A Cautionary Tale For Young Gardeners

 

There was a seed lying on the ground.

She picked it up when nobody was around.

She turned it over, lifted to the light.

It turned her fingers an upsetting sickly white.

"Little seed,

(she said)

Imma plant ya in the yard.

Imma plant ya

(she said)

where the ground is wicked hard."

Next day--

a big, black, dangerous-looking vine.

it say,

"Feed me skittering bugs and water me with wine.

Sleep with me at night

until you start to lose your sight.

Whisper me your mind

until you've gone all white-eyed blind.'

What happened to Dakota?

She went outside without a coat-a.

Found a seed from a devil weed

and down the wicked Styx she float-a. 

______

for What's Going On? -- "seed"

Music: Grace Potter & the Nocturnals White Rabbit

Margin Notes from Charles Dickens' Teacher

 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

A nice beginning, Charles, but perhaps a little bit undecided? You want a good strong direction to your opening. Try to choose one or the other and build on it!

it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness

Please refer to my first remark!

It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,

Very nice, Charles, but when you read this to the class today, you pronounced "epoch" as "e-poach." The correct pronunciation rhymes with "luck." It was wonderful, though, to see you come out of your shell! :-)

it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness

Unless you are referring to titles or proper names, capitals are not needed here. 

it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair

Don't forget that setting is crucial, Charles. What season is it? Do not confuse your reader!

we had everything before us, we had nothing before us

Charles... I can see that you're trying very hard on this assignment. Good for you! However, and once again, you want to be more definite here!

We were all going direct to Heaven,

Oh Charles. Religion is such a touchy subject and in class we want always to be as inclusive as possible. How about "direct to Des Moines" instead?

we were all going direct the other way--

Good, Charles, good! Everyone loves a travel story!

in short, the period was so far like the present period

We'll cover punctuation next week-- periods, commas and so forth. Just stay with your narrative--you can always go back and edit these things later, after we've covered that material. 

that some of its noisiest authorities insist on being received, for good or for evil,

Never let your writing lapse into moral ambiguity, Charles. While it's true that the AP English class will be studying "Les Miserables", here we want to stick to basics. Remember, you can't be The Polar Express until you've mastered being The Little Engine That Could! 

in the superlative degree of comparison only. 

This last sentence seems muddled to me, Charles. Did you mean "degree" as an indicator of the season, as brought up in your earlier line?  Moreover, all comparisons should best be accomplished by means of simile and metaphor, not by flat statement. 

Charles, don't be discouraged. We all err! You've made a fine beginning here, and with work and patience (and listening in class instead of drawing stick figure soldiers doing battle on the side of the page!) I believe that you can achieve a mastery of basic writing skills! Keep at it. I very much look forward to helping you to learn and improve as the school year continues! 

C+

_____________

for Diving Into Margins over at Dverse, with Queen Cool Dora.

Music: 10,000 Maniacs You Happy Puppet

 

AP Stray Cat Yawp

 

Think of a time when you embarrassed yourself

and the cold wet sand of your heart 

dropped in clumps down 

through your stomach.

Start there.

Fetch up a memory of raw-throated sobbing,

when you beat the sofa arm or the floor

as if it were responsible for the

wasp's nest in your heart. 

Open up, little glass, fill with it.

Leave pretty sunsets for painters or postcard publishers.

What we're after here is waking inside a coffin,

falling from height, the whole empty belly

lonesome lack of it all.

Don't shake your head like you don't know. 

The thing you cannot even think is the thing you have to tell.

Will they consider you crazy, the only one

who ever did/felt/wanted/made love to

that?

Behold the mute tongueless many saying you spoke for them.

The poet is the person who threads out their own veins,

stews their every experience, fears nothing,

stands on one leg on a high wire,

all because they can't not.

Otherwise, they would just be cross-eyed babies

waving bright toy telephones to nobody,

and calling it art.

_______

for Desperate Voicings

Music: DJ Dero The Horn 

A Canine Cautionary Tale

The dog who chewed the couch
insisted at first that the sectional had offended God--
and other odd statements,
finally blaming the previous dog, which had died.

Nothing could make the dog admit
that it had worried and bit and torn the fabric
in a manic effort
to find out if any food was hidden inside.

The dog eventually hired a lawyer
in an effort to be coyer,
and declared that he hadn't even been there.
I almost believed him...

