Yo-yo
Epic refereed over-the-moon contests
were sponsored by Duncan Toys Inc
outside the best local movie theater
where we saw twenty-five cartoons
for a quarter. Plus the raffle winner
with the luckiest ticket got to bring
a box of chocolates home to mother.
String fully extended from its spool,
my youngest did not experience that
but instead was sacrificed to the gods
of Yo-Yo Ma wannabe cello teachers
who took little girls and boys hostage
[with the tacit assent of their parents]
to draconian weekend ur-competitions.
Ephemera*
Active engagement in random circumstance
creating some spawns on almost a daily basis.
Flurry out of time busybody restlessness swirl,
primitive pleasure traipsing curious mindwilds.
Done with stressful lapidary honing drudgery.
Just mucking about intensive but mercurially.
A child looks at things: you can’t really describe
trying to work out sorta what life is as naïve.
Shooting stars screaming through digital galaxies,
many unkempt kids will find publishing planets.
Too much energy – another UFO dispatch waits
just around the corner – too superficial, hurried
-- unevenly bold -- dramatically engaged at best;
inconsequentially glib or decorative at his worst.
Convulsively spontaneous, endlessly enthusiastic,
extraordinarily prolific flow, change, mortality…
All well and good (though provisional, complacent),
reverse snobbism in pseudo-Buddhist impermanency?
* riff off The Pencil of Nature
Bowels of Nursery cum Nursery in Five Movements
i. Loose Lips Lackadaisia
Oh micro-mini-soul, you, my shirking ego,
your quotemarks would just hang there in the air
like wings without a bird.
-- Bill Knott, "Quote Unquote"
daisy-chain industrial-strength investopedia cunning lingua franca,
infamous anti-Goldwater advert
aired only once during LBJ’s ‘64 Presidential campaign,
filthy hydrogen
bombs
while peroxide or sunlight or Agent Orange proves
Lady Bird’s best shrink-wrapped nutsack dick-porn dis
infectant.
ii. To whom it may concern
To whom it may concern,
I now choose not to address
directly, but you who can read
me should by all means feel free
to convey these feelings to my wife
of a half century: Dearest-dearest,
would it be okay to reconsider
cremation instead of our plots
between both sets of parents?
iii. Hickory Dickory Anonymouse
Incy wincy spider
climbed up the water
spouting poetry
Humpty Dumpty --
good egg once – his/her
yoke’s wheeled in.
iv. Septuagenarian Nursery Rhyme
alright ahem er yes sir
let’s try to zoom that perfidious makeshift
bedroom kitchen (microwave, mini-fridge
but no sink) into shape
hide teabags, rice cakes, bread and swizzlesticks
get some essential amino acids plus salad days
in the old Sunbeam Mixmaster before our suspicious kids’
or theirs' Shabbes visit jumping jack flashes
over Bubbe’s tarnished candlestix, my adult diaper tumult.
v. Once Pert (Hyperbolic) Geek
"...envy being best understood as empathy gone wrong..."
— quoting Martin Amis from Thomas Mallon’s Style Supremacist, 5Feb18 New Yorker
Termagant gobsmack, Nabokov fantasy’s nympholepsy
slud to post-menstrual mind’s mildewed mangy
samey slapdash pedophilic mess
I spent off–hours depilling rugs, sweaters or dancing shoes
bugged by generations of his fave felines
with terminal cat scratch fever
which distorted that ignoramus’s grand unified field theory:
unlike novels, poetry’s near-quiet nastyism
is a fundamentally irrational form.