Casa Tiger

 

Every movie can be improved by adding a hungry tiger into it--

a bullet-proof tiger who can talk, but

only speaks in aphorisms and maxims.

The tiger's voice should sound like broad green leaves 

and love language.

High Noon with Gary Cooper, bad guys, and a bullet-proof tiger.

Citizen Kane with a talking tiger on a sled.

Casablanca with a tiger behind the bar, saying,

"Love is like the stripes of a zebra; 

bright and dark touching but still apart and always moving."

Real life could be enhanced as well. 

The tiger could eat people who don't allow their dogs upstairs,

who cut in line, and who take duckface selfies.

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away!"

the tiger would say while standing over their bones,

full with both flesh and satisfaction.

You could come over.

We can watch movies--with tigers in them!--

spouting maxims and bromides,

wrestling feverishly with each other and with the notion

of tigers knowing anything about zebras or hearts

except that they are foolish things

made of meat

and consumable.

____

for Shay's Word Garden Word List--Incidents Around the House

Hollyhocks, Sunflowers, Marigolds

 

Hollyhocks, sunflowers, marigolds

in a field by a white barn waving

where the orange cat searches for the little voles

hollyhocks, sunflowers, marigolds

just a stone's throw over from the spring foals

and the little stream its low banks laving

hollyhocks, sunflowers, marigolds

in a field by a white barn waving.

______

a triolet for Lillian's image

over at Dverse Open Link. 

 

Canaan

I keep a lock on the fallboard 
to keep silence on the keys.
It's not there for kitty, but for the Destroyer, 
the Hell-spawned vaccuum-souled Imp
who leans in the doorway and pipes up
that the adagio is "nice."

Follow me to my playing place,
and I will knock you down the stairs with a spiked club. 
I do this for the sake of my instrument, 
blind and trusting in every way that I am not.

If we have just made love,
our breath as close and sweet as roosting doves,
do not think that now you may ask me to "play something."
The window is glass--you will fall two floors with the shards.

I have preserved this spare garret
through hundred-year storms and momentary bullshit
using every avenue of preservation a girl can summon.
Now, in even solitude, I free the fallboard,
set fingertips to white strikers, 
and look to kitty, in his terrible authority.

As before? I ask.
His eyes are unblinking, 
and His instrument fills like a ewer in Canaan.
________

for Sunday Muse #97.

Power

"The scientists say
It will all wash away
But we don't believe any more
Cause we've got our recruits
And our green mohair suits
So please show your I.D. At the door."--"Sin City" by Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons

Power only lasts a minute,
like lion piss on the trunk of a tree
keen on the next rain.

Girl, you're somebody's Venus,
but not everyone's;
while you give some fool your smile and make another one wait hope and suffer,
here I am, up from a trap-door Hell, denying you mine. 

Zebra have nightmares of being chased,
when they dare sleep at all.
All are destroyers to the ant, even a bumbling child.

See the sun, the same one that burns
the cat, the commander, 
the egg shell CEO and that cunt on the corner,
rising above them all.

Feel your own roar shaking the earth itself.
Dig it, but remember,
the legions with their whips and cages and clocks
have a circus to make you the foil of
in a Rome you've not imagined--more real than this desert you terrify today.
_________ 

for the mini-challenge at Real Toads: "Juice."

Short Fingernails Rag

With white Mickey Mouse hands, I disguise my touch along your railroad bones.
If you feel a little goofy, ginned up, off-balance,
it's because I'm directing traffic inside your ears--
cartoon buses with walking tires jive to Cab Calloway, 
on a highway where I goon the intersection with my Mickey Mouse hands--

One finger for stop,
one for go,
and one for vo vo dee oh doe.