Self-Portrait

 

Here I am, grime-faced at the bottom of a mine shaft. 

Here I am behind this ever-changing Halloween mask.

Here I am gorgeous, touched by God and given favor.

Here I am, so eat my dust, see you bitches later.

Here I am untouchable, unthinkable, unclean.

Ask dear mother, she'll explain exactly what that means.

Here I am quiet, just a watcher in the wings

made of shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings.

Here I am inside a book, inside an old cocoon.

Here I am reflecting light as if I were the moon.

Here I am in love with you, a fool to end all fools.

Here I am, a joker queen who can't tell shit from jewels.

Here I am to dazzle you with swooping magic madness.

Here I am one hour more, paralyzed with sadness.

Here I am, an urchin girl without a pot to piss in

to fetch your smoking pipe and tell you where you can put this in.

Here I am for Jesus, here I am for Puck.

To those who'd like to pin me down, I wish you all good luck.

_________

for Sunday Muse #198.

Line 8 taken from "The Walrus & the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll.

 

PlasticHead

PlasticHead, Our Weeping Lady of Sorrows,

does not see herself in mirrors.

Like a tortoise, drug addict, or victim of a head injury,

her protective helmet lets in nonsense, 

but does not eliminate it.

PlasticHead therefore believes herself a kind of shithead,

her mind a terrarium made of one-way glass.

Her parents hand her texts substantiating this,

wrongheaded maxims, ill-timed remarks and iffy teachings.

Playmates bash her plastic head on the sidewalk.

Enter alcohol, religion, relationships.

Tossed up on the shore of adulthood, 

PlasticHead looks back and sees the smoking pile-up of her various endeavors.

It's all been a lie. 

PlasticHead, manufactured plaything of Heaven,

find angels in the pockets of your apron.

The molded face that took the place of your true visage

was nothing but assigned artifice, fiction, dressage.

PlasticHead reacts with cold anger, freezing herself solid,

thus further and finally shattering the hated doll head.

Her mosquito-pond blood reddens and warms,

evaporating her tears into a silver fog--she breathes herself in,

embraces the Divine like a gator wrestler, 

sleeps well for once,  lives another ten minutes victoriously,

then expires.

PlasticHead, inspirational story to finish the broadcast,

you have no weepy present, no golden future, no awful past.

Be absorbed into the One Mind, The Magnificent Place,

regard in a Mirror of Stars, your true, your perfect, absolutely front-page Face.

_________________

For The Sunday Muse #170, where I am hosting the masked ball.

Debutantes

It's like a telephone call from the bones,

a song that sings you, whether you love it or hate it,

persistent as a blow to the head.

While all this is going on, you must smile,

set the table properly, oyster fork to the far right.

Lay a linen napkin across the mocking lie.

Walk through the funhouse to your job, 

your marriage, the gibbet of your identifying papers.

Become an object of hilarity if you finally birth yourself.

In short, do anything but this, and then

cut a rug, or your wrists, when all other options expire.

We are the girls half gone by the time we start,

Brave, gorgeous, cursed, strangers even to ourselves.

Buck Moonskull, Private Eye

 Buck Moonskull, private eye

slugs down a spring water, heaves his hooves up on his desk, and coolly sizes up his client.

What a dame. 

Big "who, me?" brown eyes behind long lashes and a come-hither look. Buck laid odds they'd be sharing a salt lick before this case was over. 

"Jane Doe," she said when he asked her name.

"Sure, dollface." Did she think he was born yesterday? Why, it had to have been three years ago now. He watched a blush creep up that perfect face.

"I--" she began.

"Stow it, Toots," said Buck Moonskull, a little sharply. He didn't like being played with.

"I know who you are. I'm not the kind of flatfoot who can't see the forest for the trees." Buck picked up a cheap plastic folder and waved it. "Does the name Bambi mean anything to you, doll?"

