Santa's Secret Sale

It wasn’t supposed to go beyond the first iceberg.
It was a secret whispered in a snowball,
tossed around the workshop
until it melted in the wrong hands.

Refusing to be used—the doormat
principle. Who among us hasn’t balked
at being the heavy, the shark, the bad guy.
Distill it down like vein-warming whiskey:

the key to life is kindness. Kindness
is Santa’s bag. Dolls in frilly dresses,
princess vanities (all is vanity—the giver, the taker).
gleaming bicycles, footballs fat from the calf.

In ancient times, kind was the word
used to describe food. Dear, your meat
is most kind this evening—a compliment
to the sacrificial lamb and it's butcher.

Porcupines, prickly beasts, are not loveable.
Give up your prickly ways, we tell our children
as daylight fades a little more each day,
until we are in darkness, dumb to their deeds.

Santa can not take it one day more. Good
is not an option. The North Pole is up
for sale. Parents, prepare your naughty
chairs, hang your stockings over your eyes.

The bidding starts at midnight.

*************************************************************************

Many thanks to the subject of a toysale email for this poem. Does it make sense? I played with words, with the notion of kindness. Probably not one I would share with my kids.

Poetry Gong - Poem 4

Advice from a Caterpillar While Washing Breakfast Dishes


The caterpillar questioned me
hanging from the spider plant
in my kitchen window,
a wretched height for dangling.

I shrink from his glassy gaze,
grow bold with my strangled admission:

I do not know who I am.

My son strolls in with a pigeon
behind him, his sister with a snake.
Chicken and spaghetti?
they suggest the usual supper fare.
Clearly culture is in order.
I drop the mop

(am I still the same person as before?)

leave the pancakes on the plate
crusting in sugar-free syrup,
surrey to the Indian restaurant.

Welcome little family
to the hookah patio.
Inhale the cumin wind
relax in a bowl of pad thai
swim through the noodles.
Climb onto our spicy shores
nap on a cushion of naan.

Hand to mouth
food as divine. Fingertips
only, if you please.
The task at hand,
how to get dry again.
We must never speak of spoons
or forks. Clean fingers only.

Avoid the roots and subterranean
vegetables. Spare the cattle,
enjoy the dancing sheep.

Mommy wants you to have fun

.

You can impress your friends
with our secret language:
chana, atta, toor, ghee.

I pray you’re small enough to think

this is an adventure

.

We are saffron warriors.
Off with heads of lettuce.
it is rough being a child
of a poet, forced to eat foreign
cuisine. Through a cloud
of smoke we exit, hop a bus to McDonalds,
mash French fries between greasy lips.

I Touched Him

because I couldn't see his back
rising and falling
like the length of his skinny body
in and out of the pool
all sticky
day long.

(Spotlight on the little-known
phenomenon--
dry-drowning.)

They’re never more angelic
than when they’re sleeping,
or so I’ve heard.

(Warning signs every parent
should be aware
of.)

You will not find the kind of mother
here, checking on her children
in the middle of the night.

In the middle of the night
I sleep.
Like a normal person.

(easily overlooked
or misinterpreted.)

I am no insomniac.
I know my children,
the span of their small
hands, the breadth of their
chests, the width of their feet
their lips, the measure of one eye
between their beautiful blue and hazels—
the third eye.

It’s just the media.
Blame it on the media.
Measuring the depth of my love
on the frequency of my obsession.

At one end,
the pool was twelve feet deep.
That’s three times
the size of my boy.
What is the direct route to his lungs?
How much could he inhale
in an instant?

Under pressure
we can all supply
what is needed.

*********************************************************************

I had used some indentations in this poem, for effect, but they didn't all show up when I cut and pasted. Can't seem to figure that out in Blogger. This indenting is something new I am trying...

NaPoWriMo #23 - Thank you muse, for sticking with me

Did You Know

If you pick up one tiny ant
from his home hole
and drop the little black innocent
into a neighboring hole
the guard ants will take him down?
The oldest boy
at the bus stop
lets loose this bit of harsh
animal truth, sure and swift,
an elementary hand dangling
insect justice like sugar on a string.
The younger boys lap it up,
swallow it whole,
dive to their knees
in search of a (victim) subject.

In the name of science and investigation
the ruthless backpack gang
trowels the driveway
spades the lawn
scurrying to prove their leader’s genius
before the bus comes.

This is power
in motion.
High on proofs and theories,
tiny giants
hunger for crucifixion.
Help us, help us.
Give us the ant.

Even the little sister denies
the mother three times.
No, mommy.
The ant will not
ask for a play date.
He can not live.
He can not live.
He can not live.
Let us show you.

NaPoWriMo #18

Back In the Day, You Could Learn a Thing or Two from Your Spread

Everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it.
Or, so they say. Maybe that’s the problem.

My children have run amok
from birth to now without their bonnets.
Hatless. Exposed. Bare and naked,
little boy head and girl head uncovered

in rain, in snow, day and night
without their bonnets. Stranded
like hapless cartoon animals
in a leaky raft, cursed to live out their
days never quite reaching the island
where the pirates have hidden the gold.

There’s another problem. Cartoons.
Not the traditional violence,
but the nouveau brutality. In the old days
the mouse beat the cat,
and that was that.
Today, the mouse in slicked back hair,
Sean John couture would have a witty
retort for the slung back cat in phat
nylon and gold chains. This is how it is,
or as they say today, it is
what it is. Is it, now? Is it.

