The News From My Bed*

"Got to keep the loonies on the path"--Pink Floyd

The news from my bed is that the wall is gone.
At least I think it is. Things tend to pull the old switcheroo on me lately.

There's a guy standing there, by the jagged concrete and snaky rebar. His shirt is open and he's holding a Burger King wrapper to his bloody forehead. He looks a little dazed--meds? Or bombs. Not sure.

I get up. Yeah, I can get up. Nothing buzzes, no orderly or bitchy nurse appears. No doctor from Bloomfield Hills ladling out patronizing bullshit. If it's bombs, I hope they blew his golf club all to hell and gone.

I say to bloody forehead guy, "Hey." He blinks, hesitates, then does the guy nod. Maybe I lost my mojo in here. I tilt my head, look up at him with my soulful fucking brown eyes. "'Sup?" His knees buckle and he goes down, half over what's left of the bottom of the wall. Okay so. I get up, look around. What else is gone is the secure doors. And Madison, my roommate. She's hung up in the broken glass of the nurse's station. Poor Maddy. I notice she's wearing my Mickey Mouse sweat pants. 

I fuck with my hair, step over the wall that isn't there, and Burger King guy. I'd help him if I could, but I'm just a loon, right? Before I can decide anything, this awful tremendously loud roar happens and then there's a concussion and dust blinding me. I'm on my ass without knowing how I got there. I hear a heavy vehicle going by me, close.  I get up, my left leg won't work and I drop hard on my tailbone. So, I don't know a good affirmation for all of this. I don't know how this makes me feel, except that my leg and my ass hurt. The dust clears and I can see the buildings on fire and a freaked-out cat with its back arched and eyes big as next Tuesday, crouching and yowling as the rockets land. You and me, Puss. It takes a minute, but I scoop her up and off we go, me limping bad, Puss in full what-the-fuck mode, the Russians or the Koreans or the Martians raining shit down on our heads, and us doubtless sending it right straight back to their fucking pagodas or whatever. Holy shit, Puss. And they say I'm crazy.
_______

*my title is a brazen rip-off, as per instructions HERE.

Day 11 of the April thang, and I'm still rockin'. 

 

Black Milk

On your back,
thin as a banker's smile, 
black cashmere.

In your pen,
your campy prop,
black ink.

And in your fridge,
bare as a Detroit warehouse,
black milk.

Well what the hell is that?
Really honey,
what's in that shit? Irony?

You smile like you know the joke.
The cow, you say,
was making a statement about post-modern physical art.

The cow was sick
of not having command over her own body,
and so this is her finger at the world.

If you believe that, you should write it, I say,
but you just smirk and add a tab to the orange juice, stylishly blue.
Moo.
_____

for the mini-challenge at Real Toads.

 

The Ballad of Agnes Lumpf

Agnes Lumpf changes her name to Dakota Descartes,
and starts haunting the coffee shops. 

"Don't I know your name from somewhere?" people always ask.
"You might," she responds mysteriously, putting on a face she copied from her cat.

THE CRUEL PASTRY by Dakota Descartes

Light the slipknot of brusque temptation!
Immediate zoology! Feet talking ropes in hemisphere duplicity!
Highways of dough!
Icing made from the text of dead letters!
You are the planet I cannot plumb, no matter the tenderness of the telescope.

Soon, Dakota Descartes has a cadre of rapt followers,
squinting at her from behind clouds of tobacco smoke.

She learns what the famous poet must--
how to say "In night, no sun; in day, no moon" as if it were the Gettysburg Address,
and to do so with a straight face.

"Where are you from?" her fans ask breathlessly.
"Rangoon," she replies. (She is actually from Muskegon, Michigan.)

"And your parents? Were they artistic, too?"
Dakota looks off into the half distance, 
her smile as ethereal as an Enya song.

"My father was a painter, (a plumber)
and my mother a sculptress." ( a soap opera addict and part time nail tech)

When Dakota Descartes wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,
the President of the United States calls with congratulations.
"Oh, him," she says distractedly, waving a hand and finishing her black tea.

Global melancholy, manufactured star,
all-knowing duffers at the drop-off of aftermath's postmaster,
weary the practical nurse of philanthropy
into a crying stew of the celestial jeremiad!

This from her masterpiece, FUSION OF DOLL AND CYCLONE.

One dreary morning in 2015, 
Dakota Descartes dies from huffing hair coloring
in bathroom number six of her palatial estate.

The staff finds her.
Her tragic death seals her place in the pantheon of immortal poets.

Dakota Descartes 1977-2015. In her own amazing words:
"Death, wearing buskins, treads darkly toward the pyx."

Oh God.
Total brilliance.

Wow!
____

Image at top by Toril Fisher. Posted for Artistic Impressions With Margaret.

The words used in Dakota's poetry came mostly at random from the dictionary.

However, I made up the telescope line, and I'm kind of liking it now. Lord above.

And now, Lambs, off to "camp" with you...