Absence

The place could have been empty,
the other bodies could have been ghosts
mixed with cigarette smoke,
and their eyes merely stars swaying
in the night sky.

For me to watch you dance
was to allow the fabric of reality
to disintegrate,
threads unraveling
into the hemmed edges
of the corners of my eyes.

For you to pull your lips away,
after placing them so close to mine
was a tease,
muting the music
into tiny vibrations,
annoying as mosquitoes
in comparison to the bass
of my beating heart.

Let the walls have their speculation,
as I will never notice them,
and within this moment
that is as good
as never knowing
they ever existed
at all.

--

See, this is why I'm getting more out of this blog than you. I get to read over the ones I never had time to scope while I was running back and forth to my car for paper/tickets/towels/hurricane sandbags. No idea who requested this one, and while I'm about 90% sure this is Katherine "Lilly" Ramirez' handiwork, I'm guessing on that too. Whoever it is, I hope this got someone laid.

The Legend of Spaz Humperdink, Duck Gynecologist

Anyone who has never been to
that porn studio on Old Dirty MacDonald’s Farm
is a depraved degenerate.
The walk alone brings you closer to God,
especially when you can see his beard floating in the cerulean sky
right above the bright red barn
sitting on the horizon for what seems like an eternal march
through pristine wheat fields whispering Heartland of ‘Merica the whole way.

Suddenly you’re opening the barn doors and Dirty Mac, as he’s known,
is inviting you up to the loft
to watch the spectacle unfold below.
Rock Schlonger or Grover Niptwist preps over on a bale of crackling straw.

And someone lubes up the duck.

Spaz never does that. Spaz stays out of the production, sitting back in his white coat and wide hat under the shade of imported gorse outside.

The scene begins with some banal role playing.
“So,” says Rock. “What brings you here?”
“Quack,” says the duck.

The duck never seems confused once the action picks up.
It seems horrified. It flaps and slaps its webbed toes against the actor’s thighs.
But it knows what’s happening.

Spaz waits until he hears Dirty Mac yell cut.
Then he strides in, casual as you please, still blowing steam off his coffee.
He whispers to the duck for a moment, tells it that it’s beautiful. Tells it that it’s still wanted. Tells it that it’s loved.

Then he checks. “Nope,” he says, “she’s fine.”
See, a female duck who so hates her mate can alter the path of her fallopian tubes, keeping the sperm in a permanent maze. And Spaz could tell if she had done it.

She did it. Every time.

Still, totally worth the five buck admission.

--

Oh, how I love the play this poem got. I remember the couple who ordered it well: cute, youngish, dapper, the type of folks I would have pegged for inspiration culled out of some Conor Oberst song. Sure enough, the girl provided the mandated words for the poem - "cerulean," "spectacle," and "gorse" (it's some kind of shrubbery).

And then her boyfriend writes this title to go with it. Was he pissed at her? Was he just one-upping her? I'll never know. Trevor Fraser wrote this, because ... well, if you know Trevor, how could you NOT give this to him? He proceeded to memorize and read it at the Poetry Smackdown the following night, to equal helpings of laughter and controversy. I always seem to think the Fringe celebrity judges will have a weirder sense of humor than we do, but Jameson Beane in particular was straight-up horrified by this poem. (Though to be fair, the version Trevor read that night specifically mentioned the duck being raped.)

Me, I found it educational and, um, edifying. According to Trevor, the thing about the fallopian tubes is totally a real fact.

Blue is the Color of the Sky on Tuesday

She was the giving kind
as she wondered at lunchtime
in the shadow of the storm
as she stared at the wayward clouds
what they saw
when they looked down:

Droplets of humanity
swarming into their humungous schools
in plazas
and parking lots,
what must we seem
to gods with such aptitude for shape?

Obtuse images of dragons
puppy dogs, elephants
fat fairy tale refugees
faces of old lovers
or perhaps
just another passing cloud
like them
mindless of these fancies and masquerades
only making their way
through the blue
on their way to the next rain.

---

This one's just full of mysteries. I have a fuzzy recall on exactly how this title got picked, or who picked it. It obviously wasn't literally inspired, as anyone who was actually under the sky during Fringe can tell you. But that's all secondary to the main question:

Exactly what kind of fluffy Bob Ross bullshit was I trying to write here?

Anna, What Fresh Hell Have You Brought Us?

We hated her.
Tommy, Corey, and me.
Our stomachs sank in unison when we saw her coming
a harmonic chord of utter despair
played in the key of oh-fuck-major.

During recess her obloquies bruised deep
raising goose eggs on our souls
that far outdid what rocks thrown by the boys
made on our foreheads.

“Hey smegmas!” she’d yell to us from the swingset
“you’d better come give me a push
or I’ll vomit in your lunch bags!”
So we’d go over to her
because we never got used to the taste of her digested breakfast
on our ham and cheese sandwiches.

