Feb
20
Silent Film Siren
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”This heart is useless. I must have another.”
– Bride Of Frankenstein
SUBJECT: falls to the floor
comes to the door, useless.
PETITIONER: I, pitiless,
listen to the
drunken stupor, clunk of
wood on wood as the head hits
in slow motion.
No potion or remedy for either of us now.
“I like napping in transit,” I hear.
“What I ought to do just sits there, waiting.”
“I like summer, does it like me?”
“So much cursory wind with things on its mind.”
“‘No time to worry about it now,’” the wind and she say.
In short I tell her I need many
dividers of the days that come near
to eavesdrop on my thoughts in pots
bubbling, they stir, these dividers.
“Whirring wind over gliders and chases?
Yes, I like these, too! And greened copper things
for the yard, or my window… I like things from
the thirties, you know,”
she says from her Pez
jaw, popping out inane morsels as if
I’ve not tasted the sugared parcels all a
thousand, million times.
Helping her there to her
favorite chair, she straightens
a slipper while walking
talking with a sliver of kipper
on her chin: a breakfast habit she
affected long before to make herself more
Continental (but there’s Folgers-stained Boodles in
her coffee cup, perhaps making her more
urbane than she’d originally intended.)
“And if it were but a fuzzy cat
schlepping around my ankles, by golly,
I’d give it the same treatment all those
men and years gave me!”
“You can’t fasten a garter belt and not
know about it – how awful they looked
hung over the bathroom line.”
I listen
and christen
my 12th look at the clock.
It’ll be over soon, this siren song,
long before I start to
ramble and dawdle and
drink too much
myself.