‘Doze wear de daze,’ the possum says.
He Bojangles, holding on
with tail to tree as he sashays
to a Drifters tune long gone
up to that place where good songs go.
It’s called Blueberry Hill.
He segues in a staid mambo.
He thinks he always will.
My spelling checker flips to Rorschach mode.
‘Cremates’ was its suggestion for ‘cream teas’
when I typed ‘creamteas’. The ill this flip must bode
is the basis for my trembling as I ease
a first Guinness from the sideboard, let it chill
down to the temperature of the room
I pretend is British but comes from the bill
for heating that I swept with a new broom
into the fireplace where I store the wood.
I could not pay. When I told that to the gas
man, he said, ‘I did not think you would’.
Read and tremble at what comes to pass
when poets stoop to identicals to rhyme
and chat with spelling checkers till drinks time.
Not yet ready (Surely ‘able’ — Ed.) to write anything worth keeping for the OWNERS series, but settling on Ottava Rima as the form. And that encourages stray thoughts (Surely ‘ravings’ — Ed.) like this:
THE CODGER CONGA
He is developing new dance steps without music:
the creep, the slouch, the shuffle, and the waddle.
‘Old age!’ he crows. ‘When I get there I’ll choose it
in preference to rejuvenation twaddle.’
With running gone, and short-range hikes elusive
he chooses totem poles as his role model.
He sits and dozes through the hours that bridge
the gaps between his sidles to the fridge.
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.
Earth Tourist 