Once during science class she took my fecund bean sprout
which I had carefully cultured with aerated earth in a Dixie cup
and left the room with it, only to return a few minutes later
with a perfectly pinched-off turd resting atop the soil.
But damn, if I didn’t have the second-largest harvest in class.

In gym she would aim the kickball right at Tommy’s new braces
and broke Corey’s front teeth during a game of tag.
In English her colloquy with me consisted primarily
of cleverly crafted insinuations that my balls hadn’t yet dropped
and would instead collapse in on themselves to form a vagina.
Decades later I finally comprehended what she’d said.

Her laughter was a demon’s backwash
burning our throats when we were thirstiest
and turning our guts into distilled anticipation.
Our breaths caught until the next encounter.
Putty in her hands
unable
and unwilling
to resist

--

The Anna in this piece is not the Anna McCambridge of Visual Fringe fame, one of our favoritest and frequentest customers. Not literally, anyway. But she did order this one, and I can definitely see the inspiration. See, Anna's motivations are different from most of the people who come to the booth: she likes to fuck with us. She likes to give us words like "obloquy" and "fecund" and "colloquy" and laugh when we sort through our beer-addled brains for the definitions. (This one was one of about half of the Anna gauntlets that we got all the words right. As we'll see in later posts, that wasn't always the case.)

Curiously, though, Anna's pretty loosey-goosey about titles. This one came from the greeting Paul gave her when she came strolling up with that shit-eating grin of hers.

Where Do Puppets Go When They Die

There are clouds
softer than the dance floors of our angels.
There are songs
too wide for our mouths
and they’re singing them,
swaying,
googly blackberry eyes bouncing along
with a beat that turned the world
back when we watched it spin
from the cradle.

There are no sinners here
in this exclusive club of sinners
and serendipitous
may be too many grades above their conversation
but supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
is the universal response to howdy-do.
The hugs are sparks of static electricity
and they dance
footloose and invisible
along the aisles of the theatre
as the orchestra plays:
menomenah
and they sing:
do doo de doo doo
and teach us all to count the small numbers again.

Somewhere there are no strings
and they look down
to see all of us
reaching up for them
never quite making it.

---

Sometimes you get a title so ripe it just paralyzes you. I remember Paul got into the same situation a couple times: A poem with words or a title good enough to write itself, so you end up sitting around for ten of your twenty minutes, chewing your pen while you wait for it to write itself.

So yeah, the ending was supposed to be this sort of very clear image with puppets floating free from outstretched hands, and - ah, shit, here comes the lady who ordered this thing, better wrap it up. Ouch. So close!

Waiting

It has been scientifically proven
in carnivals worldwide
that one cannot eat a funnel cake
and be sexy
but here she was, proof positive
an anomaly in red.

Every maxim is a theory
just waiting for time to disprove it,
he thought,
and he certainly did his share
of waiting: clock-watching
for that rare bird of quitting time
at work, loping out to the mailbox
to mark another day
until the paycheck came,
and here,
standing at the beer tent
between a laughing couple
at least two beers ahead
and her.

The bawdy jokes over his shoulder
did nothing for the torture
and still, he couldn’t help
inflicting a little extra
in the long silence between them
in the wait to pay for his courage
and calculate his chances
which as usual
were scientifically
astronomical.

---

BORRRing. That's my hindsight, anyway. It especially stings that I wrote this one for local poetry diva and Sunscribbles founder Darlyn Finch. I believe her custom words were "funnel cake," "beer," and "torture," all fantastic ingredients. All I think is that I must have been really tired not to come up with something bawdier.

Come Guzzling Thunder Cunt

He came upon the challenge with his bat
(man-sized and as long and as thick as a sock)
prepared to swing into what would from that
point on create a legend of his cock:
It was called Come Guzzling Thunder Cunt,
as it thundered with the intensity
of a hundred diesel trucks. Also, the front
of it dropped no dribble, this monstrosity.
It was a vacuum. Not the kind you buy
but the kind created when high mass stars
create more gravity than their body
can support and they implode, their scars
above us, hovering with zero shape:
That’s how hard it sucked and made raisins from his grapes.

--

OK, I've got a confession to make. Most of the time, your Poetry Vending Machinists are cheating. Sure, there might be some conscious rhythm to your little improv poem. Perhaps even some legit and uncheesy rhyming. But if you get specific with form, most of us are going to break out in a cold sweat.

Which is why I am raising my glass to Jesse Jay Ross right now. This was written by him on the first day of the Fringe, for a handful of giggly drama club nerd-lookin' kids who not only gave us this title, but challenged us to do it as a friggin' SONNET.

Jesse, you are way too good for the Vending Machine, and I hope that I am always able to fool you into participating.