IN BABY'S TOWN
On a dreary, windowless day in baby's town,
there is a blue buggy of empty rattles
and bottleless nipples. The waxed Mother
tuts along the sidewalk, her small carriage babbling
along, until she reaches a steep bump
in the road, and stops. Peering up to the salty
sky, she feels it slipping down her cheeks, salty
and warm, like ocean water wrapping around the town
twice before drowning. The Mother holds the little bump
in her delicately calloused hands and listens for the rattle
and tattle of her little baby's babbling,
but hears nothing but the Mother
and her aching chest. Sullen-hearted, the Mother
reaches out for a hand, but receives a salty
slap on the wrist instead. Wincing, waiting for her babbling
baby to surface. All through baby's town
echoes a constant dread that rattles
day in and day out, hoping to reach a bump
in the sonogram. So mooningly round, the bump
teeters on the flat side, revealing the Mother
and her stillingly haunted imagination. It rattles
through the night, tossing and turning, blood salty
on her tongue. Just a drop sends shivers through the town.
Below a paper mobile is the absence of a babbling
shadow hugging a prayer, babbling
on and on about loss and how it bumps
through the tiniest nooks around town.
Ballooning sympathies are sent to the Mother,
but she releases them. They will not numb the salty
wounds in her womb, will not silence the rattles
ringing in her ears. They are blue and pink, these rattles.
Pink like a rabbit's ear and blue like a babbling
winter, and both need a salty
sprinkle to make their colors melt. That road, that bump,
holds a woman so still, so raw, so cold. The Mother
walks with her buggy, back into baby's town.
Preserved in salty memory, the babbling bump
rattles the empty shakers of the desolated Mother
on a dreary, windowless day in baby's town.
THE LONDON EYE
she perches on a branch of wooden smiles
with her luminous locks scaling the concrete wall,
like dapper spiders on a crisp autumn night.
a smile has been haphazardly painted upon her face,
the color of blood oranges and london busses.
she teases the corpulent man with the clumpy shoes, an ever-so-slight grimace playing on her lips.
but then she plunges into a world where there is nothing but empty, unsealed envelopes.
crumpled hopes and desperate yearnings, lined with red and blue
making her wishes seem like a reality,
her imagination careening like a perturbed swan on the wake of a hurricane
overly curly figures swirl about, professing their love to unnamed beloveds.
vehement scrawls, burning the midnight oil, spitting out expletives left and right
left, right, left right left,
the kinks of his hair coil around his head
his mind, his own noose.
with the crazed glint in his marble eyes, he watches it swing from one number to the next.
indecisive hands and stationary rims, it manages to find order
he, himself, is dangling between here and there and who-knows-where,
stuck in an eternal limbo of lost and found,
where chaos reigns free.
CAUTION
i don't know
who i am
i know that i float
wander from one street lamp to the next
in search of my identity
i pilfer through wanted posters and child missing signs,
hoping to see my reflection
an empty shadow cast onto dirty sidewalks
i am simply a bystander, an extra, in the lives of others
i mindlessly obey traffic laws
stop, yield, go
caution.
the names that are being shouted,
they are not familiar,
they never are.
as i continue my path to who-knows-where,
between lost hopes and dreams to what could've been
i think, i think that i don't know anything
YOU ARE READING
Fragments
Random**INCLUDES WATTPAD SCHOLARSHIP WINNING ENTRY** land of stories, poetry, and competition entries that don't deserve their own book.
