Too Long At The Fair

Too Long at the Fair

A Cautionary Tale 

with a  Happy Ending

You put me on your midway

you dressed me in a sack,

you gave me beads you’d won at bottle toss

then promptly took them back.

The cotton candy kisses

didn’t last  outside the tent

but the marks you brought to see me,

they never seemed to end.

You made me tell their fortunes

all miserably the same,

charged a dollar for admission

and a quarter for each claim.

They chewed their grease like cattle

as they pointed at my face

where your words scrawled as graffiti

had taken reason’s place.

I left your crooked shell game

where you always hid the bean

and ran off with the carny hick

from the Tilt-a-Whirl machine.

Now we’ve seven strapping farmboys

in our fields under the skies

and each night I get a corn dog

that would win the Fair’s First Prize.

May 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Claudia is hosting a fairgrounds rollar coaster ride over at the pub today. Come join us--the gates stay open at 3:00 PM EST through midnight Sunday.

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: Salome, by Alphonse Mucha, 1897
Public Domain, via Wikipaintings.org

On the Lam/Rant

On the Lam

The math police have found my poems

and tell me they do not add up.

Something is missing O not meaning,

we don’t read for meaning, just for obedience,

for the drumming of integers, 

the solid thumping of cadential boots

the singsong buzz of stinging stresses strung just so.

Unsequential imperfect necklaces must be 

snapped and broken

and the  beads of lapis words

that drop crushed underfoot.

I slink to my hidden den of vines,

wild witch dodging the hobnails

aimed at my pagan bastard's

face. All my life I've run 

from the dominion of zealotry.

There's only death for such as us
in the mind that closes around what it knows

and sees nothing else.

Here in words, there in ideas.

And what do I care if my iambs are lost lambs?

I hang my lines, my life, to fly a banner

not build your pillars of fault.

What matters is that the words stick

like a hooked seed in the fur

of  thought, barb themselves in

till they release in comprehension

shake loose, or rot.

The words are eggs not clockwork birds,

sitting on a mental wire in a robotic row. 

However scrambled, they invite a broodiness.

So I dip my finger in sour yogurt

and write graffiti on a white wall

where only the flies 
and the one who comes to clean

get close enough to see.

I come and go to whisper and sigh,

laugh not replicate. I've run from the shapers

since the day I dropped from my mother's womb, 

and it's my pure pleasure now

to flip them off, along with their droning coercion

to give, give, give

the asked for thing

the wanted word, demand for justification

and my own invalidation in a

graceful surrender, useless denial,

automatic agreement

and/or respectful silence.

I’m old and

done with that.

I'm on the lam, baby. 

And I've got 

one more silver dollar.

April 2011

Image courtesy Scientific American