Mrs. Daedalus

 

At twenty, I loved how you always had to have the wind in your hair.

You and Diogenes, honest, blunt, tactless assholes

drinking wine on the balcony,

grabbing truth out of thin air with gesticulating hands. 

I adored you and that's nothing new.

At forty-five you haven't changed,

You're still the Greek MacGyver,

but it only makes me want to vomit.

Our son is dead

I don't forgive you

and that's the stone fucking truth.

___________

for Sunday Muse #153.

Mike Pence, Gemini, Visits The Mayo Clinic

We made our own zodiac from prayer books and beating-sticks, 
kept folded in narrow creases,
vermin parables for rot-paper effigies
writ down as paragons in the cheap potboiler of continuous torrent and industry.

Down at the harbor,
salt angels wave goodbye to ships laden
with cream-skinned babies in barrels,
alive in a circumscribed commerce
of palm
and funeral
and coral-colored sunrise.

We peddle our peculiar zodiac at stations
where all trains have evaporated,
the green and violet of bruises rain themselves clean,
and ballads are sung with lark tongues lodged
in mother throats that cannot exist, 
but which sing and sing and sing.

Come, find our graves in the rockery,
lend us new deaths by instant contract.
Arrange us on new stars aloft by decree,
and kill the old deities by stoning via television.
The night horizon will slide us
to the harbor,
to the arms of sirens
who will sing us, exploding, 
through dust-hearts and lie-lips 
to the stuttering surprise
of creatures too perverted and vile 
to carry the note that we plot, on charts, 
like a poem slipped beneath the door of permanent astonishment.
________

for Kerry's word list and Izy's prompt for the last day of April.

The World's Greatest Lover

The World's Greatest Lover was holding forth at the bar,
with a woman poured over his arm on each side
like swooning raincoats.

He had pretty boys pouting near the potted palms,
and they rolled dice to see who would get
his cuff links and his legendary cock.

So softly that he had to ask me to repeat myself,
I said that he was nothing but a mouthy, well-dressed fraud
and that he knew nothing at all about love.

"Little seal with the red ball on your nose," he said, smiling benignly,
"keep clapping. I like it."

I introduced him to my acquaintance--
a not particularly pretty girl wearing carnival vendor jewelry.
In her bag she carried nothing but a paperback,
twenty dollars,
and her phone, which played "Beat It" when it rang.

A year later, I saw him again,
and he looked like hammered shit.
He stared right through things with a slightly stunned expression,
and did this nervous thing with his jaw,
but blessedly, he had stopped talking altogether.

I walked up to him.
It was easy; he was alone.

I said, poor sad little seal,
I see she taught you well.
_________

for Susan's challenge at Real Toads, which asked for a poem about love. I used one of the illustrations provided.