...until he started on the chair.
_______

CBU

Maude Millicent Rosevear, generally considered pleasant and quite the beauty,
sent her hopes off, by mail, in 1955.
Consider her surprise when they return to her in 2015. 

Maude, now aged seventy five,
nearly trips over the parcel while walking out of her door
on her way to the pharmacy for her numerous prescriptions.

"Non-standard surcharge," states one of the rubber stampings.
(That business with Alice, at college, in 1959?)
The postal system cares about her package. The plastic wrapping says so.
Nonetheless, they have returned it.

"Postage due", "Addressee Unknown", "Unclaimed" all on the side.
Bent, frail, living in a mother-in-law apartment attached to her son's house,
Maude supposes the return of her hopes was inevitable, 
but it didn't feel that way when she sent them. 

Maude goes back inside and sits down to compose a letter--
--an old fashioned paper letter--
to the Unabomber in prison. 

"Dear Teddy," she writes, "I finally understand."
Perhaps this one will get through, she thinks.
Perhaps he will even answer, and if he does, 
she must be sure to be the first one to the mailbox, and to not lose her key.
_______ 

for Get Listed at Real Toads. I used "prison", "mail", "inevitable", and "system".

CBU--Cluster Box Unit, a freestanding outdoor multiple delivery receptacle for mail.

CBU-55--cluster bomb fuel air explosive. 

Pictures of Heartbreak, Poems in the Spokes of a Wheel

Here is how I imagined my heart:
blood compromised, made thin and blue by work schedules,
thoughtless words,
kindnesses forgotten,
mad-making obstacle dreams and stale air
arriving at the right atrium like someone stumbling in out of the snow;

Received like a guest, served coffee and cookies,
surrounded by the biological greenery outside the atrium,
this blood eventually slipping through the delicate leaflets 
of the tricuspid valve into the guest room quiet of the right ventricle.

Shall I go on? Isn't it obvious, the druggy dream of the pulmonary artery,
the bloom of new love in the left atrium,
the free fall through the mitral valve into the left ventricle
with its clocks and chimes, and finally the aorta into the unknown?
This was my concept, my imagining.

Reality was this:
An endless rain, the filth of the floodwaters bringing
boards, bodies, houses, livestock and death on a black surge,
an ink to begin my poetry with.
Within my chest, the wheel, the weird carnival,

All I had ever consumed or breathed gathered in ceremony,
children being born and let go but never let go,
the shout above the wind, the wonderful stupidity of the church tower
or widow's walk in a lightning storm,
the stanzas, the strophes, the angeldust afterbirth of all I needed to say.

Go ahead, tell the one whose love you need the most
that you are dropping out of med school,
that you are bisexual,
that you have knocked over a bank and shot the President;
they may forgive you, or at least pretend to.

Finally, tell them you are a poet and watch them walk away.
Feel the flood, the fever and fire--
then, dear heart, start writing.
_______

for Fireblossom Friday at Real Toads

 

 

MIDWEST-4-2313

The woman who wouldn't stop talking
caused the telephone to kill itself.
For weeks after that, the operator stalked the talking woman,
fantasizing about pushing her in front of a train or a bus,
and the disturbing glee she would feel--
the drug rush of wonderful silence.

Day after day, the operator imagined scenes of accident,
murder,
the stupid woman strangled with her own tongue.

However, a repairman began paying attention to the operator.
He brought her movie tickets and hard candies;
he admired her to no end, and rarely spoke.
After months of quiet dinners and good manners at the cinema,
he tried something. She let him.

In the intimacy of afterwards, she began to confide in him.
She told him that ivy was her favorite plant, crows her favorite bird.
Further, she confessed her hatred of the talking woman to him,
and how she had been following her and planning cold-blooded murder.
He said nothing, and she loved him for it.

Unfortunately, the repairman never came by for her again.
Her number disappeared from every directory in the city,
and moving men came to take her bed away to the lunatic asylum.
With no place to sleep, and no man to confide in, she began to pace,
muttering to herself all night. 

