Drama Under The Circus Tent...Excerpt #2

Dosage

Origins Part II: Mutations…
Was Abby-normal becoming a young freak?
Worried she would turn into a hairy beast
Perhaps, she'd one day grow an orange beak.

Would her paranoia cause her to leak?
Become that person she loved the least.
Was Abby-normal becoming a young freak?

She scavenged for a cure, a little sneak.
As young fur spread, a surprising feast.
Perhaps, one day she'd grow an orange beak.

And fly away to a sunny Martinique.
To forget her dad's slow lecture on yeast
Was Abby-normal becoming a young freak?

Or ascending barefoot the highest peaks,
The air so thin it seemed as if she'd cease.
Perhaps one day she'd grow an orange beak.

She sensed she was much more than merely geek
In her future dreams, there wasn't any peace.
Was Abby-normal becoming a young freak?
Perhaps, one day she'd grow an orange beak.

Coping

When the pharmacist lost his only wife
He thought of eating salads of colored drugs
Because his daughter knew where he hid his knife
Why had his mind become tiny like a bug?
Not a physicist or mathematician, wizard
Maybe his affair was with a magic rug.
And wished he stuck out tongues like a lizard
Or was fried pulling out his sockets plug

Abby-normal spread out her massive arms
To hug her weary father's chemical disgrace
Only the great cement mixer spoon calmed
A face stomped upon by apoplexy
Would there be another love that felt like lace?
He cut toes with scissors and healed with balm.

As if it never happened…

The next day she would be forced to return to school
And avoid the prying eyes of her judging peers
She'd have to quickly learn how to play the fool.

She was too old to hide behind the monkey bars
Could she leap inside her favorite ancient stories
Like the melancholy clown stuck in tiny cars

Her life seemed like one a long word problem
Was she chosen to peel away their veneer?
Solving if she could only tear apart the stem.

In history, she took out her composition book
America's story would say what she could not
Her father was not an adulterous crook.

He'd love her even if she was a wild thing
Without the aid of camouflage's secret shroud
Would nets catch her if she flew off
The swing?

The Correct Dosage?

It seemed her dad was heretical
When it came to swallowing chemicals.
When his eyes began to glaze over
It was best to just roll him over
And make sure he drank some water
Before his mind went to slaughter.

She tried to be a helpful daughter
Before adolescence had caught her
Yet here she was forced to be both
Mother and child as if they both
Had been blown from their mild life
Not realizing what caused their strife.

She squeezed black rags over his head
And pulled him from now soaked beds
Waking him with smelling salts power
And she then dragged him to showers.
What could she conjure to provide his cure?
She'd use a fishing rod and a lure,

To catch what they needed to find with hoe
Maybe, sell snake oil, put on a show
To make them forget their troubles
Until they stopped seeing doubles
What was on her little chin, some stubble?
She did not even want to know…

Micah Zevin 2007...

Drama Under The Circus Tent!!??( novel in verse in progress)

Dosage

Before the Lights Part I:
Once she was normal
Then she was Abby-normal
She used to do cart wheels
And flips in the park by
Her father the pharmacist
He'd hand men a pill which
Would remove their cyst.
Before the hair invaded
She didn't suffer melancholia
Just traded it in for paranoia
She didn't raise her loving fist
Until she passed the sixth grade
Daddy said it was the fault of
Chemicals molding her clay
For the rest of her life he forbade
Violence's shrinking head near
His home unless no night or day
Persisted anymore to sway.
We are humans, not swinging
From ropes like circus performers
We should all have hearts of mourners
She knew if this hair made her insane
God knows what would be her refrain
So she shaved off her hair each day
Sneaking home from school a different
Way.

On a Tight Rope…
Momma was cheating on Daddy with the
Refrigerator repairman
She shouted for the whole town to hear,
You're not a real man.
The child she smirked is not even mine
Do you think dear husband I crossed a line?
You must have had some tawdry affair
Your little freakish brat I did not bare.
She stared at her father with muted eyes
He responded with sadness deep
It appeared he might take a leap.
Instead, He snarled a quip.
Look honey bunch, she has your lip.
If you try to scar her with your nomadic fever
I will take to with a clever
Just because you are losing your marbles
Do not dare scar your child
Whatever I have done she has done no harm.
There, there, husband her lies your charms
You are a martyr's disgrace
Hidden behind a younger face
At least I try to repair what has not been fixed,
He said; I don't get up and quit.
At this she laughed hiding a sniffles guilty sound
The repairman's car door was open
Is was time to cross the bridge Daddy made her turn around
He did not want her to stare at the lostWhat he had never found.

