Tickling raw nerves took you, taut in a velvet suit to Youngstown, Ohio. One of your red-faced nights ended in ellipses and singing me with a rose between my teeth, yawing out blues at 10 p.m. Taken lightly, rogue avatars that we were, elusive songstresses attached by our purses stolen from CVS clearance or was it a yard sale? You took small endings very admirably, Tom, though you said every absence turns a bruise yellow, then the bruise travels to Youngstown.
On the radio in your Nissan we’d get too high, grow silent, taken with the verandas we dreamed we’d sit on before Carson tried too hard to swim in a river and never emerged. You’d retort that Carson lived for summer and yet I’d turned sixteen and had never tried to die young. Too many junkyards in too-tight trailers, too much rotting not from the inside. This rot traveled up from the ground, from trashcan fires we started out town, rouge, then a colossal blue, almost radical though you said Youngstown was like a tattoo of a casket across his chest with a yellow interior like a notepad. Rubbing our lips in powered sugar to look like frozen corpses, we quoted movies in tire swings and took in summer like folks without jobs or time to worry though in that Dairy Queen vest you resembled a backward angel with a well for a heart. Youth tattled on us, eventually veering towards the sun’s radius and you’d say you’d never leave though a cousin in Wisconsin owned Vinny’s Pub and rather than yelp to death in Youngstown you could tour the Midwest in a stained white gown and I’d go with without trying.
Or you’d say it this way: Too much small town steered me wrong angel girl with your seizures like fallen elms that smashed, tambourines in leggings, each evening tired to the last until Reggie came in from Milwaukee and changed the topic to running. Into grief’s tin walls like a shackled queen of my own making, I was your doll but what did I think, rude accounted-for vortex angel, the Eve of the Dairy Queen without a spotlight or a truck to save you before Reggie came back with a promise that he’d keep me unsettled, take me riding ponies in Pennsylvania yet I think we both sang in off-beat patterns of triptychs until you stepped into the cave and I trailed behind.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Travesty (a poem-in-progress)
Tickling raw nerves took you, taut in a velvet suit to Youngstown, Ohio. One of your red-faced nights ended in ellipses and singing me with a rose between my teeth, yawing out blues at 10 p.m. Taken lightly, rogue avatars that we were, elusive songstresses attached by our purses stolen from CVS clearance or was it a yard sale? You took small endings very admirably, Tom, though you said every absence turns a bruise yellow, then the bruise travels to Youngstown.
On the radio in your Nissan we’d get too high, grow silent, taken with the verandas we dreamed we’d sit on before Carson tried too hard to swim in a river and never emerged. You’d retort that Carson lived for summer and yet I’d turned sixteen and had never tried to die young. Too many junkyards in too-tight trailers, too much rotting not from the inside. This rot traveled up from the ground, from trashcan fires we started out town, rouge, then a colossal blue, almost radical though you said Youngstown was like a tattoo of a casket across his chest with a yellow interior like a notepad. Rubbing our lips in powered sugar to look like frozen corpses, we quoted movies in tire swings and took in summer like folks without jobs or time to worry though in that Dairy Queen vest you resembled a backward angel with a well for a heart. Youth tattled on us, eventually veering towards the sun’s radius and you’d say you’d never leave though a cousin in Wisconsin owned Vinny’s Pub and rather than yelp to death in Youngstown you could tour the Midwest in a stained white gown and I’d go with without trying.
Or you’d say it this way: Too much small town steered me wrong angel girl with your seizures like fallen elms that smashed, tambourines in leggings, each evening tired to the last until Reggie came in from Milwaukee and changed the topic to running. Into grief’s tin walls like a shackled queen of my own making, I was your doll but what did I think, rude accounted-for vortex angel, the Eve of the Dairy Queen without a spotlight or a truck to save you before Reggie came back with a promise that he’d keep me unsettled, take me riding ponies in Pennsylvania yet I think we both sang in off-beat patterns of triptychs until you stepped into the cave and I trailed behind.
On the radio in your Nissan we’d get too high, grow silent, taken with the verandas we dreamed we’d sit on before Carson tried too hard to swim in a river and never emerged. You’d retort that Carson lived for summer and yet I’d turned sixteen and had never tried to die young. Too many junkyards in too-tight trailers, too much rotting not from the inside. This rot traveled up from the ground, from trashcan fires we started out town, rouge, then a colossal blue, almost radical though you said Youngstown was like a tattoo of a casket across his chest with a yellow interior like a notepad. Rubbing our lips in powered sugar to look like frozen corpses, we quoted movies in tire swings and took in summer like folks without jobs or time to worry though in that Dairy Queen vest you resembled a backward angel with a well for a heart. Youth tattled on us, eventually veering towards the sun’s radius and you’d say you’d never leave though a cousin in Wisconsin owned Vinny’s Pub and rather than yelp to death in Youngstown you could tour the Midwest in a stained white gown and I’d go with without trying.
Or you’d say it this way: Too much small town steered me wrong angel girl with your seizures like fallen elms that smashed, tambourines in leggings, each evening tired to the last until Reggie came in from Milwaukee and changed the topic to running. Into grief’s tin walls like a shackled queen of my own making, I was your doll but what did I think, rude accounted-for vortex angel, the Eve of the Dairy Queen without a spotlight or a truck to save you before Reggie came back with a promise that he’d keep me unsettled, take me riding ponies in Pennsylvania yet I think we both sang in off-beat patterns of triptychs until you stepped into the cave and I trailed behind.
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Killer, Shen. I can't help but wonder who Tom is...
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