24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
Early morning
loading up buckets in the carport
moths bang against the lightbulb above
I cling to the sleeve of his jacket
the tremor from the engine makes me shake
as we slip out onto the bayou
Staying at his elbow
the mist makes this place look
like a fairy land
Hiding all the monsters
freaks, trolls, and goblins
that every good swamp provides
The bayou of my mind comes alive
as your elbow digs into my ribs.
What, now? I ask as you pull
my jacket off. Your lipstick
tastes like cinnamon, your face beet red
from the alcohol, the light-bulb is off
and we aren’t even out of the carport yet.
True love or true lust?
I’ll take either.
There is a tremor in your voice
as you call me your honey elk.
I just hope at my age this passion
doesn’t cause me to kick to bucket!
Bad Guys
In a village-
Where there is no factory
nor specialty shop or alchemist;
Where we get after-the-fact reporting;
With nearby state border,
across which
conceal and carry more lax laws;
Where surrounding freight yards
have Open Box Car Night
There is no need for Feds,
who don’t see the real dealers
in the mirror
Associating traits with an idea
seeing from your mind
instead of your eyes
you think love makes the ice colder
when there are no promises
you volunteer your heart
and become an employee
to a secret invisible boundary
this connection is supposed to fill
feeling up heart pockets demonstrating warmth
yet it can also ignore
harmoniously demanding evilness to prevail
when love doesn’t show scantily dressed
and willing
The J.M.W Turner in my head elbows me into a sense of calm,
a stillness in which I’m helpless to the interplay of sun and cloud.
Gradient tremors mesmerize, then relax, contract, then open-palm
the sky like a lightbulb pulled on a celestial cord and I’m found
in an almost painterly meditation, a state my schedule precludes
but, today, encourages and guides and folds me under its jacket
of air and light. And I am all that nature contains and secludes.
I belong to and am outside the moment. A pin in a universal bucket.
11am. Poem 9.
(Use these words in a poem…
beet, jacket, tremor, bayou, elbow, light bulb, cinnomen, bucket, elk, carport)
On Taking Mom to the ER
Bracing your elbow
in the palm of my hand
we slip your favorite red jacket
over your shoulders.
The tag says
Outer Layer: Beet
Lining: Cinnomen
You like to hear about that
everytime.
Winking up at Dad’s
old elk head on the wall,
you assure Bokie
we’ll be right back.
You like to do that everytime, too.
Your sweet, soft, white hair tremors and shakes
with the rest of you
as I place the blue bucket
on a black floor mat
between your legs,
just in case.
You marvel at the beauty
of sunrise on the bayou,
lookin like the yellow parlor
lightbulbs of your youth,
as we back out of your carport
for the ER.
I won’t tell you it’s 11pm.
I won’t remind you that
you grew up in a two room
share cropper’s stilt house,
other side o’the tracks.
I won’t let you find out
you’ve never been to Louisiana.
.
That is not my conscience –
fear; a beast that feeds on attention.
Not just a beautiful root
Call me black, that is a music to my ear.
I preferred the root of integrity,
for beauty is a fading flower.
Behold, money or the love of money –
The root of all evil.
Although I felt a sudden stab of pain in my chest,
I’m proud of my African root.
The grass roots that have ants in their pants
The beginners but not the gainers
that’s a strange word and no mistake.
The past telephoned the future,
Likely to live an endless night
For it hardly seemed to notice the presence of the presence.
The alpha of the alphabet is being ignored
The fruits of the plant; tasteless and colorless
A single tremor like a bell
That Friday, we watched the elk
cross the valley below us.
Down the road, the orange truck
rumbled from beneath the carport
where a single lightbulb hung
suspended in a thin pool of yellow.
The elk flowed around the elbow
of the fence in a cinnamon river
their white markings like letters
in some foreign alphabet.
How could we know the single
tremor that followed them
was a death knell?
All of it to disappear ~
I’m here –
In my beat-up beet-red leather jacket,
The one with the elk-hide patch on the elbow.
I sit in my skiff sensing the tremor of the bayou.
I have a bucket for crawdads, and
Flashlight with its just replaced light bulb.
Will you come with me?
I wait for a sign.
I stare at the light in your carport.
Strict Parents
As I reminisce about my childhood.
I can’t help but hear the phrases:
“Don’t do that! That’s not what I taught you.”
“Don’t go to dances.”
One phrase I would hear
when the school dances came and went.
I would feel sad and left out,
when my friends listened to
Whitney Houston
Bonnie Tyler,
“Is that country?”
“We don’t listen to that kind of music here!”
My mom took my cassette player
and gave a lecture on how it’s sinful.
I’d apologize and return the tapes.
A few years later,
my brothers ran outside,
I’d follow them a few steps
only to be yanked back.
“You’re a girl. You don’t do those kinds of things.”
I would watch all my cousins laugh until the sunset,
and come back with wide smiles
and new inside jokes.
Looking back
I remember how I wanted to run wild,
how I wanted to be free.
How I just wanted for once not to wear a dress
and let my clothes get caked with mud.
Just once
I didn’t want to be put in a role.
I wanted to speak freely.
But with strict parents,
that was impossible.