Desperate and cracking, she appeared late one evening at the talking woman's door.
"May I use the phone?"
The woman only gaped at her, finally saying simply, "It's dead,"
but that should have been obvious, given the repair truck at the curb,
parked there for so long that ivy had begun to wind itself possessively around the axles.
______

Dialed up for Magpie #274

I Was Old When I Fell In Love

I was old when I fell in love.
You should have seen the local teenagers--
so respectful as they removed my heavy groceries,
my shoulder bag
and my house keys.

My blood had gone sluggish in my veins,
like the biddy who holds up the drug store line,
blindly picking ancient coins from a tiny purse.
Is that a penny or a dime?
Systolic or diastolic?
How much was it, again?

Oh go ahead, laugh.
I was old when I fell in love,
like the bird that goes bright after blundering into a window--
red as a June rose, 
sliding slowly down the pane,
as elegant as a silent-era diva expiring in the fourth reel.

And my beloved?
She bakes, and goes up in the trees 
searching the branches all morning long.
In late afternoon when I begin to nod,
she tells me there is a future for everyone.
Then she offers me cake,
fluff filled with holes,
made to rise with crossed fingers, oil, and eggs.
_______

Aztecs

"If there are Aztecs in the hall,
lock the door
and hide your heart."

Such were the final writings of Anne-April Prilly
in 1967.

From that point on,
she did not write.
From that point on,
she seemed to have taken her own advice--
gazing blankly at the babies her friends continually had,
and failing to make the required noises.
"What about it?" she would say,
turning away and folding her arms
when offered an infant to exclaim over.

In 1967,
Aztecs could have been mistaken for hippies.
A search of Anne-April's hallway revealed nothing,
save for a newspaper, 
rolled up like a stethoscope on the parquet floor.

Through the unfortunate 70s and on into the 80s,
Anne-April remained unmoved.
Between her lungs, she tried keeping a sugar bowl,
but it was no use--
she was only hounded by collectors
who wanted complete sets, and not just the incidentals.

She also tried a plastic bear containing real clover honey,
but, nestled within Anne-April's warmthless bosom,
the honey spoiled
despite all assurances.

Finally, in 2006, Anne-April returned home,
using a skeleton key to get in.
She opened windows, bought art prints,
and even resumed writing. 
She tried to find her old friends, 
so that she could exclaim, if belatedly, over their children,
but the children were grown and scattered,
the friends wary, with medical alert devices around their necks
as if at any moment they might drop dead.

Naturally, Aztecs appeared once again in Anne-April's hallway.
Such dogged creatures!
She cracked the door and crooked a finger at one shirtless savage.
"In here, sailor," she said,
letting her robe slip off her shoulders.

She was old by then, but with angry gods to satisfy,
the Aztec wasn't sweating the details.
At least she had done her nails, fixed her hair.
Still, it was a dirty trick what she did next, snatching back her heart
with her last bit of strength.

Cradling it like a baby,
with bright red blood running down her forearms,
Anne-April was just glad to have found the thing she'd lost;
So glad, in fact, that she kissed the astounded illiterate brute
and meant it.
______

 

Mexican Poet

You lay the Mexican poet down between us
on the fading blue moon and stars of our overwashed sheets.
You told me, open as a new bottle of wine,
how you loved him,
how he wrapped his words around your heart
like a morning glory vine around a nested stinger.

I should have listened to the skinny about bi women--
they will always leave you twice.
There is a reason why
sun and moon rarely share the sky,
and when they do, it is always in half-light--
that darling of killers, clergy, and affected stand-in bullshitters.

I know it was just a book,
just a moment,
just translated soul settling inside our skins,
turning them to sandpaper. 
The real blame belongs with my jar of hoarded scorpions,
scattered in our hair,
blooms on two brittle garlands lovely in any language
but never meant to last the night.
______

for Real Toads mini-challenge.

The Cat Who Spoke

Missus Doctor Figg-Millett was dusting her husband's study,
dusting, in fact, the skeleton of a re-articulated cat,
when, without really thinking about it,
she complained aloud about not having a staff.

"Fuck you," said the fleshless feline.
"I have no staff either, and it was quite a useful one.
Look at me now. How can I love? Eat? Spray?
Your husband is an idiot.
All humans are idiots.
They value the branch but burn the leaves,
prize the package but throw away the contents.
So, fuck you and the good doctor, too."

Cats rarely mince words.

