Stars

 When I was just an olive sparrow living rootless in Texas,

I met Kris Kristofferson and some hay-blond woman with a kind face. I asked Kris, "Are you going to Willie's picnic?' and in that train engine rumble of his he laughed and said, "Hell, I see Willie at his house!" I never saw Kris Kristofferson again after that, except once, last night, around 3 a.m., in a cemetery just off Woodward Avenue. I asked him, "Where's Rita?" He said, "Oh, I couldn't rightly say, but wherever she's at I expect she's singin' " We sat together on a marker for Howard Greenbriar, husband and father, our beers at our feet, brown glass sweating in the grass, their gold-and-yellow labels giving them the appearance of votive candles. Looking up, I said, "I can't see the stars." Kris told me, "That's the lights, babe. We're like belled cats lookin' for angels." It was bright when I woke up. I wondered what happened to the hay-blond woman with the kind face. Her hair wasn't dark like Rita's or mine or turning gray like Rita's or mine. A friend texted, asking if I was going to the Kristofferson show that night. I texted back "Hell, I see Kris at his house!" But the truth is, I haven't seen a star for a very long time.

_______________

The part about meeting Kris Kristofferson in the first part of this poem is true. Or maybe it was just some rando who looked and sounded exactly like him.

Book

 

Let me tell you about the book I've been reading.

I started it so long ago, I can't now recall the opening lines 

or even how I came to have this book.

I think it was a gift, but I'm not sure from whom,

and though it's at most about a hundred pages long.

it has a great many chapters and characters.

Sometimes I love it and wish I could stay on a favorite page forever,

but by turns I want to throw it against the wall or destroy it.

Every time I think I've figured out where it's going or what it means,

the narrative changes and goes off in some unexpected direction.

I'm often displeased with the author or the characters

and wonder why in the world the story goes the way it does.

For the first few chapters, I was eager to read it quickly,

but as I've gotten nearer the finish than the start I want to slow down.

I loved some characters so much that they became part of me,

and I genuinely suffered when they were written out of the tale.

Others I hated and yet they lingered for page after page.

I had hopes for what would come next, more when I started than now.

What began as a children's book, became YA, adult fiction,

and now it's almost a memoir. I'm not sure how many pages are left.

I wonder, what if I had found myself reading a different edition,

a sequel, another book by the same author, a different genre,

setting, plot, or style? Would i have liked those better, or less?

Ah well, even though I have thrilled to the love scenes, cried when

the characters failed, were terribly hurt, or died, believed every word

or scoffed at the absurdity of it, none of it is even actual in the end.

It's a tale, something made-up, though it has seemed very real.

Novels, plays, films, they move me, change me, sometimes bore me,

irritate me, or leave me in despair, but they are only shadows. 

One day, the book will fall from my hand, and I'll protest that I

wasn't finished! or perhaps I'll sigh and say I'm glad to be shut of it.

No one else will read my particular book again after me, though

sections and passages may be passed down and I'll be

a character in someone else's book, a product of imagination.

_______

for What's Going On? -- Books/Reading.

Don't forget that Word Garden Word List remains active through Sunday. 

Music: Crash Test Dummies Afternoons & Coffee Spoons

Orbit and Waterfowl

 

Here are we, in our clean white smocks

carrying our easels

waddling in flocks

freed by signatures, approved by weasels

with keys to all the locks.

Gone in a group, out to the duck pond

chicks watching chicks

circling around

like the melt around ceremonial wicks

we the lost, them the found.

We who ate bitter oftener than sweet

who had enough

and beat our feet

into shadows where we flicker and huff

sentient suns in setting concrete.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Save Yourself

Music: Gnarls Barkley Crazy 

La Vigne de Lierre Magique et Très Sage (The Magic and Very Wise Ivy Vine)

 

The queen who kissed the garden wall

was snookered by an ivy vine

who made her head a cannon ball.

You see, dear queen, this magic mine

(said the speaking ivy vine)

Has launched your bean, my airborne queen

to blow the Brits to smithereens!

