Eliciting the old poetic 'hmmm'

This is the last new poem of the semester. Boo to the end of the semester. But yay to Amaud's I-don't-like-to-do-this-in-workshop-but-hmm hmm when I finished reading it. I worked pretty hard on this and about three days ago was like, no, this isn't coming together at all, I don't know how to flip it right. And then I went to Cafe Soleil and I guess the pain au chocolat helped me find the way. Or pushed me in the right direction; the ending rhyme isn't totally working. Anyway...



The Legislation Against Daydreaming

Seven years
one month
five days
before my parents tried again,
my four year, three month, twenty-six day old sister Lucy
probably sat
in the backyard sandbox building
modern replications of ancient
Mayan villages, or maybe she stood
with an elm branch
taller than herself, drawing blueprints
for the vehicle that would eventually get her
to the barnacle-covered steps of Atlantis. Mom
probably just started her walk home after
just finishing her shift at the bakery. Dad
stood watching Lucy
from the kitchen
window while probably washing
the blue and white wedding china with counterclockwise
swirls of the yellow and green sponge. And probably
after the one spare
and three conventional, full-sized
tires of the white 1972 Maserati Ghibli SS rolled over
Lucy's civilization

Lucy's inspiration

Lucy

Dad scooped up his sandy treaded daughter
from the ruins of her native land and did not
cry because that wasn't really Lucy. Because
what was left of Lucy was busy
blasting the driver blind with a black
and white home video reel of
her first day of school
her first kiss
first honeymoon
second child's birth
third husband's funeral
twenty-year high school reunion
local lifetime community service achievement award,
techicolor somedays circuiting their last synaptic sparks
in her technicolor brain and probably all
thirty-seven year, two day old neurologist
and father of four
Rudolph Rons
could do was blubber sleep-deprived apologies
through the fleshy bloody space where his
left central and first left lateral incisors
popped out
in protest
of his reckless homicide
when his face
hit the steering wheel and finally stopped
the ping pong pace
of his meandering mind

take the left on 5th Street to the interstate
hope I get home for Rudy's fifth birthday
cake would be so good right now
grocery-store sheetcake and a mug of coffee
how much coffee is good intake before it gets bad?
how long was mom wandering before it got this bad?
was it bad or smooth criminal we first danced to?
why don't we dance anymore?
what was the last song this station played?
why did I stop playing the sax?

stopped his twenty-one hour binge
drive from Bar Harbor
twenty miles short of his Paddock Lake
destination. And started the fictitious
shitstorm of BAC numbers and DUI history
and class of felony charges because no one
wants to know the leading
cause of death for Americans
aged three to thirty-three
on a midmorning Thursday
is the rubbernecker
the radio station changer
the map reader
the drowser
the daydreamer.
Because even Lucy couldn't really
convict the mind trying, trying to get out of the glass
and steel cage. Because all Lucy ever wanted
was to fill with orange and pink painted helium, stretch
from the Mesopotamia of her mythology to the California
of her heirs until she burst over time
and space and the confetti of her organs seeped
into the aged earth, and when watered with acid
rain gave way to a weed flowering four to nine
petals that children plucked while chanting
sister Lucy
gave a brush to me
wanted no blue sky
wanted no peach pie
wanted to black bean
wanted no grass green.
Sister Lucy
gave a brush to me
wanted no sky blue
now what will you do?