Free Ride
Yoda-like—the eyes, the smile, even the
ears that flume from under a pinstriped engineer’s cap—the tiny man-boy careens
around Sweet Pea’s Espresso, serene and squat and centered in a chair as solid
as a forklift. With every turn, every flick of his right-hand joystick, he
threatens a chair leg, a top-heavy double latte, a stockinged shin, a disgusted
look. His parents, Barbie and Ken, sit
nursing cappuccinos, bribing his little sister with a bagel and pink-flavoured
cream cheese. Already a giant to her older brother, she will one day be as
precious as her mommy. “How about riding in…now, who is this…?” Ken baits the
boy across the tabletops and financial sections, pointing to Tommy the Tank
Engine installed for toddlers on the tile floor of the old smoking section. The
boy pulls up sharp, whirls around. “Yes, I wanna ride him, Daddy!” He circles
back, dodging the girl bussing the two- and four-tops, who backs away in a
clatter of cups and saucers piled high in her plastic bin. He’s a mechanical
pigeon, homing in on his hero but honking like Daffy on helium. “Put in the
money, Daddy. Lemme ride!” Lifted from its roost by armpits no deeper than
divots, his body, seemingly half dead, dangles springy, naked legs like sprung
sausage curls that slide easily into Tommy’s pilot house. The fit is perfect
and, at the clink of a token, the bullish ride, euphoric. The ancient face
savours every swirl, every hydraulic spasm. He’s Oscar Peterson mumbling at the
piano, Bird Parker juking on sax. The convulsive legs never stop jazzing. Meanwhile,
Barbie wet-thumbs the corners of their daughter’s sticky mouth, the blond
wispies at her temples, cooing to the perfect girl straining to witness her big
brother’s totemic ecstasy.
—first
published in Avatar Review
A – maze – d
Dive in anywhere. Go ’round and ’round on
pearl or coral, cross on cobalt, stall against the black mass, the black slabs
that finger under rivers of rose. Your hazel eyes will search unmirrored the
rings like years, the vibrato’d, banded angles. Your sparrow childhood will
scan for the far mouth of corn stalks, inflict patient waiting before
screaming. Scrawls in clay will cue the silliness of ancient glyphs. Saplings
will bend and sing to the wind. Darkened leaves will unhem. Dawn’s paradise
will shatter, the constellations of fine lines torn apart for a merciless
afterward waving like harsh flags. But then a familiar vermillion will send
autumn’s frost dissolving, the diurnal hours zigzag-falling like freewheeling
feathers, until tonight ages into its sedate pitch, those baffling coils
slacken into cool-jazz Taps, and you view the horizon: slimmed, glimmered,
wobbling.
—first published in Sheila-Na-Gig
Dream at Wits’ End
Under branches defying
gravity the path meandered toward the nursery. From an uncertain height all
eyes seemed upon us. The silence of blossoms made it at first feel right.
Leaf-fall, bleeding from selected trees, the greenhouse at its designated
distance, argued for the set-up as an outgrowth of nature, the temperature not
as a kind of poison. In fact, the caretakers were in league with economies of
fear. They would take mallets to our knees. These thorns were gods and we
travellers, worshippers, torsos caught eternally in coarse and caustic brambles.
What use to mouth inane prayers or stride like animals? What use to side-step
the torn stubble like creatures of the night? We’d need streamers of fire to
excavate a trench toward home. We’d need to swivel our shoulders, plunge
through the forest without helmets, pause before the altar whose namesake was
our mother, whose stanchions were of heartwood, whose scene allowed no
repeating. Our best intentions undercut before daylight, our balance challenged
by the frequency of foxholes, our voices reduced to the capacity of swine, our
vision limited like a gas-lit lamp, we ping-ponged till pleading Uncle.
—first
published in Typishly
Wedged,
Continued
Some days I even dare face whether the (un)(re)stored
fortress of language that bears up my own subtle house of doubts is surfacing
or sinking and whether my sentience is like a band of seekers crossing then
walking its idyllic beach, drawn by the free music of wind and surf, or like
exiles-like-mice left to roast in its thick wilderness of land-locked dunes,
the sky scraping and thriving overhead, bordering on ash no matter dawn or
attitudinal dusk, no matter the cringe of sun hung low, its scrimmed rise or
fall. Other times, the hours like shifting sands penetrating or escaping a
weathered perimeter flood with the cowed wonder of what might lie beyond: dark
cliffs, remnants eaten away from a tilted world, mythic stones stood and held
on edge, a remote ocean boiling away its underwater flora and fauna. Or just
maybe mind’s way one day will move easily like wheels over a hard but ebbing
frost, eventually barreling down the clean slopes with the look and smell of
lucidity borne of speed—but all caught still in the taut ebullience of sapient insufficiency.
—first published in Surreal Expulsion (The Poetry Box, 2019)
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