Improv 2, Week 4

Pimp Limp
--Adrian Matejka
For Flava Flav, circa 1993

On Flavor of Love, you crowed:
Your man Flava Flav's a pimp.
P-I-M-P! from the balcony.
A cascade of kiss and tell
on the woman walking in weaved
shame past the pool: head bowed,
bra tucked in armpit, heels clicking
maestro quick as early morning
sunbathers peeped upward
from behind sunglasses wondering
who disguised a lawn jockey
in a silk robe. It didn't have
to be this way. Fifteen years ago,
you took a jet-setting break once
a month to visit one of your girlfriends
in Bloomington. Me and my boys
hating on you before there was a name
for hateration. Before a football
player's overtures finally pried
that woman loose from you clocked
embrace. The time she cut you loose,
you came to town in a limousine
on a doughnut with a dented back
door. It was sunny, and you got
out of that limping car
with a matching limp to the applause
of me and my boys laughing.
You put your Gazelles on,
kissed two jeweled peace fingers
and tossed them to the crowd.

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Good Vibrations
Picture Brain Wilson’s sun blistered face when he heard: Strictly Hip-Hop boy, I ain't singin' this, bringing this to the entire nation. Black, white, red, brown. Feel the vibration. It was 91’ when Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch released Good Vibrations. We just discovered eyeliner and halter tops and how boys whistled to both—longing for summer in our hair and California tans. Magazines teased: tips for the bedroom, designer mini-skirts, convertibles we couldn’t drive. Remember Mike Eversole? In junior high his locker glimmered lip-glossed kisses. Each one an invitation, desired gossip, a secret admirer. For the Across the Nation dance, he smeared sunscreen on his nose, flowered his neck with gardenias, hit the floor in swim trunks. Check it, I’m a surfer. He bellowed of little black sands, glimmering like lips deposited only for him. We huddled in the corner, starched in grass skirts. His hands reached high and waved in our direction. But all we could do was stare, caught in the vibrations.

Free Entry 2, Week 4

Here, pasted to the eye of the moon, a mish-mash of postage stamps.
Duct tapped with saliva, glued with fingerprints, smelling of resistance:
What splendid travel marks the occasion. Landing your first belly flop

in a crater makes the moon accountable for redness. Craters bite,
like horseflies, in places you’ve never suspect. Moon beams stumble
over the finer points of light speed, two stepping jazz pigments

the tongue. Learn to fly, it will make breaking G-force easier:

1. Chalk a circle on the wall, preferably white, but yellow will do.
2. Walk for summer and the locust of lightning bugs.
3. Collect bugs in jars. Once enough are gathered dump bugs onto the
underside of shoebox lid and mash off their lights.
4. Smear lights in circle, dotting from center out.
5. Stand back and tell yourself you can’t fly, but neither can these bugs.

You will find a moon in your room more pleasant outdoors.
In Juno, Alaska light manifests in the mouths of whales.
Ones captured for aquariums generate tide changes.

I read that once on the back of a postage stamp.

Improv 1, Week 4

Wassily Kandinsky's Boxed-Up Voice
-Adrain Matejka

Here's
a Kandinsky print, wrapped in plastic bubbles

that didn't work. If Kadinsky wasn't
a carpetbagger, he should have bee. (lines 9-12)


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I am qualified for warning: which is to say my clichés
aren’t original. In New Mexico, they put warnings down
like rabid coyotes. Or like free-wheeling vagrants
with stacks of aces up their drunken car rides. Tuesday,
all ballpoint pen usage reduced carbon monoxide
emissions to dwarf-sized complaints. Almost as small
as keyholes. If the mayor of San Juan gave Georgia O'Keeffe
a key to the city would she key the town dealership? Call her vandalism
postage stamps? The gift of the forgotten is that they force remembrance.
Here’s a fake: Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills,
found at a truck stop. Also, here’s a shot glass with three cows
in a pick-up with a pig at the wheel, both collector’s items. One secondary color,
magenta, acts like packing material around my favorite day
of the week. I wouldn’t hock my teeth for all the coyotes
in the backseat of a Buick. Once the decorum of applause breaks
all that is left is the silver lining of ink well, inking grapefruit like tattoo.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 4

"Anatomy of an Exhibition"
-title of a webiste

"I have to go get mine."
-friend referring to picking up his dog.

