I'm still on track for NaPoWriMo2023 - and Day 7's prompt is a composite challenge. Twenty prompts to work into a single poem. Yikes. I started the challenge saying it would force me to work quickly and in short form - then they throw this at me. I've no idea if I can make it "short" at some point - certainly not today - so with something too long to fit on Twitter, too long even for my own poems & pics page, I'm dropping it here.
Little Lies
In the soul-less desert
I am making fried onion ice cream
that smells of that evening at the fair
when toffee apples were as sweet as
your skin, and the Waltzer span the
world into frozen strips of light, and
rifle-cracks rebounded off metal ducks
and won the softness of a giant panda.
I remember candy-pink music curling
between the rides, and laughter.
I remember Margaret Mills (no relation)
and the boy from Santa Ana, and
you, your skin smelling of cigarettes
and vodka.
Now robins are nesting in the holly tree
beyond the fence, shacked-up for a
single season, until he gets bored and
leaves, because he will get the blame
anyway, while she wishes the weans
were better bred: haud yer wheest
woman…or sing your sweetest
lament of memories, the dispersing
woodsmoke of what might have been.
I remember the fair and all its lights
and silver sounds, echoing, and the boy
from Santa Ana, tall and dark as the
helter-skelter, without a mat.
So, I slink in between the dark green,
where the robins hide from cats,
and sing sweet red berries, “Love-you-lots
Lizzie”, scratched and bleeding.
The vicious fair returns to its old ground,
and settles us all to waiting for the battle
to commence, c’est magnifique mais ce
n’est pas la guerre.
Ni l’amour.
C’est ma terre.
While the robin whispers in my ear that
things are different now.
