Since I'm in graduate school my creative writing is mostly done while procrastinating or "warming up" for writing dull academic things. But poems never really stop. This year I'm not even going to horde them on my computer so that I can edit them for two years and then get rejected by a few lit. journals. Nope, their all going HERE sans meticulous edits. (True bravery).
A Song from Her Songs
Sang her once the sighing
bow. immersed in one another
she had her in hers, and she—
She had her arrow. Play
an archer her wind. Her fingers
caution against whim, her lips simper
a teasing melody of Sophrosyne
Sun kissed indigo humidity
flown in by golden winged Iris
Her caduceus, the song of women—
finally Hers found in her
a thread the feather
a needle the shaft
and mending on high
voices together unfettered
Gloriously laughing through
shudder after shudder
never a quiver exhausted
her oak carved bow, her spine
two forked tongued serpents intertwine
Until low did drop a singular
shade, Her new feather fletched arrow
this girl, Her girl
Her little fletcher
caught by sight her flying
into her own marrow
Wept her once the needling
sorrow. Submerged yet
not lost to Her, bleeding
all over Her bed
She is cleansed
without baptism, the Archer
she sings herself
Still of Her
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Ancient Pornography
Saturday:
The molten Rock knew
too much
straddling repulsed
emptiness
took utthita tadasana
devoid
remonstrance
of dance
a torus queue
before the first salmon
a negative salmon
divided by reeves
equaled an imaginary
square salmon
and the eggs were of a squared
two sandy little phalanxes
crawled to consume the sacred
carrot of desire
Sunday:
the vessel
predates
the spear
deleted invertebrate
memories
did the stars appreciate
their biographies
chiseled into stones
as tiny squiggles
while the river deities gulp
their offerings
their celestial blue dances
deluged graphite stone mounds
erected temples topped with wells
invented the fountain
a season of eating well
a priest’s con-
firming the plumbing:
blood poured through rock tunnels
Guarantee
offerings become bribes
ancestor forgotten vessel
Wind-ing sails across,
a ribbon, a stripe
invention of string:
of lingual and lutes
Aeolic lyrics
Monday:
Assembly, a semblance
of an organizing
Body in the Closet
hauled into the noonday sun
upside-down satchel
Winged Nike and sitting men
Men, man, Age of Dirges
String knotting
tied up bundles of spices
and chewing ginseng root
Crown fever:
offers of ore to Blaze
castings test malleability
Of forced Amalgamation—
the extinction of certain
uncertainties. Kudzu
strangles an oak dead
Tuesday:
illiterate, kid, pregnant, and dead
the females of one ancient world;
cattle and sheep
an obsession with accounting
the semen, a Colony survives
Purity departing from truth:
a maiden pregnant with integers
Horus reincarnated
the vessel itself
mistaken for the meal
decapitated, nude, and forgotten
Goddesses bleed their marble in ruins
somewhere back in the motherlands
verdant moss conquers a tomb
a virus conquers a people
Closets full of bones’ dust
sleepy on the edges
without eye-glasses
soldiers of prophets
march down blind
the spines of old cities
and checkered farmlands
chessboards of Empires
Wednesday:
Bread verses potato, rice wins
aristocracy of free samples
Time becomes a piece
a piece becomes forked:
New Dynasty—“progress”
Child labor force and vast lands
of trees is to lumber
as gods are to saints
An ecosystem receives a guest:
invention of “Aliens”
the Other made un-human
enslaved by short diseased men
wearing fancy headgear
Snake people perform Jedi trainings
in caves under lakes:
for the Buddha
an inconceivable dampness
pale caved-aged Gruyère
settles a violent dispute
between Gumby and Pokey
Hats become as varied as
fungi in a southern grove
bloom into a golden song
Resonance mastered through the rust
colored cherry and walnut
Music finds new loudness
inspiring the (re)birth of Panic
so white even the spiders’ webs
cast shadows of their crisp geometry
the fleets of messengers and
Armadas chase the sunset because
All day we thought it was Friday
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“The Reason Why I Shot Him: A Clown’s Perspective”
“Yet each man kills the thing he loves”
— Oscar Wilde
At the height of my tower built upon the flimsy gold bridge leveraged over my treasure chest and piled high with white-faced bozos in their little red and blue flivvers, I stood triumphant as an elephant. The crowded tent shuttered with the rallied cries of my audience. I managed to silence them with a wave of my assistant’s hand. My sloppy checkered bowtie lifted now and then. The air up this high in a tent this huge is fresh from the upper vent. Looking down at the dirty stagnation all quiet with anticipation, I took a breath of pure whist and raising the oversized blue pistol high above my head, I pulled the trigger. The crowd wailed like souls trapped in the Lake of Fire and a tiny neon checkered flag sprang from the end of my pistol barrel. This was after the cleavage crested quiz show, the circus parade in which I mount and ride each animal in a faux selection process, and my conquering the evil sorcerers with their black gowns and gavels.