"Stupid" Laws from across the country
New Mexico
Hunting is prohibited in Mountain View Cemetery.
Ohio
It is illegal to fish for whales on Sunday.
It is illegal to display colored chickens for sale.
It is illegal to walk a cow down Lake Road.

"Dumb" Labels found on products

Wearing of this garment does not enable you to fly.
Child-Sized Superman Costume

Warning: Never iron clothes on the body.
Rowenta Iron

This product not intended for use as a dental drill.
Dremel Electric Rotary Tool

"Most of my cliches aren’t original."

"Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours."
-Yogi Bera

"If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t either."
-Dick Cavett

Free Entry, Week 4

Animal Fair
Not the elephants but the teeth creeping about the elephants,
that funnels out the Metropoltian Shores Zoo, clinking
down the park bench and into the coin slots of the boardwalk
aracade. Down the alley, raking the door of the Lucky Lou’s
nightclub, the teeth groan, streching like newborn fawns.
Ciggerette butts dint the ground, and some girl’s
rainbow-colored retainer nests in the O, of a fallen Open sign.
This is true:Thirty-four years remains the time it takes a mudflat to dry.
Not dry, but to churn like silver in the hands of a miser.
Not churn, but bubble like the sunburnt back of the boy
at the pinball machine. Other animals, or the teeth of other animals,
buck in the mouths of the guardian. Jowls puff
in unision with coins dripping into the hands of ticket-takers.
And all that echoes in the throats of puddles is the sound of a wet O.

Free Entry 2, Week 3

(Draft 2)
(formally The Clubhouse)

Over Dinner

Your mother hollered at us in thick German.
Dumplings for dinner and your Father, his cigar
smelling of straw, loaded the table.
Parakeets pestered us from the other room,
the dog licked my knees, you whispered
to your mother over the turnips about the stain

in your underpants. Macht nichts,
she gurgled, mouth full of dumplings, you’ll be
woman now. Your father forked another pea
as he quelled a cough, your mother carried on:
My Mutter stuck my panties to pole and put in yard

for whole village to see that I was woman.
Her broken English reminded me of that day
in your clubhouse. We both worn yellow jumpers,
I sported a ribbon, sliding down my braids.
You pounded a nail into the roof and etched:
I druved this here. When I told you druved

should be drove you hurled my doll across the room
and pelted me with calm insults. So, today
at the table when your father jabbed his napkin
in his glass and dabbed his wrinkled, sweating
brow, you smashed a turnip with your fist
just to force him to speak. But there was nothing.
Not even a stop or not at the table or please, the guest.

Later, that night we climbed once again
into your clubhouse and then holding hands,
we began to recite: Lord, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change… Serenity,
which in German I heard means ailment.

Free Entry 1, Week 3

At 12:54 I harness the winds of last
Tuesday. As they scrape the sky and etch
grooves into my scalp like lace
corseting a shoe, I remember a simple fact:
You look nothing like the map of
the town. Nor should you. You are not
portable by any means. I wonder when
terrain becomes terrain? When we have
treaded it enough? Even the marble moon
wanes in its arduous nobility. Collects a value
of movement however depleting. Enacts trickery
or a guise of omnipotence, where as are you
just sit or fake a rare slug. Now I know why
coyotes bawl at their own reflections
in those lucid gullies of last season’s rain.
They yelp and hurl sounds of stillness,
their trapped image, rippling within
a hedge of water. Fear springs
from animals ensnared in static. Any being
pumped with instinct would eat itself whole
before squandering its own legs to flatness.