Lullaby Of A Beautiful Girl

I'm a beautiful girl, made of ice.
I am water when it stops moving.
If you want me, it is either because you're crazy,
or because you see summer, still, inside me--
a season preserved that you can't touch.

Invite me in anyway, murderer.
Make love to me with a hammer;
don't kiss me unless you want us to stay that way forever,
not eating, not speaking,
like poets, or the damned.

I was an urchin once, making cat shit castles in my sandbox,
wondering what I'd be when I became a woman.
It rained and I became a mermaid instead--
winter stilled the waves and left me half in and half out,
half a woman who will never bear a child,
half a fish caught on a glittering hook.

I'm a beautiful girl, made of ice.
I am water when it stops moving.
If I want you it is either because I'm desperate,
or because I feel summer's seed, still, inside me--
a season destroyed, yet suspended in my touch.
_______

Girl

She's not a nice girl.
Her kiss takes your breath,
and while you're weak,
she'll take the rest.

She'll have your child,
but bear it dead--
then raise it up
(but just the head.)

Kiss me

instead.
______

for Words Count at Real Toads. 37 words on the nose. 
 

Close Your Eyes And Think Of England

You said,
"stay in the compound,
mind the babies,"
but the babies grew while you were out in the cane fields.
Now they roll those laughing bones
and speak the local dialect,
distrusting the gendarmes like natives.

"What about the girls?' you might ask,
if you were ever here to ask.
That is the girls.
In the afternoon, they walk barefoot and hatless,
with a pack of stray dogs trailing behind,
hoping for a bit of biscuit.
The dogs are brown,
the girls are brown,
and neither have ever been to England.

Reach for me in the night; pretend I'm a receipt.
Drop your suspenders off your shoulders like a coquette,
while I close my eyes, thinking of the fox hunt
with me as the fox,
but this time
with a cane knife beneath my petticoats.
I've been in the trash again, yes I have.
Better strangle me now.
Howl, man-hound, though you never had the scent.

The household budget allowed for two Arabians.
Our oldest and I go riding,
but not side saddle. 
We are as wild as Indians, painted like Zulus,
shrieking in island French, 
our cheeks rouged with fresh chicken blood we get from the cook.

You complain about the fare every night,
addressing us as if we were the candlesticks,
blustering about everything being too spicy.
The girls and I,
we doctor our dinner until we hallucinate,
just to be able to bear it.

Still, how bold you are, how genuinely manly,
coming here and conducting a successful business
in this sweltering mosquito hell
where the women cast spells
and the men are weak and lazy.
How amazing what you manage to accomplish
wearing a sturdy wool suit
in this place where you couldn't claim to truly know
anyone at all.
______

for Fireblossom Friday, featuring the art of W.T. Benda.

"Close your eyes and think of England." Queen Victoria's famous advice to English ladies being depended upon to produce more population for the Empire.

kindness

Kindness--
I aspire to it.
Think of the martyred saints secure in Heaven with their reward!

If it had been me,
I would have pulled the arrows out and made bones of them;
I'd have stood up out of the fire pit and made somebody pay.

I picture myself sanguine,
mild as milk,
but sometimes I get tired.
The day goes on and on as if it were The Train Of Infinity
hogging the crossing on some devil-hot day,
and at times such as those, it may become necessary 
for me to pat you on your head,
replacing the bloody divot I have taken out of it.

Look at my hands!
Soft and harmless, now, as unbaked dough.
I only ever have the best of intentions,
and that has served me well in my job with the Highway Department.

Do you think you could trust me again
some day,
in some bright future where mobs are made lazy 
by a surfeit of love and patient understanding?
Or will you will yourself to die just to get the ear of God
and talk shit about me?

Kindness
is my watchword and my natural way.
That's what I'll be explaining, hoping for acquittal,
pro se, having to do everything myself--
getting the pencils and pens,
getting my own glass of water,
getting the maximum,
getting the legal pads, the table itself, the chair.
________

 

Harpies

Night is a shell we were half out of--
its edge an obstacle at eye level.