______

First written down by the French monk Gustavius Petitgrand, this well-known rhyme royal depicts the Battle of Camembert Castle in 1599. Beheaded by an angry mob of lettuce cutters in the streets of Paris, Queen Amie de Chateaubriand's head had to be used when the French cannoneers ran out of ammunition. The Queen's head landed in the officer's tent where British commander Lord Bupkus Kewgarden-McWeatherstone, Second Earl of Weevilwiggen was dining. The head is said to have spoken to him, though the exact words have been reported differently by various sources. In any event, so terrified was His Lordship that he immediately surrendered his army as well as his collection of chessmen carved from candle wax. This battle and the resulting French victory was a key turning point in the Twenty Minutes War and insured that no French child would ever be named Basil again. Vive la tete! (Alouette!) Ahhh!

For Word Garden Word List--Classic Fairy Tales. 

top image: Soul of the Rose by John William Waterhouse

Music: Choral Saint-Jean Alouette

The Legend of Large Larry Lilliput

 The Hollywood heavy left the bughouse

to become a public gangster,

then dynamited the studio

out of some imagined rancor.

"I am the King of the Eskimos!"
he declared with eyes gone glassy

and wore in his hair a plastic rose

convinced it looked quite classy.

His career was a catastrophe

playing ghouls and goons

but they say he gained some mastery

in the place where they count the spoons.

After a time, he married a mime

who made crickets seem loquacious.

They had nine kids--one sublime

and the other eight pugnacious.

He coughed and keeled and passed away

in the middle of his biggest caper.

You can't even visit his grave today--

he vanished into vapor!

______

posted with profuse apologies to Alicia Suskin Ostriker, the subject of this week's Word Garden Word List. 

The image is of Lon Chaney Sr. 

Music: Betty Booom & Ashley Slater Spooky Scary Skeletons

The City Inside My Head

 

The city inside my head

keeps its Sweet Face down

like a Japanese fan in the hand 

of a dead woman whose ghost

dances in air, 

untethered.

I am an ocean on the edge of a nightmare,

a horse gone headlong,

an unseen hand hanging up the cruisers,

mid-air,

sirens sounding like Stratocasters,

wah-wah pedals at patrolmen's feet. 

In the after-time, when you had gone,

the tall grass afternoons went on and on.

There was a yellow butterfly and a glass of gin,

and a thorn in the soft place where you had been.

The nights were cool, the stars were cold,

and together we turned slowly old

on a blue and green revolving ball

until love was dust, then nothing at all.

The city inside my head

keeps its Sweet Face down

like a Japanese fan in the hand

of a busker's monkey whose chattering forms

these poems, this after-time,

this image of the sun behind closed eyes 

hidden and 

glittering.

________

for Sunday Muse #168. Thanks to Hedge for telling me how to ditch the double spacing. Apologies for the varying type size in this. I can't fix it. 

What Happened To Aunt Flossie

Arsenic in the wallpaper killed Aunt Florence,

her demise hastened by her habit of banging her head into the wall

at the slightest provocation.

Last time we visited,

my sisters and I chimed "Hello, Auntie,"

followed immediately by our polite curtsies

and more thundering head-bangs

which shook the house and dazed poor Aunt Flossie.

At tea, she spoke of being haunted by the spirit of a skunk

which had been living under the back stoop.

Her dog killed it, but the striped stinker in its anger

sought revenge.

We held our napkins to our faces in order to endure it. 

"How awful," we remarked,

upon which Aunt Flossie let her tea cup drop

from her fingers, and would have

banged most ferociously into the wall had we not instantly intervened.

My sisters and I are pious girls and we have faith

that the stinker will not be permitted to follow Aunt Flossie

into the golden gates of Heaven.

We shall miss her.

_____

for Poetry Pantry and Real Toads "scent."

The Slats Stuffenberger Story

Today, not many people remember the story of Sigmund "Slats" Stuffenberger, a major league baseball player of the 1950's. Other things command our attention, such as earning a living, watching "Celebrity Karaoke" or fighting corruption charges in federal court. 

