Mimi and Mona Poetry: Love on The Left Or How I Prevented A Barroom Brawl

©Love on The Left

Or

How I Prevented A Barroom Brawl

Mimi Wolske

All Rights Reserved

Saturday morning breakfast off

Mill Avenue’s famous restaurant’s mezzanine

in the smoky, boisterous, and profanely

jam-packed Tapestry Room

and I nonchalantly quipped to the air

I wanted to tour old Route 66 to paint

and suggested we could both write.

George pounced on the idea

like a wolf on rabbit prey.

A momentary, penetrating stare

at my long and wild, frizzy, natural-curly hair

and he added I looked like some Fiji Islander.

An exotic observation for once

since he usually called me

you crazy Bohemian.

With an atypical burst of energy,

his chair scratched the parquet floor,

and then turned over,

knocking over a trolley of collected

and deposited dirty dishes with a loud crash.

Someone groaned Oh Hell

and the place fell into a frightful silence

as though they expected a barroom brawl.

The silence became so absolute,

the click of an electronic cigarette

being turned on sounded loud.

Only levity could change this atmosphere,

so, buttons clicked and pinged

on the table top and the floor

as I ripped open my full-length dress

and tore it from myself so

I stood naked...

except for my cowboy boots...

and began signing, at the top of my lungs,

I ain’t got no body.

Apathetic, crotchety, and cynical old men,

whose legs were too brittle and stiff to walk out on me,

stood and listened with the others—

not because I had a great voice.

I had an Olive Oyl body that,

after I finished my song and dance,

had them all bursting with laughter and applause

because, honestly, I ain’t got no body.

Mimi and Mona Poetry: #3

About my four-line poem:

I am presenting it to the reader using the element of the language of indirection.

Learn more after you read this:

#3

Mimi Wolske

All Rights Reserved

The Northerly is absent this year;

When will that cold winter air across the border blow?

Oh, Boreas, let your breath bring his embrace to this Fallen Leaf

And pray, with me, he will never let me go.

At the center of this short poem is the speaker’s desire to be reunited with the one she loves (most obvious in lines 3 and 4). However, the full meaning of this poem depends on lines 1 and 2 as well.

We know the speaker is the Fallen Leaf because she refers to herself as such (line 3). She associates her grief with the wind; but, the speaker leaves to implication (or, indirection) just how the lovers and the wind are related. I worked on this poem so they (the lovers) are related in several ways.

The need to manifest and experience love is an inherent need, just as nature’s need for changing seasons and, in this instance, wind. We can think of it as love, like the wind, is natural.

The lover is living in a kind of drought, or arid state (a drying, fallen leaf) that only the one she desires can slake by his presence, his embrace.

The wind cannot be controlled nor can it be foretold, and human affairs, like the lovers' predicaments, are subject to the same (sort of) chance.

There are also associations with specific words; for example, Northerly and border, which the reader is probably only half aware of but contribute to the meaning of the poem. Their connotations provide indirections that enrich the entire short poem... they offer the reader the location of the one she loves. Fallen Leaf is an indirection because it isn't just about the time of year, it is telling the reader the lover is in the Autumn of her life.

Thanks for bearing with me as I explain what I wish you, my readers, to take away.

(painting: Boreas and Fallen Leaves, oil on canvas,35 x 26 inches, by Evelyn De Morgan — 1855 - 1919)

Mimi and Mona: ©To Our Graves -- from the “Letters I Never Sent You” series

From the "Letters I Never Sent You" collection/series, there are some memories we must all consider taking to our graves. 

©To Our Graves

from the “Letters I Never Sent You” series

Mimi Wolske

All rights Reserved

How Well Do I Know You from those first provocative words in letters and phone calls when you courted and wooed me? I’m awash in nostalgia as I look into the castle where our memories are recorded.

Words growled like a wolf the first time we made love and you, playing the role of the alpha wolf, insisting that I say I belong to you (and me, smiling at my playful thought and saying, “You belong to me.”), and, then, you laughing and growling.

Words shared about past lovers (and me, once again laughing at my thoughts, deciding to post my limerick about you and her, naked, and the saran wrap) and her asking you, “You told her about that!? Why?”). The words you limited after that over the years. I still laugh.

Words you put to paper in poems and limericks for me, about me, and shared on your blog for the world the read. But also the words about me you protected from the public eye as well as those hateful words of revenge you told others and then told me what you shared with them hoping to keep us invisible from jealous mouths and prying eyes.

I know your eye color, the names of your blogs, the fake names you use on social internet sites, your birth date, how short I should trim your toenails, your college major, your moods, your favorite color, your humor, your love of a good nap, hobbies you like and that massage table you had once, your religion, what you like for breakfast and how you like your asparagus prepared as a snack, that you chase women, and I know your full name.

I know you by heart; you’re in my heart. You’re a loving memory on every part of me. How well I know the taste of you along my lips, and the corners of my mouth; the feel of you warm and moist at my crown, my nape, my hands, my back, my navel, my toes.

The commanding gentleness of your hands is registered on my shoulders, my cheeks, my back, my waist and hips, the back of my thighs, and my hands as your fingers teased and tensed every iota of skin day and night, as those hands directed me as we danced the tango—in our fashion.

Forever in reverie is the weight of you against my breasts; my belly; between my thighs and against the matted, black mass of curls at their apex; on my back; and against my buttocks.

You can never be alien to me again; our DNA is blended together in every city, every state, every country we have shared time as two, as one, as partners for minutes, hours, days and nights, and weeks. It has found homes on every book, every CD, every remote, painting, piece of each other’s clothing, every room key, every house key, the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, every boat paddle and cabin at Sandy Point, restaurants, bus seat, car seats and doors, the zoo, the Roswell Alien Museum, every bottle of massage oil, the trailer down near the border, casinos, beds, chairs, counters, showers, divan/sofas our bodies have touched.

We have shared laughs, political thoughts, tears and sadness, loss, happiness, jokes, religions, advice, vulnerable moments, anger, intimacies, special names/abbreviations for each other, gifts, photos together and separate in all the places we visited, and so much more.

How Well Do I Know You? As well as any loved one, more than some, never less than any. I know you like me and also more than like me.

 

Some memories we take to our graves.

Mimi - Mona Poetry: Weaving My Future From My Past

I think a poem ends when it answers itself; however, it may have resolved nothing.

©Weaving My Future From My Past

Mimi Wolske

All Rights Reserved

He complained I pissed on his corn flakes.

No! It was he who aimed his dick

as if I was a target in the snow and

drilled his piss-poor attitude into my chest.

Sometimes laughing uproariously,

sometimes weeping, sometimes running

and sloshing the red from my wine glass,

I turned in my painter’s brush and descended

into darkness and bowed to the iconic

figures of lovers past: clowns, actors,

artists, entrepreneurs, boisterous braggarts,

womanizers melded into a cast of characters.

I was weaving my future from my past

dreams, fantasies, and myths and some

alarmingly autonomous aristocrats who

were truer to life than super hero super humans.

I paid a fortune in words to get a grasp

on my feelings so I could think and see

that through the interaction, pieces would come

together and could hold a kaleidoscope of relations.

No longer suspended in ambivalence,

I continue to be attracted to double mindedness;

I am Atlas unburdened from the weight of others

in my imagistic life — I will be a woman at the top,

and then, maybe I can actually piss on

on someone’s cornflakes and walk away

remembering the first poem I fell

in love with and let it become my mantra.