poem: "THE MADWOMAN'S KISS"
Posted: November 4th, 2005, 5:56 pm
(performance notes: Where I play music in the open, an old acquaintance lurks. The people who haunt downtown -- many homeless, some mentally unbalanced, including her-- circulate freely)
THE MADWOMAN’S KISS
“Look for me under your boot-soles.”
–Walt Whitman
Like mint-collared bourgeois cremes,
many townsmen put it at a premium,
like touching the French bellringer’s hump,
his incensed cry
rinsing glory from plain clouds.
Crazy Ellie got behind me
and pecked me on the cheek--
trigger-fingered hands aimed lower.
She stood in
the Farmer’s Market and danced
a slow tar-strip waltz.
Once you’ve had her
they say
she never leaves you
you are locked in her heart
or under the diamond tread of her
tambourine boot-soles.
So it was a grace to be nibbled by
her mouth, a red cave of air
fresh from the bite of
ocean rhubarb.
For just a moment
I was happy.
10/05
THE MADWOMAN’S KISS
“Look for me under your boot-soles.”
–Walt Whitman
Like mint-collared bourgeois cremes,
many townsmen put it at a premium,
like touching the French bellringer’s hump,
his incensed cry
rinsing glory from plain clouds.
Crazy Ellie got behind me
and pecked me on the cheek--
trigger-fingered hands aimed lower.
She stood in
the Farmer’s Market and danced
a slow tar-strip waltz.
Once you’ve had her
they say
she never leaves you
you are locked in her heart
or under the diamond tread of her
tambourine boot-soles.
So it was a grace to be nibbled by
her mouth, a red cave of air
fresh from the bite of
ocean rhubarb.
For just a moment
I was happy.
10/05