But Slats's story is worth remembering. Born in Pigslop, Kansas in 1935, Slats was named Sigmund by his father, a poor but hard-working tenant farmer who admired 19th and early 20th century Austrian academics. Slats's father, Bifford "Pea" Stuffenberger, had high hopes for his only son to become a concert pianist, but young Sigmund wanted only to play big league ball.

Sadly saying their goodbyes on a train station platform in Phlebitis City, in the rain, wearing torn coats, and not having bathed in weeks, the elder and younger Stuffenbergers parted and Sigmund rode the train to Corn Corners, which at the time had its own Class D team, the Corn Corners Shuckers.

Shuckers skipper Ernest "Mad Dog" Mumford didn't think much of the green kid fresh off the farm, and refused to play him at all until the day when the team's star, Ragland Dollie--who had once batted twice for the New York Giants in September, 1905--broke his femur when he fell from the center field clock tower at the close of a cocaine-inspired spree. "You're in there, kid!" cried Mumford, and with that, Sigmund got his chance.

He tore through the minor leagues like there was no tomorrow, hitting a combined .439 for five teams, each one in a higher league than the one before it. He pitched, too, compiling a log of 31-3 on the mound. It wasn't long before scouts and telegrams from as far away as Cincinnati and Boston, wanting Sigmund--now known as Slats, for having once hit a grand slam home run with a bed slat to win a game for the old Oakland Oats--to come play big league ball began to arrive. 

Bright lights, big city! Slats arrived in Boston to play for the Braves on a June afternoon in 1952, when he was just 17 years of age. The veterans on the club gave him a warm welcome, setting his suitcase on fire and pouring itching powder into his jock strap. Undeterred, Slats got into the game as a pinch hitter and belted a line drive double down the line. Spurred, perhaps, by the itching powder, Slats showed speed nobody could remember seeing before, at least not in Beantown.

The next year, 1953, saw Slats traded to the Phillies, where he hit 62 home runs, won 14 games as a pitcher, and spent the winter playing pro basketball "for fun." He met a young woman named Betsy Helgenshooker, and married her. "I'll always remember what she said to me at the church altar on our wedding day," recalled Slats some years later during an interview for the Philadelphia Phrenology News. "She looked so beautiful. She smiled shyly at me from behind her lace veil and whispered to me that she was 'pretty sure' the baby was mine."  

Perhaps tired from changing nappies, Slats slumped to only 47 homers in '55, and then 31 in '56 as the Phillies dealt him to the Pirates for Spook Jacobs. In Pittsburgh, Slats became a Buddhist and renounced all material possessions. Converting to vegetarianism as well, Slats hit a meager .213 in fewer than fifty at bats before being shipped out to the Elmira Elephants of the Barnum & Bailey League. Playing center field and shortstop, as well as filling in on the flying trapeze, Slats whiled away the time until he could return to the bigs.

But he never did. Georgia Alabama, the circus Fat Lady, entered Slats's hotel room one evening and shot him in the abdomen with a revolver. "I loved him," she explained to police, as Slats clung to life at Hobgoblin Hospital in Elmira. Though the brave young man tried a comeback, first with the Elephants and later with a succession of 'bush league" clubs, it never worked out; Slats became an alcoholic bum, sleeping on cardboard boxes over steam grates in downtown Philadelphia. 

Despite his sad end, the memory of Slats Stuffenberger's exploits as a lad in 1953 is cemented in Phillies lore forever. As his widow Betsy said--with Slats's son Jamaal at her side--"Slats always saw the best in people, and in life. He was a good man." A good man who once swatted 62 baseballs into the seats in the summer of 1953.
______

Assignment

Bloodorange, the Big Boss,
assigned me to report on my own death, 
presenting a ticklish situation, both logistically and ethically. 

Cockrobin, my first journalism professor,
wrote "REPORT the story" on a blackjack and let me have it.
I saw stars indicating the edition with my byline on it, Chickpea, girl reporter.

