Dreaming of obsolete automobiles
Roadcrosser, the rambunctious chicken,
dances across the road.
Somewhere in her DNA
memories of two-leggeds and the crumbs they threw
fuel her frenzied crossing.
Old Mother Hubbard’s garden and dinner bells
do not ring over fallow fields.

Roadcrosser’s ancestors
zigged and zagged
a headless dance
that fills fowl stories
beyond the demise of yesterday.

Grandmother Chicken danced into the pond
spilling blood from her body
across the barnyard ballroom.
Nailed on a hat-rack fence post
her head squawked a protest song
before the end of everything.

When she reaches the other side,
Roadcrosser imagines the beheading.
Swallowing a lump in her chicken throat,
she sings Grandmother Chicken’s protest song,
unaware of the admiring eyes
of the last remaining two-legged
peering between a crack
in second story curtains
while sharpening her hatchet
and dreaming of Kentucky Fried.

Brenda Warren 2011

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Process notes
The wordle at The Sunday Whirl this week provided a bizarre assortment of words. I thought the best way to tackle them was with something quirky or playful. Friday night, I went to bed with the words dancing through my head. I woke up at 1:30 a.m. and wrote down the phrase: The rambunctious chicken danced across the road. When I went back to sleep landscapes of apocalyptic times visited my dreams. I combined the two ideas in Roadcrosser. It is my fervent wish that Roadcrosser survive, to pass on her Grandmother’s protest song.

In downtown motion
she clutches her insides
as passers-by jostle her spirit.

Occasionally swollen moments,
accidents that mirror everybody else’s outsides,
pull her into the human race.

She shops,
she looks in windows, lingering,
pretending she knows how to chat,
how to make others understand
she’s like them

when she’s an outsider
clutching her insides.

Passers-by strolling by homey shops
move in arcs around her
never noticing her hollow eyes
never noticing
she’s like them.

Clenched and unsteady
she clutches her insides
a solitary turquoise stone
cracking in the black of crowds.

Brenda Warren 2011

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Process Notes:
I suffer from crowd anxiety in large shopping centers, and started writing with the intent to explore and exaggerate that feeling. An alienated persona weaves its way through this piece. “She clutches her insides” is inspired by a student.

Visit The Sunday Whirl for more pieces utilizing Wordle 23 a la Viv.

disheartened spirit

Up from the ashes roaring
like a phoenix we should rise,
proud Americans,
scraping our hopes on the underside of freedom,
building our dreams, simple in the bold bright promise
of pockets one day filling.

Nine-Eleven’s devastation
an urgent Congress passes laws
designed to keep us wary
designed to keep us safe
designed to keep us
under control.

Shift our attention to strengthening our borders,
good fences make good neighbors.
Ron Paul cautions that fences can also be used to keep people in.
America, America, God shed his grace on thee.

Spending spins out of control,
military build-ups,
war,
now the people’s pockets empty.

Dignity falters and my spirit grows sad,
disheartened at the discontent
of congressional impasse.
Jolted into unimaginable debt,
we can’t even balance our budget.
My country ‘tis of thee
letting the rich run free
cut through those loopholes
that bind the greater we.

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Process Notes:

I am not so naïve to think that restoring equity to America’s tax system is the only thing that will solve her budget woes, but the resistance of the rich gets under my skin. Warren Buffet (the third richest man in the world) illuminates the inequity of the American tax system to a group of his peers, “The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.” Thank you, Mr. Buffet. Unfortunately, the Republican ruled Congress does not agree with him. It makes me so dang angry, that I wrote two pieces….this one was the second, but my favorite of the two. My intent was to go somewhere else with disheartened spirit, but either the words or my muse would not steer clear of the topic.

I think a great deal of what Ron Paul says makes sense. However, he would not raise the taxes of the rich, stating on David Letterman that they “already pay their fare share.”

If you want to read the first piece I wrote with this week’s Sunday Whirl words, it follows.

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Hang the Rich

Build a nation
then cut it down,
jolt it into modern nows.
Curtail false dignity
inflating bold ideation
roaring over the burdens
pausing passersby for pennies
(pennies!) in the street.

Pockets of people
starve and scrape.
Pockets of people
grow deep beneath loopholes
emboldened by the headiness of wealth.

Other faces puff up over dollar signs
faces that purchase control
faces that face an urgent
“we the people” smiling through their teeth.
Simple faces,
smug,
dancing in the glory of their shining yellow gold.

 
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
~George Orwell

Buttery sweet and birdlike the pallid women perch
quivering at Hell’s Bar studded with hordes of goofy bikers
who bloom like Dakota oil wells in the seventies
hitching their bikes, each to an old lady
lubed up and eager to crawl on back and rumble their
bodacious racks through rural Dakotan by-ways,
working their way to Sturgis where all the little white girls
line up at the bar and pretend to be bad ass biker bitches
but later cry about injustice underneath the stars
worried that the evening air will never salve the wound
of bikers and their bitches seeing straight on through their ruse.

 

Brenda Warren 2011

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Process notes:
With little editing, this piece came through quickly. In my early 20s you could say I was a little white girl, greatly intrigued by bikers and their “bitches.” I had some biker friends and got tattooed, but never quite fit the mold. I always thought that it was okay with me to watch their world from the outside, but after the speed with which this piece came, maybe the wound runs deeper than previously imagined. 😉

My diminutive rack made me certain that I’d fall short of biker expectations and that led to the title. I have driven through Sturgis, but never during the rally.

This piece was constructed around words from Jack Kerouac’s refrigerator. For more info on that visit my other blog, The Sunday Whirl, where you’ll find more pieces with Kerouac’s words waiting for your eyes to devour them.

***political aside (a balm for my conscience)***
The playground white America has made of South Dakota is a slap in the face to the Lakota and other American Indians who consider much of the land sacred. It’s kind of like an ongoing circus in a church parking lot.

Worse yet: Mount Rushmore is named for a white American male, and has the likenesses of four United States presidents carved into its face. Prior to the name change and its desecration, the Lakota called the mountain Six Grandfathers. Where are their grandfathers now?