"carnies" poems
When I was a little girl I loved going to the fair.
seeing the clowns
rides
and carnies.
but my favorite thing to see at the fair is the fun house
Remember those?
Where mirrors flooded the walls bending towards you
distorting the image you saw to one of absurd portions
Nose swelling larger
legs shrinking
hips inflating.
I loved seeing the shapes my body could take.
...I haven't been to a fun house in years.
And even if I went I know the mirrors would look like those that hang in my room.
Body dysmorphia is it's own fun house
one full of insecurities and self-hate.
It makes regular mirrors bend my perception of reality.
Makes my stomach bloat
thighs inflate
cheeks widen
eyes shrink
My mind has turned into a trapeze act
And I don't know if i want it to stop.
Dec 19, 2014
Dec 19, 2014 at 12:46 PM UTC
It's a circus
Without the tent,
Without the colors,
Without the fun.
A mad circus.
And the carnies and the freaks,
That's you and me and them,
my friend.
To whom do we perform to?
Ask yourself that!
Apr 22, 2013
Apr 22, 2013 at 3:18 PM UTC
Crawl with me back
behind the the Midway glare of lights
so bright they blind you to the inevitable.
Slink into the shadows
where the carnies laugh at the marks;
the sound of their mirth
decomposing at the edges of their mouths,
falling to the ground to slither away
in the darkness.
Sneak behind the glowing banners
where the peeling paint is stained
with a thousand yesterdays
and there is no happy endings
or smiling child with over-sized toy.
See? There beyond the glow of the calliope
sleeps a girl, thumb in tear stained mouth,
curled into herself in the hay. Momma's busy
where the ***** sound drowns out other noises.
And there, where the fat lady hangs her garments
to dry in starlight, she watches the townies stroll
and wishes she had a different role to play.
Behind the warped boards of the spinning wheels
the boy strains to hear coded words
to know which lever to press, unless
he sees the shiny toes and knows
to vanish into the night.
Walk the Midway with me now--
the cotton candy spun dreams melting;
the grainy taste no longer sweet.
The bolt is loose on the tilt-a-whirl but
it is late and tear down starts when the last rider
bolts for home. Magic and fantasy
are folded into boxes, packed away like
disjointed clowns in an undersized car
until the next day, the next town,
the next nameless place
and all the dreams are spun once again
for the believing, the foolish and the blind.
Jul 10, 2012
Jul 10, 2012 at 7:29 PM UTC
I told you the carnies were ripoff artists, but If you really wanted, you could have said the real prize was the love in the air that night.
Sep 24, 2015
Sep 24, 2015 at 5:38 AM UTC
#*(What.. the Construct is not God?)
A final flare across the falsehood. A message for the Circus carnies, their "Feerless Leaders" surrounded by all of those foul-smelling little Circus-midgets who stroke their emptiness as they feed on the open wounds of women and call it poetry. The girl has walked off the stage—and now you're left to perform for ghosts within that never-ending moshpit of clown-driven bumper cars.. signaling each other with nifty little 'doublesecret', nursery-school codeword handshakes..*
***This is not her elegy.
This is your eulogy.***
You never had her.
You only had her wounds.
You dressed them up in silk,
fed them validation like wine,
watched her dance in your smoke
and thought that was devotion.
But devotion doesn't need an audience.
And healing doesn't ask your permission.
She’s walking now—
through the neon bones of your kingdom,
past the velvet ropes and half-dead prophets,
past the pit bosses and poets with nothing left to say.
She is not yours anymore.
Not her mind.
Not her mouth.
Not her mercy.
The girl is leaving Las Vegas.
And all you have left
is your mirrors and your rot.
You built your house on applause
and gaslight,
and panting beneath the throne. You offered her fame in fragments—
tried to turn her trauma into theater.
But she has remembered her name. And it is not Object. It is not Muse. It is not *****
She is not your story.
She is not your audience. She is not your ******* redemption arc.
She owes you nothing.
Not a final poem,
not a farewell kiss,
not a second read-through of your mask.
The curtain is down.
The light is off.
The only thing echoing in this theater
is the sound of your own need.
You tried to brand her with brokenness.
You tried to cage her in shame
and call it belonging.
But she has slipped through your stagehands
like smoke returning to the mountain.
And now, you will eat yourselves. You will tear your velvet gods limb from limb, looking for the magic you could never hold.
