Icky

This Is A Gun

This is a gun

If no one had ever invented it

I would not know

That one

Gun

Was waiting for my outstretched hand

Just within reach

During those quiet moments

Appearing as a sleek steel solution

To a myriad of problems

An endless catalogue of grieves

Just a thought away

And the bullets

That go in it

So cheap and so plentiful

And life so expendable

That the thought comes

Most every day

This is a gun

A tool I can use

And my God-given right

Right?

Mine to bear and employ

Stead of sufferin’ the fools

And the madmen

And walking away

I can turn

Barrels blazing

So the sun glints off my teeth

And calmly

Quite rationally

Blow them away

With my tool

With my gun

Just a brief thought away

In the trunk of my car

Or in my nightstand

Bought off that one guy

Behind the taco stand

Who beckoned to me

With a crooked finger and said

“This is a gun.”

And it gleamed in the darkness

And it followed me home

Like a dirty thought

Still there and still lurid

In the cold light of day

Wrapped in an oily cloth

Stuffed in the back of a drawer

Under old socks and scrapbooks

That tell of decay

And love lost

And wars fought

And nothing’s been saved

But some money

In a jelly jar by the sink

With a label reading

“This is a gun.”

And every time

It hurt some

Or it hurt a little more

In went some quarters

And a couple of ones

To buy a gun

And when the rage

Filled my rooms

And burst open the doors

Fistfuls of money

Were forced in my jar

And the label was altered

“The Best Gun”

“The Worst Bullets”

“A Big Scary Thing”

Make them all pay

Like I pay

In cold sweat and blood

That I’ll turn into bullets

For my gun

This is a gun

And it’s mine

Not yours

You can get one

Go buy one

But I’ll kill you first

This is a gun

Party Girl Obituary

The party girl is dead and buried

With a “Hallelujah” and a couple of “Bout time”s

But her bones

Keep poking up

Through the grave

Calcium reminders of

What she had been

Splintered and rotting

From cocaine and gin

Intruding themselves

Into the bright fresh day

So fractured and crazed

They blow away to dust

Like those feelings of lust

Seen red-eyed in the morning

Through the holes

In the skull

Of the dead and buried

Party girl

Whose rib cage

Floats upward through the dust

To show the empty case

That held her heart

Dead and buried before her

In the grave next door

Capital

I feel CHAOTIC

You look POSSESSIVE

Let me buy you a drink

The gin will start us talking

And we’ll see if this can WORK

Can it bring home the BACON

Fry it up in a pan

Can it make you a MAN

Can it make an HONEST WOMAN

Outta me

Let’s think

And have another drink

On me

Cuz I feel less HOPELESS

And you look less HEARTLESS

Than you ever have before

Do you snore

Slip ice picks in BAD GIRLS

When you’re bored

With the WHINING

And the SIGHING

Tell me more

About yourself

And have

Another drink

As we sink

In a morass of love

Rough Ideas for Idiot's Guide To World Peace

[The following are just some ideas I was kicking around during the Bush administration. Pretty simplistic and fairly naive but still has some merit.]

Essay-IdiotsGuideWorldPeace

I’ve been thinking about writing a book called The Idiot’s Guide to World Peace. One basic premise is the “punch in the face” theory. If I walk up to someone and punch him or her in the face then his or her first instinct is to return the favor. America in terms of the CIA and military (as an arm of the government) goes around punching a lot of people in the face. This makes it more likely (not less as the Bush administration purports) that we will get punched. Here is the big idea- Stop punching people in the face! Stay home, staunch our bloody nose, get it reset, and start spreading the word.

Like “Hey, all you South Americans! What say we stop sending our spooks down there to show you how to be experts in the deadly art of face-punching and you stop punching each other in the face? Especially stop punching the poor ones who are too weak from lack of food to recover from the blows.”

We could go to Africa and stand between the punchers and the punches (seeing as we are big and strong) and repeatedly say “Hey! Cut that out!” This may seem simplistic but look at it this way. When the puncher keeps punching but not getting the expected result, he’s going to have to say “What the hell! This ain’t working. I’m gonna ask this bastard what’s up.” And, voila`, diplomatic talks have begun.

