Ernie Wormwood
ELVIS & ME
We call each other E & wear blue suede
Birkenstocks.
I recite my poetry for him.
He grooves to one called
Elvis At The Poetry Festival.
He paints our toenails
Cobalt.
You should see our bods.
We work out on Tuesdays,
Memphis Pilates,
Right after cooking class.
Elvis's forte,
The Fried Banana Peanut Butter Sandwich.
There is no cholesterol here.
Wednesdays, it's opera with our parents,
Vern & Gladys, Eleanor & Ernest.
This moon we're doing Puccini's La Boheme.
Rodolfo is a poet too, you know.
Elvis performs Rodolfo.
I, of course, am Mimi.
It's never too soon to take up writing so
Thursdays we host a workshop with
Keats & Yeats, Babe Ruth, Chaplin,
Patsy Cline, Carlos, Kurt Cobain, Diana,
Marvin Gaye, Flint, Shakespeare. Tham.
The Babe is our Manager, all is fixed here.
& all we write lives on in
The Dead Poets Workshop Anthology.
We sing country every Friday night
Now with Johnny & June
& spend long weekends together writing
Songs about sex.
It's so easy when death is done,
There's only one thing left to write about.
They crash in our guest room painted
Johnny Cash Black.
The J's & the E's are happy.
The circle is unbroken,
The ring of fire, intact,
Here, at the We Fix Your Heartbreak Hotel
In heaven.
NOBEL NOVELIST
The Wish We Were Somewhere
Else Reading Group
read Absalom, Absalom
and listened to Faulkner's
Nobel acceptance of 1950
where he drawled
at a hundred miles an hour,
that the young man or woman
writin' today has forgotten
the problems of the human heart
and "Writes not of the heart,
but of the glands."
One story goes
that when the garden club
ladies toured his house,
Mr. William Faulkner himself
languished in the garden,
and as any gentleman
from Mississippi would,
upon seeing the ladies,
stood up to greet them
naked.
Let us now put our hands together
for southern writers.
VIENE LA SERA
This Sunday morning
one year, one month, and one day
after you went wherever you are,
I listen to the love duet from Madama Butterfly,
remembering that night at the Opera House
such a beautiful sense of dread, almost unbearable,
for a thousand of us know all along
what Butterfly does not
that her love
will come to ruin and everlasting sadness
and one always ends up an orphan
in a country far from home.
We all weep for us all.
"Look our tears are shining," you say
as Butterfly and Pinkerton
in the viene la sera
call to the opera lover I have lost,
sweet Father.
INSOMNIAC THEATER
At my writing desk
it's 2:00 a.m.
the tv is on
how high the moon
outside the window
a lambent saucer
tilting in the night sky
turning just a little, just for me
as the lovers
on HBO's Real Sex
perfect anal intercourse,
feathers waving to me
from their you-know-whatsies.
A COUPLE, AFTER TRUFFAUT
Truffaut felt sometimes that the filmmaking
process was more interesting than the result.
While you are gone so that I can rest, there will
be dark shades to silence the sun, to make
night for day.
When you return to the bed, I will be awake,
rested, restless, ready to make
day for night.
Ernie Wormwood is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her poems have appeared in yawp, Convergence, The Antietam Review, Underwire, Beltway Quarterly, The Cafe Review, Rhino, Raintiger, and in the anthologies Poetic Voices Without Borders and Only the Sea Keeps:
Poetry of the Tsunami. She lives in Leonardtown, Maryland.
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