Now, Bloodorange and I used to be a thing
until he undrowned his wife and family, up from the river, reborn.
I'm a loose end, an extra column, and the new ace of a dying profession.

Bloodorange is as crafty as he is cheap,
with two dicks that duel each other constantly, resulting in
his slightly gassy, somewhat bemused expression, commented on by all.

Concerned for my career, not to mention my mortal flesh,
I went to see Cockrobin, down under L Street where he lives in a funeral urn.
I kissed him by way of interview, and he bade me live just to spite his rival.

Like any good reporter, I wrote what I could long before deadline,
plumbing the morgue for basic bio stuff about myself, all news to me.
Then I composed several endings and demises, stored in a cloud like akashic records. 

Oh how Bloodorange and I used to dance, but now
one of his brats has killed me with a ball peen hammer, emerging from a high cupboard
to bash my brains in. How'd the little darling even get up there?

CHICKPEA, HOTSHOT INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST, 
BOUGHT THE FARM TODAY, DONE IN BY LOVE AND AMBITION.
(Bloodorange hates vernacular, that's why I used it.)

The next afternoon, the newspaper folded,
journalism died, and Bloodorange became a Hindu,
reincarnated, single again, and using my skull for a doorstop at his ashram

Where the ideals are advertising revenue, and survival of the fittest.
__________

for the weekend challenge at Toads: the news.

Bukowski

His hero was there
at that party
being an ass.

I was there,
being an ass myself.

"What do you remember?" someone wanted to know,
when the poet
met the poet.

I said I remember him bumping the kitchen table
lumbering to the john.
Somebody mopped up the spilled drinks with an old shirt.

His hero was there.
He wasn't, but he defended his man crush like a defense attorney,
listing the titles and Apocrypha.

How wrong do I have to be
about my own memory
before he mercifully shuts the fuck up?

His hero was there
at that party
being an ass.

I was there,
and now I'm here
biting my tongue so as not to join him.
_______

for Stevens, there at every disaster.
 

Francisco

He kept Plath in his beard--
Pound in his pocket.

He was a big, round, officially endorsed cargo ship
carrying Crane, Yeats and Cummings
to and above all our upturned mermaid faces.

How we adored him as he
orbited above us,
tossing us enjambments and sandwich crumbs.

Everyone I knew that winter
was on some sort of diet, slowly
starving themselves to get more
love
looks
and saints' medals for self-denial.

He alone moved through our world consuming it
even as he fattened it with all he stuffed us full of.

He said, "I have the reputation of being unapproachable,
but come to my office any time."
He had The Bard on the wall, Ferlinghetti on the book shelf.

He saw that I was famished and gave me loaves and fishes,
bound with glue and published by the University Press.

I let him down, you know, in the end.
My depression settled in and I gacked the final paper.
His appearance that last time, shocked me.
He said, "You're smart, but you don't try."

Gods kill themselves,
and when they do, nobody can believe it.
I thought it was my fault.
It wasn't, but

I grew all that spring and summer, even after he was gone.
My parents' lips hard-dried in a thin line.
Friends put their palms on me.

I never told anyone, and they all assumed it was some college boy.
Now I have one of my own, but when he was little
I would bitch at him to go sledding,
make a snowman,
play hockey,
anything, but just get your nose out of that book.

Then I'd feel bad and apologize to the air, and to Francisco
for all of my shortcomings
and the poems--the poems unwritten. 
______

For Magaly's "Carpe Jugulum" challenge at the Imaginary Garden With Real Toads. Some of this poem is true, the rest is my imagination.

One Does Not Simply Walk In

Dread is a useful emotion--
it's nature's way of telling you something's wrong.

As the rodent considers the feline at the mouth of the burrow,
as the passenger considers the drunken buffoon sliding behind the wheel,
I consider your stupid bedside radio
playing your unbearable soporific radio station,
and dread of the next thirty years overtakes me.

It is then that I know that I-eye-eye
will not always
love you-OOOOooooooo.

