Does it burn, dear, does it trouble you to see these dropped stitches letting the wind in? Walls disappear even as they shelter, hollow as bird bones or violins stacked each upon each like the worst regrets of ghosts bewildered, emigrating with dust of memory gilding frayed keepsakes as we hold each other, advancing, disintegrating. _________ the opening line is by Kerry O'Connor, used by permission as part of the mini-challenge at Real Toads, where she presides. image: one of the lost suitcases of Willard Asylum
There is no reason for us to fight. Here is a ticket, exempting you from fighting. A ticket out of town, praise whatever gods there are. We fight in the town. We sell tickets beforehand. We call each other bitches and all sorts of things. Every woman is a god(dess.) Don't forget to tick the box. Whatever. There is no reasoning with you. God knows why God(dess) made a great honking bitch like you. I exempt myself from all this. Let us now praise famous men. Men like us when we fight. In the town, by the fountain, glittering with coins. Fight, fight, that's the ticket to a life filled with famous men swooning over our dumb butts. Whatever god(desse)s there are can't cope, they lie down in a bed made of doves as we fight, under the imprimatur some bitch, in a box, atop a pole That the famous men have put there, and we appease, to great applause. _______ for Weekend Mini Challenge at Toads.
My yard is green, wild green as generous as a lover two weeks past hello. All of this profusion, it doesn't need me-- it simply is, bursting with itself because it can and will and must.
Not so long ago, these trees and this ground was bare as an old steamer trunk, empty as an attic. It didn't need me then, either, even in extremity. Any words or prayers I may have said were said to comfort my own mind.
Lately, I find myself thinking (as I sit surrounded by green, wild green) about clouds that change their motion and mien; about doors and blooms and lovers that open and close, arrive and slip away. I wandered spring and summer until spring and summer were gone, and now green, wild green, reminds me of what I never understand or hold for long,
leaving me lonely to the bone thorned by my own stupid and constant craving in a garden of green, wild green. _______
Here are the blue walls of the blue bedroom of the Cape Cod cottage by the blue sea-- here is the blue handle of a blue broom on the floor of the penitentiary. Here are blue fish in a blue basket to clean and fry on a blue afternoon-- here is the blue face in a blue casket and the blue of the ocean and the moon.
Lapis this lonely feeling, slate the sky Carolina the soft chime on the air-- peacock the pride, azure the things that die; admiral the clock that takes me unaware-- sapphire this sense of the heavy, the high, and this indigo poem, like foxfire there. ______
"Tonight
just let the curtain fall in silence
why not approach with less defiance
the one who'd love to see you smile
the one who'd love to see you smile tonight." --Elton John
"Hello darkness my old friend."--Paul Simon
This is a letter to myself because anything I say can and will be used against me-- everybody is a cop. I will sneak these words to myself in a paper cup because I have to have them. When I eat them, they will catch fire. I will vent them in fantastic concussion-- my molten words roiling on themselves roundly for a fucking billion years sustaining nothing. When I was a child, I talked like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child. This is a letter to myself because I have to keep remembering how, and not be destroyed this time. I have wrapped my heart in words, stuffed my eyes with them, my mind, my intimate places murdered and abandoned. This is a letter to myself. Goddamit. Goddamit! I said I wouldn't shake, but I always do.
This is a letter to myself because then, if anyone asks why I am crying, why I am bashing my brains out against the wall, why I sing though I cannot sing why I sing though I cannot sing then I can say it was these letters, and wave them like a girl on shipboard, departing on an adventure instead of what I am-- a woman tearing her own throat out with her fingers; drawing watercolor roses in drying blood for no one. ______ for the weekend mini-challenge.
There's a door charge to get in to Right Reverend Randy Tulsa's Old Rugged Cross Mega-Church. One tenth of everything on you, as well as one tenth of everything out in the car, back at your house (both the main and the summer "cottage"), and whatever you've got squirreled away in the Caymans. God sees it all, brothers and sisters.
Come on. Come in. If there's a cover charge, you know there's a band! Check out Miranda and the Trinity! She's got the pipes, brothers and sisters.
You make me so happyyyy such love makes my heart soarrrrr... Jesus is my boyfriend I could never ask for more!
How about Miranda, let's give her a hand! What a testimony! All right now, let's talk about prosperity a minute. God doesn't want His children scrabbling around without a nickel to their name. Would YOU let YOUR kids go hungry, have to sleep outside, or drive a three year old compact? NO! God wants you to be prosperous. Here's Tiffany to talk about how tithing leads to riches!
