Wee ***** Waggles was the whitest whale
And from the day he was born he was a wiggler ~
He wiggled and waggled so very much
His friends called him ***** the wiggling jiggler~
You could always find ***** in a crowd of whales
As he would make the wildest waves as he was going~
Wilder waves than any whale could make
Most of all when he surviced to do his blowing~
Other whales loved playing with ***** Waggles
And they would swirl around in Willys waves so wildly~
Willys mother would always be watching him
As she wondered around swimming mildly~
And Wee ***** Waggles was so easy to watch
Because Wee ***** was so wonderfully white~
For Wee ***** was so wonderfully white
He could even be seen at night~
All the fish in the ocean how they loved *****
When ***** would wonder their watery way~
And they all loved Wee ***** so very much
They'd cry out "Oh ***** stay with us and play"~
Wee ***** Waggles was the whitest whale
The most popular whale in the water~
Mrs whale , Willys mum wondered just what
Would have happened if she'd had a daughter~.

Terrence Michael Sutton
copyright 1988

http://youtu.be/RGFytiWwsRo
(this is a link to a video that I created for this poem)
Ridgewood (Where We Wait)
We take the most delicious train
to the Queens-Brooklyn border to get here
Where everything is liminal, uncertain, undecided
Even the foundation, Arbitration Rock, at the house on Onderdonk
Was buried for centuries, dug up, and chucked on another imaginary line
The streets are on a grid, and the border on a diagonal
making a stair-stepping hypotenuse of the confused
A challenge to put your time to good use
even on the oz-like yellow brick road on Stockholm
You hear Poles on the street muttering “Marnowanie mojego
czasu tutaj” through the bachata dripping
from the apartments above the stores on Fresh Pond Road

Two of the best restaurants in the boroughs
Rosa’s pizza and Zum Stammtisch mark
the north and south borders of the hill where we wait  
During the seventy-seven riots, Ridgewood
seceded from her stepsister, broke from Boswijk and Breuckelen
-
There’s racism here like carbon monoxide smoke:
at the Ridgewood Y, a man sweats through his shirt
revealing swastikas pierced through the skin underneath
and the Romanian dentist down the street drilling
says “Cred ca am pierd timpul meu aici”
through the machinery scream and burning enamel
she won’t say this if you understand what she means

Walking past the 99 cent stores and the pharmacies,
remembering that there is good, fast, and cheap
But you can only have two of them at the same time,
Crazy Loretta, under her navy knit woolen hat
in her pink sweatsuit and winter coat, smokes
her shaking hand-rolled cigarettes below the train
trestle grinning with her jaw-jutting through
her inch thick specs.  She waggles her chicken bone fingers
saying, “Hiya honey” when you walk by.
If you are brave enough to stop and talk to her,
she’ll tell you that her nephew plays
for the Texas Rangers and her daughter
is a doctor and she’ll probably give you bedbugs
She’ll tell you, fascinated, like a child: “when you squish them - the blood comes out”
She’ll tell you the same thing tomorrow - Loretta forgets.  
In her mind, a phrase like green smoke from her youth
Ich glaube, ich bin meine Zeit hier

The playgrounds are packed with children
practicing how to swear, the girls huddled
reading Twilight like the Bible, and the boys
huddled reading the girls like the Bible
A woman yells to her son to come home a third time
and mutters “Creo que estoy perdiendo mi tiempo aquí”

Buried in Machpelah Cemetary less than a mile from my house,
is the place Houdini is still staging his greatest escape
He has a wide audience.  Sometimes I think there are more dead
residents of Ridgewood than living ones.  The cemeteries stretch
the borders of the appropriate spilling into Christ
the King high school’s front lawn.  Driving Cypress Hills street,
the Manhattan skyscrapers rise looking tomb-toothed parallaxed and
blurry through ephemeral sepulchres, stones, and cement angels pointing at the sky

On one of the stones it says simply: Videor perdo temporis hic
I think we are wasting our time here.

Luis drives around the block once more;
his car zipping, ripping,
as his thoughts
are surely racing.

We don't know,
but Monica keeps his keys in her back pocket.
She waggles her peaches when he drives by.

"Juicy fruit", Luis murmurs, then
shifts it into high gear,
spins out,
comes again;
his gravel strikes her hard
between the knees. Monica spreads

her branches, two twigs waving.
She shouts,
"Hey old man, why don't you come perch on these?"

It's a dance of disaster, and no plaster cast protects
those alabaster bones she bares so well.

