What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

My Queendom for a hair clip,

plastic gizmo that I prize

as my hair in the wind whips

in my mouth and face and eyes.

My Queendom for a hair clip,

though I cannot see to search

I think I know right where I left it

so off I weave and feel and lurch.

My Queendom for a hair clip.

Here it is, hey wait what huh??!!?

Hope I don't skid or skate or slip

And smack my forehead, falling, DUH!

---------

for Sunday Muse # 158.

Dirt

What's under the dirt
in the garden by the moon-gray shed?
What's under the bloom 
and the petal walls in my head?

Dangerous, it's dangerous
hooker red and high like this.

What's under the beat
in the heart of a summer night?
What's under your skin
where ravens go blackly bright?

Dangerous, it's dangerous
hooker red and high like this.

What's under your smile
curved with fearless faint regret?
What's under our tongues
gone dawn dissolve and yet....

Dangerous, it's dangerous 
hooker red and high like this.

Dangerous, it's dangerous
Yes.
______

Progression

Ice broke the bowl
of the bird bath.
Spring had revenge upon the ice.

In summer I watched my sweet dog
step up and hide her head
against my stomach, for love.
Winter cared nothing for her.
She is gone.

Illness broke the bowl
of my body.
Today's better, though.
I tell the empty room.
_____

a flash 55 about extremes for Kerry at Real Toads.
 

Review: A Life

 It's a little slow to get going, honestly. The early dialogue is impossible without subtitles, and little happens with the plot; it's mostly some kind of study on basic bodily functions. Not sure what the director was going for here, and the plot device of "parents" and their largely inexplicable attachment to this character is perplexing and not entirely believable.


After a while, the character begins to do more, but its dialogue becomes peppered with "like" and "whatever" to the point of irritation. Much of the action in this segment takes place in a large building full of similarly odd characters divided into groups of twenty-five or thirty, who don't seem to be enjoying being there very much. Is it a prison movie? Not sure.

Then, in a cinematic master stroke, the director shows us this character becoming more and more like the "parents" from the beginning of the film. Despite some fairly predictable rom/com scenes and an improvement in costume, the statement that's made about circularity and fate more than offsets the feeling that we've seen all this before. 

Finally, this film borrows heavily from improvisational theater and European sensibilities as the character falls into decrepitude and foolishness. The dialogue once again becomes rambling and incoherent, and even the character no longer recognizes the rest of the cast, so how is the viewer to make any sense of it? 

In sum, I can't recommend this. While it has moments that seem to promise something, on the whole it is a mishmash, with a frustratingly ambiguous message. Two stars.

Bon Vivant/ Exis Ten, 2015, maximum distribution. Rated R, length 60-90 years. Stars Jennifer Connolly, Leonardo DiCaprio, Dwayne Johnson, Miley Cyrus, and features Sandra Bullock as a bag of stale candy. Rated 23% at Rotten Tomatoes.
______

For Play It Again Toads. I used "review". 

 

Bells

Quasimodo hefts himself onto the handicapped bench of the cross-town bus,
then takes the newspaper crossword puzzle out of his backpack.

"This metal object has a tongue." 4 letters.
Quasimodo smiles and squirms in his seat because he knows this.
Bell!

"A set of tuned metal bells or tubes." 6 letters.
Chimes!
Quasimodo looks around to see if anyone has noticed his success.
No one has.

"Alexander Graham ____." 4 letters.
He doesn't know this one,
but he's arrived at his stop anyway.

At the Office For Americans With Disabilities,
Quasimodo has a desk. 
On it is a telephone which converts voice into text.

His friend Guy, at the next desk, waves at him.
Pointing to his phone, he signs "drunk asshole again."
Quasimodo's laugh is surprisingly pleasant, though of course, Guy can't hear it.

Quasimodo's phone lights up, indicating a call.
Guy has transferred the drunk dialer to him,
and can be seen hurrying off toward the break room with a bag of Doritos.

Looking at his screen, Quasimodo reads what the caller is saying:

Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
                     How it swells!
                     How it dwells
                 On the Future! - how it tells
                 Of the rapture that impels
             To the swinging and the ringing
                 Of the bells, bells, bells -
      Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
                     Bells, bells, bells -
   To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

"May I have your name?" Quasimodo types in.
"Eddie," comes the reply. 

That evening, at O'Brien's Tavern, 
Quasimodo and Eddie sit mooning over a pretty Gypsy girl.
"Go say something to her!" urges Eddie,
but Quasimodo just grins and shakes his head sheepishly.

At nearly two in the morning, Quasimodo hoists Eddie onto his misshapen back
and carries him back to the apartment he had mentioned.
All the while, Eddie mumbles rapturous boozy verse about the Gyspy girl.

Catching the last bus to the group home,
Quasimodo thinks of the girl, and of Eddie's beautiful poems.
"So...lovely..." he says out loud, but no one hears, 
not even the driver perched like a raven in his high seat behind the wheel.
_______

for Fireblossom Friday: mash-ups.  The quoted poem is, of course, by Poe.