We only saw each other's soft side
in those days when the jagged break seemed benign,
like a string of crescent moons made of party paper.

We didn't know we were already growing flight feathers
and talons as large as grizzly claws.

Honey, we were sheathed in the things that killers are made from,
seasoned with the urge to fly or fall,
and of course,
an instinct to claim and use them.
_______

Harem Girl

They kicked me out of the harem.
One minute I was sucking on a grape, 
listening to Trixie tell Helen Keller jokes,

How does Helen Keller drive a car?
With one hand on the wheel and the other on the road.
How did Helen Keller ruin her nails?
Reading roadside signs.
How did Helen Keller burn her ear?
Answering the iron.

and the next, I was being dropped at the old filthy-ass bus station downtown
with my duffel and my backpack, like some parolee.
Inside, there were no pillows,
no peacock feather fans,
just hard plastic seats and a vending machine filled with crap like pork rinds and pop tarts.
I guess they weren't expecting a lady.

It's not that the harem was the greatest place to be, you understand.
When he calls you, you've got to act all swoony and glad about it.
You can't roll your eyes and go, 
"Right now? Well fuck a damn duck!" like I did.
You also can't get away with a quick hand job while flipping through Cosmo with the other.
I learned that the first week.
You've got to be engaged, or he gets all bent out of shape about it.

A word about those Cosmo articles--
you know the ones.
1,000 sexy secrets that will drive him wild!!!
If those really worked, there would be grinning goofy-faced men walking around everywhere, wandering into traffic with their shirts buttoned wrong.
There aren't. 
I rest my case.

It was this kind of thinking that got me thrown out of the harem.
I needed that job.
I'm the single mother of a six month old chameleon named Rainbow Happy,
and we can't eat wolf whistles. 
I will admit, right here, that I complained a lot--
about those stupid pastel paint jobs on the walls, like we were living inside an Easter egg,
and the way the eunuchs never knew the baseball scores despite knowing that I would ask every morning.
I couldn't manipulate charm them, cos they weren't really men anymore,
but they could sure sock away the pizza like a bunch of doughy, pasty-faced truck drivers.

This is all very difficult for me.
Here, take my duffel, all my dainties are inside and I can't lose them.
Maybe I'll catch the four-fifteen to Seattle,
or the five-thirty to Salt Lake City.
Do Mormons have harems?
I can do a great Marie Osmond.
Listen to me belt out "Paper Roses"!
A girl with my skill set should be able to land a new gig in nothing flat, don't you think?

Hey, it's been nice chatting with you, but I've got the highway in my blood, and all that hokey stuff they say in the movies.
Marilyn Monroe put it best:

Just because you fail once,
doesn't mean you're going to fail at everything.

Marilyn was smarter than people think.
She read books, she had a lot going on, but people think she was just blonde hair and great boobs.
Are you even listening to me? My face is up here, by the way.
I'm off into the great unknown.
Give me your email, I'll let you know when I hit Flagstaff.
I went through there once when I was thirteen, in May, and it was snowing. 
The guy next to me put his hand on my knee, so I faked a coughing fit and jerked forward.
He smashed his fingers on the metal edge of the seat in front of us;
it was just like breaking up a bird for Sunday dinner.
I got kicked off that bus.
They didn't understand the burden of beauty,
and I had to stand before a judge and explain my "violent outburst."
He told me I seemed like a nice girl and why don't we discuss this privately?
Well, I never look a gift horse yadda yadda.

But when he took off his robes and everything, he looked like a wookie,
and I couldn't help it, I started to laugh.
I got pitched out of his chambers and straight out of town,
like common trash.
No one in the modern world appreciates true beauty,
and so I wander like a mystic,
or a peculiarly hot-looking staretz,
searching for my place in life,
teaching when I can, loving when they agree to use protection,
and just trying to perfect my soul
so that they won't throw me out of Heaven before I've made any friends,
or gotten to try those little crepes that I hear they make up there.

