I Am Professedly a Sucker for Barrel Staves - 2011
in which it is Blue's first year of NaPo and most of the poems are weirdly humorous
Spoiler
Poem Numero Uno:
We could fly away
on happy thoughts and fairy dust
to our childhood:
So much to do and so much time we'd have for it.
It was a sleepover of many firsts:
Ericka Marshall introduced me to Harry Potter and Faygo pop;
we watched "Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island"
and stayed awake all night, deliciously terrified
as we watched the girl from across the street sleep--
she was a sleepwalker, and we thought
she would sleepwalk through the house with a knife
and kill us all.
In the spring we spent three days
in a tent in our backyard until
a thunderstorm chased us back indoors;
and in the summer we ran bare-footed over hot sand,
unashamed of our bodies, our baby fat, ourselves,
and splashed shrieking into Lake Huron.
They told us, You can be anything you want to be.
Today,
I want to be an astronaut.
But the world is sadly short on fairies
(and happiness too, I think sometimes),
and we are chained to this adulthood,
where freight trucks rumble through distant streets
and bills clamor to be paid,
their raucous noise drowning out the TV on which
we watch the world crumble.
Today,
I am me.
It's the best we can hope for here:
To know ourselves.
We could fly away
on happy thoughts and fairy dust
to our childhood:
So much to do and so much time we'd have for it.
It was a sleepover of many firsts:
Ericka Marshall introduced me to Harry Potter and Faygo pop;
we watched "Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island"
and stayed awake all night, deliciously terrified
as we watched the girl from across the street sleep--
she was a sleepwalker, and we thought
she would sleepwalk through the house with a knife
and kill us all.
In the spring we spent three days
in a tent in our backyard until
a thunderstorm chased us back indoors;
and in the summer we ran bare-footed over hot sand,
unashamed of our bodies, our baby fat, ourselves,
and splashed shrieking into Lake Huron.
They told us, You can be anything you want to be.
Today,
I want to be an astronaut.
But the world is sadly short on fairies
(and happiness too, I think sometimes),
and we are chained to this adulthood,
where freight trucks rumble through distant streets
and bills clamor to be paid,
their raucous noise drowning out the TV on which
we watch the world crumble.
Today,
I am me.
It's the best we can hope for here:
To know ourselves.
Spoiler
If I could fly like the mockingbird I would
fly away singing in a mocker's voice and
mocking all the sorry earth-bound
non-birds, people wearing worries on
their brows and woven into their wrinkled clothes.
I would soar like the hawk, hocking
worries until they slid from my shoulders
in the slip-stream and fell away, too heavy
for flying. I would not be a bird of sadness;
I would make no nests in people's hair.
I would fly free.
I would live like the phoenix, born not from an
egg but from ashes. I would be born in
ashes and rise from ashes, borne on
a warm wind of fire, and in the end
I would be the fire, and I would die in ashes
and rise again.
I would be a bird of freedom.
fly away singing in a mocker's voice and
mocking all the sorry earth-bound
non-birds, people wearing worries on
their brows and woven into their wrinkled clothes.
I would soar like the hawk, hocking
worries until they slid from my shoulders
in the slip-stream and fell away, too heavy
for flying. I would not be a bird of sadness;
I would make no nests in people's hair.
I would fly free.
I would live like the phoenix, born not from an
egg but from ashes. I would be born in
ashes and rise from ashes, borne on
a warm wind of fire, and in the end
I would be the fire, and I would die in ashes
and rise again.
I would be a bird of freedom.
