Picasso in the rain

a piano found in a field

(this from last prompt, alas...)

I’m reeling it in, A Virginia Reel across the strings
Plucking the lower keys with my big toe,
Lay my toes

across the mahogany,
my mahogany southern body
my key, my white teeth clacking middle C
This is where I’ve ended up
Finally,
blood flowing through ivory

Sorry, sorry,
dear elephant who never lived on my street
but dies in the living room each time a third grader
huffs her way through Chopsticks.
Bow your head to the pachyderm tapped in every note
Bow your back to the staccato plea of each key
And each tiny bum on the leatherette bench

One key per breath,
finding the space between the notes,
that gap-toothed smile
between atoms

A Mountain of Shit

1. I was sitting in Starbucks staring into my Espresso Macchiato and thinking about the fecal matter stuck to the bottom of my shoe when it occurred to me that dog crap is only metaphor for real shit.

2. Real shit is the wealthy business man who purchases a first class ticket to Cambodia in order to rape a ten-year-old enslaved in a brothel from which there is no escape.

3. Real shit is the mountain of refuse on the outskirts of Manila that regularly avalanches down to bury the children skipping rope below.

4. Real shit "happens" all right, but lets not diminish that truth with a dumb shit sticker tacked onto the bumper of a chunk of metal spewing real shit into the life-sustaining air we breathe.

5. Real shit "happens" because we allow it, dispense it, toss it, fan it, eat it, smoke it, sling it, and imagine it into existence.

6. Real shit begins when the sperm of greed meets the ovum of dark fantasy and births naked carefree indulgence.

7. It's not what a human ingests and which later drops into the latrine that equals real shit, said the Rabbi; it's what oozes from the dark corners of the human heart that stinks up the world.

8. Hitler's real name was Adolph Shitler. Mao's real name was Mao Tse Dung. Stalin's real name was Joseph Shitionovich Stalin, otherwise known as Little Shit. But despite their atrocities, let us not think that we are less capable.

9. Real shit is the 10 acres of tin foil manufactured each day to wrap eighty million Hersheys Kisses made of chocolate originating, by the way, from the Ivory Coast cocoa farms where child slaves work 100 hours a week making us happy on Valentine's Day.

10. We are shit athiests refusing to acknowledge the existence of shit we can't see. Which is why the plastic pebbles swirling in the Pacific now cover Hawaiian beaches and catch in the throats of gulls and crabs but don't really bother us much.

11. Real shit isn't the dog feces on the bottom of the shoe. Real shit is the shoe on the top of the dog feces made of materials that won't decompose any time soon.

12. Real shit is the plastic straw and styrofoam cup into which I stare in my daily Starbucks ritual.

13. But then again, who really gives a shit.

Scene of the crime

Strolling through a college town is like playing lead inspector
in some curbside murder mystery —
clues strewn everywhere in the gutter —

broken glass, an abandoned shoe, latex gloves,
a boutonniere that lost its bud, leaving only lace, brown ribbon, and a pin.

Who done what to whom and why?

Even the police drive those humming little hybrid cars,
which sneak up likewise on pedestrians and bad guys,
and when elections roll around
a slate of suspects reveal their motives
with little plastic signs posted on every other lawn.

In autumn, a cast of characters arrives,
dressed to the nines and rushing in out of the rain.
They bear boxes packed with military precision
and a series of bags marked with a Target.

It’s all smiles and bright expectations for the pursuit
of knowledge, pussy, and some really good parties.

Yet we all know, as they innocently lug
freshly painted bookshelves up the stairs,
that at least one of those objects has a bull’s-eye on its back.

Winter is the time of appliances.
Everyone has an alibi:
vacuum cleaners gargling carpet, dryers churning denim,
and the incessant tap-dance of computer keys.

It’s enough to send a man over the edge.

Instead, walk the streets at dawn when everything is silent
or late, when it’s all reveling stereos and studious tequila shots.

Bang! Suddenly it’s May, and they return to the scene of the crime.

Threadbare sofas, moldy futons, and the odd barber chair
come outside for air, lining up on the sidewalk
alongside the milk crates and cinder blocks
pressed into service as undergraduate furniture.

The ringleaders strand them there by the dumpster
and head home for summer, gossiping

about who done what to whom and why.

But despite parole, garbage like that don’t last long on the outside.

Soon enough, it’s swept up by another gang,
thrown in a dormitory cell, where,
surrounded by the scent of bud,
it must hold up a liquor store for one more year.

√ walk, find a piece of trash, write

recycling

until i realized
my mind was a recycling bin
fortitudinous
like a blender with a wonky blade
cattywompus cerebellum bloating and blistering bubbling
awhirring cauldron

i would never have thought the trash i pick up on my morning stroll
would be the thing i tossed in the brain
of me, head hinged up like the hood of a car
hoping for recycling as a poem

of course there is no such thing as trash
really. it was a word first applied to humans in 1604, in othello
comes from the norwegian "trask" ("'fallen leaves and twigs'") which reminds me that the trasks
daughters were friends of my older sisters',
and that they only ever ate on paper plates which they then threw out
a form of women's liberation, no dishes: trash eating on trash

one of them, the younger, d.,
beat me up when i was in kindergarten
what does it mean to be pulped by garbage? lower than low
i can tell you

my memory, half used refuse, brailles over the date: 10-25
knowing seventeen years ago something significant happened on this day
but the letters have faded off the page of my memory like scuffed newsprint mouldering in a recycling bin

instead of trying to figure it out, dig through the boxes of papers carefully
sequestered on basement shelves (the same storage system as my dead wife)
i just hunker down in the midst of an october storm that promises to rip every gorgeous
[indescribably colored which we will call] crimson leaf off the dogwood:
there are ghosts in my blender
my feeble brain, my lower than trash trash compactor

to make paper
you take the riffraffand duff, the broken bits, the shredded paper refuse, the trask
and blend it - all the letters and meanings bleed out into pulp
and then push it on a screen, flat, and let it dry
memories in my recycling bin brain are just so, reconstituted

my grey matter, pulp and my memory a pulping screen
taking the glimmering memories, faded lettering, and bits
and making something new, something clear, a canvas for the coming day

soon we will move beyond othering and there will be no other-than, no refuse
no refusing, only this recycling alzheimer-like montaging
or even less than this, no trash to pick up, a time
when our dead fade and the ghosts stop yammering
[a time of erasure?]
a time of clarity and peace


Scooter Cascadia
10-25-10
Taurus Moon, Scorpio Sun

Recycling (this week's poem-spark)

Go for a walk.
Find a piece of trash.
Write a poem.

Please add these LABEL to your post: "trash," "poem"