I want mine with strawberries,
and not a man in sight.
________

The Girl Who Liked Hemingway

I didn't win the pageant
because those bitches wouldn't know beauty if it beat them over their 'do's with a porch plank.

My Mediterranean sultriness was not what they were looking for;
them with their politeness and their narrow-lipped smiles holding back the churning reflux that their hearts produce.

They are not human.

As a baby, I was different.
I spoke within minutes, asking for a mirror before milk,
and sharing Portuguese brandy with my father in the library before the month was out.

Let others become checkers at Target.
Let others slave in the shamba under a broiling sun.
They do not have my sculptured cheekbones,
and so must scramble and struggle while I laze under an awning in a cafe,
accepting the dazzled worship of waiters named Jean-Guy.

But look, it hasn't been all roses and honey, just the same.
I stayed barefoot until I was twelve, by choice.
I whipped all the local boys,
and was the terror of the American compound.

I first considered pageants when I was caught siphoning gas from a diplomat's car.
The diplomat took me inside and stood with his back to me,gazing through his wife's sheer curtains at the stucco buildings across the street, and said,

"There are other things
you could be doing."

Soon I was shivering,
my arm dangling boneless over the edge of the dining room table,
smiling at the patterned copper ceiling.
I had still been in command of myself when he lost all his polish and said things to me that were not diplomatic, but rather,
the shouts of a drowning man finding shore.

So anyway,
these bitches looked at me critically, as if I were a steer at auction,
each of them a little complacent fat cask of petty.
I knew I couldn't win,
and my mind turned, as it always has,
toward ways to rain down destruction upon my enemies' heads.

I have a little French cahier
that I write down my dreams and plans in.
If the gendarmes ever find it, I'm so fucked.

But never mind.
The world of pageants plateaus early--
you're done at twenty, turned loose in the streets to blink big-eyed
at the onrushing autobus that will flatten you dead.
Does this sound like me?
Does it?

I am a girl without an umbrella,
because it never dares to rain on my perfect creamy shoulders.
I own no pearls,
but I have six different divining decks,
one for each day of the week, and then I go to Mass on Sunday.

I didn't win the pageant,
but I escaped to Algiers and met a man.
In the morning, we start out together for Kilimanjaro--
I shall be barefoot, in my element once more,
and McComber will have some sort of accident and leave everything to me.

Heft those trunks, bush guides,
I forgot my mirror and am keen to retrieve it
so that I may kiss my image as one would Cerberus,
if he were female
and as pretty as me.
_________

for Flipside's word list 15: Mediterranean, siphon, brandy, destruction, cafe, cahier, raincoat, narrow-lipped, barefoot, pearls, sculptured, mirror, critically, casks, plateau, politeness, awning, curtains, shivering and shamba. (words taken from Ernest Hemingway's "The Garden Of Eden")

Also linked to real Toads open link Monday.

And shared on 10/27/22 to Dverse OLN. 

 

The Lovely Bride

She made a lovely bride.
Wearing her white dress, she looked like a sexy cloud.

Her happy groom had their days planned out ahead of them,
As numerous and alike as the whiskers on his cheeks when he smiled.

Later, no one would admit to having invited the wolf--
To having brought the wolf;
Perhaps he brought himself, from deep in the forest's secret heart.

Up the aisle he came,
Right in the middle of the ceremony.
No one had a gun,
(it wasn't that kind of wedding)
And so no one knew a way to stop him.
He helped himself to a big fat bite of organdy and lace--
As if confusing the bride
With the wedding cake--
And half-dragged, half-carried her off to his sylvan hideaway.

Well.
Pandemonium!

Maybe her perfume attracted him.
Maybe she knew him before.
Maybe she knew him still!
She had only been standing there, trying to get married,
But the woman always gets the blame, yes?

The groom wept, then shouted,
"What do they want?"

