by Martha Zweig
Eviction Ghazal
What God gated the neighborhood-primeval Fools’ Paradise?
What Author‘s plot stirs absent good and evil? Fool’s paradise!
Exposure: west, north, east; shade over chilly channel currents:
no counterfeit cloud, bellied-out fair for ill, fools paradise.
All night long the sun schemes behind earth, counting out your fortune.
Morning’s doubletake scrapes your bowl naught-to-nil! --fool’s paradise.
An entire royal family litters the stage in carnage.
Simpleton the sage hops up to a throne still fool’s paradise.
Socialism of labor, arts & sciences: pretty good.
Once we engineer organisms to foil fools, paradise!
One by one polar bears ride skimpy ice into no future,
fools’ hell to follow them in due course, as will fools’ paradise.
Would-be blessed martyrs, don’t do what’s right for a wrong reason!
Seventy-two righteous virgins overfill fools’ paradise.
Every time & wherever I turned, no sign stood forbidding.
‘No trespass’ never entered my mind until fools’ paradise.
Green Zones’ topiary snips: have we got our fill of war yet?
Sin’s snake flickering scintillas of peril fools paradise.
God frowns. Romance the real & wrangling world & he can go hang!
Dance on your own pinhead: let him bedevil fools’ paradise.
Seek me where one may greet another all speaking lamb language,
each lion cuddling its woolly imbecile: fools’ paradise.
Lock, stock, barrel & mewlings: I remember. Begone! Welcome!
Near-miss Martha cheers you into your April Fool’s paradise.
Miscreant
Shame about the mistaken-identity theft--
but, ask anyone, plenty of even more
meticulously titled property starts out
theft too & repeatedly. And who
lit that shredded waste
papers’ box afire? Who did they think they are?
Who else
was it that whoever-it-was
half-glimpsed & ratted-out as me supposedly?
S/he, I, you, no one recalls,
especially none of these flimsy orange flaming
nobodies themselves.
Sackcloth-&-ashen, now, I keep to myself.
Abnegation personified, although
on occasion I do peer up as if seeking my own
worldly business formerly fingering
back at & down to me through my tiny assigned
time slot
& I ask myself why, of all others, I?
When disciplinarians used to give me the what-for
I cried the only tears I remember,
then got to meddling in things that were not one
of them ever the same
again & again.
Onset
Ruffle-&-drawstrung girlhood: I used to manage
blindly enough to tell the dark by touch.
Dark & I told each other everything.
Its features told me: as soon as the dark
or I discerned a twixt or tuck
of the other we’d break
into almost facial expressions.
Warmer months, a plush. A hunch
distressed under a rib still appeals to me,
but I will never love anything
but dark, won’t need to.
If I leave it a minute the dark
gets all snarled up. Throes:
the dark’s not well. It’s in a bad shape.
Later if I ask
it anything at all the dark barks
orders of some duration who knows how long.
Anything the dark
says goes:
for instance someplace downcoast (it says)
a risen flamingo stalls, cramps
on the air & drops out of all resplendence.
Delinquencies I never meant. Yet I repeat myself.
Then again. A thin sunshine spots
my left eyelid & aches there. A stipple.
Symptom: a touch.
A knot, failure-to-thrive.
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