Since we were toddlers
We've had the move;
Something like a siddle,
The sway of balance
On the right/left shift.
But a siddle's for a snake,
A wiggle's for a worm,
And my dog waggles
When I return.

We stop, we wait,
Frozen, and confused;
We're a bit ticked-off
We can't pull this off
In a dance of decisive moves.

We've seen our share
Of waddling sops
Leave sidedoors
On Sunday mornings.
That's not what we do.

I've stopped a tot
From toddling,
Yet now I can't help you.

It's not a reel, a jig or clog,
It's like a line-dance of two frogs.
Then I hear Yeats' fiddler,
And I commence to be a widdler.
When you meet your doppel-widdler,
Don't look,
Don't ask,
Don't take long,
Just widdle past
To the fiddler's song.

Wrapped in the warm
prison of the bedsheets
a cold foot sneaks past
and dangles in the air at the
end of the bed

I shiver like sailors of old
in this cold wind that blows
across my toes

I wrestle the blanket
for the sleep it maintains
all elbows and thumbs
****** this way and that
restless wanderers of designer sheets

I shiver like sailors of old
in this cold wind that blows
across my toes

As I grumble
look to the clock
Four AM glares back at me
a cold foot wiggles
a cold foot waggles
Ode to be a cold foot
sorrowful tale to be sure

I shiver like sailors of old
in this cold wind that blows
across my toes

4 stiffened, his joists are particularly long and gnarled lances
of pearly bleach. gradually skinless of bones lanky with hands
laid a scythe. he waggles and sheds surly mortal coils we waif
to dust in polite crumbs of rotting health
and his breath is specific. a lash of practical mort

In a world so full of muddled dichotomies and clumsy classifications,
Of spectrums and ranges and imprecise definitions,
Of moving targets and sliding scales,

What is a woman?

When your definition’s solid, sorted, and sold
Am I an archetype or anomaly in the sordid taxonomy?

Here are my chromosomes:
Two Xs to mark the swirling twirls of DNA
Properly paired to provide a guide for my curves.

Here is my body:
Ripe and rounded and ready for perusal
By those who find art in a classical form.
******* that are not perfect,
*** that waggles as I walk,
A waist that looks even better when I’m angry
(Hands on hips and arms akimbo).

Here is my ***:
Excited by the touches that evolution would predict.
I respond when kissed by stubbled lips,
When stroked by calloused hands,
When rocked beneath a man that biology would call
“The fittest.”
Our coupling is a pledge to survive.

Here is my womb:
A wonder of chemistry and medicine,
It has been occupied for defense against bearing fruit.
I have declared my selfishness to doctors,
To family,
To strangers.
I will not house another life
Because my own heart is sufficient.
I will not nurse another’s hunger
Because my appetites are wild.
I will not be a mother,
And you will not change my mind.

Here is my hysteria:
I cry sometimes when books are sad,
Or when commercials are touching,
Or when I’m angry,
Or hungry.
Or confused.
Or happy.
Or whatever.

Here is my meek and mild nature:
In the hand that covers an ornery smile.
In the hesitation before I swear.
In the blush of a lover surprised.
In the warmth that you must lose, not earn.

Whether I am a winning or a wanting woman
I am finished with apologies.
When all is counted/sorted/labeled

My tastes and brightest talents are as tame as I can bear.

It is like shaking hands with a bag of oyster crackers;
Joints sprained, ligaments torn, fingers fractured
And splayed off in several different directions
Like a weathervane that has had a rather nasty shock, indeed,
The whorls of his fingertips, the uneven rise and fall of the knuckles
Serving as a travelogue of a lifetime spent
In towns not quite ready for the big time:
Olean, Oneonta, Visalia, Valdosta, a dozen more besides,
A million miles on buses
Of uncertain vintage and roadworthiness.
Each scar and swelling, each uneven path
Between base and fingertip has a tale of its own;
The ring finger on the left hand first broken
By a Big Bob Veale fastball that was supposed to be a curve,
Later snapped again by Steve Dalkowski,
Who, drinking quite a bit by then
(When ol’ Steve had put away a few, he notes ruefully,
You didn’t want to hit him, catch him,
Or sit in the first few rows behind the plate)
Most likely never saw the sign
Indicating slider instead of high heat.
The index finger on his throwing hand?  
Well, that was from a foul tip in…Wellsville in ’59?  Walla Walla in ’62?
When you’ve bit up by the ball as many times as I have,
You tend to forget what you tore up when.
Ah, but no such problem with the right pinkie;
That was snapped one cold April night
Somewhere between Winnipeg and Duluth,
During a poker game when a backup infielder
Produced an unexpected and wholly inexplicable king
Seemingly from nowhere.

