Pardon My Doggerel

 

I never met Gregory Corso

but his words were Gasoline

to the engine of my mind.

I did meet Allen Ginsberg once.

He signed the books

whose Howl had assuaged my loneliness. 

Here is a picture of the two of them,

another random human,

and a dog.

The tv is silent, cowed by the presence

of such vagabond intensity.

Corso shares a sandwich as if it were a chapbook.

Whitman said that not one animal is respectable.

Neither are poets, but they understand appetite

for food, for love, for being here now.

Come closer. I will shed a poem on you and make a mess,

then smile as if I had done something fine

to the engine of your mind

to assuage your loneliness.

I will do for you as these others have done for me,

off the leash and across the page

down through all the days of my life. 

_______

for What's Going On? "It's Raining cats & Dogs."

Music: Jennifer Warnes and Leonard Cohen Song of Bernadette

The Boffin

 Of course, we all fumble at first,

doofing up out of our childhood like baby turtles.

There it is, all at once, 

the Sea of Love,

and we scramble for it, driven by

instinct

movies

pop songs

and our own bodies bolting away with us.

But that's kid stuff.

At some point we think we've got it,

that we've become some sort of love boffin

smug in the sugar bowl of partnered mid-life.

Look! No hands! 

Up on the two-wheeler and thinking NASA needs us.

Oh, little turtle, little turtle rules the waves. 

Hang your heart on the sawtooth coat hook a few times

and all that changes. 

You find out you married a Matryoshka,

a total stranger.

Big and slow, you're back out there among the hatchlings,

drinking too much

doing stupid things to your hair,

fumbling again, tangled in the seaweed,

wishing you were dead.

Oh little boffin, doofing up out of Love's trash can,

now you know how much you never knew.

What was it all for?

You'll find the answer to that when your own grown child

sits crying at the kitchen table, saying mom it hurts so much.

You'll reach out, try to wick away their pain, and helplessly say,

I know,

honey,

I know.

_______

for Sunday Muse #241. 

Music: Tom Waits Sea of Love

La Famiglia

Mom would have done well as an underworld figure,
sticking the steel into some poor bastard
then doing the perp walk holding a Le Creuset enameled cast iron skillet in front of her face.

There is something to be said for always seething with petty resentments--
it keeps a girl from going lazy,
idling away the hours wandering the arboreal colonnade
with a peach in one hand and a bible in the other.

Better  to brood under a starved star and crescent moon
bad-tempered as a sick camel,
rooting out infidels from the shadows and making them bow to the east.
After all, what's family for?

Then again, we all have our foolish hour and faint notion,
stumbling along in silver slippers,
carrying the quilled bowling ball handed us by our elders and betters.

Mom, she never believed for one minute in butterball sunshine and rock candy mountains.
She harbored a crow scrabbling just beneath her heart,
telling her quite sensibly to kill that child and kill it quick,
just like she learned at her own mother's knee.

Grandma wore ice boots,
Grandpa had no tongue and a nail through his eye.
Into the world they sent their girl to birth a scapegoat upon an altar
built from fear and silence,
the perfect place to start a family of her own.
______

for Sunday Muse #93, using the word list below for Skylover Word List.

Image at top is Ruby Cruz as teenage Annie Wilkes in "Castelrock." 

And finally, some music to read poetry by.