Pink Tupperware
when I was young there
were these neighbor girls
who had their own cups,
maybe pink Tupperware
marked with each of their
names, which all began with
the same letter
Megan,
Melinda,
Mandy,
etc,
I think there were five of them,
and it struck me as sad for some
reason, they were stuck with the
same cup for the rest of their lives,
or so I thought at the age of seven or eight,
and I longed for them to be set free,
to use any cup in the house they pleased,
for their mother to throw caution to
the wind, and i remember they walked
on their tippie toes, and so I did too,
and it was glorious
and i thought i might be a ballerina one
day so it was all good to practice for that,
and we walked up and down the sidewalk like
that and climbed the trees and hung upside down.
Later my mom told me they got sick a lot,
and the cups were so they didn't get each other sick,
that they went to the doctor so much
the pediatrician gave them a discount,
it wasn't a ploy to strangle their freedom,
and i remember how it felt to be young
and walking on sidewalks up and down
the street and peeking inside someones
refrigerator and after i wrote this i
wanted to do cartwheels and
dream about endless summers
where school didn't start until September
Exit Rows
on the flight back,
a man is lying across
the reserved exit
row seats,
"Excuse me sir?"
the stewardess says,
"do you belong in this seat?"
"There's no one sitting here,"
he states, a bit too smugly for my taste.
"Can I see your ticket?" she asks,
I try to ignore the hoopla,
I bury my head in a tacky
"adult" novel,
try to shut my eyes on
this red eye flight,
but he is drunk and belligerent,
and I hunker down smaller in my seat,
afraid of violence on moving bullets of
steel ten thousand miles above the sea,
and he slurs his words,
" There are two kinds of
people my friend,
those that can pay for exit rows
& those that can't,"
and the stewardess is annoyed,
"Sir, do I need to get an agent? you
need to return to your assigned seat, please."
and he moves slowly, mumbling about
lousy customer relations and the diet coke
he just sipped tasting "funny,"
relieved the crisis was over,
I peered out the window
but there was only darkness,
another few hours until we
reached land,
and i tried to think of as many
songs as I could that contained
the word "Albatross," but i couldn't
think of many before i fell asleep,
my face mashed into a pretzel
against the seat in front of me.
Unexplained
I sit on the couch with my book,
the dictionary of the unexplained,
and I wonder if horse-eels are real,
and how they came to be,
supposedly they have head of a horse
and the body of an eel.
I have never seen one on sale
at the pet section of Wal-Mart,
I munch on M&M's and
read about how Anton LaVey
worked as a psychic investigator,
investigating crank calls,
and I can't help but picture that scene;
a perv on one end breathing
heavily into the phone,
pretend this phone is my dick,
and rub it all over your body,
and LaVey, puts his fingers
to his forhead,
and says "Boys,
the perp is at the Safeway,
massaging the Hamburger buns,"
but that's not half as interesting
as a talking Mongoose named Gef,
who had fire-starting abilities
just like in the Stephen King Novel,
they had to lock Gef up in a dungeon,
with manacles around his little neck,
one of the saddest stories I
ever read
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