Here is what we want:
In the morning, the bride crawled out of the wolf's den,
Her dress in shreds and tatters, bloody,
With scratches all over her skin and leaves in her hair,
Stinking to high heaven of wolf.
"Wow!" said the bride.

In a few years,
She will divorce the wolf
When he forgets her birthday again--
When he forgets to bathe or use cutlery--
When he drags home another big dead-ass elk, expecting her to turn it into pot roast.

But it will be all right.
There will be no kids.
In time, she will find somebody different--
More human, maybe.
More verbal.
Maybe even female!
Who really knows? But when that day comes,
One thing won't have changed at all--

She will make a lovely bride.
_______

for dverse open link #36

Three poems for Kerry's magical realism prompt at Real Toads

DRAGONS

Oh honey, good for you--
For the bread you won and the dragons you slew.
It's enough to make a feminine heart flutter.

Who is she?
Who is she?
No matter.

All day I read the Tarot--
Some cards up, some cards down.
Some turn their back, some show their face,
But the cards themselves do not change.
Every morning:
The Hanged Man.
Every afternoon:
The Lightning-Struck Tower.
(And the dragon's tail
Of hours.)

Perhaps this is why
The dragons came to me,
Despite the ones we ate, and the ones you slew.
There are more--
more more more more more more more more.
They filled the yard, rang the bell.
What was I supposed to do?

One at a time, I took them in--
To my confidence.
To my bed.
They told me how they grieve, and dream.
And, oh,
The other things they said to me!

Honey, how I admire you--
For the bread you won, and the dragons you slew.
The deep scratches on my skin are from baking.
The smell of cordite in my hair is from
The salon,
Or from taking the kids to school.

How glad I am,
As I cool myself in the limpid pool of our evenings together,
That you find my nattering pleasant;
Like a woman standing on the next-closest planet,
Singing to you in a pretty foreign language.
_______

KITTY

You like Kitty when Kitty is nice.
I love Kitty all the time.

You like to toss Kitty up in the air.
I love to let Kitty sleep in my hair.

When you call Kitty, she hisses and spits.
When I call Kitty, she comes close and sits.

You like for Kitty not to rankle.
I love how Kitty twists 'round your ankle.

Upsy-daisy, down the stairs;
When we land, brand new pairs.
_________

BLACK CATS

Here is where you were wrong--
Black cats are not bad luck.

I am a nice girl, and you should not have set me on fire.
Is that how your mama taught you to do?

Here is a bowl of dove tears--
Wash in them.
It won't do any good, but at least you'll feel like you're doing something;
Not just sitting on the tracks
Looking like you just lost your best friend.

So many times, we missed the boat,
Stepping into thin air, like wobbling bowling pins.

This is my hand, cupping your face.
These are our beautiful memories, like butterflies on a board--
Is it my fault that they fly right into your head
Whenever you don't keep yourself occupied?

We quarreled, and you set me on fire.
It happens, and I bear you no grudge;
But witch that I am,
My ashes grew eyes, and landed on their feet.
Do you see, now, how wrong you were?
Black cats are not bad luck.
______  

top picture: Gregory Crewdson. middle picture:Michael Parkes. last picture unknown source.

for Kerry's Challenge at Real Toads.  

Cindy & The Unfortunate Birthday Cake

Cindy did for the birthday cake.
Damn the thing anyway,
As if enough Bisquick and bullshit could 
Make her husband keep his dipstick where it belongs,
And keep her kids from going wrong,
And make everything as orderly as the numbered pages of a Redbook magazine,
Lined up flush and sequential,
Not loonbat crazy in the middle of the afternoon.

Cindy did for the birthday cake
With a ginormous honking big knife
Longer than a mother in law's memory,
And someone's got to answer for that,
For the gashes in the easy to clean table cloth
And the fucked up frosting
And anything and everything that Cindy faked since forever,
Like interest and orgasms and staying sober until five.