"Where did you--"

"You're his mother. Don't bother to deny it. Oh sure, that faked death scheme paid off when Stag Antlersen copped the insurance money. I'm on to you sister."

A sly smile played around the edges of her kissable lips as she drew the .22 and purred, "So. You found out about Stag." She raised an eyebrow. "You're good, dear. But not good enough." She raised the gun and, as fast as a landlord on rent day, Buck Moonskull dipped his rack and knocked it away with a practiced swipe of a his 8 points.

"I must have been crazy to try to con a con," stammered Ms. Doe. 

"Lunacy," said Buck Moonskull as a gold halo of light shone above his head, like tacky foil on the neck of a bottle of drug store champagne. He picked up the black rotary phone from his desk and, gesturing with it, asked, "Do you want to come clean to Bambi, or do I put him straight myself?"

Jane Doe sighed, crossed her legs provocatively, and reached for the phone. In the middle of the dialer it said "Buck Moonskull. CLOverfield 5-2999." Watching her, he had a feeling that number would be ringing again soon.

_______

for Sunday Muse #120. 

Remember This

Remember this,
When dolls start speaking to you from the nest stuffed deep
inside your own throat.
Remember vanity,
as worked by hand in the lace hem of a tiny dress;
Remember never to seat a Gypsy next to a mark,
and to preside with grace, charm, and engraved silver service.

Listen to this,
she'll say, from between the feathers of birds hooked by wires
to dying Christmas trees in burning houses.
Listen to this--don't be a ninny and ignore this warning
when she chirps in your ear like broken glass--
Baccarat or Waterford.

Girls love cats, horses, dolls,
and attics filled with bird cages and unexploded ordnance.
Listen to the water fountain my ghost animates the flow of,
and line up your darlings along the window sills.
Seat the priest with the diplomat,
Arabian with alley cat,
and remember this, as the afternoon wears on:
I owe no explanations as to what birds think about dolls that talk,
and the girls who take them to bed
like said prayers.
______ 

Blechface the Terrifying

Blechface, the terrifying monster, opens a Facebook account and starts posting.
She posts selfies that everyone hates.
She switches to kittens and makes scads of friends.

Blechface the terrifying monster is part squid, part insect, and part monkey.
Pervs she doesn't know from Adam send her private messages, which she ignores.
Facebook suggests friends:
Susie, Annie, Bob, Gerry.
How to approach them? By sea or by air? (By tree?)

Blechface the terrifying monster puts this problem aside, and works on her profile.
Interests:
mating, ingesting, establishing territory, poetry and movies.
Education:
?
Looking for:
mates, food, territory, poetry and movies about these topics.

One day Blechface meets someone on Facebook who seems to understand her.
He sees that she is
Blechface the Royal,
Blechface the Brilliant,
Blechface the tentacled sea mollusk, with exoskeleton and prehensile tail.
Blechface the Babe.

They arrange to meet.
Blechface the Coy insists that he come to her, and so he boards an Amtrak in Ohio,
and travels to her home in Galveston bay.
Imagine her surprise when he turns out to look so different from his profile picture!
She was expecting Sean Connery,
but he turns out to be Tabbyface, the Unbearably Cute Kitten.
She shrugs her tentacle and smiles.

"I will make you the happiest little puffball dude in all creation," she tells him.
"I will take pictures of you and make you a MEME."
He gets a thousand "likes" the first day on her time line.
"Pooky," she says, hauling him up into her tree.
"Foxy ladyyyyyyy," he purrs.

Blechface and Tabbyface, trending forever.
________

Promise Me

Promise you'll always love me
as we sit with pastries and a cup of coffee before us;
say it after the bar holding up the awning of the cafe has fallen,
dazing you.

Say it now, when the sun is as bright over your shoulder
as a hijacked 747.
Say it now, when we can have the moment as lovers,
not as litigants;
soothe me with the words I long to hear.

