though of course her referencing it left Lord Hampstead seething and abashed while Lady H. appeared positively smug! 

Interviewed for this article, Lady Hortense opined that, in her view, today's "slipshod copycat noise" cannot hold a candle to the "passion and derring-do" of the electric folk emo metal which first launched her into the limelight. Pontificating quite charmingly on a range of subjects, she reminded this writer time and again of why Edmund Mumzet-Pagliatano bestowed, in Your Evening Calling Card that famous sobriquet "The Sublime Hortense" on our national darling, Lady Ainsley-Billington.  There is no other like her.
____

for Get Listed.

The Winter Guest

You were the winter guest
wrapped in scarves and leather,
and I was the girl with red hair
and a dollar on the dresser.

One night, eating on the cheap
at the Chinese restaurant downstairs,
you turned an egg roll into a talking dog
who called me her Heart....her Air.

Do you remember when I played you
the song about a nightingale in Berkeley Square?
You called me a granny and kissed my ear,
then dropped your coat on a kitchen chair.

I loved the delicate balance
of my quilt on your back--
candle light in my bedroom--
and all of that....

You were the winter guest
wrapped in cable knit and leather;
now I'm a lonesome nightingale
with a scarf on her dresser.
______

from a word list.

 

Woman In A Coffee Bar

I don't look like much, but when I open my mouth, 
they send the bomb squad and a priest.

Standing there at the counter, that dress makes me both jealous and repentant
of the things I want to declare at the border of your beauty.
Does the world seem blurry,
silent-movie sped,
to you, too?
Or are you as contained as a coconut,
as cool,
as necessary and as removed

from earthbound spirits?
You'd like me, if only you'd release your carnality into my custody.
I'm nervous, but that's all the time.
I'm the girl with a locust under each eyelid;
all I have to do is look,
and everything reduces to simple appetite.

Don't condemn me, I'll pay whatever back tax you demand.
Just come over here. Soon. Admire me, too.
Tell me I'm the ladybug you've been looking for
despite the fire department,
child protective services,
and, especially, the aftermath predicted for my bedding
by the tarot card I keep in my bag to notify
handsome firefighters and lady doctors of my special conditions.

Someone sent me their heart by telegram once.
It was too slow, and they had
to use dynamite and a blowtorch to get into the crypt I was renting at the time.
I came back to life anyway, though,
just now,
when I saw you standing at the counter.

I said to myself, there's the drug I've been kept off of--
the stuff cats and deep water divers know about,
made from equal parts next year's pandemic,
mother's milk and
the smell of pussy on the pillow, one's fingers (nails trimmed short) and
a book of favorite Catholic hymns
that we'll use to prop the door

so the breeze can come in, as you should as soon as you possibly can.
_______ 

From the following word list. I did not use all of them.

carrot

soon

seducer

deepwater

condemn

blowtorch

locust

urban

coconut

fluctuation

flesh

blurry

aftermath

ladybug

decadence

crypt