However, one does not simply walk in,
turn one's delicate bangled wrist sideways,
and start blasting as you lay in bed dreaming of the stupid shit that fills your head.

One must endure the outings at your suggestion,
the lame, candy-cute destinations you choose for us,
eating away my free hours like a virulent, if wholesome, cancer.

I thought loving another woman would be better.
I thought there would be good sex (there was),
that my life would be free and fine and full,
and that it would rain ten dollar bills every afternoon at four.

I know now, that no sanity-saving modicum of happiness
will ever slip through the customs house of your insecurity,
the labor camp of your unreasoning jealousy,
or the passive-aggressive pogrom of your thoroughly fucked up personality.

One does not simply walk in and slosh an accelerant pell-mell.
One does not, then, offer you a light for the very last time,
gallant butch to the end.

But if one is lucky, very lucky,
one simply wakes up, and the offending clock radio isn't there.
YOU aren't there, and the dread slowly ebbs away,
giving way to gratitude and an intoxicating elation.

See how happy you have made me, how ever long it took?
One does not simply accept such bounty as one's due.
To do so would be to dishonor the Goddess who, in Her mercy,
gave me the great boon and gift

of your absence.
______

For my Fireblossom Friday challenge at Real Toads--"Dread".

 
"A circus of horrors, yeah that's what you are"--John Fred and his Playboy Band

In The Time Of Dinosaurs

In the time of dinosaurs,
we were happy.

In the nights of silent spinning planets,
you could reach for my hand,
and it was there.

Since then, the sun has risen a thousand million times,
and has set as many, 
less one.

Now they have discovered
that monsters are more than bones--
we knew
that they were birds all along.

This afternoon, a comet will come, in all its rarity--
then a cloud.

Who knows what happens after that?
But, until then, 
before I turn to dust,

Here is a sound I call a song
in a language we called ours.
_____ 

Fever

In the day of the fever,
at the end of the war,
you'll take up my hand and I'll give up my place--
my customary place--
in the hall, on the floor,

to go riding with you.
Remember the days when willows leaned low
over the canal, where we girls used to go?
And oh, the things we liked to do.
But you, dear, my Only One, you already know.

In those days when the voices were sweet in my head,
the willows leaned low, as if putting babies to bed;
there were no air raids,
no rubble, cracked and sharp-edged--
just mama's little angels passed out in the hedge.

So now...what, My Pet?
Kisses to catch up on?
Rooms to let?
Do you want to fuck me slow and easy?
I'll take all I can get, I'm not so far gone
that I would say no to that.

In the fields at the far end
of the old road to town,
you can see the hulk of the Junker
that the home guard shot down.
I just like to think that it fell 
from its bedding of clouds
like a baby...My Baby...
where the willows lean down.
______

 

Facts About the Presidents

Do you feel different, out of step, 
last to be picked for badminton?
Take heart,
Oddness is a thoroughly American thing.

Consider the presidents!
Millard Fillmore once suffered a minor fall down some back steps at the White House while secreting one of the domestics away from Abigail's jealous eyes.

The injury healed, but at the wound site, a large, prehensile tail began to grow. 
Fillmore could sometimes be found hanging upside down from an Oval Office chandelier while his hands remained free to sort and sign important documents.
Once, while playing cards with Secretary of State Daniel Webster, he set down a straight flush with his tail, enraging Webster and resulting in some unfortunate gun-play with small caliber arms.
All of this was quickly hushed up, but it is fact.

James K. Polk had a small pair of antlers protruding from his forehead. Contemporary portraitists left the antlers out, but Polk, far from feeling abashed, was actually quite vain about his antlers, standing at the mirror in the presidential bedroom for hours, polishing them.
With the opening of the Smithsonian Institution, Polk arranged for his antlers to be placed on permanent display after his death, but when Polk eventually passed away from cholera, postmaster Cave Johnson made a disheartening discovery.

