POEMS FROM A PARALYZED SUBURBAN HYSTERIC

     It is Spring once again! It usually happens every year just about this time. Across the SuperAmerica parking lot, the tiny niche park is beginning to express its love for MY world by putting forth precious little fists of blossoms that look like nothing so much as tiny hearts, all a-flutter with their new-found life. I imagine they beat for me! I imagine many things...

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     I dream of the trees, and it really does seem that they DO dream also of me! How could I doubt it, when all of nature seems poised to embrace me in her loving wooden arms? And although my ex-husband (Bill the Bastard) may have left me for a tawdry English Lit. professorette he fell upon in that phony "intellectual's" mating ball, Socrate's Sweet Bowl, I can still hold on to nature's gifts (my terrier Shamylan's warm tongue, the soft greenish fur of Darkimedes my one-eyed tabby, the heartening and relentless insistence of the next door neighbor's colic infant, Noctula) as recompense for all the pain. It is enough (when the last call comes) to be able to say "I knew where to sit and I sat." How many of us can truly claim that?

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     "We expect so much and receive so little," I think Nietzsche said on the eve of his marriage to the lovely but slutty Ursonka. These are indeed words to live by, no matter what one means by "living." So what to do while we await the arrival of that "Last Train"? Leisurely drinking a demitasse of green tea in the morning as I read the obits in the BARSTOW DAILY TUMBLEWEED, or watching the sun peeking up at me over the mansard roofs of the strip mall, or listening to the profound wisdom of Oprah, as she expounds upon the lithesome beauty of Julia Roberts (albeit at a somewhat uncomfortable length), and - of course! of course! - sitting down at my vintage "escritoire" to compose another poem. These little raptures make up the healing moments in a wounded life. Alas! Alack! Etc. 

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     So here are a few of my little "life bandages" which staunch the flow of blood and bile. Please do not judge them too harshly, for poetry is a fragile child of the universe, unlikely to withstand too many cruel blows, or to survive a constant deluge of vicious words from fellow writing class students, or the endless critical blither from so-called "experts" who know nothing of the "lavender spirit which flies through the cerulean confines of the human soul." Accept them for what they are: tiny packages of one person's sensitivity sent with care to the postal box of your eyes. Life is too short for mere "intellectual wind" which blows no one any good. Give me the zephyr, or maybe the sirocco of a brief and rapturous affair beneath the

umbrellas of the elms. Alas! Alack! Etc. 

Your face is a rose 

Untarnished by the vinegar of time

Or by the brown acid of former friends.* 

Beautiful its odor, bountiful its order,

Its color like a child's mind 

Blossoming into your heart.

 

Your face is a rose,

A fatal flower of fortune

Which must lose its petals

On the cold ground

Of another's needy weediness.

* Rose Hulot and Tricia Kotaxi; you know whom I'm talking about!

 

 

"I think I can

I think I can"

Steams the heart along its  rusty track.

Small towns rush by

Like a film about a lost America,

Lost, lost

In the distance

We called our love.

 

Go ahead

Drive your golden spike

Deep into my metal/mettle

And carry your cows,

Potatoes, and passengers

To the Denver 

Or Chicago

of a new despair.

I don't care,

Because

I KNOW I can, 

I KNOW I can...

The kNot in your nEver.

The cLeave in your cLever.

The Little sun

And the unLittle CANdle. 

The Or in your gOLD

And the hAND in your hANDle.

Romeo's in Joliet

While Juliet blows Rome.

Give it UP

Or let me DOWN

A hOMe is still a hOMe...

Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.  

He sits

In the small unpainted 

room of my brow:

First floor

or soleil.

No semi-precious heat

But a sparkling desk bell

And some sour 

hard candies

for the local children.  

1. Where Are My Jewel CDs?

Kaos on the shelve

Between Rick James and Joplin.

I listen to the jays.

2. Why Didn't You Pay the Last Gas Bill?

December's wide cold

The bank's accounted empty

Frost on the bedstead.

3. A Lovely Dream

A man with a knife

Sticking in his fat stomach.

A woman all smiles.

Is it one Monarch's disease

Usurped by the relative's lie

 

To crimp so, in lazy sines

Without each heart?

 

To wax less with each flap

And the nude waver

 

Of soufflé wings, beaten

At a funereal thrum

 

Upon the ensconced drum

At the preliminary hearing.