(Tiffany does her thing. Miranda sings Ripped Jesus Is My Strength. Then Randy Tulsa takes the stage to wild applause.)
Yes, friends, God loves you, is proud of you, wants the best for you! And no matter what you've done, God forgives! Take this man over here! (Randy Tulsa whirls around and points at a pew off to the left, in front. Randy's finger is like Judgement itself.) The man he's pointing at is smeared with gore and is wearing a hockey mask. Randy thunders: Have you lived a life steeped in wickedness and sin, brother? The man looks around from behind his mask, seems uncertain, then nods nervously. Randy roars: Have you scorned the ten commandments? Have you forgotten The Lord in your life????
Hockey Mask Man begins to tremble, dropping the knife as his shoulders shake. Randy Tulsa strides with purpose down the steps to the man and lays hands on him. Randy, taken with a sudden ecstasy, sings out: Are you ready to repent, brother? Are you READY to be FORGIVEN by His almighty LOVE? The crowd is into it, swaying and shouting "Amen!" Randy Tulsa waves the nearest of the congregation into a group hug with the gore-soaked man. Randy beams and exclaims: You are forgiven, son! It's like all that sin never happened at all! You've been through the wash cycle of Heavenly Love! As an aide gets the man's address, cell number and estimated weekly pledge, Randy re-takes the stage.
But what is THIS???? Again he points like an angry Old Testament prophet, but this time toward the back of the mega-church as cameras swing around to capture it all. Heads turn and necks swivel, but no one can tell what Randy is pointing at. He resumes: Outside, the unsaved! Homosexuals engaging in behavior the bible tells us is an abomination to God! Devious foreigners slipping into our country to destroy it! Lazy welfare cheats living off of our backs, rioting in the streets! Will YOU pray with me now, brothers and sisters? Let's bow our heads while our wonderful Youth Bible Camp teens come around with the offering plates.
Miranda sings:
Jesus has the kindest eyes like a lifeguard watching over me So powerful, but gentle, too And Omg, Kimberly, he's set me freeeee
As everybody files out, Randy Tulsa stands beaming at them benevolently, thinking: Pay up, you dopes, I owe my fucking dentist a bundle! ________
"The scientists say It will all wash away But we don't believe any more Cause we've got our recruits And our green mohair suits So please show your I.D. At the door."--"Sin City" by Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons
Power only lasts a minute, like lion piss on the trunk of a tree keen on the next rain.
Girl, you're somebody's Venus, but not everyone's; while you give some fool your smile and make another one wait hope and suffer, here I am, up from a trap-door Hell, denying you mine.
Zebra have nightmares of being chased, when they dare sleep at all. All are destroyers to the ant, even a bumbling child.
See the sun, the same one that burns the cat, the commander, the egg shell CEO and that cunt on the corner, rising above them all.
Feel your own roar shaking the earth itself. Dig it, but remember, the legions with their whips and cages and clocks have a circus to make you the foil of in a Rome you've not imagined--more real than this desert you terrify today. _________
"Why?" she asked, holding a headless sparrow that the grackles had killed.
The sun was out, but could as easily not have been. I could have been someplace else. She could have never been born.
Here, it is like stepping off of the unfurled tongue of a devil. For hell, it's cold. People work here, collect checks like anybody else.
Once, she was spinning. I caught her in my arms. It could have been someone else, but that day, the sun was out. That day, the sparrows were thick around the backyard feeder.
At a certain age, she started locking her bedroom door. There I'd stand, blind in the hallway, holding laundry warm from the dryer against my arms. Here, they let you look, their faces a question.
His eye is on the sparrow, so they say. I was someplace else, collecting a check like anybody would. I came rushing through the front doors, from a window to a hallway to an elevator, one level down.
Someone caught her in their arms. Now she's here, oh Jesus. Oh God oh sweet Jesus, yes that's her. My knees buckled, the floor came up. It could as easily have been someone else.
"Give her some water," someone said. "Is her husband on his way?" Oh oh oh oh no no no no. Every day of her life has run through every day of mine. Once, she was spinning, dancing to some song in the living room. She was smiling. Her arms might have been wings. _______
For the Real Toads mini-challenge. Write about a building. I wrote about a morgue.
