Faux Foxes

You three.
Come to me.

Open this box.
Take out a fox.

They are color coded.
Don't tell me you didn't know this.

Now here's something you may not know:
Two are real, one is faux.

Ever wonder how this came to be?
What I'm saying, what I mean,

Is the thing that I most want to say:
ever wonder how a faux fox fffff-finds its way?

Okay, back in the box.
Come back next week--next week, ducks.
______

foolishness for Sunday Muse #102 and day 13 of my 39 poems in 39 days. 

Photography by Anatasiya Dobrovolskaya

Fox Hurries On Alone

Fox hurries on alone,
wearing a night coat made of indigo memories.
She is solitary and keeps out of sight,
but the moon that finds me, finds her, and says no word.

Here, the lizard on his rock,
head cocked to hear the mandolin the grocer plays
when the lock is on the door
and the bottles hung on yews gather spirits from his tunes.

A desert bird speaks your poems
along the edges of a sunset, and once again 
I hold my breath to hear them
as the fountain with its coins lulls the fox with Spanish songs.
________

for Play It Again at Toads.

I chose Susie's Amber Tamblyn prompt from 2016.

Letter To My Love

My love, beware of snakes--
skin they understand, but they have no arms,
and so, in jealous anger, will do what it takes
to see you come to bitten harm.

Use every skill, every charm
to remind them of their low degree,
and then, carrying their empty skins, ride on untouchably.

Peacock feathers in your hair
denote the flight of thought and dream,
with beauty a posing passenger there,
mere shade to what you are, and seem.

The leopardess, that lonesome queen
bestows her outer cloak enchanted
to help you leave the snakes laid low, their venom weak, destroyed, recanted.
______

A rhyme royal for Fireblossom Friday at Real Toads, featuring the art of W.T. Benda.

 

Advice

I was a chattering child
living in the Sturm und Drang
until a jealous dark star filled my mouth with snow and silence.

There I stayed, a drift with nothing to say
for decades and donkey's years,
feet nailed to the floor to prevent St. Vitus' Dance.

Though silent, I was not stupid--
I hid my heart in the hollow of a tree
until such time as I could own the fever, 
like a yogi or a bush doctor.

Over ages, slow as a slat-leaked barrel,
I incubated language inside my teeth;
each word sharp as truth and long as lies.

I pulled the nails up inside my feet,
until I had claws, and when I finally moved,
it was under a sign-moon, quick as a curse.

I spat out the snow and my mouth learned new tricks--
there were the poems I garlanded from asters and barbed wire.
There were the women who listened, and whom I kissed.

Long ago, I went back to claim my heart from the tree,
and bargained with the guardian owl for a fair price
and her share of a summer night.

I gave myself a name, and the name means "beloved".
From that day until this, I have walked up and down upon the earth;
the snakes know me and hush their hiss.

Still, for all that, here is what I have learned,
and it is a woman's lesson, to be kept in a locket,
in a trunk, in secret, against bad fortune when it comes in threes:

Remember, girl,
that silence may still have its moment.
Remember the bird who can hide your heart,
and when the wind swings down and the moon goes dark,
remember you can run.
Remember 
you can run.

_______

top image "In The Woods 2" by onkami, both images found on weheartit.com

poem idea inspired by the Catie Curtis song "Run", which I can't find a video of, but the lyrics can be found HERE.

Come On

Come on.
that's what my friends say.
They say,
girl,
go conquer Egypt, or something.
Get a ring on every finger.
Did you know,
those are not Nile crocodiles
doing the old snap and roll
in the shallows?
Those are my old loves.
Talk to them.
See what I'm about, on my good days.

I still have them, sometimes
(good days, I mean)
but the nights have gone molasses black for me,
though not half as sweet.
If you could love me,
then why won't you love me
like you did
the first time?
Come on, baby,
I need so little, and you possess so much--
every toss of your hair moves the planets.

Come on.
that's what my friends say.
They say,
do that strut, like you used to do.
But that was before I went so girl-weak and needy.
That was before I knew how you could please me.
Before the fall.
Before I met you.
_______


 

A Vulpine View Of Common Maxims

(in 40 words)

"A bird in hand..."

I got
no
hands.

"A stitch in time..."

one
ring,
twelve crows.

fox by flock,
sleepin' on the
snow.

"Which came first...?"

church
or
stones?

good books stacked,
heavy and
black.

look quick, child,
foxy smile.
________

Freaks

Behold the human tragedy of the discarded runway model--
This is not the cheap bathos of crying clowns, painted on velvet and sold to women named Madge at tawdry flea markets.
This is true waste, genuine suffering.

Do you think that high cheek bones are a guarantee of
Joy?
Adoration?
High-paying shoots in glamorous locales?

Listen--
They are a predictor of sorrow.
Consider this...
Being exceptionally beautiful places one outside of the norm just as surely as exceptional ugliness does.
Removed from one's fellows, one becomes
A perpetual foreigner,
A beautiful mote floating within one's own smooth skin,
Another panicked dot--albeit a gorgeous one--lost on the streets of an inner Tokyo,
And everyone around you
Is, in some manner, a hungry Godzilla.

Welcome to Beauty.
But wait. There's more.

No one cares about your soul, honey.
No one cares about your wa, your essence--
Stow that shit.

You are the blank screen upon which the visions and perversions of others are projected.
In London, Rome and Paris, you are nothing but virtual reality, a mecha dream girl,
A dumb donkey to haul the loads of otaku motherfuckers who can design this season's rage,
But cannot tie their own shoes or order a sandwich without desperately consulting their tablet--
That severe and tiny god.

