My Gibbet

My gibbet is a fine and private place

where a lady may tarry of a summer afternoon

elevated and untouchable--

an ideal love just out of reach

like fruit for Tantalus, all pointless sweetness.

Allen Ginsberg appears from out of the crowd,

pink as a schoolmarm, fat as a Christmas goose

carrying his harmonium

singing about plutonium,

barefoot as any angel, toking on the Golden Blunt.

He looks up, mistaking me for a caught kite

dangling above the street in my gibbet

making other women's children

point and cry

demanding candy or weather reports.

Someone climbs up and ties tin cans

to the bottom of my gibbet

in an atmosphere of giddy holiday.

I die and begin to stink

pieces falling away like confetti.

Here I sway to this very day, high above 

the Emily Dickinson Parkway

a paragon of virtue and demure reserve,

dead as hell

black as a bowling ball

ring still on my finger, an ingenue of the afterlife, 

until gentrification when they'll take me down

because gibbets are out, they're upsetting,

like poetry, 

like dead dodos

like buskers in the subway, beautiful, buried, irrelevant.

_______

for Word Garden Word List.

A Strange Place To Die

 

The Polo Grounds was a strange place for a man to die. 

Across the way at 515 Edgecombe Avenue,

14-year-old Robert Mario Peebles' enthusiasm

for the 4th of July hit just above Barney Doyle's eye,

killing him instantly as he watched infield practice.

He never got to see the game. 

Thirty years earlier, a fellow everyone considered to be

a mean bastard delivered a fatal pitch submarine-style.

Back on the farm, his daddy had taught Carl Mays never to back down.

Ray Chapman never got up.

No, wait, after being hit with a dirty, hard-to-see ball

with an impact so loud that Mays thought it was a hit,

Ray Chapman got up, fell, rose, and fell again on the baseline.

"Tell Mays I'm all right," were his last words.

Ray Chapman was a man with the world on a string.

Good-looking, friendly Ray, playing out one last season

at the sport he loved, was newly married and set up in a good job.

He even got on well with quarrelsome Ty Cobb

who was said to have killed a man in Detroit.

The world was his oyster.

In a New York hospital, Ray Chapman got better, then worse,

then was gone forever. His widow lived just eight more years herself.

Carl Mays never felt he had done anything wrong

on a dusty diamond July 4th, 1920 in Manhattan, New York City.

The Polo Grounds was a strange place for a man to die. 

_________

for What's Going On? An Historical Moment.  

Music: Jeff Buckley I Know It's Over

The Hosting Tree

 

What idle devil limned your voice

with salt of falsity

and set such poison in the heart

that was so kind to me?

The thing that curled and grew there had

its own vitality

just as the lush green climbing vine

kills the hosting tree.

_________

I wrote this for Word Garden Word List--Stephen Crane, but only used three of the words and one of them got removed during editing. As a result, I haven't linked this to the prompt, but that was its origin, nevertheless. 

Reanimated Lavender Granola Switchblade Nun Rides Again

 

Halloween is fun but it's over and the 

candy-scamming spooks

are back in class.

Turkeys wearing pilgrim hats are taped

on the windows and the President

pardons some tom

who has no idea what these talky apes are laughing about.

He'd rather be out in the woods,

eating fruits and nuts

and taking a run at your car on a dirt road when you blow by

for cider and a donut.

From what I read, pilgrims

were a pretty constipated bunch.

When I was outed, the family holiday invitations

dried right up. Poof!

After Halloween, the faux dead rest, but when real people die,

sometimes it takes some time.

Some make nice

some get high

some find a new family

some suicide.

Me, I survived, hanging out with the fruits and nuts,

and my blood and kin?  

Dead to me as if they'd fallen on some foreign shore.

_________

for Dverse Poetics: Epiphany In The Time of Holiday

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.

____________

Pearl Harbor

What you did before?
Can't do it anymore.
Shoulda done it when ya could've, say all the dark mothers,
whispering from the walls. 

Lookitcha.
Fat as a battle ship, slow as one, too.
Girrrrl.
Unh unh unh.

All that time, the Zeros were flying,
there you were,
lazy as an umbrella in last night's drink.

Now you're a mess, damn.
On fire and sinking,
feel like shit all the time, and might lose that breast. 

Steam for the mouth of the harbor,
and tell that stupid band to shut up.
Who the fuck are those guys in the planes, where'd they come from?

So many questions, you're so inquisitive! Let me try to answer.
No, this isn't a drill.
Yes, those are real bullets.
No, you never did anything to them; they don't even know you.
Yes, they're trying to kill you.

What's that last question you asked, dear?
On purpose? Bless your heart. They came out of the Sunday sky, that's all.
_______

Reconsidering Liars

"Let there be light."
Did you think
He had it just lying around?
The sun, the stars....all made up.

Billy Robinson was an upstate New Yorker of Scottish ancestry,
a magician who reinvented himself
as Chung Ling Soo, Chinese conjurer,
ripping off most of his act from another vaudevillian.

His wife Suee Seen was really named "Dot." 
They weren't really married.
She was as American as he was.

Consider this:
"America" is a construct. 
You start with trees, bears and native tribes,
kill most of them, plant a flag and
Voila! America. Something that wasn't there before,
like a rabbit out of a hat.

You'll argue that it was there, just different,
like "your" card, now at the top of the deck every time,
fanned in the illusionist's hands.

Watch and learn, padewon.
Billy Robinson whipped lather in a mug and shaved off his moustache,
used greasepaint to darken his complexion,
threw on some bright Oriental robes,
and started banking the cash from the suckers who came for his act.

God would tell you,
ya gotta have a gimmick,
whether you call it Manifest Destiny or The Ten Commandments.
Billy's was a stunt he called "Condemned to Death by the Boxers."

Marked bullets were loaded into rifles wielded by stooges in costume;
the weapons were rigged not to fire,
but Chung Ling Soo would appear to catch the deadly missiles with a china plate.
However,
the sun and stars are slowly burning themselves out,
and the rifles became worn with cleaning.

Bam! Bam! And down went Billy, right there on stage.
"I've been shot," he said, in astonished perfect English.
You can look on Wikipedia today and find Chung Ling Soo's whole story.
Do you think that if he had stayed Billy,
kept his moustache,
and sold tam o' shanters in a shop all his life,
that anyone would remember him now?

Let there be light,
how ever it is made, and how ever far it has to travel
to get here.
________