Here is the street door to where you are not. The red bricks remain-- together they make a wall, a building, The old Busy Oak restaurant and the apartments above it.
Here are the winter cars out in the street, the noisy buses sending up dust and old leaves, none of them carrying you. Here are the mailboxes, none of them yours, no way to fold in a note; here are dark stairs leading up, but they lead to curt strangers in your place.
I'm not sure I miss you, but I miss being young, full of desire and hope, uncertainty and kind intentions. I miss the way your walk made me feel to see it, something like being drunk in church, naked and faith-struck.
Here is the place I lived to find, then found. Here is the Busy Oak, turned realtor's office and recruitment center. The places we love come and go, the young come and go, it all passes and fades, but something brought me back here Once more, today, to this place and you. _____ for the mini-challenge: people and places.
You bring in Moon Men to take your side, the way you always do. They seem unaware of their own absurdity, and miss the irony when I offer them cheese and a jaundiced look. Martians, Venutians, your whole catalog of 1950's movie space-crash schlock take up for you and goggle at me with their several eyes, some on stalks.
I've had enough. I'm going to swing away on the rings of Saturn and land on a moonless world, where everyone is courteously silent. But just as I start to unclench, here you come, with Moon Men to the right and left, charting my shortcomings, agreeing after much discussion, and then stuffing me into a sock to be swung like a cat until dazed, dented, dead.
Flavius Julius Valens Augustus checks his Facebook page and discovers that he has been trolled again by the Visigoths. They make memes insulting him. They go into hysterics criticizing his hair and nose.
He types in his status: "Stop doing this II me. What do you do it IV?" He adds a sad emoji. "Why all the hVIII?"
But the Visigoths keep trolling him. They send a new meme showing a sausage with a face wearing lederhosen. It says, "Bite me." He unfriends them, but one day they will prevail. ______ Mini-challenge: "not what we came to see"
My glasses fell, broke, went blind in one eye. Not much that I lose (anymore) upsets me very much, but the world has lost its bones and I feel like a stranger.
Faces become pillows, buildings blobs. Only my heart retains its hard edge, and I bleed myself dizzy every night. "Look," say the pillows, gathering around my wheelchair
Like dumb birds for bread. They think I'm blushing when I'm dying and hang little samplers on the walls of my room. "She's as rosy as a girl," they say, silly chatterboxes
Without faces, but with mouths as big as the white shadow that doctors know. ______
Read this poem and I'll find that girl who snobbed you and cut her dead in mid-sentence.
Read this poem and receive 15% off any astrolabe at The Drunken Parrot.
Read this poem and lose weight fast, locate lost loves, eliminate mosquitoes, find a bank bag just sitting there on the sidewalk.
Read this poem and grow bigger boobs, thicker hair, enormous wings, why not? Read this poem and Donald Trump gets laryngitis. Read this poem and Hillary Clinton gets a big honking herpes cold sore. Read this poem and feel younger, smarter, better!
Read this poem and leave a comment-- say a lot about my brilliance. Thanks. _______
Little green men arrive, looking like seasick 98-pound weaklings. Some frat boys decide to have fun by putting one in a dog crate and pouring beer on him to see if he melts or something. They piss on him too (used beer! ha!) and then roll him--still in the crate! too good!--down the apartment stairs and into the swimming pool.
Finally, they pose, with boozy grins, holding the drowned spaceman's head up like great white hunters on safari while somebody posts it on YouTube.
When the Mother Ship arrives (Who's your daddy now?) the things that are done to the frat boys by the "rampaging inhuman monsters" are fodder for outraged talking heads the next morning across the land. Why did they commit such unspeakable cruelties?
The answer is just like always. Because they could, boys. Because they could. _______
Death and Night were obliged to share a room after their brother, Morning, was born.
Death sat smoking a cigarette, bad-mouthing Morning. "Fuck that little bastard. They think the sun shines out of his ass."
"Did you wear my black sweater again, bitch?" asked Night, fuming. The neck is all stretched to shit." Frowning, she tossed it on the bed.
"Well excuse me, Your Highness," drawled Death. "See if I ever loan you a tampon again."
Death and Night were sisters, but while Night was always being invited to every soiree, Death only got random attention from tubercular poets who thought she was a Goth.
"Morning, you little ray of sunshine, come in here and let your sissy give you a nice hug."
"Piss off, Death."