Doctor Figg-Millett arrived home from his practice to find
Missus Doctor Figg-Millett had taken to her bed.
"Are you ill?' he inquired uncertainly from the doorway.
"I want a cat," she replied.
"Nonsense. Cats shed."
"Fuck you," said Missus Doctor, shocking him with the unwonted curse word.
Then she added, "I want a lover,
and some opium. Maybe even an automobile."

Cats and women have often been seen as similar.

Doctor Figg-Millett hoped that some broth and a cessation
from reading novels might ease his wife's malaise,
but as the days passed, she shat in the potted palm,
and destroyed the curtains in trying to climb them.
One afternoon, she gave herself a climax,
then stared at her fingers in astonishment.
She even remarked that women certainly deserved the franchise,
and that's when Doctor Figg-Millett had had enough.

How he fell down the stairs is anybody's guess.
No one really credited Missus Doctor's claim
that a cat had tripped him half way down,
as the Figg-Milletts owned no cat. 
Yes, she did gesture with her cigarette at the re-articulated tom sitting upon the doctor's desk,
but really, how absurd!
"It can say 'fuck you'," she added,
and then seconded the demised feline's alleged sentiments herself.

That night, the various policemen complained to their wives
about the whole unpleasant business,
and the wives listened in demure silence 
except for a certain Missus Elroy MacDougal, who requested a cat.
_______

June

That June, I was on my back in daisies,
happy, high as a goldfinch on a space station.

Wait, what June?
There was no June like that.

Having begun with lies, let me continue,
but this time with bigger better lies, whoppers, impossible bullshit...

I played autoharp at Woodstock,
and made out with June Carter Cash.
On my back in daisies, out on the fringes of Yasgur's farm,
happy, tripping on chords I scored from Joni Mitchell on stage the night before.

Well that's all crap.
I was studying maps of South America in grade school,
braces on my teeth policing every word I said.
But I could sing "Jackson", both parts. So eat shit.

If I were still the debutante I once was,
poised at the top of the staircase, holding a wheelbarrow,
eager to collect my portion of gilded horse manure from the polo pasture of old Birmingham,

I wouldn't be so coarse.
June wouldn't have turned to October,
whites and yellows to browns and deep reds.

When the sun goes down, 
I like to sit in the high weeds next to the Walter P. Reuther expressway.
I am the girl guitarist of the goldenrod,
wailing blues for Toyotas and Subarus,
those invasive species that killed Detroit.

Here is the truth.
I have about reached the limit of how much shit I can take.
If Pontiac and Mercury can disappear, what can be depended upon?
A dog. Goddess bless dogs, but a morsel can distract them.

I'm wondering what can be depended upon,
when June Carter Cash must be about a hundred years old, and Johnny's gone altogether;
Carlene Carter isn't blonde anymore,
and even Emmylou Harris can't get Graham back.

Here in the goldenrod, I'm sober as a Baptist raccoon in a church attic,
six hundred miles and forty-five years from Woodstock,
but I can't help wondering if there might be a mulligan god,
whipping out second chances
and bootleg versions

of Pontiacs and Mercs,
old country singers,
and debs who kicked off their shoes
and barefooted it all the way from Birmingham to You Are Here, USA.
______

from a word list provided by mood wings.

note: June Carter Cash died in 2003. Young me always thought she was pretty dishy.

  

The Fiddler's Cat

The fiddler's cat
keeps one claw in a treble clef--
keeps one eye on the mouse that's left--
the fiddler's cat--
white but not deaf.

The fiddler's cat
caught the note she drew from you--
knows polished maple from driftwood, too--
the fiddler's cat--
can scratch and scratch she do.

The Neighborhood Babe

Wise man say:
Quit with the pidgin already.
If you can't put together a simple declarative sentence in the English language,
the best I can offer you is a gig with the railroad.

The Neighborhood Babe leaves her rugrats at home for the evening,
and attends a night class.
Pretty soon she can dance like Ginger Rogers
and do her own taxes,
but she needs more, you dig?

Up, up the mountain she goes, that chalk-fingered Babe,
to the tippy top.
Survey says:
Location, location, location,
but there he is anyway,
the Shell Answer Man,
chewing on a Krispy Kreme.

I want to be a poet, she tells him.
He says:
Jot down a bunch of gibberish.
Everybody'll love it and toss roses at your feet,
and even if they don't,
just call your sloppy nonsense poetic license and smile indulgently.
Then come back here and fill in for me;
I need to see a man about a dog.