The runway model is a brand ambassador for the Divine.
She is what we would be,
If we were not so twisted, so marred, so comically fucked up.
Why, then,
Is she reduced to shilling for overpriced underwear?
Why does she not destroy us all, an angry Athena not to be trifled with, confiding in her owl,
Leveling fools,
Bringing fire and flood?

Perhaps I overestimate the power of beauty
As I prowl the soup kitchens and freeway ramps for discarded angels,
Loading them into my dented van,
Adding them to my holy army.

I am the hideous crone at the head of a sexy shock wave--
Here we come, the Different Ones you never understood.
Kiss our asses and hand over the cameras;
It's our world now, and you shrunken Godzillas
only 
live in it.
_______

My sincere thanks to Flipside, who provided me a word list to work from, and to my co-worker Tanya H., who shared with me some of her impressions from having worked as a runway model.

The Girl Who Liked Hemingway

I didn't win the pageant
because those bitches wouldn't know beauty if it beat them over their 'do's with a porch plank.

My Mediterranean sultriness was not what they were looking for;
them with their politeness and their narrow-lipped smiles holding back the churning reflux that their hearts produce.

They are not human.

As a baby, I was different.
I spoke within minutes, asking for a mirror before milk,
and sharing Portuguese brandy with my father in the library before the month was out.

Let others become checkers at Target.
Let others slave in the shamba under a broiling sun.
They do not have my sculptured cheekbones,
and so must scramble and struggle while I laze under an awning in a cafe,
accepting the dazzled worship of waiters named Jean-Guy.

But look, it hasn't been all roses and honey, just the same.
I stayed barefoot until I was twelve, by choice.
I whipped all the local boys,
and was the terror of the American compound.

I first considered pageants when I was caught siphoning gas from a diplomat's car.
The diplomat took me inside and stood with his back to me,gazing through his wife's sheer curtains at the stucco buildings across the street, and said,

"There are other things
you could be doing."

Soon I was shivering,
my arm dangling boneless over the edge of the dining room table,
smiling at the patterned copper ceiling.
I had still been in command of myself when he lost all his polish and said things to me that were not diplomatic, but rather,
the shouts of a drowning man finding shore.

So anyway,
these bitches looked at me critically, as if I were a steer at auction,
each of them a little complacent fat cask of petty.
I knew I couldn't win,
and my mind turned, as it always has,
toward ways to rain down destruction upon my enemies' heads.

I have a little French cahier
that I write down my dreams and plans in.
If the gendarmes ever find it, I'm so fucked.

But never mind.
The world of pageants plateaus early--
you're done at twenty, turned loose in the streets to blink big-eyed
at the onrushing autobus that will flatten you dead.
Does this sound like me?
Does it?

I am a girl without an umbrella,
because it never dares to rain on my perfect creamy shoulders.
I own no pearls,
but I have six different divining decks,
one for each day of the week, and then I go to Mass on Sunday.

I didn't win the pageant,
but I escaped to Algiers and met a man.
In the morning, we start out together for Kilimanjaro--
I shall be barefoot, in my element once more,
and McComber will have some sort of accident and leave everything to me.

Heft those trunks, bush guides,
I forgot my mirror and am keen to retrieve it
so that I may kiss my image as one would Cerberus,
if he were female
and as pretty as me.
_________

for Flipside's word list 15: Mediterranean, siphon, brandy, destruction, cafe, cahier, raincoat, narrow-lipped, barefoot, pearls, sculptured, mirror, critically, casks, plateau, politeness, awning, curtains, shivering and shamba. (words taken from Ernest Hemingway's "The Garden Of Eden")

Also linked to real Toads open link Monday.

And shared on 10/27/22 to Dverse OLN. 

 

Pipes

I've the desire to be a siren,
and so siren shall I be.

I'll wash my throat with strong lye soap--
my tongue with strychnine tea--
then when I sing, my cunning will bring
the doomed from out the sea.

I've the desire to be wicked,
and so wicked shall I be,

that the Lorelei will seek me out
to ask and bow and find out how
I sing so
sing-u-lar-ly.
________

for Fireblossom Friday.

Tanya

Do not rely on time.
It recedes unendingly--
There is less of it now, even, than there was when you began to read this poem;
The grave yawns.
Do not rely on time.

Do not believe in your own wits,
Or that yours are sharper, somehow, than others'.
Once, you believed that lost teeth were boughten by fairies,
And that only old people died.
Do not believe in your own wits.

Religion, causes, various grand undertakings--
Do not live for these,
They come and go.
Do not live for fame or wealth--
Every third chump on the street is famous, wealthy, and echoingly vacant and hollow.

Only these things matter-
Tanya,
Tanya's thighs,
Tanya's face,
Tanya's breasts
and Tanya's pleased smile.

Take my advice--
Sell everything,
Compromise everything,
Forget position, principles, pride--
What good do they do you?

Find Tanya at the place they call
La Maison de L'oiseau Vert.
Kill or betray anyone who gets in your way.

Leave now--
The things that matter matter only for such a short time.
Go to her,
She is waiting.
_______

Sweet Things

Fox sleeps
Under a whipped cream moon
Dabbed into the sky
By the baker Goddess.

Fox curls
In her deep blue bed
With her kit's heart beating
Soft against her side.

Red fox, white fox,
Mad fox, mine,
As you dream, I'll whisper sweet things
Thirteen times.

________