Home

shooting star damsel

by Gabriel Ricard


You complain about
everything. You’re never satisfied.

You don’t even like moving from one end
of a red light trying to make the most
out of its stop-and-go life to the other one
getting frantic when the Cadillac racecars start to growl.

Moving forward,
leaving town and getting to London
or Hong Kong without getting on a plane
just gives you cause to find someone who once stabbed you
in the back or is about to take out a piece of you from the front.

I don’t get it.
I don’t understand how you could loathe the rain. You’re the only
woman I’ve ever known who can actually get five to ten feet
in the air with the wind and a good umbrella. The rain becomes
a Technicolor masterpiece straight from those weird, vibrant-
but-somehow-grey-ghost-musicals. You could bounce one beautiful
foot off a streetlight and send those Jesus freaks screaming
for the nearest textbook,
but you can’t stand the thought of looking extraordinary.

You’d rather a thunderstorm go sideways,
refusing to touch you and directing itself like fire
with a clear-cut conscience into every street that’s let you down
and everyone who’s ever laughed when you weren’t kidding.

It doesn’t make sense to me. You could probably
change modern art with a can of spray paint
and an old building being pushed out of town
like a degenerate selling old porn novels in the back of a relic.

No telling what you could do there,
but I happen to know you’d rather line the windows
with crucifixions and assume everyone’s guilty
of not paying attention.

Although you probably know this
I feel obligated to get in real fucking close
and remind you that you’re probably not
going to live long enough
to get even with every single charlatan.

I’ll stand so close
that your hair,
if it ever finally turns into
all those little snakes,
can take as many bites out of me
as the situation demands.

I can do this
because I already know
what you think of me
and decided years ago
that I’m too old and too lazy
to try and change it.

You don’t think I’m creative enough
to pull it off,
and I’m quite frankly inclined to agree.

12/13/2009

Posted on 12/13/2009
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by V. Blake on 12/16/09 at 09:27 PM

"I don’t understand how you could loathe the rain. You’re the only woman I’ve ever known who can actually get five to ten feet in the air with the wind and a good umbrella." I found the fact that these lines appear in the same poem as "You don’t think I’m creative enough to pull it off, and I’m quite frankly inclined to agree" to be pretty damn funny.

Posted by Joan Serratelli on 12/17/09 at 05:50 PM

How do you come up with these stories???? So good, excellent work! Thank you!

Posted by Kristina Woodhill on 12/17/09 at 11:03 PM

Ooooh, an angry female to avoid, I would say. You laid this out clearly in those first couple of lines and then added sizzling imagery - asbestos gloves for this one....

Return to the Previous Page
 

pathetic.org Version 7.3.2 May 2004 Terms and Conditions of Use 0 member(s) and 2 visitor(s) online
All works Copyright © 2024 their respective authors. Page Generated In 0 Second(s)