Now on to Iraq. Like it or not, we started that brawl. Those Iraqis had nothing to do with the deadly and most devastating punch in the face our nation has ever received. What the Iraqis did have is a very turbulent unfriendly regime that threatened America’s –shh!-oil interests. But, believe it or not, the answer to our problems was not to go punch those people in the face. Now, that whole nation is a continuous free-for-all of face punching and we are in more danger than we ever were!

Here is an alternative. We go to people and say “Hey, buddy, what’s wrong? What is really going on here?” Sometimes, the reaction will be, diplomatically speaking, a punch in the face followed by some instructions to mind our own business. We can react by saying “That is totally uncool and uncalled for but you know where to find us when you want to talk”. Then, we return home and ignore them until they are ready to stop being such jerks. This is, essentially, what we call “sanctions” or “I’m not sharing anything with you until you learn to play nice!”.

Yet, other times, when we employ this alternative approach with no threat of face punching in the offing, we may receive an honest reply such as “We’ve tried this and this and this but things are still really screwed up! Any ideas?”  Here, we can begin with the “stop punching concept” and move forward from there.

            I know all this seems very silly but it is deadly serious. Let’s take a look at all the things that fit into the broad category of face punching. The biggest and most obvious is out right war. When one nation or an alliance of nations occupies the territory of another nation, slaughtering so-called combatants and civilians indiscriminately, this engenders a level of violence that cannot be ignored and that is always met with more violence. It does not matter what cause or justification is assigned to the initial act of violence, the end result is always great suffering and death. Another form is civil war which can be linked to any number of causes. As we see in some parts of the world, this can lead to the virtual annihilation of whole cultures. Not just by death but through rape, degradation, and shattering of the homeland. Also, there is terrorism. We are currently in the grips of terror. When all feel that they are under constant threat of attack, the overall level of violence continues to escalate. We lash out indiscriminately, hoping to hit a target we cannot see and by this we further degrade any hope of security.  A particularly vile form of face punching is torture. There are individuals all over the world who have been stripped of their human rights and are being subjected to unthinkable tortures in the name of national security. When anyone, anywhere can be treated with no human dignity then not a single man, woman, or child is secure.

These are what I consider to be the largest forms of face punching. Yet, as long as we live in such a climate of violence, we will become further anesthetized to the smaller forms that surround us every day: The school yard beatings, domestic abuse, molestation, rape, theft, and murder. We watch all these things on TV in one form or another and have begun to accept them as an unavoidable part of life. We cease to be shocked and horrified and become resigned. We must now learn, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said “Violence begets violence.”



Fragmentary Shards of Past



Please excuse my total lack of posts as of late! I am trying to edit a cabinet full of poetry as I have realized it does me no good languishing on the shelf. Here are a few of the poem fragments I have run across to tide us over until I start writing new poems and essays again. -Megan the Wonder Bunny

Fragment- No Name

I know a man who has no nose

He likes to sense things with his toes

And although he thinks that no one knows

His prehensile tail still grows and grows

In point of fact, it ate his nose

Fragment-Clarice

What can I say about Clarice

She never let us down

She never left a bad taste in your mouth

She was a real lady

Clarice could make a man

Cry out for his mama

And never smear her lipstick

Fragment-BrainTune

My brain is tuned to a frequency other than mathematical

But the light from a distant sun still touches my face

Though I can’t measure how far

It has travelled

To reach me

The knowledge and the light

Are not dependent on each other

Fragment- NiceMice

Beer on ice

Is nice

For mice

In the pitter patter of an unlit kitchen

Leave them wine

And cheese

And rice

You needn’t tell them twice

Those mice

Fragment-OneEye

Closing one eye

I lose half the world

Is it my good eye

Or my bad eye

I’ve closed

Which half of the world

Am I seeing

Which half has disappeared

What have I lost

Denied

Pushed aside

Fragment-Teeth

I like to obsess over things

How bout you

I like to gnaw

Small, petty things

With my sharp, keen teeth

Til my lips bleed

And my tongue is lacerated

Don’t you

Fragment-Union

My soul went to a wedding

And caught the bouquet

Returned with these flowers

And asked to marry my mind

With my heart’s blessing

The union was approved

What a happy day

What a lucky bride

To walk through the world

United mind to soul

Stoopid Vampires

I think the time has come for a story about dumb vampires. I am unsure about when the vampire myth made the transition from the minds of men to literature but since the early 1800s we have been saddled with the cultured, charismatic vampire. What a pain in the neck! I am sick to death of the fascination with and romanticizing of the vampire. I think the legend of the vampire is ripe for a story of a tremendously stupid bloodsucker.