When Mr. Johnson tried to affix his newly created postage stamps to the antlers, in order to ship them the slightly more than a mile to the Smithsonian, he was aghast to find that the stamps refused to adhere to the presidential rack. 
Hurriedly slinging them under his arm to carry them by foot, he accidentally stabbed himself, and the antlers were tried and convicted of assault upon a government official. They were sent under military and police guard to federal prison, where they were immediately misplaced and never found again. 
This explains the lack of information generally available about James K. Polk's celebrated horns.

Finally, Chester A. Arthur showed great loyalty and courage when, even though his health was compromised by the presence of a not fully formed Siamese twin growing out of his right side, he sent a parade of cut-happy surgeons away, and named the twin Roscoe Conkling, eventually forming the "Stalwart" faction of the Republican Party with the blighted parasite. 
In time, Arthur offered his twin a place on the bench of the United States Supreme Court, a position which the twin accepted and was approved for by Congress. However, Conkling's physical inability to be any place where Chester Arthur wasn't, prevented him from ever serving.
It is said that, at dinner parties, Chester Arthur would unbutton his vest and allow Conkling to come out and amuse the guests with the one about the whore and the Legal Tender Act. 
Because of his prominence and position, this was tolerated, but when Arthur tried to dance with Governor Hamilton Fish's wife Julia, and the twin tried to take her hand, even the Chief Executive realized he had gone too far, and withdrew.
The twin later distinguished itself by winning a boxing match against Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes is said to have acquitted himself well, but a punch from Conkling drove Hayes's cigar down his throat and set his stomach on fire, ending the fight. Conkling, a non-smoker, declared this a victory for "clean living".
Chester Arthur was tremendously proud of his parasitic twin, and wanted to see him remembered as a great statesman. Whether this can be said today is debatable, but the silent comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle did derive his Christian name from Chester A. Arthur's little stowaway Roscoe Conkling.

I hope that this painstakingly researched article has made you feel better, Weirdo. And remember, nobody likes badminton anyway.

Sincerely,

Constance W. Scripps, historian
______

  

 

trifle

There is a poem I wrote for you,
a trifle scratched with a fingernail file into some stranger's parquet floor.

There was an accident--
I stumbled inside the nearest house,
leaving smears of blood like sloppy lipstick 
on the glass panes of the study door.

Foolishly, I tried to kiss the air,
though it didn't have one molecule of your scent in it.
I fell, then crawled up into a chair, feeling sick and dizzy.

The alarms in the house were made of clarinets.
The police who came wore blue serge
and knew all the standards.

I told them I was delivering a donor poem,
so if they come up your walk with their little ice chest,
receive them. Remember your southern manners.

Eventually, the blood will wash out
and I will stay in my grave like a bookmark.
Until then, know that I was thinking of you
all the way up until the end.
_______

 

 

Concerto for two trumpets in C

While Vivaldi played,
we said unflattering things about my ex-girlfriend from earlier that year.
There are kinder creatures living under rocks,
so if we talked her down
she deserved it and a ticket out of town.

"Did she make you come?" you wanted to know,
ever the ethereal philospher,
like Vivaldi, priest and composer--
and I told you no, no she did not.

Vivaldi was born in Venice,
borne by water and the Divine spark,
but you, 
you are as Turkish as a crescent moon and star.
The English tucked their tails and fled Gallipoli
because they saw you foretold.

When I talk this way, you roll your eyes.
You say,
"Not everyone thinks I'm as wonderful as you do, Shay."
Fools. I can't account for them,
and anyway,
you look so smug even as you deny.

I am as slow as the four seasons,
inhabited by movements and tempos beyond even my own reach.
There are rigged carnival games easier to solve than I am,
and besides,
I have always been more fascinated by the sorceress's candles
than by common fireworks.

You level a look at me, dark-eyed and not bothered
with Christian ceremony or habitual reserve.
"Come here," you say, not harshly, not sweetly.
"Now."
Venice is known for festivals and lights, as well as its canals--
sometimes a new arrival takes the old city as a challenge,
taking her time,
finding her own way,
walking on water as Vivaldi plays.
_______

for Marian's challenge at Real Toads.