Wait

Wait for me,
wait--
where the river runs
softly south.

Night will come,
night--
let her let her silver
stars come out.

Stay, my love,
stay--
though the hour goes
two, then four;

Then come, my love,
come--
and you'll never have to wait
anymore.
_______

Ward 7

A little bit of needle and thread will put that limb right back where it belongs;
There's no need for panic,
No cause for foolish rivalries with the other patients.
Do you know,
With that stick clenched between your teeth like a rose stem,
You look almost angelic
In a shocky, poleaxed sort of way.

See the pretty nurses,
Wringing out cool cloths to place upon your face?
If you ask them, between moans,
They may even dance for you as they did at the Spanish Theater;
They may lean to kiss you while checking your intracranial pressure and your vital signs.

Once, you sat upon a futon in her silly studio apartment,
Sipping Tab,
And feeling at once aroused and idiotic.
No cataclysmic events disturbed the two of you that night--
No bleeders,
Just sweet warm capillaries expanding like tiny flowers;
Blushing her,
And making it awkward for you to stand up,
Back when you could, sir. Back when it was easy.

This is a place of healing and of peace--
If the doctors have threatened you, waving their pen lights like signal lamps,
Tell me. I'll shoo them away.
Most of them are dedicated and well-meaning, but if you'd like it to be just you and me,
I can pull the curtain and keep them away,
As if we were honeymooning at a fine hotel and needing our privacy.

Catastrophic things happen--
Flesh tears away, one is made hideous in an instant;
Even loved ones rush, queasy, from the room.
Drugs can be dizzying,
Despair even more so...
But does this have to mean that no beautiful woman, no handsome man, will ever smile across the room at you again?

Quite the opposite is true, in fact.
Let go,
Trust us,
Be something you could never have been before--
A spirit among the corporeal,
A broken toy still beloved
If useless.
________

for Flipside's word list #13

Summerdale

At Summerdale,
big cats got right up on the dining room table;
They leapt over our shoulders
as we sat sipping tea, still wearing our robes.

Tiger swallowtails swarmed around the sweet-cube bowl,
while sailors called from the samovar;
A thousand sets of hooves thundered down the hallway,
rattling the pictures of our forebears in their frames.

Wolves and wild dogs sang us lupine,
as your dark almond eyes brown-sugared my bones.
Your lips had the power to make eye or wing flutter,
and I love you now as I loved you then
at Summerdale.
______

for STWIASD, with her beautiful dark eyes and her sexy lips!

Tanya

Do not rely on time.
It recedes unendingly--
There is less of it now, even, than there was when you began to read this poem;
The grave yawns.
Do not rely on time.

Do not believe in your own wits,
Or that yours are sharper, somehow, than others'.
Once, you believed that lost teeth were boughten by fairies,
And that only old people died.
Do not believe in your own wits.

Religion, causes, various grand undertakings--
Do not live for these,
They come and go.
Do not live for fame or wealth--
Every third chump on the street is famous, wealthy, and echoingly vacant and hollow.

Only these things matter-
Tanya,
Tanya's thighs,
Tanya's face,
Tanya's breasts
and Tanya's pleased smile.

Take my advice--
Sell everything,
Compromise everything,
Forget position, principles, pride--
What good do they do you?

Find Tanya at the place they call
La Maison de L'oiseau Vert.
Kill or betray anyone who gets in your way.

Leave now--
The things that matter matter only for such a short time.
Go to her,
She is waiting.
_______

Cheetah

Cheetah be on the big bus, rollin'. 
Gypsy she was born, and Gypsy she stays;
Her black-haired mama pick her up from under her armpits,
hold her up, shake her a little and say,
"Mama loves you, Spot. To the moon and back."

She say this in Romany.
Cheetah curl her lip and snarl, wavin' her paws.
This means, "back atcha, mom."

Cops pull the Gypsies over, fuck with 'em a little.
"You got a license for this here cat?" says the ex-jock-y lookin' one.
Cheetah's mama say somethin' in Romany. It ain't "Good afternoon, officer."
Animal control get called.
Cheetah's mama go nuts--
a thumb gets bit, some nuts get kicked. She get arrested, screamin'.
Her Gypsy man get backed up quick with a gun to his nose.
Cheetah ain't never been in a cage before,
leastwise one tied to the roof of a truck speedin' down the freeway.

She watch the bus gettin' further and further away behind her. It ain't a good day.

Cheetah go to foster cheetah care.
She get pitched into school.
What the feck is this? 
Other kids welcome her to class by singin':
"Cheetah over there!
Cheetah got no hair!
Cheetah don't wear any underwear!"

Cheetah get in fights at first, but Cheetah always win,
so the fights stop, but nobody talk to her.
Teacher say, "what is the quadrangular hypothesis of a Mimbis angle?"
Cheetah don't know.
Out the window she go, fast as ten dollars from a sailor's pocket.

