(With Apologies To Dorothy Parker)
Xanax floors you;
Old bars are dank;
Playstation bores you;
And you’ve got no bank.
Poker’s not lawful;
Ennui throbs;
The soaps are awful;
You might as well get a job.
(The Fake Angeleno is helping to organize an L.A. chapter of the International Dorothy Parker Society. He invites everyone to join him for a martini or two or three at the chapter’s inaugural meeting April 24th at the El Cid in Silverlake)
The murders mattered
only because they went down
in my sweet pea-with-a-bent-stem friend
Daisy’s neighbourhood. We could be sisters,
sharing obscure origins in la belle province. I foisted
white trash, Daisy adopted, blossoming into a blonde
Jewish princess. Beguiling kook. Fatal Queens accent.
Two transplants to Los Angeles. I dipped in Silverlake.
Solo act. Daisy regal atop Lookout Mountain Avenue,
three blocks west of Wonderland. Aspiring director boy toy
in tow. No gun clubs on their map of LA. Leery elkhounds
patrolled the property. Litter box kitties safe from coyotes,
rabid coons. One morning LAPD prodded creeping sage
ground cover. Rats? No. We’re searching for body parts.
Clues. Wonderland, the movie based on a true story.
Val Kilmer still too hunky to play geeky John Holmes,
decidedly Joe Blow as appearances go.
Might explain his appeal though.
Everyman identified, despite the grotesque cock.
Coppola wannabe split. Mattress and pillow a prairie
of down. Daisy bought a Colt. 45 to dream on. Statistics,
shmistics. She had a plan to scare off intruders, to shoot up
into the rafters where the petrified red rosebuds hung.
So where
did I lose the Stuka
pelicans; to which
lifeguard stand did they say
au revoir at last,
and the sandpipers with
their panicky legs,
where did they race to, finally?
Bicycling, along with a school
of dolphins for a mile,
maybe more, ramping up
and down the strand, as the smiles
rise to spout, their dorsal fins
splitting the surf like
a laugh at the library
gone out to open water now
drinking
one martini
deliberately,
while her nude fin-legs
prick a green olive
the plastic Mermaid
has many such suitors
many would-bes, but no
real lovers, like
the sun
to which all sandpipers scuttle,
all pelicans rise,
all dolphins blow,
all mermaids shake and flap,
every soul seeks out, the sun
at last says in the evening:
Here
is the wind now coming your way,
your feathers blown like spring pollen,
your beaks crusted, damaged,
your blowholes spraying harmlessly,
your shoulders
growing colder in my breeze,
your faces sandpapered,
your bodies beaten, exhausted, spent at last…
did you think I would fail
to make you too wholly mine in the end,
and why
do you still need me,
not settling, not letting
the setting light go again,
even yet again?
(The uniquely talented Joseph Mailander can be found on the Web at Mainbrace , Kafka’s Mouse, and Mayor Sam. He describes this poem as “an awestruck refutation” of Dylan Thomas’ If I Were Tickled By The Rub of Love.)
