After a wildly productive life as an alchemist, Carol Shillibeer retired to read tarot, stalk Hierocholoë odorata in the lands west of the Pacific cordillera, and consider the implications of post-human materialism.
Ronald McDonald and His Buffalo Love
Ronnie thinks Sartre couldn't have done a better job.
Plastic seats sticky with leg sweat in summer;
In winter, a stiff reminder of cold's unyielding.
The Golden Arches into the dead part of late-
at-night. A man like an emaciated hippo raging
like Hamlet about his cold super-sized fries.
A young woman, black-haired,
blistered face hunkered in the corner
under white canceling headphones.
Ronnie hears her choking down the song she's listening to.
He turns to his own devastation, his white glove.
Peels off the left one, stares
at the space that should be a hand, if he were human
but because he ate the burger he made out of his Buffalo Love,
that vacancy now twists darkly into at least something. Instead of nothing.
A little girl in the ball room yells I want to sit on Ronald McDonald's lap.
Ronnie hears furious footsteps. He reattaches his glove,
catches her as she jumps pajama-clad into his arms.
She'll come back to me the PA system croons.
What a day! Host to the freedom from want for millions,
and trammeled by the smile which Ronnie actually can't take off.
He wonders. How can he still have bodily functions at all
when under the suit, if he peeks, or tries to use a mirror,
nothing much ever appears. He has begun to wonder
if his love for Buffalo Woman was empty that very same way.
The way when ground up and cooked, his love vanished into the void.
A broken sweaty mule of a man blasts through the outside doors,
clatters, keys and tool belt rattling, pummeling the air
going the distance between his need and the men's room stall.
Ronnie told her! You know me, I'm the burger guy. He can't be blamed,
for her disappearance, he knows that,
and yet he finds himself humming along with the music
when Cake comes on, and then, that half-bad twang
of a voice drops Somehow I know it won't last too long
and Ronnie's smoky gut clamps in warning. His Buffalo Love
leaving, her footsteps on the walkway of his colon.
He waits and waits. She'll come back to me he thinks,
half afraid, half done with the furious needs of his suit,
his erupting hunger. The mule man staggers out again,
under the exit sign, teeters towards the yellow-lit parking lot,
and the incessant half-light of living. Ronnie doesn't.
He labors up, red shoes slapping, splutters
into the stall the mule-man has just left empty.
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| Carol Shillibeer |
Note: written in response to Cake’s song “She’ll Come Back to Me” on Fashion Nugget.
BlueQueen to Sisyphus 4
God, like the self, a lapis petal hung
on the flowered stone necklace of body's longing;
small round cabochon―glisten, linked
with twisted threads, our golden narratives―
and in that verbal rebirthing―into monstrous
what was once simply
the body's cerulean desire,
stringing bright beads of knowledge
across earth's plain of things.
The mind has mistaken itself
as the polar star, mistranslated―
bead bobbled blue-petalled bright―
for some deep and universal heart.
This incipient tragedy, claiming
universal interiority, that gem lazuli,
now the unbearable somatic rock,
our up-endlessly, hill of it.
How does such a capitulation occur?
A small thing in origin,
but that blue-longing turned a flowered blade,
a deep debt out of which we often
cannot climb. Sisyphus' avaricious tragedy:
What was once a small blue bead hung
at the ear; on the Queen's throat—
in the harsh breath of a body
beyond its limits, thiozonide and ripened curves,
lazuli, by nature, is the material engulfing of the blue
—a small rock―the dark mirroring―
offered to us from those god-named depths.
Attended in ardour and jealousy
by the bright rounds of solar narrative,
twined by leaden desire and Corinthian inhospitality,
festivities of human life drape,
the primping of hill's ridge with boulders,
virtual territory claimed in aid of spiritual necessity.
Oh, to let go―stone shatter, ultramarine―
to carry instead, a single blue bead
strung on an ear to bear the memory
and quietly sing of Sisyphus' laboured breathing.
spun on a car
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