Singer & Song

vintage Russian post card

No matter the storm
and the lightning bones that dance across the night--
no matter the bear
who wakes hungry from a winter of dreaming you--

No matter the snowdrop and crocus
who lie and tell you to leave your clothes by the frozen pond--
no matter the evergreen
claiming to be constant from behind its newly fledged fingers--

I will sing, 
as the blackbirds do,
for you, no matter how hopelessly, how strangely--
I will sing for you.

No matter the goat with its bell
who eats the shoots of grass before the sun can set on them--
no matter the shepherd's dog
who has run away and left the flock to whatever may pass--

No matter angels or devils
who quarrel and pose never-endingly under their different banners--
no matter creatures who hide 
and wait, only to have remained too long as you passed by--

I will sing,
as the blackbirds do,
for you, no matter how hopelessly, how strangely--
I will sing,

Sing for you.
______

Jacks

Noon is when I stopped being pretty--
no one cares and it doesn't matter, 
BUT
I was the spider bride of a textile tycoon and he
took one look and started laughing.

Out of my ears
crawled everything I'd heard and learned--
all Mom's good advice good for nothing, now.
I went straight to the mill
and worked everybody I could lay hands on;
they call me Saint Susan--
Bernard doesn't see those jacks in the palm of my hand.

When a woman loses her looks, anything goes.
Bernard recoils like I'm radioactive,
has a slut mistress tucked away in his office.
Meanwhile, I roam the factory floor like a suicide,
my fingertips solaced by
bolts of cat's claw crimson and
beautiful indigo.

There will be a revolution.
Bernard's gonna look good hanging from a roof girder,
his wrists knotted tight with my pretty scarf.
I'm an uggo but I kiss the blade that cuts the checks;
sugar and sorcery have made the shifts see me
not as I am, but as I could be and have become--
a red ball bouncing and a quick hand to catch it.
______

For "A Poem Of Our Own" with Magaly at Real Toads. I have incorporated the titles of four of my poems from our book "Three-Note Howl: The Wild Hunt" : "Noon", "The Spider Bride", "Advice", and "Beautiful Indigo."

Top image by cellmon, deviantart. Bottom image, creator unknown. 

After hearing it last night, I woke up with my head full of "The Minstrel In The Gallery" by Jethro Tull. I had it in my head all the while I was composing this. Lyrics HERE.

Brick-Dumb Motherfucker

A co-worker, a woman I'd liked quite well up to then
for her quick mind and ready smile,
said, as we were completing a delivery together,
that she thought
lesbians
only went that way because they couldn't get a man.

She said it as an observation
without any rancor
and without any idea who she was talking to.
Then she looked at me to agree, the way women do.
I thought of my then-girlfriend
and how she knew me like a crow knows its nest.
I thought of her blackbird eyes,
her sure touch and drag race temperament.

"That's not true," I told my co-worker, who remained
unconvinced.
It's death by a thousand cuts, this living on the outside,
but we are warriors--have to be--and we keep on.

Later that day, I read about a transwoman who was murdered
by her boyfriend, who felt
he'd been lied to.
Listen, you brick-dumb motherfucker, I thought,
the woman beat herself up every day,
all her life,
until she found the stupendous guts to live as herself
and living as yourself
is always the stone cold truth.

The next day, some god squad evangelist
told me the bible says how I love is an abomination.
All I know is,
his squeaky clean Sunday jesus
wouldn't last ten minutes--
would be curled up fetal-style in some vestibule by the mailboxes,
sucking his thumb and begging to go home--
if he had to live where we live all the time.
_________

for real toads "women's freedom".

Blood Bracelet

A blood bracelet is the best kind.
It is proof of life
and the ability to bear pain.

Before sleeping with you
in the big bed upstairs with the cuffs on the posts,
I spent six weeks living with religious lunatics
in the woods;
they had whips and crosses, 
thorns and theology.

Later, deep in the rabies dance of our mating,
I called upon the things they had taught me--
starvation without complaint,
dogma without tenderness,
and the acquired skill of animating bird carcasses with or without ceremony.

That was the key--the corpse cardinal, dead dove and rot starling,
all left on your pillow along with red script
from the blood bracelet your bite left
when you spoke to me
so ignited and
sure of redemption's need for absolute destruction as prelude.
_______ 

for bits of inspiration at real toads.

The Weatherman

A weatherman
in crisis
is not something the public is interested in seeing.

They want
forecasts, temperatures.
They get tears, confabulations, outbursts and exposure.

This could happen to anybody.
One minute, you're talking about high pressure.
The next, Woody with Sports enrages you with his talk of baseball and
basketball; his death seems mandated
and necessary.

Listen to me and learn, Grasshopper.
Just backpedal through the studio doors two minutes ahead of the cops.
Take over the crosswalk from the street preachers
and roll with it.

The arrest of a weatherman is not a common thing.
Tazed, his delivery becomes staccato and shrill, disturbing, mad.
If it begins to rain, oh then the cops will need him,
the station will be contrite,
viewers forgiving.

But if the sun stays out,
all day, all night,
the whole Universe will have lost its mind and the Weatherman,
installed at last as Supreme Commander,
will have his revenge upon
the public,
the European Model,
and every trend and anomaly that unhinged and changed him.

Try voice command then.
Try the mute button then,
you worms, writhing expectantly under the shadow of his unstoppable boot.
_____

a compound of idiocy and nonsense for real toads. 

In The Haunted House

In the haunted house,
a ghost wrote a letter to the moon.
The moon, for her part,
was just an ornament for her admirers to sing to;
for wolves and cats to sing to;
for ghosts to write letters to.

Her lack of substance didn't bother or deter them
in their admiration or devotion--
each one believing she sang to the moon
but really, in silver light,
they composed their notes--
wrote their letters--
in alleyways,
next to frozen rivers,
or in empty rooms
alone.

Book Review: "Excelsior"

Excelsior by Randall Silvis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Bloomhardt--we never learn his Christian name--is a real jerk. He bullies his wife, loves his son but manages to always hurt him somehow, and works in the accounting department of a steel mill, where his soul-shriveled co-workers pass the time by playing practical jokes on each other and locking the men's room door with a padlock because the last guy blew his brains out in there and they're all afraid they'll do the same thing at the first opportunity.

But wait, there's more: Bloomhardt works Saturdays at a mortuary, where he is supposed to be selling monuments, but instead has sex with his boss's wife. He gets caught--and chased around a cemetery with a chain saw. He has to wait for dark to wander home, because the boss took all his clothes with him and delivered them to Bloomhardt's wife.

But wait, it's even worse than that. When his wife begs HIM to forgive HER for not being a good enough wife, and therefore driving him to do this terrible thing, he decides he'll show her, and move out. Thus his (well-deserved) descent begins.

Bloomhardt commences an odyssey in which he moves into the world's shoddiest divorced-guy apartment, spends an evening looking for, and finding, his co-worker The Goathead, who has expired in a back booth at the world's rankest gin joint, and trying--always clumsily and unsuccessfully--to get back the life he scorned at the novel's beginning. His wife's new assertiveness-trained feminist friends form a Wall Of Scorn, and when he can manage to get past them, his wife is no longer the doormat he knew and abused, but rather a woman who wants a divorce and takes out a restraining order on him.

Despair and disaster don't get much funnier than this. Recommended.




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