Cindy did for the birthday cake,
And it felt hella good.
____

for the dverse Tuesday night cattle call

my 300th Word Garden post of 2011 

Morrin

Morrin lives in the shadow-bog, the storm-side, the cold hour.
She has no lace gloves, no roof--
She has no mother, no confessor, no beguiling face;
She fell full and bloody from the wolf's mouth,
Like a moon-pale broken tooth.

Morrin nay speak, nor sing, nor pray upon her knees.
She kills cuckoos, catches crows, kisses bees.
When your carriage passes by, Morrin writhes and spits;
She wishes your horses snort, bolt, and carry you quick
Out beyond the road and the twisted trees.

Oh but you, sly and sick with dull ennui,
Bade your driver stop, to set your tiny foot
Upon the mossy grave where Morrin sat.
How delicate your fingers, how soft your tones,
When you touched her, told her she was beautiful, bold, and good.

The grateful girl let you see her cry
In the moments before new devotion turned to helpless rage--
The servants cross themselves as your carriage comes back,
Carrying your smug, giggling face beneath a wide-brimmed hat,
And broken Morrin locked in a gamesman's cage.

______

for Real Toads

Love Poem In Extremis

Go down by the graveyard, darling;
I'll be there,
Carrying my patent leather heels in my hand.

Meet me where the headstones lean.
Wear a veil.
Come out of a cloud of crows, like a black sun.

My feelings for you stun me, always.
I am gripped with heart attack.
I fight for breath.

I wore a hussy's black lace for you,
And lied like a viper about where I was going;
Look around, everyone is dead. There is no one to sniff and deplore.

I am on my back in the decaying leaves,
Beneath a weeping angel made of stone.
Come to me, I beg you.

Under lowering clouds in late-day dusk,
Let's fuck as if our lives depend upon it--
Because they do, sweetheart,
They do.

______

Full Moon

I want my hands to be
two crescents--
one each, warm upon
your face,
and, also
your hip.

I want to lay with you,
as close as fur to the fox--
I want to say,
I love you sweetheart,
and, also
that there is only one sky
and one earth curved close against it.

________

Written on the night of the full moon, for STWIASD

Rain

I want it to rain.

I want to place my palms where your shirt is open and gather rain between my spread fingers.

I want my face as close to yours as your skin is to the storm.

I want to kiss you,

Hungry.

I want thunder

And strike-heat.

I want to show you that the sun is simply too small, too common.

I want the culverts and the sloped roofs rushing.

I want no one, and nothing, else.

I want you,

Desperately.

I want it to rain.

______

Song

Where does the night come from?

It is brought by birds, blue and black at the tip of every wing.

How is desire undone?

By lying still and silent at the bottom of the stream.



When do you best love your darling's dark hair? 

In the early mist of morning and every seventh spring. 

When do you most adore your darling's dark heart? 

I'll score the answer on your bones if you dare to ask again.


______

Fingerpaints

Afterward,
Simple with joy,

I have the urge to draw a sea shore
On the skin of your hip
With fingerpaints;

But you touch my wrist
And two birds stay together in the nest,
Playing moon to the tides
Of love in you.

_____

Congratulations

Etiquette note: one congratulates the groom, and wishes the bride good luck. To congratulate the bride implies that she was lucky to snag a man at all, and saying this could be construed as snarky. Miss Fireblossom deplores snarkiness.

Congratulations!

Oh honey, congratulations

On the success of your

Machiavellian machinations.

(I'm so glad

So awfully glad

I didn't say that out loud.)



And really,

I just know you'll both be

So happy,

So happy...

He looks dashing,

And you look smashing,

If just a little

Only a little

Trailer trashy...



And I just want you to know

That I wish you

I wish you both

Would just fall down on the polished floor and choke

Til death do you part.

Thank you for letting me be a part

Of your special day!

Do you know what I wish?

Oh, I wish you would both fall head-first down the stairs,

Down, down, down.

(And thank Goddess I didn't say that

Honey, I would never ever say that

Out loud.)

_________