Polishing Grace Under Pressure

In order to give a little back (wine poured onto the grass at a picnic), I decide to reach out to the community.  I look about me (Pip-like), and see that there is a terribly urgent need to keep the stars better aligned. Over the years, I am informed (quite belatedly) via an old crumbling newspaper, the stars have started to sing off-key.  In the old days, a Christmas Pageant Soloist could set their “Come All Ye Faithful” to the ever perfect pitch of a rising Jupiter moon.  Not so anymore.  Due to satellites, airships gone awry and a myriad of other factors too lengthy to recount, no moon rising (blue, bad or otherwise) is now even remotely sound savvy.

Which is not to say that they have lost their umph.  Many’s the night when I will sit and listen enrapt by the slightly bent caroling of the Seven Sisters.  Not unlike the scales of say, an Indian sitar, all music — however unique — if sung with an urgent compassion — can be beautiful.

This having been said, I am informed by a number of galactic agencies (some too far away to reach within a lifetime awake or dreaming) that many stars, moons and untitled “rocks” are in fact desperate to be polished and overhauled.

Not unlike (again bemoaned the bygone newspaper) ancient man and his and her facial sculpting.  Constellations, so it would seem, can be vain about their music just as easily as a free floating universe can be a bit touchy about its vast and potentially irreversible, black holes.

And so, with a charity in my heart that knows no bounds, I set out to construct a ladder to the stars…

© agw

A Busy Town Drags the Lake

Mama was an astronaut

Daddy was a plumber

Sister rode her roller skates — every day in summer

Rickey was an ice cream man

Ida was a stripper

Sandy worked the carnival — dressed as Jack-the-Ripper

Dora rode her submarine

Bob he fed the snakes

“Our town is a busy town — come let’s drag the lake!”

©

agw

No Country for Old Phoenix Communists

I long to be a communist and spread the wealth like cheese

Give Prada to the trailer kin and Gucci where I please

Give every kid a beach house, some cars for teens to crash

And gin to desperate house mites, the Senate I’d give hash

Yet as I sit in squalor, without heat or light or phone

I hear a voice inside me scream — “Leave well enough alone!”

© agw