Death ignored him and dragged on her ciggie. "I think I'm adopted," she complained to Night. And fuck your stupid sweater. Things aren't meant to last forever, yanno."
Night was too busy smearing moisturizer onto her skin to answer, obsessed as always with her sensitivity to sunlight and her insomnia.
Death and Night were sisters. Night was beautiful and mysterious. Their brother Morning was the very definition of youthful charm. As for Death, people avoided her and said she smelled bad. She got fired from Lowe's for making all the flowers wilt. It's sad, but there it is. As soon as Night left to go take a shower, Death picked up her black sweater and pulled furiously at it, really fucking it up good. Then she sat down, lit another cigarette, and smiled like a serene-ass Madonna in a painting. _________
Look, friend Jane, for a wishing star stuck in the sky like a dime in tar; Tell that star what you won't tell mother, tell what we tell, only to each other.
Wish star, wish star, Imhotep and Ishtar, Nile crocodile keep this secret safe!
Oh, friend Jane, tell me what did you wish? swear on a little finger, seal with a kiss; meetcha by the rail fence, meetcha by the moon, mother make the evil eye when she sees you.
Wish star, wish star, Imhotep and Ishtar, Nile Crocodile keep this secret safe!
Now, friend Jane, I know what you said, mother's at the bottom of the stairs stone dead; moon on the pond water, stars in the sky, mother's eyes are open but she's blind, Jane, blind.
The milliner suffered from insomnia. When he did sleep, he was subject to dreams involving his lost love, Lucinda.
He would dream that he could see her at the other end of a train station, waving with a folded newspaper held in her gloved hand. However, in the manner of dreams, when he tried to hurry to her, each movement required Herculean effort just to budge an inch. He would never be able to cross the entire station in time.
And so, he would wake up and go down to his basement shop to work on a new hat. As if he were a public fountain of loneliness, his sadness dripped from his mind down through his arms and out his fingers, into the material for the hat, into the ribbons, into the packaging for mailing it to the customer.
Upon receipt, ladies would see the lovely color, feel the softness and delight in the unique design, hand-made only for her by the milliner. Unfortunately, upon wearing the hats, odd things would begin to happen.
Mrs. Arthur Popovich, after wearing her hat to her bridge club, failed to return home. She was found sitting on a bench at the local train station, fanning herself absently with a folded newspaper, with tears streaming down her cheeks.
"Do you see the platform?" she asked a bewildered Mr. Popovich when he finally found her. "Do you see how it makes no move to hold the trains as they arrive and depart? How cold it is! The rails never meet. Did you ever notice that?"
"Come home, darling," he said gently, and she did, but she was never the same. Other husbands from Dubuque to Sioux City reported the same baffling behavior, and read about each other in advice columns.
Meanwhile, the milliner saw his Lucinda once again in yet another dream, waving to him with a folded newspaper held in her gloved hand. Inside, were letters from men whose wives had purchased hats. These men sat in telephone booths along the wall, the doors folded back, their overcoats open, not talking, just staring. When the lonely milliner tried to run, to get to Lucinda in time, each of these men picked up their respective receivers and began to dial. The milliner found himself moving so fast that it made him dizzy. In the time it took him to realize it, he was at the departure platform, losing his balance, reeling and falling past Lucinda. She turned his way and blew him a kiss, her lips a perfect red, her gloves as white as electric lights. After that, he did not dream anymore, and there were no more hats, despite dozens of orders scattered across his work table, unfilled. _____
At some point, there was no more of Jerry and yet, I kept walking him around anyway no matter how he billowed and sagged, no matter the film-melt at his hands, his feet, his face.
I kept thinking, this is Jerry, MY Jerry, and he will rally, he will laugh it off and start dancing even though we would both know it hadn't been a joke; love can be that way, can't it?--illogical, like improv, chancy.
Okay, I lied. We had got to that point of inattention where things get missed, or recast, or denied, and so when I walked down the street with Jerry I wore no black, but the night lent me its share and I wrapped it over my shoulders and knotted it in my hair.
Look, Jer, I'm 3 a.m.-- your girl full of stars, still circling, ever faithful. There's no more of you, but life is crammed with leftover me; I don't know what to do, and it's lonelycold, unbearable, rainful.
'Bye, Jerry. When dawn comes, I'll have to pretend there's a tomorrow, and there it will be no matter what-- without me caring, without you there. _______