When we were young, we believed
in every fantastic happy fiction we found in the sticky pages
of our heavily illustrated story books.
Then--
tornado.
Then--
regime change.
Then--
attractive others, smiling, as kind as undertakers.

Promise you'll always love me,
say it now, before the Narcan kicks in.
Say it now, while my heart is full for you--
don't wait until the mail comes,
full of better deals, and introductory rates.
Don't wait until the gurney begins to roll, 
and some sensible doctor gets a hold of you, making you sign things,
agree to things, and do things, on Wednesdays, when his office is closed.

Listen, life never turns out the way we pictured it.
Quick, before we crumple with age,
before our fingers curl back at us like strangers,
dropping things,
lost and pissing our pants a block away from home.
Promise me
that you'll always love me.

Then we'll finish our pastries,
and walk hand in hand until neither of us can tell anymore
why we came this way,
or how we managed to stay on our feet without each other.
That will be enough for me--
I give you my word.
_______

For Karin's mini-challenge at Real Toads: Promises

 

Devils

Devils stole my face before I drew my first breath,
and so the laughter of devils became my lullaby.

Mothers were scarce, though I searched for them
sang for them; I was a mermaid with a tail of shame.

I had no face, so I stole other faces.
I never realized that they had been left by the devils, for me to find.

My faces were kissed, but the lips weren't mine.
My faces were mocked,
stabbed,
turned to nightmares;

I went to a wedding in a false face, and the wedding was mine.
The devils congratulated us.

I drowned a hundred faces in every spirit I could lay my hands on.
They grinned, vomited, and ate words the devils gave them.

I would have died, you know;
many times, I wanted to die.

In the time before my first breath,
in the time before devils,

I was loved. Someone told me that, and from then on, inside my head,
was a church made of those words.

Mothers were scarce, and so I turned to the Mother of All.
I said, I have no face. She said, use Mine.

Devils are everywhere, on top of skyscrapers,
wrapped around the wheels of city buses,

killing the best of us, killing the spirits of the brightest of us,
whispering in my ear like a flock of empty crows;

but someone told me that I was loved
in the time before my first breath; in the time before devils.

Someone told me that, before the beginning, I was loved,
and in a church made from those words, I kept living.

Here is a poem. Here is a little light from the Mother of All.
I said to her, in tears, I have no face.
She said to me, wandering child, use Mine.
__________

Real Doll

I was a real doll,
dressed to the nines,
and cuter than ten puppies in an Easter basket.

I had button eyes.
My doctor shone a penlight at them and declared,
"flat affect" and started me on a prescription.

Pretty soon, my stitched-on grin
was making me popular!
Invites everywhere, filling up my screen.
Oh hell yes!
I'm telling you, girl,
I was so surprised I could have shit and fallen back in it.

Me and my doll friends wore striped stockings
and cute dresses we changed twenty times a day.
And boyfriends?
Girrrrrl.
Mine came and went like the weather--
I kept pushing their hands away from my hem,
spouting some crap about saving myself for marriage,
but I was worried what they'd do 
when they only found smooth plastic.

That's when things started to go tilt, a little bit.
Like at the beauty college,
where the Barbie with a ring in her nose took way too much off.
"It'll grow back!" chirped the cashier,
but, hello, it's yarn, it won't.

And, no matter how much Aveeno I slather on,
I'm about as soft as a baseball bat.
I turned to booze, but unlike some, I can't pee.
I tried smoking dope, but my mouth doesn't open.
I even tried hard dope, but the needles always break.
Fuuuuck.

You know what? I never went back to that doc.
Now I spend my days splayed on some little girl's bookshelf,
next to a Beanie giraffe.
Sometimes she takes me down and dangles me by my heels, 
squeaking, "Oh noooo! I'm falling out of the ski lift! 
Save meeeeeeee!"
Don't laugh, Toots, it's a plumb part.

I'm a real doll,
dressed to the nines,
and cuter than kittens in a cereal bowl.
________