Posts for June 27, 2023 (page 8)

I strode manfully into the princess’s bedchamber, where I expected to find her asleep for a century. I’d spent months imagining how grateful she’d be, awakened by my kiss. But I found her wide awake, a laptop on her knees, in a group chat with her girlfriends from all the neighboring kingdoms. She was lovely, as promised. I took off my visor and knelt at her feet but she didn’t look up. Minutes passed. My knees began to ache. Finally she glanced in my direction and said, not very politely, “What do you want?” “Princess,” I said, “I’ve come to save you. I’m here to take you away.” “In there,” she said, pointing toward a half-hidden door on the other side of the chamber. “I’ll be with you when I can.” I opened the door and stepped into the next room, which to my surprise was full of princes. They were rather lovely, too. One lifted his dimpled chin toward me with a shrug and said, “Welcome to the club.” He patted the seat of the chair next to his and said, “Come sit next to me.” He leaned in and whispered something in my ear that I couldn’t hear clearly over a rustling in the background, the sound of pages being turned turned in a book.  

They called him Bro’ Pops,
The folks of Crooked Tree, Belize
All day he rested on the veranda
Facing the lagoon
Watched for birds
Listened to the wind rippling the water
Was fed by the old cook
Who kept him company when she could
By day the women and young children of the village
Traced the dusty paths to visit him
By evening the older children came on horseback
He slept well    

Our PopPop, in his eighties
Took care of the mail
The cooking
The bills
My grandmother
Shuffling around the suburbs by himself
In and out of the car
To the bank
The pharmacy
The grocery
He joked of death by schlepping
Evenings on the balcony
He’d catch his breath
Scan the stars                                
But sleep eluded him      

A fine birthday scribe from New Brunswick
Decided the frosting to first lick
This went on with a smile
And after a while
He declared, “I have written a tanka!”

Keep from falling – dribble, shot, score, and pet
burro bareback balancing act barrage
straw, nips, opponate, and manuer dodge
played to support returned Vietnam Vet
Minor distraction moment to forget
comical efforts – the ball to dislodge
Keep from falling.

Emotional healing ousting regret
unlikely combinations rare hodge-podge
belonging and winning – again in charge
a way to say thanks, repaying our debt.
keep from falling. 

With untaxed money a thief gave me
before his death by disappearance,
and inheritance from an unnamed aunt,
I purchase a major league baseball team.  

I do it for the fun of giving them a name.
Their hometown is a moving target
on a map of Texas, so I’m thinking Amigos,
or Hombres if Amigos is too pink.  

I interrupt a board meeting no one told me about.
They stare at me with a lot of white in their eyes.
Their motionless faces say I’m the boss
they’d stab if I turned my back.  

However, they seem to know what they’re doing,
all this business stuff with columns and lines,
so I back out of the room like I’m delegating.
I’ll just work on the name.  

My CEO catches me in the hall.
He has a John Waters mustache.
I need to stay on top of this thing
or its going to get away from me.  

We schedule a meeting for Sunday
at the place where the thief gave me money.
I jot down some ideas:
Figure out how to make money.  

Pleased with myself, I put down my pen.
I’ll think up one or two more before the meeting.
Owning a baseball team is doable.
But it feels like work, and I’m supposed to be retired.  

I wake to birdsong and revelation.
My teeth and tongue are imitating the bird’s.
I’ll sell the baseball team and learn to sing like a bird!
But research reveals that’s not how birds sing.  

I lose faith in myself. My brain is a cotton ball.
Retirement isn’t where every day is Sunday.
It’s a day not among the seven that govern labor.
It’s a baseball team that doesn’t have a name.

Sun in Leo, some three degrees:
a house cat threatening emulous starlings.

Moon perversely split with the centaur and goat-fish,
fob-watched Lorna Doone like glaucous ribs,
like rice in a wine sack passably peddled as
                          some folk Cymraeg rain stick:
breakneck breath of a burpling cryptid’s stomach
obscured in the greening clouds
like fumes from a Barbicide plant
due south of old Rose O’Neil’s golden Branson.

Mercury sulkily curled in that rose quartz conch
that a crackling piggy’s still stuck on:
those erudite eructations sperm whales weave
round hunch-backed Poseidon’s knees,
who carried the world in one woeful wail,
with Atlantis tacked with a rusty nail
to the plinth of a broken snow globe snagged
on buoying rolls of a charred sanatorium mail sack—

Venus between the twins: amanuensis
for fractured factoids flung like Ajax
glibly dissembling throes of a
spoondrift brushed down glittering eaves
of a duplex squatters were piercing the septum of

Mars at home with Ares, embarrassed:
a child refining from chivalrous trophies her sister scored,
among snickering litters of proxy wars their mother’d incensed,
a flaccid plastic cutlass beat against
Joanie’s gorgeous gorget cobbled from
playing cards and Julia Child’s
recipe cards
and greeting
cards and
cards left flattened, black, and red as Robespierre
                                            trumped in a tricks game.

Jupiter, but a degree beyond the bull’s hor—

What do you got their, Goldie? Goldie,

a wheat paste golem
sprawled out among newspaper clippings and passages plucked,
curled up into ickle and ticklish scrolls,
and dandled in sulfurous vinegar,

wadded up gods and planets a toddler scrawls
in wax across crumpling crepe paper;

sulkily nestles her baubles back in their tackle box.
It was a gift she’d intended to give herself come

morning, lucid as scars of stars in the
scurvied and scurrilous sky come midnight

bay to their smoldering hearts’ delights.

source maintains answers
guessers gab scenarios
frivolous forecasts

haiku: pieta

i am not holy,
just a mother turned to stone,
who can’t let you go. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietà_(Michelangelo)#/media/File%3APieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg

Buzz the fall fly in my bonnet
Burr the chain saw feeding the smoke
Calming my own self as it all falls around me
Autumn’s come so settle down
We’ll be here now til winter

There are horses here
Penny, Nickels , Dime, Quarte, Half and Dollabill
A quiet place, worthless really
Eight thousand acres of nothing
On the corner of a pipeline and a dirt road

Place called Slick Rock
On the Dolores Sometimes River
Biggest noise we’ve heard yet
Gas line crew came through
With horses and riders, who knew

Nickels and Dime wanted to join them
I was tempted to allow it
But I kept them in the stall
I’ve known some horses
But these two are just flat out stupid

Penny is the biggest and the boss, a red mare
Quarte is dull and strong, eats a lot
Half and Dollabill are married
Now for awhile we have this ranch
We ride the gas line

I tell myself I cannot help