Two poems in the hall

A couple Christmases ago, I took a rejected manuscripts of poetry I had written, divided it up, edited it, and made backgrounds with patterned scrapbook paper posting one of the selected poems on each one. Presents!

There were some pretty ones. One was a poem called ‘You’, and I used delicate, gauze green leaves around a wine colored background with a few curling vines of silver here and there. Some that weren’t slated as gifts, I took to the bizarre to see if there was any interest. A woman offered me $30 for the rose bordered poem. My grandmother was with me, and as I turned to make the transaction she said, “I’ll give you forty.”

I blinked. “But I’m giving you one for Christmas.”

“Like this one?”

“No, they’re all different.”

The lady who was waiting patiently asked, “Is this your grandma?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you’d better give it to her, then. If she wants it that much, that’s who it should go to.”

That memory always makes me smile. The poem hangs now in their guest room…

And then there’s my dad. I gave my dad something else that year, cus I thought he’d see the poems as overly sentimental. There were other, less sentimental options, but those poems seemed too warped or too dark to give people for Christmas.

Well, dad wanted a poem. Typical of a parent, eh? They zig when you’re counting on them to zag. So on my visit up north, I brought the binder where I’d stored the laminated ‘ungifted’ poems, and let him take his pick.

He could not choose between two of the weirdest ones, so I gave him both. They hang now in his hall, framed, and I wonder, I just wonder what kinda nutter people think he is when they pause to take a read. It kinda gives me a warm fuzzy to know he proudly puts the family’s warped streak out there on display.

An Old Fashioned Love Poem

I thought that you and I understood something
but I see that I was mistaken.
It was such a beautiful night, you in your wedding gown,
me in my oxfords, hemming like a British Gentleman
about to give discourse on a subject that has just started to stop being
wildly popular.
I was mistaken to ask your mother to dance with me;
I didn’t know you had ‘a complex’.
I didn’t know she stuffed her bra with Kleenex, but now, I fear,
it will be very difficult not to look.
I only followed you into the ladies room my darling, because it IS midnight,
the men have been drinking, and they want to mount something on the wall,
and I fear it will be Fifi, or somebody’s bicycle;
and although your Pomeranian and I have never gotten along-
and although your dress isn’t a ‘Manxivier Genuine’,
and although I cancelled our trip to Maui and booked reservations
for Guatemala,
still, I think we’re on to something, you and I.
I’ve known it since the moment you broke your wineglass in my bathtub.
So take my hand:
I won’t let my parents talk to you, I promise;
I will not let harm befall your Pomeranian;
I will be your gentleperson, and you can be my Amazon.
Together we will outmode and outmaneuver
and outlive
the harsh glare of kumquats on Bastille Day.

 

The Tragedy

I choked my muse today.
She came at me too fast around a corner
and I thought she was going for my head, but
I think she was putting something in there,
not taking something out.
I strangled her dead,
my fingers closing tight around her throat
till the face went blue, and the hands
fluttering around like butterflies
went limp.

And only then did I notice her loveliness:
The features sharpened by duress.
Those final gasps reverberated
down my core and filled me with
abortive music. She was a mermaid
swimming away from me, her scales
leaving a shimmering path that grew quickly
too thin to follow.

She really shouldn’t have come at me like that, though
all crazy bright and fired up
like a freak, or a strung out mugger.