Why We Adore Cindy

When it comes to beauty, sight only takes you so far
our eyes, though they can scan millions of wavelengths
perceive the slightest trace of a smile
see even in darkness
they still close when the light gets too bright
which is why they just don’t get her

The way angels strum a harp without moving
and tickle clouds with a heartbeat
flying through the heavens unaware of gravity

It’s harder for a fish to swim than this brown-eyed girl to move you
as though their gills are filled with jelly and every scale a broken rudder
her laugh, her grace, her genius tells a story
that none of the five senses can alone
cobble together to form the definition of beautiful

But even we don’t understand this
a puzzle of a woman that’s complete when left unsolved
like breathing the scent of a rose
and wondering what’s brushing our nose

--

Welcome back to another installation of the Poetry Vending Machine! This is Paul. Have a seat. A quick recap: earlier this month The Red Chair Project held their annual Red Chair Event, a sort of sampler platter of the arts things you can expect to see in the next year. As a treat to the hoity toity VIPs, some vending machiners were asked to come by and write poems for them, free of charge, during their drink and mingle session. And so we did. It was a surprisingly slow session, considering that the poems were free and that all someone had to do was fill out a slip of paper and they get a poem. Alas, the poems we did write turned out pretty well. Well, sort of.

This is the first one I wrote. Next year at Fringe I would like to put some sort of instruction on the slip saying something to the effect of "We do not know you or your family, your mistresses, your dogs, your unborn children, you mailmen - please talk to us about something universal that your loved one likes and have us write about that. Because if we try and write about them we could be dead wrong (and plain ol' boring)." So I tried to write about this wonderful woman named Cindy (and tried hard not to think of an ex by that name), given only the clues of angels, brown-eyed girl, and beautiful. Next time someone asks me to write about a loved one I'll describe how awesome it is to fuck the shit out of them and see what happens.