“I went up in the ferris wheel for a last ride …

On By Christina's WordsIn Art, Quote1 Comment
London Eye by Mary Pierce From Mary's flash fiction piece: "Until a tiny thing trips you up"
London Eye by Mary Pierce
From Mary’s flash fiction piece: “Until a tiny thing trips you up“

 

“I went up in the ferris wheel for a last ride before being thrown into seventh grade. It went up into the stars and fell back to earth and rose again, and I had a magnificent vision, or think I did, though it’s hard to remember if it was that year with the chocolate cake or the next one with the pigs getting loose. The ferris wheel is the same year after year. it’s like all one ride to me: we go up and I think of people I knew who are dead and I smell fall in the air, manure, corn dogs, and we drop down into blazing light and blaring music. Every summer I’m a little bigger, but riding the ferris wheel, I feel the same as ever, I feel eternal. The combination of cotton candy, corn dogs, diesel smoke, and sawdust, in a hot dark summer night, it never changes, not an inch. The wheel carries us up high, high, high, and stops, and we sit swaying, creaking, in the dark, on the verge of death. You can see death from here. The wind blows from the northwest, from the farm school in Saint Anthony Park, a chilly wind with traces of pigs and sheep in it. This is my vision: little kids holding on to their daddy’s hand, and he is me. He looks down on them with love and buys them another corn dog. They are worried they will lose him, they hang on to his leg with one hand, eat with the other. This vision is unbearably wonderful. Then the wheel brings me down to the ground. We get off and other people get on. Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.”

~ Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home

Hi Mary! Thanks to your piece for inspiring today’s quote.

“Daffodowndilly” by A. A. Milne

On By JennieIn Poetry5 Comments

She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,
She wore her greenest gown;
She turned to the south wind
And curtsied up and down.
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbour:
‘Winter is dead.’

~Alan Alexander Milne

“The Whole Mess … Almost” by Gregory Corso

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry1 Comment
I ran up six flights of stairs
to my small furnished room   
opened the window
and began throwing out
those things most important in life

 

First to go, Truth, squealing like a fink:
“Don’t! I’ll tell awful things about you!”
“Oh yeah? Well, I’ve nothing to hide … OUT!”
Then went God, glowering & whimpering in amazement:   
“It’s not my fault! I’m not the cause of it all!” “OUT!”   
Then Love, cooing bribes: “You’ll never know impotency!   
All the girls on Vogue covers, all yours!”
I pushed her fat ass out and screamed:
“You always end up a bummer!”
I picked up Faith Hope Charity
all three clinging together:
“Without us you’ll surely die!”
“With you I’m going nuts! Goodbye!”

 

Then Beauty … ah, Beauty—
As I led her to the window
I told her: “You I loved best in life
… but you’re a killer; Beauty kills!”   
Not really meaning to drop her
I immediately ran downstairs
getting there just in time to catch her   
“You saved me!” she cried
I put her down and told her: “Move on.”

 

Went back up those six flights
went to the money
there was no money to throw out.
The only thing left in the room was Death   
hiding beneath the kitchen sink:
“I’m not real!” It cried
“I’m just a rumor spread by life … ”   
Laughing I threw it out, kitchen sink and all   
and suddenly realized Humor
was all that was left—
All I could do with Humor was to say:   
“Out the window with the window!”

 

Gregory Corso, “The Whole Mess … Almost” from Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. 

“Creatures” by Billy Collins

On By JennieIn Poetry2 Comments

Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds,
but I saw them in the furniture of childhood,
creatures trapped under surfaces of wood,

one submerged in a polished sideboard,
one frowning from a chair-back,
another howling from my mother’s silent bureau,
locked in the grain of maple, frozen in oak.

I would see these presences, too,
in a swirling pattern of wallpaper
or in the various greens of a porcelain lamp,
each looking so melancholy, so damned,
some peering out at me as if they knew
all the secrets of a secretive boy.

Many times I would be daydreaming
on the carpet and one would appear next to me,
the oversize nose, the hollow look.

So you will understand my reaction
this morning at the beach
when you opened your hand to show me
a stone you had picked up from the shoreline.

“Do you see the face?” you asked
as the cold surf circled our bare ankles.
“There’s the eye and the line of the mouth,
like it’s grimacing, like it’s in pain.”

“Well, maybe that’s because it has a fissure
running down the length of its forehead
not to mention a kind of twisted beak,” I said,

taking the thing from you and flinging it out
over the sparkle of blue waves
so it could live out its freakish existence
on the dark bottom of the sea

and stop bothering innocent beachgoers like us,
stop ruining everyone’s summer.

~Billy Collins

“I try to believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast. …

On By Christina's WordsIn Quote4 Comments

“I try to believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Count them, Alice. One, there are drinks that make you shrink. Two, there are foods that make you grow. Three, animals can talk. Four, cats can disappear. Five, there is a place called Underland. Six, I can slay the Jabberwocky.”

– Lewis Carrol