Seaside Fable

 A memory came to me, riding in a wagon

pulled by a baboon. Sick and white-faced,

this memory asked for a glass of vinegar

and told me in Spanish that the baboon was a doctor.

"She can cure you," the memory assured me 

in a terrible cross-saw voice. "I'm not sick," I

insisted, but the memory barked, balancing

a world on its nose like a seal and said, "You are dead already."

This world spun on a wash of wine, yellow and sour,

and was no world of mine. "Listen, horrid seaside ghost,

ashes can never be castles again, and you don't exist."

That's when the sick, dying, putrescent memory-thing

bit me in the heart, and laughing, threw back its head as if hanged.

There was nothing the baboon doctor could do,

and seeing this, she hocked my memory and gave

me the ticket, saying, "Swap me your forgiveness,"

but I injected her with roaring fury and beat her to death 

with my empty heart.

__________

for Word Garden Word List--Giovanni's Room

Music: Men At Work Down By The Sea

A Man

A man grew
up, out of the April Michigan ice
in my brown grave of a garden.

This man was never a child.
He never bounced some goddamned ball
or climbed into my lap for a story.

What I'm saying is, this man wasn't natural,
though he grew there
among the astonished screaming jays.

How can I sleep, knowing this shapeless bastard
is leaning upright out there,
moaning like the last lover on earth?

For now, the hard earth is his vice,
he stays half-born, entire,
fucking with my head, expecting some sick future.

Slashing rain and warmth as sudden and wrong
as a stranger in one's kitchen
will free him, he will roar the mud from his throat and tarnish my name on the dead medicine of his lips.

He will call, I will come, terrified and scalded,
to be touched and opened by him,
to weep in his arms, hissing damn you, darling, damn you."
_______

for day 13.

Kill All Monsters

Mirror, mirror on the wall--

be honest with me one more time

before you go blind;

before I disappear and you start to lie. 

I am ugly,

so they say and have said

for as far back as my memory reaches.

The unkind ask straight-out,

"Were you in an accident?"

The kind remark on my beautiful eyes

and let the rest hang in the air like lost birds.

It's a great day for my mother,

hiding in her space suit of conventionality. 

The doctor in whom she has such faith--

who treats me like a block of wood

and speaks as if I weren't sitting right there--

thrills her when he holds my nose up with his thumb

and she gushes 

that now I look like her darling, my sib.

Mirror, mirror

tell it to me straight, as a sweet sixteen gift

before you lose the truth forever

and I vanish into this involuntary shift.

I know that others find me ugly

and that my mother finds me ugly

because she comes right out and says so.

But I am not ugly to myself--

I am simply me.

After tomorrow,

after blood and blades and anesthetic,

someone will heal and go back to school and marry and grow old,

but she won't be me.

I'll be riding inside, in my island prison, unseen.

Someone will say, "You look so pretty,"

and it will mean nothing to me,

it having been said about someone else,

this mask-face I can never take off even for a second.  

Mirror, mirror,

tell me the truth before you deceitfully bend--

before I submit to the will of others

and am never seen again.

_______

Dedicated to the disfigured, the different, the intersexed, and all children whose bodies are altered without their consent.

And in memory of Lucy Grealy, author of "Autobiography Of A Face." In the arms of the angels, Beautiful.

For Fireblossom Friday "This Is (Almost) The End" at Toads.

Image at top: Adele Exarchopolous from the movie "Blue is The Warmest Color" 

On The Popularity Of Zombies

I do not lightly speak ill of the dead,
but I will say this, as witness for myself--
the disagreeable word from a stranger's head
is not cause to take my gun from its shelf.

Look at them! They shamble!
Observe how they grasp and flail!
Easy to dismiss, without preamble
the groans and grins of those beyond our pale.

Enter the God, the Goddess!
Enter the anointed, the selected two!
Ignore the yoke, the chain, the harness,
as off to the kiosk go I, go you!

Undead mouthing nonsense vile
on social media--denounce, unfriend them!
Become un-human, toss brains on the pile;
attack the other, and those that send them!
_______

for grapeling's word list at Real Toads.