Jenny Mechanical

 

Jenny Mechanical is too mecha for the main house

but too human for the tool shed.

She can turn stripped screws, whip up a perfect grilled cheese,

provide power during an outage and mow and mulch while she's at it.

She also dreams of a recharging kiss and poems appear at her fingertips.

Jenny had a little lamb whose fleece was made of synthetic polymer

and everywhere that Jenny went, the lamb was sure to follow.

See Jenny Mechanical, stopped in the middle of the front yard,

telling her lamb to look at the new leaves with its LED eyes.

She has always been a perfectly average 5 foot 3, can open any jar, pick any lock,

but she is crying into its faux wool because of something beyond utility.

She is needed but not loved, maintained but casually disposable,

and the poems at her fingertips have diverged from factory settings,

glowing pink

then rose

then lavender

then blue

then indigo

like space that has no atmosphere yet sustains those billion burning stars.

_________

for Sunday Muse #213. 

How To Do The End Of The World Cha Cha

 

Convinced of the End Times, Neighbor Jim

MacGyvers up a companion from old soup cans,

paint brushes, stereo wire and car parts,

A sort of Bride of Frankenstein to ease Armageddon 

with chicken pot pies and a surprisingly

avid libido.

One day she comes across the common alley

for a woman-to-woman, making certain things clear about

Neighbor Jim, my skank ass, and Fist City.

Watching her walk away, dragging her dinosaur tail on the lawn,

I envy her those spinal plates, round-so-round

vulcanized boobs, and blowy porn-model Medusa hair.

I'm saying she's dishy, in a home appliance kind of way.

There is a tender grace to the way she lights the candles with her tongue

as she and Neighbor Jim while away the evenings

Watching This Old House on the generator-powered tv,

waiting on the six trumpets of Revelation as if they were the Tijuana Brass 

doing a hotel gig on the last day of a bang-up Cancun vaykay.

________

for Word Garden Word List #12 (Richard Brautigan)

To An Admirer

 "It's like being mailed into space" --Sylvia Plath

There are children

and a magnifying glass,

an ant

a sidewalk

and the summer sun, 92 million miles away.

The Prometheus ant will shortly know glory

and the eagle.

The children are its doctors

with their laser.

A poem on one's heart

is a volcano in a paper bag.

An old romantic

is an ant in a Hiroshima body.

You'll see me magnified, aflame,

for writing this poem about

happy children

in the summer sun.

________

for Sunday Muse #183.

Instant Karma

We were called by other names,
each of us
separately;
years appeared, shone, yellowed, peeled away
before we called out that falsity and all the coiling lies 
tripping off tongues we left behind.

There were dry years,
each of us
alone in a crowd like single stalks of grass.
Sunrises came, noons blank and hard
with evening riding on the tail of eternity
whispering through the book of our solitary dreams.

But I remember
--and will always remember--
that moment of recognition when like met like.
I have been often confused, mistaken, lost;
but this time it was sure and simple as east to west.
I knew, honey. Right away I knew.
______

for the Sunday Muse #39.