It shouldn’t be that difficult to imagine. Consider the common view of how someone becomes a vampire. After being bitten on the neck and drained of most but not all of one’s vital fluids, a person finds him or herself with an allergic-type reaction to sunlight and a bad case of dehydration. Sounds like a virus to me. I don’t know about you but a good dose of the flu makes me all wooly-headed and thick. I’m much more likely to curl up on the couch and watch cartoons than break into a person’s bedroom and start spouting Proust when I have a bad cold. It really isn’t much of a stretch to imagine vampirism making you all kinds of stupid. I think it is much more likely that vampires wear footie pajamas while clutching a box of Puffs than velvet tuxedos and capes. They would probably stalk you in the cold and flu aisle of the local drugstore rather than an exclusive gallery opening. It’s hard to be mesmerizing when you have crusties in the corners of your eyes and a runny nose. Vampires could prey on your sympathy for how lousy they fell rather than draw you in with their exotic sexuality. But, even that implies a certain level of cleverness for vampires that I am totally over.

            I want a really, really stupid vampire. Seriously, irredeemably dumb. I want a vampire who accidently eats garlic bread and drinks holy water. A vampire who plans a vacation in equatorial Brazil and forgets the sunscreen. Maybe even a story about a vampire who faints at the sight of blood. A gang of vampires who plan to rob a blood bank but end up cleaning out a sperm bank instead. Dummies.

            All I know is that I’ve had enough of vampires who, in spite of being parasitical, undead monsters, are still cooler, classier, and sexier than the humans they hunt. Someone please step up and write a story about the vampire equivalent of Homer Simpson and end the reign of the trendy vampire forever. Thank you.



Science and Me

I like to consider myself an intelligent woman. I believe that I am well-educated and have a reasonable ability to comprehend difficult concepts. I act as if I understand the various scientific reasons the world works as it does. The truth is that when I look on these myriad processes I truly see one thing. Magic. That is the actual depth of my understanding. Nuclear reactors. Magic. Electricity. Magic. Digestion. Magic. I am no more aware of how these things work that I am of next week’s lottery numbers; I know that they will contain digits which are a combination of 0-9.

A good example of my belief in magic can be characterized by my relationship with electricity. I sit here with my headphones on; listening to music while I write this with no clear idea of what makes this possible. I can speak with great confidence about power plants and generators but, it’s all a front. I do not know what actually happens when I plug my little MP3 player into my computer to “charge” its battery. I take it on faith that after a given period of time the little meter shaped liked a battery will be full and that when I flip the “on” switch it will play music. Magic. And don’t even get me started on how sound can be digitized, recorded, etc. As far as I’m concerned, my MP3 player is a magic box that has forty-eight bands and a symphony orchestra shrunk down to microscopic size contained within it. Or do I mean nanoscopic? I am sure that at some point in my life I was presented with a cogent explanation of how electricity works – probably while watching School House Rock. Nevertheless, all the details about electrons and conductors have been smelted down by my furnace of a brain into one big lump of magic.

            If I were to try and explain to a child how the body turns food into energy and more person parts, the results would be laughable at best. I would probably start strong enough by describing how stomach acids break down the food we eat but I cannot in anyway explain how the body then goes about extracting anything from the resulting soup – let alone transferring it to my cells and toe nails. To me, the only way that a slice of veggie deluxe pizza becomes brand new cells for my friend, Liver, is unmitigated magic. I know about as much about the process as I know about how that damn rabbit ended up in Mystical Marvin’s top hat.