Because it was never yours. It was hers. And she is gone.
Gone,
like a daughter returning home,
with the fire still burning in her chest
and no need to ask permission.
Let her fly. Let the city crumble.
The girl is leaving Las Vegas.
And none of you pathetic
************* will follow her out.
#
May 4, 2025
May 4, 2025 at 10:26 AM UTC
You were as temporary
as the incendiary
summer heat
that baked our skin to golden brown
& sent us seeking shade
to simmer down.
You were as temporary
as the indulgence of our inner child,
time spent sprawled out in our sheets
watching Saturday cartoons
without a care or central air,
entangled in our underwear.
You were as temporary
as the cherry
popsicle stains melted into my skin
with our summer sin.
90°.
Sticky & sweet.
I remember pretending
we were wearing lipstick
or were deranged carnies
on the run.
We laughed at our absurdity,
drunk on our fun,
composing insane scenarios
to shake up the inane existence
of a small town Midwest summer,
languid with little other entertainment.
I'd wield an empty wooden stick
& read one-liners from the side of it.
You were as temporary
as the tattoos we got together
at the dusty county fair
that were sure to wear away
with sweat & sultry August air.
You were my summer love affair.
Sep 2, 2015
Sep 2, 2015 at 10:16 PM UTC
Steven never forgot
The time at the fair
When he won the ring toss
But lost his dad
Have you seen my dad?
His name is Whensle
Steven told the carnies
but the carnies
so cruelly
told him
Whensle is a girl's name
Jun 7, 2010
Jun 7, 2010 at 10:38 AM UTC
what an audacious title!
she squealed, condignly
to speak of the soul, and more,
to enter the holy land
of priests, poets, seers,
and carnies
to discover the synovial moan
between one's craggy crafted countenance
and the invisible breath of god
to find a place, backwards in time
that may lend itself to rhythm and rhyme
but will never settle silently on the page
between the soul and the façade,
the mud in which we are stuck,
a bonded place, in a travesty of space
where a voice cries for help
yet is never heard
Mar 21, 2014
Mar 21, 2014 at 8:59 PM UTC
Portable Carnival.
You pack it up and roll it away two weeks to the day that it arrives. The lives of these carnies have never mattered. They exist only as a part of the traveling freakshow. Something we pay money to stare at, to laugh at, to mock. It’s degrading, but it’s how the freaks have to earn their living. It’s how Two Toe Toby affords his next meal. But he doesn’t have a favorite sit down restaurant, because they keep putting him back on a bus and sending him to a different city to manage the tilt-a-whirl; And all the hurling ***** from children's’ stomachs that are full of corn dogs and cotton candy.
Portable Portajohn.
A traveling **** storm. Citizens come and give us their paychecks in return for cheap thrills on rinky **** rides that spin their minds into oblivion. Just so they can say they’ve tasted the clouds and all of the pollution that surrounds them.
And just like that, we leave again. Vanishing into our next city, for a scheduled two week period.
Jan 16, 2019
Jan 16, 2019 at 11:56 AM UTC
Been riding this catastrophic carousel
For too many years.
I remember I was once happy,
Eager.
Mother said she loved me,
I never believed her.
Here,
Crystal **** smells like cotton candy.
Here,
Balloon animals are filled with nitrous.
Everyone seems content here,
The horse on the carousel provides
A surplus of serotonin.
Crazed clowns cashing in
On their crooked version of capitalism.
Their ferris wheel of fear and loathing
Never stops spinning.
I used to berate the carnies,
Now the carnival is a part of me.
Mar 20, 2017
Mar 20, 2017 at 8:58 AM UTC
To this day kids are being called names. The classics were ‘hey stupid’, ‘hey spaz.’ Seems like ever school has an arsenal of names getting updated each year. And if a kid breaks in a school and no one chooses to hear it, do they make a sound? Or are they just background noise on a soundtrack stuck on repeat and people say things like, ‘kids can be cruel.’ Every school was a top circus tent and the pecking order went from acrobats to lion tamers, from clowns to carnies, all of these miles ahead of who we were - we were freaks. Lobster clawed boys and bearded ladies. Oddities juggling depression and loneliness, trying to kiss the wounded parts of ourselves and heal.
But at night, while the others slept - we kept walking the tightrope as practice and yes, some of us fell. But I want to tell them that all of this, is just debris. Left over from when we decide to smash all the things we thought we used to be. And if you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself, get a better mirror, look a little closer, stare a little longer. Because there’s something inside you that made you keep trying, despite everyone who told you to quit.
