CONSUMER TACTICS
So you buy them for her,
Marlboro Lights,
more easily than you would
have purchased tampons,
your embarrassment buried
beneath your gender,
ghost of The Marlboro Man
astride his horse in deep snow
in mountains in Montana.
Let me intrude, dear reader,
dear buyer, instruct you to buy
Tampons. Stand at the counter,
money in hand, holding the blue
box so all can read it.
Announce to the line in front
and behind you: "I gotta a woman."
Hell, sing the song and grin.
No matter what their faces show,
the ones who won't laugh or sing
with you, their legs anchored
in the muck of their jealousy,
cannot mock you, and by your
own admission you will have,
dear reader, what you just declared.
¤ ¤ ¤
THE PROPRIETY OF PAINT
With my thumb I peel the flake of paint
from the sill. Its cream skin crumbles to reveal
a green belly so sickly one understood the need
for cover. Who could have thought this
proper burial?
As I move from room to room,
I wonder what lies beneath. The rose
of the dining room belies perhaps a brown
so nauseous no meals were taken well
before the warm tint gave the meat its subtle hue,
the beets a darker tint.
The royal blue
of the living room is too strong of itself,
if truth be told, is grey, a haze turned
inside out, spent conversations somehow
all on sorrows past and direness future.
I shall move from house to house, from town to town,
with one hand paint the spaces I shan't inhabit,
and with the other scratch the surface with an awl,
dig and gouge, look always for real surfaces,
the end of lies, a place to stop for beauty.
¤ ¤ ¤
THE COLLECTORS
Tell me a story, the small boy asked the man
who sold stocks and bonds. The tie-and-coat
man shrugged, taught a lesson on investment
until the young fellow, taking his sister's hand,
made way to the hotdog vendor for a tale
with mustard, and more. "It was lunch,"
the fellow said (oh, by the way, I'm Louie).
"Six guys were haggling while I piled the cabbage
higher than they'd ever stand, and so I pushed
it right between the loud ones, yelling words
your mother never lets you say (I hope),
said 'three bucks,' and got a fiver back,
a wave, that kind of keep it makes you want
to wad it up and shove it up their nose, you know?"
The small boy painted his face with catsup
and mustard until an Indian appeared in the chrome
reflection of the cart. Louie nodded approval,
gave them both a dog and a drink, sent
them off with a stranger's faith in good things
happening to good people, few as they were.
"He was funny," Melissa, his sister, said.
"Yes," the boy said. "And a wise man too."
On the corner a woman sat knitting
with needles made of air and a yarn
of deep faith in better days. "M'am,"
the young boy asked. "What do you make
that says clickety-clack, clickety-clack,
but is some invisible today?"
"Whatever I want," she answered, amazed,
it seemed, at what must be obvious.
"Can I see?" said Melissa, her mittens
off as if vision took hands today.
"Certainly," Amanda (the old woman's name)
said, "Certainly. Hold them out," and then
she wrapped them round and round with yarn
the sky provided, described the rainbow
sweater worn by the dark sky which chilled
with the rain. "We'll put on long sleeves,
and a flourish just like the cuffs of fancy birds
that waddle in warm waters rich with small fish,
salty, lapping at your feet, that beg you take
your sweater off, where you'll not need
it any more. . .never again..." Her voice
a patient slide to silence, then a snore.
"We'd better go, her brother said, and so
they walked inside the city as they always had,
two Wisdom Seekers collecting what they did
not weigh, gathering stories, day by day.
