Mourning Sickness
(the day after losing to Donald Trump)
How like a mother poised to bring to term
what would have been the distaff side’s first born,
must Hillary appear amidst the sturm
und drang development. Her fans are torn
to hear gestation periods so long
could bring to bear such inauspicious fruit.
They’re gathering to find out what went wrong
with a delivery that seemed astute.
Forget a baby shower’s diaper packs,
as Secretaries line her cabinet
with Treasurer, Defense, and State – like cracks
inside a ceiling made of glass. Regrets
alone inform her mortuary mood,
like hens on hatches that they failed to brood.
The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus
(after the painting by Max Ernst)
Although the child possesses rank
when swanked by saints in Heaven’s sphere,
He swallows pride astride her shank
while she raps penance on his rear –
despite presumptive blasphemy.
Albeit not of woman born,
and sworn to bear the cross for me,
He’s not above a woman’s scorn
when matters turn to discipline.
For no one is above her law
who’s swaddled with a diaper pin –
regardless of prophetic awe.
And since He suffers every man’s
development at woman’s hands
His kingly crown has tumbled down
beside her. She, with feet apart,
imparts with unforgiving frown
harsh blessings from an anguished heart.
For though He’s God’s anointed son,
He’s spared no trials while on her knee
who, faithfully, has just begun
to trod the road to Calvary.
Indeed. If he’d redeem His flock
He needs ambassadors on earth
who lovingly make us take stock
of life before our second birth.
As such, He raises from the tomb
the blistered fruit of woman’s womb.
Free Throw
Imagine if Dan Sterling’s senile rants
were not made public to the autocrats
who smugly dictate what we can and can’t
communicate to girlfriends in our flats?
Our black Americans would still be riled
by fruits of their oppressed ancestors’ plight.
and street gangs would be running wild,
ensuring that their neighbors heed their might.
But now that Sterling’s forced to sell his share
of ownership by Teflon corporate shirts,
the black community will get a fair
proportion of the wealth for all the hurts
inflicted on them. Poverty’s passé
when knights in mail that shine like silver slay
with magic dragons those who scarcely puff.
Forget a hundred years of slavery.
A sacrificial goat appears enough
to show the world belated bravery.
Who cares if it’s 200 years too late
to fight the battle when it mattered most?
They also serve the cause who sit and wait
self-righteously to trumpet a riposte
against offenses in an old man’s brains.
Instead of reparations to oppressed
descendants of those victimized by gains
acquired thus, those presently obsessed
to compensate the loss of photo ops
to jocks, insist this worse injustice stops.
Prophylactic Encounter
I scarcely thought her bedroom was smack in the heart of the pharmacy. But the way she glared at me, it could have grown out of her
heckling hide, or else she wore peripatetic bedding to bide what was bugging her. Anodynes – seemingly secreted in crevices of her salutary skin at the express check-out counter – it’s not surprising she locked horns with mine in the safe of her incubating mindset. Bedded near proscriptive drugs, she wore Rx pants like sackcloth for the bulldog barter. Her lethal looks infected me like a syringe inoculating a viral glance. With clinical duress, she measured passion’s pulse, poised to fend off a lubricious encounter. Was I a druggy, rummaging through the philter of her medicine cabinet looking for an angry fix? Ginseng notwithstanding, there’s no hospice in this supreme deceit of courtship. And so armed with my doctored addiction I pay for my Pillsbury mixture like a flattened doughboy kneaded to leavened flour rising. With the salubrious jewels in my hand, I paid Miss Glam Puss with a post-transactional “Thank you, ma’am.”
Born & bred in New Jersey, Frank De Canio works in New York. He loves music from Amy Beach to Amy Winehouse, World Music, Latin, opera. Shakespeare is his consolation, writing his hobby. He likes Dylan Thomas, Keats, Wallace Stevens, Frost, Ginsburg, and Sylvia Plath as poets, and attends a Café philo in lower Manhattan.
Bindweed Magazine 