Movement In Four Parts

 

Shot-Through-The-Guts had been shot through the guts.

"Tsk tsk," said Portly Pantaloons, packing his pipe. 

"Serves him right!" growled Razormouth, having done it. 

"Might...die..." gasped Shot-Through-The-Guts.

"Tsk tsk," scolded Portly Pantaloons, with his habitual air of mild disapproval.

"He woulda stole my teeth with a monkey wrench!" complained Razormouth, who hated the dentist's smock that Shot-Through-The-Guts liked to wear. 

"It's worn ironically," groaned Shot-Through-The Guts, as a crimson stain spread across his dentist's smock.

"I think it's vulgar!" cried Mrs. Portly Pantaloons indignantly.

Razormouth said nothing, but clicked his teeth together menacingly.

"Where will you go," inquired Portly Pantaloons, gesturing with his pipe, "if you, eh, pass on, as it were?"

"Straight to hell!" interjected Razormouth, dancing from foot to foot.

At that moment, a host of beautiful angels wearing pure white dentist's smocks floated down and tenderly collected Shot-Through-The-Guts, then returned to the clouds.

"Not from this neighborhood I daresay," complained Portly Pantaloons, stamping his cane importantly. "Probably came in on the bus line."

"Dentist's smocks!" bellowed Razormouth, his little eyes widening. "I shoulda plugged 'em! I shoulda....I..."

"There there," cooed Mrs. Portly Pantaloons distractedly. Turning to her husband, she asked, "What bus line, dear? They seemed to appear out of the sky." 

Portly Pantaloons, grunted, mumbled something that seemed very definite in his sonorous baritone, and pretended great interest in a bird across the way. Mrs. Portly Pantaloons was still talking, and Razormouth was still blubbering, but by then, Portly Pantaloons' mind was far away, calculating ways to manufacture more monkey wrenches, more dentist's smocks, and more shooters-through-the-guts, at the least cost, with the widest distribution, and at the highest profit. 

The bird, whose name was Captain Poopybird, lifted its tail feathers, pooped, and sang.

___________

for Sunday Muse #156. 

Stunt Pilot

 

I had more to say than my skin could hold,

so lent my tongue to red weedy blooms

and with Winter Mother still and cold

Sawed and planed her coffin rooms.

I had more to go than my feet had bones

so lent my skin to a spring-stormed road,

a cowbird child from a nest of stones

by an April wind to the May field sowed.

I had more to dream than Night could carry

so lent my skull to Mare in trade

for a poppy dream of elderberries

and a jar of poisoned marmalade.

I had more to die than Death could sanction

so lent my trick to an urn of smoke

and hid there in sly satisfaction

tucked like a babe in Lugus' poke.

________

for Sunday Muse # 155. 

Mrs. Daedalus

 

At twenty, I loved how you always had to have the wind in your hair.

You and Diogenes, honest, blunt, tactless assholes

drinking wine on the balcony,

grabbing truth out of thin air with gesticulating hands. 

I adored you and that's nothing new.

At forty-five you haven't changed,

You're still the Greek MacGyver,

but it only makes me want to vomit.

Our son is dead

I don't forgive you

and that's the stone fucking truth.

___________

for Sunday Muse #153.

Austin

 "Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack

I went out for a ride and I never went back" --Bruce Springsteen "Hungry Heart"

When I met you I was nineteen and on intimate terms

with Beat poetry and Budweiser,

sitting at the bowling alley bar, Howl in my hand,

sweat from a gin and tonic on the margins.

You'd read the books I hadn't even heard of yet,

an ex-teacher ten years ahead, 

scrawling The Wall, Jean-Paul Sartre in pencil inside the cover of a book I've still got

and I miss you every time I see it.

I was like a little firefly and you the night,

warm as July, funny as the best bonfire story,

drunk as skunks and amazed with each other,

we made Detroit seem like a thing worth doing twice.

I get that ache, you know, like looking at a night road,

maybe the one you took out of town to an interview that never was.

Couldn't you have given me your unhappy restless heart?

I would've done anything to soothe the blue if you had let me.

From nineteen to thirty is a long stretch.

Maybe it began to feel like a bad fit when I sobered up.

Didn't you know, you were my favorite high and I'm sorry

if your suffering got by me, and I lost you forever 

From being so sure you would always be there.

_____________

for the Sunday Muse #152.

Ginger Bang

There is a fox wrapped around your eye,

his black front feet like lashes,

his back like a ginger bang.

They say a person with a fox around their eye

is shy but up

to something,

makes a poor pet

and makes you miss the morning,

caught like a rooster's neck in the charm of their 

quick and

toothy grin.

____________

This Train

This is the train that circles the sun,

set on a single direction.

Memory has no beginning on this train,

and though I've made my nest in the straw and dirt of an ancient car,

a home in motion never feels like one.

There is no deer trail here, only deaf rails.

The way behind no longer exists except in my longing.

The way ahead is obscured but always near,

like a huntsman and his hounds and so I run while lying still.

This train is containment and escape, a snake eating its tail.

I began helpless but grew strong,

believing the power in my body drove all motion.

I began foolish but wounds made me wiser,

and though I've been quick as winter light and now slow as March thaw,

the train keeps its pace and me with it.

I have leapt and spun in circles and still I rode the train.

Now I sigh and slowly sink to my straw, 

the passing scene softer but filled with phantoms.

My life has been pursuance of prey and sidestepping of traps,

but always, the familiar yet foreign, perhaps imagined

headlong terror of the train.

________

for Sunday Muse #151.

Here

Here

is the place where starlings gather thick as macchiato,

singing expressivo in the morning, bedlam fortissimo at sunset.

Here

is where the old gather silent, still as a reverie,

rallentando until dawn, then second-souled,

blue-eyed, demanding life again, vivace.

Here

discard heavy indigo, the ultramarine of too many days,

dissolve into a new chromatic scale, alive with starlings,

expressing without thinking, dolce, 

glissando,

Here.

______

for The Sunday Muse #150.