Dusty Poem

This is a poem I found in the back of one of my journals that I remember being utterly consumed by when I was writing it. It was like I couldn't stop. I wrote probably half of it at an open mic and read it right then. Enjoy, I guess:

Oddities of Boulevard

M.L. London

Men and women surging against my path,

I put on a raincoat, feeling excited.

One child twirls a straw that makes howling noises;

it clips my sleeve and sends me into a frenzy.

The men and women surge, I rebuttal with echoes of my school teachers:

wherewithal of yellow desk chairs.

Before it gets loud – the surging –

my pockets open to the memory of my summer at sea.

I feel sand in the corners, and my lips

are a brilliant, muted purple.

God save the queen, a woman says, surging.

She picks up her toaster oven and moves away.

I slip back into the wooden hull of a boat;

my mother is statuesque against the brig.

The boat is our boat, but my father hasn’t signed for it.

Crew members scuttle the boat, and we are left out of the mad-dash.

Men and women surge – my path inhales

and exhales the beating of rubber shoe soles.

My mom carries me out of the water.

She sees an abandoned light house erected on boulders near a river’s mouth.

I weigh more than she does, so the sand compacts and breaks

and dissolves into stars along the sea’s rim.

Two gentlemen with accordions trot past me, surge in their step,

making it hot inside my raincoat.

I tried to smile, but their cigars caught me by surprise.

Somewhere I remembered I smoked.

Indian chiefs masqueraded their totem pole

as a lighthouse: so my mother was mistaken.

They welcomed us all the same –

but we don’t smoke (I know my dad does).

The street sweepers are too busy this time of year

to do anything about the melted popcorn on the side of the gutter.

It looks as if the crowd will clear

and men and women surge on my rocks.

My father always told me to drive standing up,

but I was never a fan of attention.

The joke was on him, I think, and before he could tear up,

gasoline became like the red chairs we had on our boat.

Perhaps the taxidermist could make a new one;

afterall, the joke never sank this close to the Indians.

I saw a taxi over the heads of the men and women surging.

I would have to take off my raincoat if they’d let me pay the fair.

The shore was light like yellow,

but my mother was far from my cradle.

There were bank tellers attached to sycamore trees

that told my gypsy-mother our dream was closer than the Indian smoke signals.

Men and women surge against my path with sticks and dowel rods,

and I can’t see through the sewer steam.

Our bodies wafted through pools of black absinthe,

numbing my middle-school days with pink elixir.

My mother and gypsy-mother wandered ahead

holding a Christ-torch with enflamed flame engulfed Black Christians.

Newspaper delivery boys and girls in pink gingham berets

trickled through the surging men and women, all on bicycles.

The red bell hop helped open the doors to a Gothic abbey

for my new sister; I held her thigh.

The thought of blood-elephants portrayed their breasts

to a jury of prostitutes, and I only looked on.

Any mention of my sister being pregnant made my mother sick,

but my gypsy-mother could only sit.

Men and women sure around my raincoat,

the buttons and lapels resemble the path.

Cry-baby-Daves and Dakes flourished for

our pocket money. My father signed for the boat.

And six gifted merchants traded purple belts

for a night’s stay in our adjoining satchel.

Red ribbons tightened in the hair of a new wave

of men and women surging against my path.

Tee-pees and horse carriages brought home my father;

my mothers and sister left me in a pine needle thicket.

They sat and chased a dragon on the clapboard ceiling

to the tune of an 18^th century organ melody.

Gothic barriers to grotesque, jaundice serf

bombarded the doors of the building – windows depicted the flesh-maelstrom.

Lauren Bean and Parsley stew, split pea soul

drenched the petticoats of the men and women surging against my path.

Three sheets to the wind, my father remembered then ink pen;

the boat was never ours, and he complained about his knee.