And what if, I, a poet, just repeated
these lines? It is. What it is.
It is.
It is.
It is.
We still wouldn’t be caught dead
wearing bonnets,
blue, indigo, or down
in the dumps.
And whose fault is that?

NaPoWriMo #4

A Stranger Walks Up To A Mother Playing In the Park

Hey, do you mind if I play in the mud?
And who is she to deny him,
original mother of mud players, pie makers
trackers of wet earth across her floor.
It has been her job from the dawn of time
to allow mud.
To cover the hut in mud,
cover the wounds with mud,
drag herself up out of the mud.
It is mud she spends her days with,
mud she cleans nightly from their shoes
from their carpets,
washes in wide arcing circles
before sending it cleaned and gleaming
down her drain.
Even as she feeds her children
she repeats the old adage under her earthen breath,
One peck of dirt per child, per childhood.
One peck, one peck, one peck.
We’re all good.
We’ve got the pyramid covered.
Even as she tosses the clean stitched ball to her son
and he drops it in a puddle,
slides through an endless brown pond
to slick the mucky ball back at her.
Even in that dirty instant she knows
she will not drag her children through
the mud back to their car.
She is not afraid of this man
spreading his blanket next to a puddle,
preparing, perhaps, for a picnic
were it not for the mud
he has settled next to,
were it not for the mud
he is wringing through his hands--
a potter working his clay.
It is the stuff of life.
We are born from the earth.
We go back to the earth.
Stranger! Stranger!
The strange man digging his strange
hands into the mud,
letting wet mud fall from hand to hand
from hand to hand,
a brown, cloudy metronome.
Who among us has not wanted permission
to play in the mud?
Who would dare deny it?

********************


I was going to post a poem I wrote last week, not in April. Then I went on a date with my husband. He told me a story. I came home, wrote this poem. Thanks, Dude!

Sniff..last PoeTry ThuRsdAy post...

It is with great trepidation that I post this last poem for PoeTry ThurSday. PT has gotten me up off my *&% so many times and moved me to write a poem when otherwise I would have probably wallowed in I-don't-have-time-town not writing(warning! poets, do not visit this unsavory tourist trap!). And what a great group of writers, even friends, I have encountered! Thanks PT! I am hoping to take some time to link to the poets who regularly read my irregular blog (as in no schedule, no potty reference intended! can you tell I spend my time with kids?).

On to the poem. I wrote this some months ago, just found it under a pile of papers and books. It is still relevant to me today, and, in fact, could link to the whiny lines of my last post. Here's me, still trying to get spiritual...

Reading a Few Thoughts on Faith, I Put Down the Book, Pick up the Pencil

"...But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer." - Henri Matisse

Here is what I need
to get more spiritual.
I need to get right down
in my hat and pull out
a rabbit. Ignite a fire
somewhere in the nether regions.
Yoga, chakra, centering, God.
Yes. We all know it's in the details.
How many other names does God have?
My son, worshipper of dirt and speed,
poses the question as we bow our heads
in time to Bob Marley
on the way to the non-denominational
church we rarely nominate
in our nuclear democracy of a Sunday morning.
We wind up not in pews, not in organized
chairs, but at a trail head
open mouth of fur and pine
drawing the family in past needle
and cone teeth to its ferny belly.
We have entered the church of tree huggers.
I cross my fingers, bless the narrow log
we balance on to cross over into
the sunny side of the trail.
In heaven all rivers will run wide
but not deep.
Buddha will not be there,
belly bobbing above the current.
Allah will not arrive late
with seven virgins in tow.
Spirit is a boat you can not sail
without someone's wind bearing down on you.
Which weatherman shall we call for the forecast?

All tied up

Welcome to my blog. Let me introduce myself. I am skull-dried-in-sun-tied-with-a-net, formerly jillypoet-mom-trying-to-write. Have you ever tried to write while on vacation with two children under 6 years of age? At one point, I was in the company of four children 6-years and under. And at all times I had either my husband or my father, or two husbands (one mine, one someone else's...now there's a writing prompt), so in essence, I was surrounded by idea-sapping vacationing children. Children of all ages. Fodder for writing for sure, but not, at least, for this mom, the ideal writing situation.

OK. Is there an ideal writing situation? Virginia Woolf said women needed a room of their own in which to write. At the time, in my free-wheeling, flip-flopping 20s, I whole-heartedly agreed, but just because it was the feminist thing to do. Now, in my flip-flopping (still with the flip-flops), child-rearing 30s, I want to wrestle the stones from Virginia's pockets, drag her from the surf and hug her for this so accurate assertion. A room of one's own. And not a room with laundry waiting to be put away, or a two-year-old sleeping in your bed, or a five-year-old waiting for you to lie down with him. I love my children. But, I need a room of my own.

Summer is just about over. It is making my heart hurt. Today I thought about sending my son off to first grade and I worried that he might not know anyone. And my heart hurt. Yes. Hurt. I know, I know, use the pain, write a poem.

Can someone tell me when? When will the voices in my livingroom and my kitchen and my bathroom and my SUV STOP? OK. I will just wait for the space to breathe.

Maybe it is not my children (whom I really really love!), but my bad, too-short haircut that is sapping my muse. My pal Polkadot Witch just got a shorter hair cut and a new color and she feels empowered. Maybe I'm looking at this all wrong.

OK. I will rest with that thought. I'm looking at it all wrong. I'll sleep on it. In my messy bedroom. Unpacked suitcase, unpacked laundry, short hair and all.

I'll get back to you. With a poem. Promise. (I still have my assignments from the previous post!)