if only the girl in the song were real/and the boy were me
she would be a california girl with a mild southern accent/and i would have surfed from an early age/and met her on a bright summer afternoon on the beach
and i would have a vw bug and legs almost too long for it/and she would say I was lanky
and we ate a lot of ice cream but stayed skinny by burning calories surfing and running miles and miles on the sand and making out after taking showers
and we got picked to be the first shipload of settlers on the first moon colony where there would be no surfing but plenty of flying with strapped-on wings and tail assemblies
and–whoops, the song is over
wow, what a song/really took me places
here I am a seventy-year-old man with stubby legs again
yearning for what can never be
but maybe there’s a woman out there, a woman my age, for whom leg-stubbiness is not a significant factor in the selection of a companion
who wants to be a landlocked surfer girl
with some occasional barefoot-on-the-sand interludes
From the website’s prompt: “Today, try writing a poem that imposes a particular song on a place. Describe the interaction between the place and the music using references to a plant and, if possible, incorporate a quotation – bonus points for using a piece of everyday, overheard language.”
East on Thomas, North on Western Civilization Going South
Walking on the sidewalk on the north side of Thomas Road/Heading east toward the Sonic/Where I’ll order the #13 medium, tots,/Diet Coke plus a corn dog with three mustard packets,/”Flight of the Bumblebee” starts playing in my head
There are no bumblebees here/But there are bicyclists far outnumbering the pedestrians/Who out-of-nowhere insistently materialize from the gloom between streetlights/And somehow connote the threat of a swarm of bees
And somehow spark the memory of a thirsty four-mile hike/Up to the base of Piestewa Peak/Where I knew a blessedly coldwater drinking fountain awaited/To cure my early-June dehydration/But when I arrived at that oasis/I found it to be jealously guarded by honeybees/Who inexplicably preferred the cold metallic sterile drip-puddle/To the lively nectar of lantana and cactus blossoms
And the rumor of aggressive Africanized bees from way back danced in my vivid imagination/And fueled my cowardice/And, thwarted, I turned my back on the mountain I had intended to climb/And rubber-leggedly made my way to the nearest convenience store/There to buy a large bottle of the appropriately-named Lifewater
Yes, these cyclists vibed a similar menace/And I flinched and dodged ineffectually as they zoomed past
Then as I passed a bus stop/Where idlers with blankets and a shopping cart with oddments were chatting/I heard a hate-filled young woman’s voice say/…and it turns out my FUCKING husband had been texting her all along…
And it was as if stage-scrims of scenes from Armageddon/Lit up above the gloomy sidewalk/And they featured the mysterious death of bees/The uncaring wheeled hordes/The disenfranchisement of multitudes so recently compelled to sleep at bus stops/My own complicity in buying products packaged in environment-damaging plastic
And I wondered as I walked/How long the fragile embroidery/Of this our civilization/Would hold
And “The Flight of the Bumblebee” played on in an endless loop as I walked…
(From the website’s prompt for day 14: “Today, try writing a poem that describes a place, particularly in terms of the animals, plants or other natural phenomena there. Sink into the sound of your location, and use a conversational tone. Incorporate slant rhymes (near or off-rhymes, like ‘angle’ and ‘flamenco’) into your poem. And for an extra challenge – don’t reference birds or birdsong!”)
buzzed
rumor has it that horny cicadas/have a cacophonous periodicity/doing the buzzbuzzbuzzmate deed as/cyclewax fills, and in this vicinity
all around me the hereiamfuckme bugs/meet their seventeen-year obligation/shedding skins as their synthesized noisymoogs/vibrate like crazy in arthropod nowpassion
not too romantic to my human taste you see/but different strokes, different folkcritters, yes?/their peculiar frequency mastery/gets exempted from cutesy-poo spattermess.
Thor had red hair long ago/And a beard/And a boy companion named Thialfi/And he drank so much ocean the tide ebbed/Not noticing his beer was actually seawater
Millennia later Stan Lee came along/Having co-created superheroes and having space to fill in the monster-genre comic Journey Into Mystery/He told his brother Larry to bring thunder god Thor into the fold/And Larry and Jack “King” Kirby concocted a myth of a myth/Turning timid but worthy Dr. Don Blake into the hammer-wielding blonde prettyboy Thor/And with the hammer BlakeSlashThor discouraged some rockpile-looking invaders from Saturn from conquering the Earth
Silly though this may seem/A not-even-mint copy of Journey Into Mystery #83 is now on sale on eBay/With an asking price of $39,500.00 US
(But hey–free shipping)
And Thor became the stuff of new legends
And is now featured in several movies
But the Marvel Cinematic Universe retrofit the Thor legend to mostly ditch Dr. Don Blake and turn Jane Foster from Blake’s decorative, pining nurse to a kickass scientist specializing in weird energies
I will never be a head on Mount Rushmore/Nor cast my capitated lot/With those four dead presidents/Whence came such woe/So I humbly propose:/Those who wish my Wright[my middle and momside family name]eous visage/sculpted on a mountain/fountain up some seed money,/Honey, and let’s make a Mount Rushnomore/For me and three nonslaveinvolving pals to be headscaped/Scrapedstoned/Shape-cloned into a fitting nonument to lay-backedness/Stray-hackedness and politically neutral
You troll no one when you’re Mount Rushnomoring/Soaring instead above such strife-begetting matters
Begatters of aggression (TR) andor passive-aggression (AL) andor typo-critical hypocrisy (TJ) andor domestic oppression with a side of cruelty (GW) will be invited to mend their ways
Raise the money and let me sculpt a scale model/What’ll consist of Jane [That was my mom’s first name too) Goodall and Jeff Bridges as The Dude/Who’d be between the Great/Raitt, Bonnie and me
See us under anarchic Antarctic ice/After we reverse the genocidotropic anthropic climate alteration
Altercation-quelling proof as snow and then ice resettles on our gently smiling phizzes/Whizzes a more humane humanity into the Undark Ages and that gentle snowfall and ice incrustation on the newly snowcapped peaks of Mount Rushnomore will be the icing on the cake clique
One with Clay, Image and Text 