Barbie® does a promenade around the mulberry bush,
kicking her stiff hoop skirt,
twirling her bandera boots,
her pirate sleeves slapping her limpid wrists
like flags at gust, asking herself
the same vapid questions we all come
up with while doing our square dances:
what color my eyes?
what song my heart?
how point A to point B?
where does this square end?
A corner table catches her hip and for a sec,
for a brief tilting lilting nano-moment she gets
perpendicular to the floor,
screaming across the sky like a blitzkrieg.
We don’t have to kid ourselves
about this horizontality: it’s no great
Miltonesque fall of man, Lucifer
is not a main character, no shorn
salvation will signal the agonistes to follow,
it’s just Barbie®, in a flattened hoop skirt,
falling to the floor, acknowledging Newton,
minus the ability
to catch herself or even turn her head
to see the impending crash.
Some of her comb-it-now hair has ended
akimbo to a bit of convexity where an ear
should be; one bandera boot has fallen
from the foot and in between these extremities,
Barbie®, as she is wont to do,
considers her fate, the music
(some sweet low sound still
jangling out of a saxophone-tuned
guitar that sounds like the Malcolms
have hit the jackpot at the pawn store,
or at least like the sound of the next toilet
you hear, flushed with the light
of an infinite bulb)
that led her to the bush
that led her to the dance
that led her to the table
that led her to the fall
that put her on her ass
in this predicament.
All this time, this time being
not her fervored dance or her flight
into the layers of potential string theory
versus the soothing calming power
of Coptic eschatology or her
proneness on the parquet
(was it mentioned that the floor is parquet?
If no, then oh by the way, the floor is parquet)
(not that that is supposed to mean some or anything)
(parquet being parquet not metaphor)
or her revealing
dishevelment now that she has landed
but rather forever, all the time,
every moment since the nadir of the first
bang until the zenith of the infinity! infinity!
jinx! bangs that will moot every previous
argument and dialogue
and every cryptic epistemology
versus skeptic ontology conversation, eternal
Barbie® has blamed Ken for her stumblings, for
her failings where grace is implied.
Ken, more often than not, never sees it coming,
afterwards can’t precisely put his formed-together fingers
on what exactly hit him. He gives his learned
behavior as much room as necessary (from
previous floor-crashing experiences) always to find
that when her floor falls it rises to meet him
face first, flattening his facile features, giving
him the renewed and always renewable knowledge
that the past can teach us nothing. Even when,
or especially so, he wants desperately to learn
something enlightening or translucent or meta-
historical or valid or murky or false or ringed with
the triggers of a V-1 waiting to launch. Barbie®
thinks the same useless things about language:
its very temporality denies its permanence.
What is true on Tuesday is as often false
on Thursday and forgotten on Monday, some
trace of a whisper left for the theologians to come
to weasel an explanation from. How will
her hoop skirt be described? As stiff? as
flattened? as translucent? as hind sight?
You can always tickle His creatures but
you’ll never reach the Master.
Supposition might have it as a non-point:
which came first? the skirt or the Fall?
How does the hierarchy line up for the last
walk-through before final execution of judgment?
It all falls about her drums, the bowl
of her skull hollowed for the same experiments
she always suspected she was an unwitting
participant in but was afraid to ask: she
was asking the wrong questions already
knowing she’d never get the right answers.
Winged creatures and ambassadors matter
not a whit when your bandera boots slip-slide
out from under you, flipped, twirled, twisted
beyond recognition. When recognition
equals the fatal execution of final judgments
mostly withheld. Oh, the inevitability of it all.
How it matters, how every single minute stupid
unremarkable movement must matter.
Curtain falls or rises, does not compute
in Barbie®’s zone: everybody
now…an’ a one, an’ a two…
© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved
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