But those hands!  They were, in the lexicon of the scouts
(The same ones who labeled him
With the dreaded tag of “good field, no hit”)
Who trolled the sandlot parks
And high school fields of his childhood, “soft”;
Indeed, he could cradle a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball like an infant,
And, with the gentlest and most imperceptible of movements,
Turn the wildness of a nineteen-year-old phenom
Into an inning-ending third strike, and even now,
Two decades of bad lighting and jury-rigged equipment
Having turned the topography of his digits craggy and asymmetrical,
They seem as smooth and supple as they were at nineteen,
With all the strength and unsullied smoothness of youth,
As he grips and waggles an unseen bat
In the course of retelling
(In his one brief, glorious spring in camp with the big club)
How he doubled to the gap in right-center
Off none other than the great Whitey Ford himself.

the bird pecks the acorn,
fighting through the casing's steel,
the bird breaks his beak and falls to the floor,
the rainbow of his wings failing in spiel.

the floor becomes a deep red,
the acorn waggles and girds in its success,
not realising that his compatriot he had spent all the moons with was long dead,
and it falls with the passing winds of distress.

It hit's the floor in the same place,
bouncing off the stone statue corpse,
the acorn stares to the bird's face,
knowing that it won’t peck anymore marks in its force.

the acorns rolls next to the bird in solemn shifting agreement,
knowing that it's barrier and breakdown is imminent for its bereavement.

.i'm not going to perfect this piece of writing, since i know, that it will sink into the bottomless pit of time, and even if i give a **** about it being remembered, it won't be... there are authentic observations in this... the authenticity is in the fact they are being remarked... but to even bother to make said observations dogma, or perfected... no... not a chance... i can't be bothered... i'm already thinking about what i'll gorge down before going to sleep... a tuna, sweetcorn and mayo side... i showed the way, i'm not going to provide the pristine scholastic schematic of the interaction between tongue, lips, teeth and the breath; least of all... people will draw different conclusions when they look into their mouth while ushering out an R... notably in English... with the extinct trill, in orthodox text: atypically associated with the letter... bee sting ow something... these people mowphed the lettew Aw into a lisp and wewe stung by a bee, so they widiculously speak like so? calling it a lisp?

all the president's men...

   i just woke up from
a period of the 1980s,
the 1990s,
the naughty-naughty
double zero d'd'digtal
aging of the digital world...

the Mongols are coming!
the Aztecs are coming!
death cloud don counter
measures, no. 6...

but seriously...
what the **** happened
to journalism?
you think that i am nostalgic
about the music from
the 20th century?

i'm nostalgic about
the sort of journalism
displayed
in the movie all the president's men...
the current stuff?
thanks for the crack...
but... i'll just stick to either
sober, cigarettes or *****...

what happened,
why all this bogus...
worse than fiction dissection...
words are... violence?!
i thought that words
were meaning?
i thought that words
were phonetic encoding
devices?
  from the phonetics
came the linguistics...
i thought weren't
mono-,
  one-dimensional,
they had a resonance
to them,
the words were stereo-....
words, are, violence...
let that sink in...
words, are... violence?!
you sure on that one?

words are the skeletal
representation of forms,
words are the elevated status
of hieroglyphs...
they are the conjurers of
ideas, narrative, otherwise
hidden / lost names
and nukes of meme...
ideas... working from the basin
of images...
  
words are violence...
wow!
     it's like the previous
years were backwards
chimp frenzy of violence...
but now?
now is a different playground...