So the Neighborhood Babe finally arrives back home,
spouting zen koans
and making the rugrats dig a koi pond in the back yard.
At night she dreams of China--
the Great Wall turns into an undulating snake,
and she rides it, waving her hat like a cowgirl and shouting hoo-wee!
Fortune cookie say:
Though shrouded in mists, lofty heights await.
Sometimes she actually knocks her pillow onto the floor.
______

for Hannahballistic's Transforming Friday challenge!

 

 

fine.

A struggling author approached his friend William Ross Wallace who sometimes listened to the author's "not yet published poetical work".

"Wallace, I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written." Wallace listened and pronounced it "fine."

"Fine? Is that all?"

The author? Poe.

The poem? "The Raven."

He made nine dollars from it.
______

source: "The Beautiful Cigar Girl" by Daniel Stashower.

55 fine, nice, interesting words for G Man.  

the inappropriate wrist watch

The inappropriate wrist watch
does not tell the time;
it slyly suggests.

Like the acquaintance not respectful of personal space,
the wrist watch takes your arm--
obsequious and demanding all at once.

The inappropriate wrist watch leers and fidgets,
making "two forty-seven p.m."
sound vaguely filthy and perverted.

In addition to the time, the inappropriate wrist watch offers the date.
The little number sits there,
like a room key from some misadventure drenched in shame.

If thy wrist watch offends thee, pluck it off!
However, then there is the problem of the tan line,
pale and not meant to be seen, like flab.

The inappropriate wrist watch is the admirer one cannot discourage--
the one who shows up at the door at odd hours
wearing shoes with mouths, and clicking its teeth like a second hand.

How, then, to avoid being lured into depravity and ruin
by one's inappropriate wrist watch?
Ask not for whom the tinny chime tolls--

it tolls for thee.
____________

 

This is snot the way to court me

He felt called upon to improve my poetry,
and so, unsolicited, sent to me
a rewriting of my latest verse,
done over in shades from bad to worse.

Wasn't this presumption enough?
No, it was snot.

It did not seem to occur to him
that a creature such as me, so frail, so dim,
would react with anything less than gratitude--
imagine his offended surprise at my att-i-tude.

Wasn't my pointed silence enough?
No, it was snot.

Thank you, sir, for your ham-handed edit,
your testosterone hubris, and refusal to get it.
Thank you, dear dumbass, dear pencil dick fuckwit,
for trying help this mere girl be more literate.

However, I must decline future offers of assistance.  I am not worthy.


Delicately,

Fireblossom
__________

I took a swipe at writing something vaguely Sara Teasdale-ish for Real Toads, but somehow Catblossom got involved and...well, what can I say?

Double

There are stupid women everywhere--
thick as pigeons on every sidewalk;
if you step on one she will try to lift her snapped neck
to kiss your boot heel and make it better.

I am not like them,
any more than a tigress is like a turnip.
I am nothing like those women laid out on the berber, weeping,
as if they were human carpet runners in the rental house of Love.

I have perfected the art of being solitary.
I cup my hands under the good sturdy faucet of just-enough.
You can lean on my doorbell all day, caress it like a clitoris, 
but I will stay in the far room, as bored as a blind Burmese.

Once, though,
in the months after Us,
when I spent my time plying puny needle and thread
building swaying rope bridges to find my way around the bomb-scatter of my heart,

I wept for you like a child.
I kept your last message on my machine until a power outage erased it.
I took myself for long walks and was jostled by strangers
who hurried through and past, like bad news from a Ouija.

Sometimes they looked like you,
and I would coo to them,
from my broken throat
like an imbecile.
_____________

for Karin's "entwin(n)ed" prompt.

 

The Perspectives Of An Idiot

The perspectives of an idiot
may a certain beauty bear--
as a sorceress in stocks, under questioning and locks,
shorn of her hair,
fed on flung incivilities, poxy blackbirds in the air--

Tell us.
Do not reject the embrace of mercy.
Confess to us
what you are capable of; healing, harlotry and heresy...

The choreography of the somber
may dark comedy conceal--
as a seductress sent to ash, under pretense, purpose and mask,
purified by flame,
removed from those grinning cretins who call hypocrisy by name.
______

photograph: Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil

tongue-in-cheek musical accompaniment