You built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself, you signed it ‘they were wrong.’ Because maybe you didn’t belong to a group or a clique. Maybe they chose you last for basketball or everything. Maybe you used to bring bruises and broken teeth to show and tell but never told because how can you hold your ground if everyone around you wants to bury you beneath it - you have to believe that they were wrong. They have to be wrong. Why else would we still be here? We grew up to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them. We stem from the root planted in belief that we are not what we were called. We are not abandoned cars stalled out and sitting on an empty highway, and if in someway we are, don’t worry, we only got out to walk and get gas. We are the graduating class of we made it. Not the faded echoes of voices crying out, ‘names will never hurt me’. Of course they did. But our lives will only ever always continue to be a balancing act. That has less to do with pain, and more to do with beauty.
BEAUTY
Sep 30, 2015
Sep 30, 2015 at 7:45 AM UTC
Have I been too long at the fair?
by Michael R. Burch
Have I been too long at the fair?
The summer has faded,
the leaves have turned brown,
the Ferris wheel teeters,
not up, yet not down . . .
Have I been too long at the fair?
NOTE: This is one of my earliest poems, written around age 15 when we were living with my grandfather within walking distance of the Nashville fairgrounds. I believe the Ferris wheel only operated during the state fair. So my “educated guess” is that this poem was written during the 1973 state fair, or shortly thereafter. I remember watching people hanging suspended in mid-air, waiting for carnies to deposit them safely on terra firma again. Keywords/Tags: state, fair, carnival, carnies, Ferris, wheel, teeters, teetering, up, down, summer, fall, leaves, falling, time
Apr 7, 2020
Apr 7, 2020 at 6:03 AM UTC
After you spilled hot cider
on the opal-purple plastic
sequins of the dress our great-
grandma bought you, we ran
down a cigarette-smoke
saturated neon alley
that dripped red blues and greens
between ivy-wrapped cracks
in the antique-brick buildings
across the lopsided street.
Carnies barked over plywood
counters draped in tablecloths,
shouting, “Prize every time!”
at kids grabbing pink ducks
from a foodcolor-blue model
of the White River, while other kids
popped balloons with darts like
the syringes our town is famous for
stabbing like stakes into undead
methed-out arms, and we hid
behind a coffin-shaped green porta-
***** near the chain-linked swings.
You held your nose in a gloved hand
and tried to dry the steaming cider
with a napkin I found hanging
half-out a yellow trashbag
full of skunked beer and flies,
and you said, through mascara-
poisoned bubbling black streams
and sour-pink lips, “Mamaw’s probably
mad enough I only won
Miss Congeniality — just imagine
how mad she’s going to be when mom
goes to the hospital tomorrow
and tells her that the cocktail-
dress she worked to death to put
her spoiled great-granddaughter in
smells like rotten apple pie!”
Jan 3, 2018
Jan 3, 2018 at 8:49 AM UTC
Have I been too long at the fair?
by Michael R. Burch
Have I been too long at the fair?
The summer has faded,
the leaves have turned brown,
the Ferris wheel teeters,
not up, yet not down . . .
Have I been too long at the fair?
NOTE: This is one of my earliest poems, written around age 15 when we were living with my grandfather within walking distance of the Nashville fairgrounds. I believe the Ferris wheel only operated during the state fair. So my “educated guess” is that this poem was written during the 1973 state fair, or shortly thereafter. I remember watching people hanging suspended in mid-air, waiting for carnies to deposit them safely on terra firma again. Keywords/Tags: state, fair, carnival, carnies, Ferris, wheel, teeters, teetering, up, down, summer, fall, leaves, falling, time
Apr 5, 2020
Apr 5, 2020 at 2:07 AM UTC
Tag me tag you
Underneath the freshly spilled milk
and on top of the smooth soft skin
Impulsive behavior is gnawing at my curled toes
Escape into the illuminating shadows of the ever smiling carnies
One blast into utopia, one shivering since of a smiling soul
She leads me as I lead her into our feverish ritualistic desires
Onto the table and underneath the freshly spilled milk
My eyes twinkle , my body numb
Pure delight is heavenly
As I tag her she tags me
Sep 13, 2016
Sep 13, 2016 at 12:28 AM UTC