      
    
    

Kimberly & the Atomic Bomb

When Kimberly saw the atomic flash,
she didn't really care;
it just meant no more Gas N Go,
no more washing her hair.

No more filling out college apps,
no more diet fads and
no more having to hear that one sucky song til she pukes.

She thought of the times her mother had told her
how she came before she was due--
so tiny and fragile and blue--
but she said she had known her Kimmy was a fighter and would prove all the doctors wrong by surviving.

When Kimberly saw the atomic flash,
she sat on her bed and looked at the backs
of her hands as if she had never seen them before,

And the moon glowed red over the Gas N Go
like a rose on fire in the night.
_____

for DOLN #65.

Pembroke

Pembroke, the predictive parrot
Is sensitive to seismic phenomena.

Even when his own cage rattles, and the ends of his swing jigger wild and spastic,
Pembroke's black beak remains constant in its expression of wry amusement.

Pembroke does not want a cracker.
He wants your finger, or, hopefully, two.

Pembroke the pedantic parrot
Can recite "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" in Portuguese, while swaying his body from side to side like a batshit lunatic.

The only time that Pembroke goes quiet,
Is if your house catches fire in the night;

He sees Mexican dancers in the bright orange flames,
And balls of smoke become marshmallow skulls floating in the air as if they were pinatas.

Pembroke the psittacosis-ridden parrot
Wants to mate with you and leave you great with baby birds.

He wants you to live with him in his shit-spackled world,
And to understand that, because he needs you, you must love him and never leave,

Even as he yanks out your hair to make a voodoo doll he'll call Mrs. Pembroke--
A monster he can drag around in the shredded newspaper at the bottom of the cage, captive and faded as yesterday's headline.
_____

"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" is a poem by Robert Browning, and can be found HERE.

A Primer For Young Lovers

Tarot Girl and Manx Man
sat upon the rocky ledge
of a craggy cliff
high above the eternal sea.

The Sea said,
"Those who touch my body
whether cruel or tenderly,
will lose their breath--
lose themselves--
and become a part of me."

Tarot Girl demanded of Manx Man,
to tell her his purpose
hidden behind his questions
set, like faith, before her deck of cards.

The Cards said,
"Those who see my faces
will need a thousand eyes,
a single mouth--
a single heart--
and many flames to make a fire."

Tarot Girl and Manx Man
sat upon the rocky ledge
of a craggy cliff
in the face of a howling wind.

The Wind said,
"Let he who has no tale
kiss her who tells them well;
then throw two birds
into my keeping,
and name one Heaven, the other, Hell."
_____
for dverse poetics--fairy tales

Shay's Rebellion

Plenty people
Tried to bang me down in a box
At the bottom of the sea
With a thousand million locks...

Mama was their Queen.
She tell me do right,
And toe the line,
Or she smash me to smithereens.

Sorry, Mama,
I'm a flock that scatters and spins;
Turns once, turns twice,
Then comes together again.

I always been this way.
Don't cotton much
To rules and such.
That's all I got to say.
_____

Thanks to Cloudia, of Comfort Spiral blog, who sent the kitty pic, and wished me a happy anniversary of Shays Rebellion!

Top photograph: Charlotte Gainsbourg
 

The Party

I was laughing.
Someone set a black box in front of me on the bar;
His cigar set my hair on fire:
I'm a saint.
I'm the sun.
I'm a pilot light tucked in among these gas bags.

I was laughing.
Someone handed me a telegram;
Her fragrance took me back to simpler times:
Prison.
The hospital there.
The Western Union office in the basement of the violent ward.

I was laughing.
My life had been encoded on cards;
I slid them through a Gypsy's teeth and she bit me:
Bleed, girl.
Bleed hard.
That's the tarot she told me, and by the time she kissed me
I was crying.
____

Poe

His cape wet with rain,
Edgar Allan Poe slips into a 24-hour chain pharmacy under cover of night,
And asks the pharmacist for laudanum.

He is recognized.

The pharmacist is a crap poet who lives in a nearby bedroom community.
He participates in fantasy sports pools,
And worships Charles Bukowski.

Poe is strung out; desperate!
His shaking hands offer out-of-circulation bills, in wads.
"Laudanum," he repeats, with urgency.

Instead, the pharmacist
(whose name is Ted)
Starts rhapsodizing about "Buk".

There is so much blood.
Officers from this quiet suburb have never seen
Anyone impaled with an umbrella before.
A nearby display of magnifying reading glasses has been upset in the fracas,
And their empty lenses bear useless witness
To the waste of a human life.

An answering machine beeps.
"There is one pharmacy call," chirps a robotic female voice.
It will be pending for all eternity,
Or at least until the yellow crime tape comes down.

Meanwhile, Poe has scored something from a teenage boy loitering outside the 7-11.
He doesn't know what it is, but he takes it anyway, because
His girlfriend is gone,
His mind is a roiling snakepit,
And he has nothing else, nothing at all
To protect him from the storm.
_____