[a modified sestina]


My sister and I watched grandpa and grandma.
She has trained him into a service dog,
Sister has never been so marveled.
Grandma clears her throat and grandpa
clears her plate into the garbage.
My sister giggles. She has a thirst to learn.

My sister is ten when she rings in her first boyfriend.
Grandma crows that it’s lovely. I can see her mentally
checking off the list grandma made for her, thinks she's
taken the right step into womanhood. I can see it
in grandpa's trained face. He knows as I do that this
is only the beginning of her rise to the twisted Aphrodite.  

My sister is fifteen when she realizes she can puppet men
with the clink of her hips. She strolls with a boy lapping
at her heels, the next day she is with a new chump.
I ask of the boy, she snides that he is just a dip,
thing on the side, a mister, for when she is bored.
What god, do you think you've become? I spit.

She does not give me a second glance.
She nods his way and he dashes to the car door,
He doesn't dare let it brush against her arm.
She has mastered it, no need for lessons anymore.
She has achieved what grandma wouldn't dare touch.
I do not think she will stop here.

She is sixteen when I find her pooling
her eyes out on our father's front porch.
She spills They are gone.
The chump, the boyfriend, the dip, the mister,
all shelved her like a forgotten doll.
I bet they realize there is no love in puppetry.

I face her with no sympathy.
Can't expect men to tap dance on your string.
You can't bask in the burlesque of Aphrodite.
You wanted to be like grandma.
Grandma was noosed by the strings
she sowed onto grandpa before he left her.

No man will bow under a self-acclaimed god.
So, study this fall from Olympus.  
Understand, you are as human as we are.

So you want to look like a celeb?
Your teeth so bright but not into debt?
Well scrape back the enamal and watch what they can do
For a round trip to Turkey is the quick fix for you,
Waltzing the streets looking like the next Rylan
Still wearing the cheap snides and the push-bike you ride on,
As they scrape back your natural front covers
Stuck on caps to look like the perfect lover
But pre-warned by your annoying sensible brother,
And now it's starting to show its disorder.
No dentist will touch you with what you have left
That money you blew to just look like the best
Now rotton and hanging by a thread,
From that modern shiny smile that could hail down a cab
To looking like you've never had it so bad,
Be careful what you wish for and to mix with rest
Just don't consider anymore, from your eyes down to your breast.
You're beautiful just the way you are
Just get the dentist to scrape that bit off,
I think its a bit of rotton tar!

Turkey Teeth

JJB

Heather mounts the whispering hillsides where, since
Time’s genesis, hopeful men have retired and gone to die
And where their murmurs now permanently reside.
Where there is a home for the settling magpies, between
The bushes of bleached purples and murky greys. This place,
This stretched out place, sits under the teary drowned out sky,
And beyond the sight of the youthful starry eyes -
This place, this dreary place is coined the Sunken Side.

Gormless men limp out onto those hills, parading
Their depleting health and bragging to the clouds
Of their dampened wealth; all without the grandeur
Of uniformed marching limbs. Rather, they are more akin
To a slow drunken tide coming in at day’s end. Alas, this
Is how the Sunken Side has been penned, a place for buried men
And sullen men to withhold remorse, and play dead.  

Strangers strapped to strangers, glued to one another’s side,
Like mere passerbys queued in crowds of outsiders and snides .
This is no Holy place, and neither is it a Royal place;
Kingly deemed men are not catered here, rather only
A peasantry mess is ever vindicated, and spaces are reserved
For those sulking on islands, or those looking for new faces.

These same men bathe in buttercup fields, and seemingly
Fall in love with the briskly buttered on luck. But,

Do they dare take the Sunken test? Go out onto the Sunken Side,
Take in the hollow sinking breath and abide
Now only to the heather hills and the stranger men whose eyes
Are sewed to stars where each pupil latches
On to a flicker in the heavens, and men turn bizarre. Sparking
An obsession, and initiating constant digression with their
Sunken life. No, they rather regress to soaking in time.

Their need for kingdom
And want for graded inclusion outlives their mortality
And perpetuates their morality. Kingdoms always die.  
But the thirst for kingdom will never dry.
Alas! on this Sunken Side, amoungst the heather and
Whispering hills, men surrender their wills
And gladly give their final farewells.