Cheetah find the city, but can't find the bus.
Cheetah real lost.
It startin' to rain and she don't like it much.
Her mama woulda threw her in the sleepin space, stick her hand under the blankets and pretend it a creepin' monster for Cheetah to get.
Big sigh.
Things looking poorly, if you want to know.

Cheetah go to sleep in some trash behind a store.
Pretty soon, some townie poke her with a boot toe and she curl her lip n snarl.
"Who are you, Spot?"
It's Savanna, the teenage runaway. She wear a back pack and keep a knife in her boot.
Pretty soon, Cheetah find herself stuffed into the back pack, 
just her dome stickin' out, watchin the streets go by.

"Looky what I found," say Savanna,
and she plop Miss Spot down in the middle of Danny's Coffee Shop.
Right away some crazy cat come up and stand there like he own that place and seventeen others, too.
It's the kitten Giuseppe Verdi.

At the closest table, a convo goin' on.
A man sayin' to a waitress, "It's in the bible. You can't argue with that. It's His word."
Waitress say, "What make you think God is a guy?"
"He just is," say the man, lookin at her like she just flew out of the nut house.
"I see," she say, walkin' away, and her smirk could win a prize at the Spring Fair.

Turns out, this place got a serial murderess,
a Succubus,
a seriously hot dark-haired chick,
and also The Queen of the Vampires, who can shape shift into a black panther.
They also got killer coffee, reasonably priced.

The Queen of the Vampires say, "What happened, Spot? Who done you like this?"
She say it in Romany, and Cheetah's ears prick up like they on fire.
Just then some dweeb from the city walk in and say he lookin' for a truant pursuant to article blah blah and he "got to take Spot here."
Chloe roll up her music magazine and brain him with it.
"Like hell!" she say. She ain't known for her subtle ways.
The dark haired chick grit her teeth. "Mister, you are SO workin' my last good nerve."
The QOTV say nothin, she just shape shift and fly through the damn air like a giant black bird with huge fangs.

Over goes the dweeb, like a bowling pin been hit by the space shuttle.
She drag him outside and down to the cop shop.
She shape shift back, and stand there lookin fine and sayin "Here's your man. Don't ever send him back."

Back at Danny's, Cheetah got a whole pile of mamas now.
They teach her what they know, which is
mostly sass and illegal junk.
Chloe sing, "Spot's a rebel and she's never gonna be any good..."
Everybody hoot n holler and whoop and so forth.

One day soon, all the Danny's girls gonna take a road trip.
They all gonna wear Blues Brothers sunglasses, and carry Tarot decks.
They gonna find the bus.
They gonna find the cops what done this, and then
they gonna open a can of whup ass.
They gonna take Cheetah home, Spot the Snot who they'll have raised up like their own,
and she will know all that they know, and be all different and brassy and high steppin' down all the days of her life.

On that righteous day of homecomin',
Cheetah's mama gonna cry and clap and 
be so proud.
__________

for Izy's Out Of Standard challenge at Real Toads: rebel girl

Poem inspired by this photograph taken by the matchless Mama Zen:

Book Review: "Twilight Girls"

Twilight Girls by Paula Christian

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Two lesbian pulp novels from the vaults. The first one, "Edge Of Twilight", is surprisingly good; the best such novel I have read, having gotten started with Ann Bannon's "Odd Girl Out" which I found by accident in a used book store. In the 1950s and early 60's, there were no lesbian presses turning out books for gay women to enjoy; these paperback novels with their lurid covers were it. In "Edge", airline stewardess (they weren't "flight attendants" yet!) Val McGregor has a cool job, her own apartment, and male pilots wanting to paw her luggage. But Val feels like something is missing, and that something turns out to be another stewardess, the very fetching Toni Molina. The first story bucks the norm of the time, which was that the women in these novels could get a taste of honey, but then had to commit suicide, go mad, or end up in ruins. In fact, it has a sweet happy ending, much to my overjoyed astonishment when I read it.

But then it's as if the powers that be must have insisted the author atone for that by writing a sequel in which everything goes to hell in a handbasket. In "The Other Side Of Love", Toni inexplicably has morphed into a psycho stalker, Val moves back home where she can get terrible advice, and just to make the destruction of the first story complete, she goes to a (male) headshrinker and receives the most unintentionally hilarious bad advice ever. Val even mulls this stuff over and decides he may be right! The ridiculousness of all of this is tempered by the knowledge that this scenario actually played out far too many times back in the bad old days. Skip the second story, unless you just want to read it as historical dark comedy.



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Thoughts From A Walk In The Blue Dawn

I received a letter from my own near future,
and it said
oh,
girl,
oh.

I made a poem upon a window pane,
but I drew it
slow
so
slow.

Hurry Autumn, hurry love--
I so seldom feel beautiful at all;
I've no idea what I've been thinking of,
or who that is that
calls
and 
calls.
_____