Phooey on sonnets 'bout flowers in spring!
Those moldy crotchets are trite and cliché.
There's nothing 'bout flowers that makes me sing,
Ne'er to my love a bouquet would I bring,
She isn't keen on that stuff anyway.
Here is a list of a few other things
She coyly suggests she'd prefer I bring:
A silver Rolls Royce, a Tiffany ring,
Deed to a villa or castle in Spain.
To do so I'd have to live on a string,
And debt is a very cumbersome thing.
She smirks in reply, "No gain without pain."
If one day my love's dear neck I should wring,
Sing Sing, I hear, can be lovely in spring.
Mother bartered me to an Englishman.
His tribe made televisions.
In those days
televisions were wooden vehicles
crafted out of electric fans
and the spare parts of flying saucers.
Later he became an overseer
of sparky factory hands.
Once while waiting outside for his shift to end,
I jumped from the cross-strut
of a tall billboard. When he found me,
my leg was broken.
'Look what your son has done now'!
"Superman made me do it."
My exiled Irish mother shrugged.
She had entirely forgotten herself
since her surrender.
I liked the Hospital;
African nurses coddled me with plump pink palms.
It was there that I first learned to play a sick piano;
ears pressed into drumming wood
while the blind piano tuner
(a wandering Jew), tapped its hollow bones.
For days I kept
an infirm Steinway under my pillow -
dreamed of fret-sawing crotchets and quavers.
When I returned home mother had found a priest,
and again her native religion began to spook her,
though she still spoke to me in a language
only Superman could hear.
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