i thought that words were meaning...
so...
     all meaning is now hate?
so... if i wanted to encode someone's
speech, by lip-reading...
the B pouch of the bubble lips...
P, also similar...
   M the vibrating lips murmur...
A: hidden breath catcher H
in dentistry...
        open mouth...
O genesis of an open mouth
getting smaller...
   U... open mouth...
forming into a bird's beak worth
of lips...
    so many instances...
wait... how many times is the tongue
actually used... to provide
letters?
A: x
      B: x
C: ✓
      D: ✓
E: x
          F: x
   G: ✓
                H: ✓ (not in Slavic, though)
I: ✓/x
   J: ✓
    K: x
        L: ✓
    M: x
  N: ✓ (tongue pressed to the palette)
O: x
               P: x
             Q: ✓ (the tongue is tensed,
   when the breath is passed...
like when you fold your tongue
to look like a ******, ever so slightly...
the letter actually rests upon
a tensed tongue, slightly folded,
retracted, and the breath and pursed
lips being subsequent)
    R: ✓ / x
         unless you had your tongue
numbed in western Europe,
on this letter, or harking up
no excess phlegm from a non-existent
flu in French... this is the rattle
letter... rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rolling a ball...
rattlesnake...
  you pass a breath... whereby your
tongue waggles... repeatedly slapping
itself against the palette...
otherwise... just a boring Ar....
S: ✓ (no explanation required...
          the tongue presses against
the palette... a breath is passed through
it... and a hiss is made)
T: ✓ - the tongue bounces off
the palette once it has been pressed on
it for a while...
U: x
    V: x
        W: a misnomer in terms of vowels...
or in terms of consonants...
   it's a duo-syllable,
and... well... not exactly given status
as a letter, a mono-syllable instance
of either vowel, or consonant...
it's the only name of a letter
in the English language...
a double-U (shh... it's a double V)
X: ✓ an exploratory variant of S:
choking tongue on the rub-rub with tonsil,
pulling back, and then behaving like an S...
Y: ✓
                 the shape?
  pursed lips, expanding to an open mouth,
almost smiling, pivot on the tongue
caught on the schematic            i
Z: another alternative to S...
tongue pressed to the teeth,
a breath passes above it...
   a vibration, the teeth unclench
their bite... and an -ed comes out...
but the tongue posits the Z,
so unlike the S
             the breath is ejected
-ed
                 rather than inhaled
           es-

tongue versus the palette versus
the top two incisors,
contra breath and lips...
of the bones...

It is like shaking hands with a bag of oyster crackers;
Joints sprained, ligaments torn, fingers fractured
And splayed off in several different directions
Like a weathervane that has had a rather nasty shock, indeed,
The whorls of his fingertips, the uneven rise and fall of the knuckles
Serving as a travelogue of a lifetime spent
In towns not quite ready for the big time:
Olean, Oneonta, Visalia, Valdosta, a dozen more besides,
A million miles on buses
Of uncertain vintage and roadworthiness.
Each scar and swelling, each uneven path
Between base and fingertip has a tale of its own;
The ring finger on the left hand first broken
By a Big Bob Veale fastball that was supposed to be a curve,
Later snapped again by Steve Dalkowski,
Who, drinking quite a bit by then,
(When ol’ Steve had put away a few, he notes ruefully,
You didn’t want to hit him, catch him,
Or sit in the first few rows behind the plate)
Most likely never saw the sign
Indicating slider instead of high heat.
The index finger on his throwing hand?  
Well, that was from a foul tip in…Wellsville in ’59?  Walla Walla in ’62?
When you’ve bit up by the ball as many times as I have,
You tend to forget what you tore up when.
Ah, but no such problem with the right pinkie;
That was snapped one cold April night
Somewhere between Winnipeg and Duluth,
During a poker game when a backup infielder
Produced an unexpected and wholly inexplicable king
Seemingly from nowhere.

But those hands!  They were, in the lexicon of the scouts
(The same ones who labeled him
With the dreaded tag of “good field, no hit”)
Who trolled the sandlot parks
And high school fields of his childhood, “soft”;
Indeed, he could cradle a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball like an infant,
And, with the gentlest and most imperceptible of movements,
Turn the wildness of a nineteen-year-old phenom
Into an inning-ending third strike, and even now,
Two decades of bad lighting and jury-rigged equipment
Having turned the topography of his digits craggy and asymmetrical,
They seem as smooth and supple as they were at nineteen,
With all the strength and unsullied smoothness of youth,
As he grips and waggles an unseen bat
In the course of retelling
(In his one brief, glorious spring in camp with the big club)
How he doubled to the gap in right-center
Off none other than the great Whitey Ford himself.

when ere sleep tries to soothe the sleepy eyes
i get the mirror from off the shelf
and start getting queerer, chasing myself
drilling thy far-out mien that no more is my guise

Alas!,emits the odd reflection,
A young woman with good intents
but needed direction

pardon my manners dear me,
i says, I've lost my taste for grace as you see
I'm no longer virtue's servant and devotee

pardon my treacherous soul that trembles like autumn's leaf
like a slice of iron between two lodestones of woe and grief

but, life waggles me up and down in ebb and flow
and nothing but moans, perfidy and malice To bestow
shall i settle for a crust of bread and a place to sleep in ?
shall i hold my tongue in pain and take a corner to weep in ?
I've been a gullible pawn in a staggering game of chess

pardon my weary soul dear me, i shall confess
not pawns who gentle but pawns who bow
nor who crown are kings  but they who blow
therein he who craves the crown full-blown,
cleaving all paths, must wrestle the burden
that dropped him down