            And now, on to the Magical World of Computers! I remember my class in junior high where it took the full hour to type commands into the system to make an outline of a sailboat that I could have drawn in twenty seconds with a crayon. But, in a way, that made sense to me. I had to tell the system where to place each individual pixel on the screen to form the pathetic sailboat. I could assume that all the operating systems we use daily that I find so convenient are a result of someone writing lots and lots of sailboat type commands. My mind boggles at the very idea. What makes it possible for me to use a program to draw my same sailboat via pointing and clicking is, clearly, magic. We can now store vast amounts of information on microchips that look like the base materials for really exciting, avant-garde art jewelry. It’s not binary, my friends. It’s magic. The internet? Wi-Fi? Cloud drives? Magic flowing through wires and flying through the air. I have friends who could sit down with me and patiently explain every detail of how our new information age functions in ways both educational and entertaining. But, after the magic show was over I would still be wondering how he crammed all those doves up his sleeve.

            I have to reach a place where I accept and embrace how I really see the world. The magical sun rises every morning and sends down its magical rays to warm the earth and magically feed the plants. Plants which are magically turned into parts of animals which we magically turn into parts of humans (unless you’re a vegetarian which means you skip the magic animal step). The humans then perform tremendous feats of magic as they magically stick to the surface of the earth. I, magically, give up.



Polyanna Rescinded

Dragon Baby

Penitentiary blues

I feel a cage coming on

No point in runnin’

The chain’s already welded tight around my ankle

I put it there

Forged the links

Out of grudge metal and angry fire

Made the decision

To be chained

To be caged

To be an animal

To be a dragon with opposable thumbs

Raining down destruction

On my own suburban landscape

Of peaceful homes and happy families

Lock me up

Before I make victims

Of my own dreams

I made the cage

I made the dragon

I lost the key

I acted out my fears

Lived like they were true

Until they became true

More real than the blue skies above my head

More real than the green earth beneath my feet

I want my freedom

But I just can’t

Let

Go

Symphony

Walking down the street

Looking for cigarette butts half-smoked

Hoping no one will notice when I pick them up

All I see is leaves and feet

Cracks in the sidewalk

A symphony of fear plays in my head

When will I die

And why am I not dead

Every day I wake up

Breathing

Wearing skin

Like I belong here

Should be on this planet

In the form of a girl

With no money

No cigarettes

No hope

But to find that half-smoked butt

To breathe in its smoke like shame

To match the symphony of shame

That plays in my head

That sounds like theft and lies and empty sex

That sounds like bagpipes at a funeral

For a lonesome little girl

Who lived her life in a bottle

Praying for half-smoked cigarettes and death



Stars and Dirt

Lull

We never dreamed to make our own constellations

To write our own names across the sky

We should have

We dreamed of being rock stars

We dreamed of being rich

We dreamed of dingy things

That tarnished to the touch

We dreamed of a better life

We dreamed of a better day

Then slept through its creation

To dream of movie stars

Who swept us off our feet

And took us away from it all

We dreamed of power

We dreamed of dominion

We dreamed like sheep

We never dared to dream

Of creating a world

With our own two hands

We never dared to dream

Of brightening the sky

With our own fierce light

We never dared to dream

Of peace

Then awoke to unfold it in our lives

We never dreamed we were real boys and girls

We never dreamed the stars flowed in out veins

We never dreamed we could

We should

Now dream

Short Harvest

Grow me a rose before it’s too late

My bloom is already fading

Petals drifting down

With the softest slither of sound

Create a bouquet

That spells out my name in color

That means what I mean

That shows my beauty

Which is fading

Bleaching like winter grass

Grow me a garden

To feed my soul

Through the long hungry years ahead

Plant an orchard

Till the earth

To keep me fertile

To stop me from withering

And going to seed

Dissolving into the soil

Unnoted

Unmarked

Like a forgotten grave

In the countryside

Thanks Luna

The moon told me I was beautiful

And I was so flattered

To look on me

With that milky white skin

And see beauty

So I reflected it back

And waxed more beautiful

As the night wore on

The moon told me I was flawless

Still whole and complete

On the darkest night

And I was filled

To overflowing

And shone with such radiance

That I woke the birds

The moon told me I was wanted

By ever star that filled the sky

And the light that touched my skin

Was a far traveling gift of love

Sent centuries before my birth

To reach me just in time

The moon told me I was loved

From the moment I first drew breath

And resting in its gentle light

I just knew

It was true