I’ll start from the beginning. “Slap stick is funny because people need a break from the predictable. And they need to feel superior. Most of all people need to see you fail over and over. To be unpredictably absurd in the extreme is your ultimate goal.” These were the words of my mentor on my first day. At the time I was one of ten siblings and one of twenty others vying to run off with the circus. I never thought I’d become a ringmaster or anything, I just wanted to get away from Kentucky. Honestly, I figured the clowning thing wouldn’t work out and eventually I’d have to do the gross but responsible thing: join the army.
Traditionally the Ring Master is an eloquent male authority. He is half magician, half businessman, and for me, half fool. My logic is that if a maestro is an accomplished musician, likewise a Ring Mistress or Master is an accomplished interdisciplinary circus performer. At first I was the clown car—we didn’t have a real car so I drove a sheet with some cardboard cutouts around and the clowns came in one side and exited out the other. Then I started training in rigging after one the riggers fell in love and left us.
The rigs in those days for our production were very basic, then Saul was hired on. He had worked for Wriggly and introduced us to more sophisticated methods and props for trapeze and staging. On the side I had been working on a short clown act in which I birthed doves or rabbits from my big pink trousers. When this became a regular act I devised more of them and started including others. If your act had a good audience reaction more and more people want to be involved until it morphs into a full scene. Other circuses had more hierarchy and gatekeeping perhaps, but ours seemed to work off whatever brought the people back the second night. My success was due in part to this openness and the fact that I was willing to do whatever it took. If an audience loved seeing me in a leotard with high heels then I’d do it. If they wanted sexy women riding donkeys, then I’d find the women and the donkeys.
The circus was my family and the big top was my home. But as I write from my dingy prison cell, those days are long gone. It wasn’t the people who left me—I had new assistants and dancers every year. It wasn’t the fading red stripes of the big top, or the fact we couldn’t use real animals anymore—it was him.
Let me be clear: If he had kept his blue business man get-up on, I would still be adorned with brightly colored wigs and face paint shooting blanks from my pastel blue pistol—but in Vegas. I was on my way, or so I thought. Admittedly, the last few decades have been difficult for clowns.
Where in Ireland the fae were once thought divine creatures of extraordinary beauty, when the monolithic religion came the fae were suddenly cast as wretched creatures with hair growing in all the wrong places and wisdom supplanted with dark mysteries. People have been asking me lately if I miss my customers—the children, they mean. The truth is that the number children afraid of clowns has been steadily increasing since the invention of the television. Once only hinted at by shadows and stage scenes, the small screens have been a boom for monsters of all kinds. The florid striped suites and would-be comical facial paintings contrasted in the dimly lit big tops, but in the sunlight they appear ghastly. It has been the depressed and overworked adult that has been my bread and butter. Children are fed softer things now, teletubbies or cute animals. Humans—born sinners—are too much for those little developing minds.
People came to see our show with their children as an excuse, then one day they didn’t need the excuse anymore. There is no shame in enjoying a shimmering nearly-nude nymphet slide down a life size glass fish bowl. Entertainment used to be entertaining that which we know to be impossible or unlikely as a real life for someone out there. A clown is an unlikely hero but with enough magic anyone can be a hero—that is until now. One day the tide will reverse but in my short lifetime I may not see it. What I have witnessed is the rise and domination of Reality as entertainment. People lacking any magic in their lives seek their reflection, and in their ignorance of magic they value money and fame over mystery, power over transcendence.
The first time I saw Cheeto I loved him. The orange tan complimented a bulging gut blue business suit and like me he was unapologetically everything everyone hated. The Boss Man, The Creepy Hands Stage Man, the Sinister Sally, The Lonely Rich Boy who buys a Russian Wife, Tiny Tim whose actually giant, not disabled and rich. You get the grimy picture. He was even more me than I could ever be.
Of course every clown votes and I was no exception. I voted for Cheeto like a queen bowing to Cher, but something started itching in the back of mind.
After he won that son of a Billionaire Bob was everywhere. The same way I’d start off a Thursday show singing through a bubble kazoo as I juggled on my unicycle, he start tweeting before six am about North Korea. By Sunday I’d have a whole chorus of kazoos on unicycles trying to fix my skirt and brush my frizzy rainbow wig while I was talking on my fake cell phone and ogling a girl offstage. The Sarah Huckabee would stand off to the side and assure everyone I was actually just fixing my tie and not drinking from a rubber boot and not waving my balloon wiener dog around and certainly not calling up my buddies on unicycles to go to the Ukraine post office to pick me up a whole suit case of bitcoin.
Monday I was done but Cheeto kept going. He was on round three of the slippery weener dog balloon act with all his bitcoins falling everywhere, and I was sleeping in.
A year went by and the son a shitty shot sheriff was holding G3 summit on his golf course and sending everyone home with engraved wine glasses reading “Best Ever G3 Summit and Don’t Forget to Hack the DNC and Import 35K Ballot Incinerators 4 USPS.” The idea stuck me, what if there’s four more years of this? Then a lopsided jumper cable connection caught my ear: what if there’s not?
