The stupid Christians exile Jesu Cristo
because he’s strange-named, refugee, and Jewish
or was when he preached love, God’s rule, and peace though
they won’t admit to that. They go all shrewish
at the idea he’d want bigotry to cease. No
chance they’d follow him. His eyes weren’t blueish.
Wise Christians, there are many, hide in shame
at the evils that the dumb do ‘in His name’.
The wind less dark than coal tar still sufficed
by jiggery-pokery to keep us in the dark.
It scrambled clouds and ringed the moon with ice,
eclipsed it with the world. No solar spark
traversed Earth’s molten core to light the ring
of atmospheric ice around the moon.
The walk home in the dark was twice as frightening
as we had dreaded all the afternoon.
You walked ahead and waved to keep your torch
alight and upright so we’d not get lost.
I saw the large dog pad down from the porch.
Your light blew out precisely when you crossed
your arms to shield your throat as I had dreamed
you would, and since you could not then, I screamed.
The old man doffs his nightingale and whinnies.
Aware from stares that his garb is wrong, he waits
near the entrance, while his hostess sets him straight.
‘You’re adorned in bird, as we all are on Wednesdays
but it’s Tuesday! Tuesdays tout le monde wears cow
in pieces on our heads and hands and feet.
And we don’t speak horse on Tuesdays, we all tweet,’
she trills, thrilled seeing he remembers now.
Poem fragments form the flimsiest bon mots,
Being foreign-born moths, unused to English sun,
they mistake it for the moon and navigate
most erringly and end up waxing wroth.
No dotage-hampered colt whose race is run
nor any whinny-jaded reprobate
anticipates a moth preserved as Goth.
There are none here: no mots preserved in amber.
They ambled, rambled, flew the coop and went
back where they came from or straight on to Ghent.
She stood alertly, groomed. Her livery shone.
The valet parking manager approved.
His excellence at Davos was well known
among the other servitors. They moved,
the manager and maid, among the rich
and parked their cars and planes. She curtsied well
and he was proud she did. No single hitch
could hinder either one of them. The swell
and affable world leaders, and their owners,
tipped both of them enough to live a year.
It riled her how the rich behaved as donors
and she, donee, was to them just veneer
on a scene they graced with presence while they planned
how to keep their world another year in hand.
=====================================
It’s our world too, she thought. Her staring frown
made the manager chastise her softly: ‘Smile.’
He could not afford to have her coming down
so he slipped her more white powder. ‘Walk a mile
in their shoes,’ he implored her. ‘Rich is good.
The people who assemble here control
the world to make it function as it should.
Without them, there’d be wars, and heads would roll.
There’d be refugees, and pestilence, and despair.’
She looked up and saw him clearly. Made her cry.
‘You keep telling me plutocracy is fair,
because it works. It don’t, although you try
to excuse the people who’re exploiting you,’
she said, and shot him twice. There’s little new.
A flat fish, lost and lonesome
asks, ‘Oh, which way lies the sea?’
of a trawler’s mate so handsome
she believes his ‘follow me.’
She does. They reach The Anchor.
He is buying. She has beer.
‘That’s a chaser,’ he says handing her
a shot. Makes her feel queer.
It’s a routine they keep repeating
from Cheers to the Rose and Crown.
‘I am starved. I fancy eating
something fried,’ he says. She frowns.
The plump plaice keeps smiling flatly
the way most flounders do.
She finds the mate beguiling
but she drinks and lets him stew.
His own smile turns to grinning
then to yearning then to drool
as he fantasises winning
while his mind fries up a school
of flat fish like the flirty one
who keeps saying ‘bottoms up’
so frequently he spends a ton
of his earnings for the cups
of the wine and beer and whiskey
they keep drinking matching shots.
He’s lethargic. She’s more frisky
telling him, ‘I like you lots.’
She reminds him of a floozy.
He reminds her of a shark.
He is seeing double, boozy,
when they totter to the park.
He has not forgot his hunger.
She has not forgot her quest.
Right before he could have hung her
on his grill she has finessed.
She finds him dear without his trawler
but his will remains a wish.
No runner-walker-crawler
ever can drink like a fish.
He last sees her neatly diving,
swimming strongly to the sea.
She waves fins, says, ‘Keep driving
us extinct, you’ll be killing me.’
In my tarpaper shack in the forest I am free but not clean.
I don’t get proper care but the big guys all tell me I’m good.
Good to go. Good for something. They say it is good I am scabby and lean.
I am good with my gun like the other guys back in the hood.
Free of care, not so scared as you’d notice, I stand and defend
What they tell me is worth it. They say it’ll be good in the end.
Earth Tourist 