Origins Part I: A Betrayal?
Abby-normal ran home fast
She hoped her tears would last
Her mother had become another
Monster freak show demon housewife?

She hoped her tears would last
Memories might erode like the beach
Monster freak demon housewife?
Would dad burn her photographs?

Memories might erode like the beach
He'd say, this was never your mother
Just an elitist boutique store clerk
In search of quick aphrodisiac fixes

He locked the pictures in his diary,
His love was touched by addiction
In search of quick aphrodisiac fixes
To hallucinate a reality of choice

His love was touched by addiction
Or branded by a fetishistic affliction?
He'd always been curious of alternatives
Changing colors like dye in a quilt

He'd always been curious of alternatives
Her mother had become another's lust
Changing colors like dye in a quilt
So Abby-normal ran home fast.

Part 1 with more to come of my novel in verse in progress. Look out for what comes next in the Drama Under the Circus Tent. Has anyone taken the correct dosage here?

Micah Zevin 2007

Between a Nightmare and a Dream

Pillows and Knives

Are the feathers from pillows bringing him down?
He treaded over hot coals with the softest frown

With the crickets insistent dialogue he’d begin to sneeze
His tears were emasculated by the tentative breeze

He liked to climb to tops of tents and reflect on Northern Stars
Wouldn’t be better off if he really came from Mars?

Why does he assume his anger is wrong?
Brewing beneath surface fumes among the angry throngs

When he sharpened his favorite knives
He’d wondered how he should live out one of his nine lives

Would majesty spring forth as the bees were creating honey in the hives
Droning on and on to a queen who dominated their lives

He said he would disregard the noise and watch out for spies
Until you have no use for my watchful eyes

Late at night he could not sleep so he chopped some vegetables
And wondered why routine business trips could be so illegible

Sometimes it felt as if life was an inconsequential comedy sketch
He heard comedy was hard but could it make you wretch

If he could magically write a masterpiece
He’d revise spring and make it his new disgrace

He met a guy at a workshop who called him a writing schizoid
He told him it’s just a character so don’t be so paranoid

No, he said, I mean cut through the crap
Get to the prime meat, sharpen our senses with a fitful slap

Micah Zevin 2007

A Bearded Lady Dreams?...

Selected Memories, or Storytelling...

I am trying to stink up something to right
Was the lion tamer kidnapped in the night?

You have been wronged by many a dirty sponge
If there is treasure before you, why don't you lunge?

In a dream, you have a drink with your writer friends
You tire of their babble, their triteness offends

Yet they were transparent or never really present
They did not have the beauty of a mumbling pheasant,

The circus strong man's most favored companion
What inspired him to become a vegetarian

Only the circus librarian had no one to love
Cloistered in his bibliotheque frowning from above

Where were the "Bearded Lady's" famed talking doves
She'd open her hands and they'd fly off her gloves

Each time one could see tears in her eyes
Her faces carried the weariness of many surviving lies

At the end of her act, she lost her repose
Heaving at the audience a bag of clown noses

Now everyone looked like the clown she hated
She used to love him when he'd been caught and baited

She dreamt that she had died on top of big red feet
or had been visited by a troop of ghostly sheets

The "Bearded Lady" thought of her blind father
She wanted to erase all that had faltered...

Micah Zevin 2007
...Stories from the circus tent

A Secretary's Song...

"The Lullaby"

Does this foundation rest on jewels
or, the malevolence of mules?
She believes everything will crumble
until she follows all the rules

Her moods disorder her hanging clothes
She's too tired to re-organize
Are there cobwebs in her large eyes?
Does she know if she can even speak in prose?

When will here prince disarming
come to bring deserved spoils?
She needs stabilities cement
to erase these burning boils

Each morning she wakes for work
to be screamed at by another jerk
Each day ending, she hopes could begin again
Then she'd laser away those callous smirks

She will not wait for foreboding days
to bring out of hiding her melancholy lear
at the planning she could of done to
stop those many headlighted deers

She should go swiftly to the church
where trusted gospel of childhood lurks?
She prays to escape the minds rack
and find her own graceful perch

Where there will be no reason on tap
to twitter at paper pile dismay
only incubate drama's malleable farce
and filter the blackbird hovering by her lap

She'd rise dripping as if from a nightmare
wondering why she'd become so scared
Could she propel curtains to open and close
and heave the rickety cradle down those neverending stairs...

Micah Zevin 20o7
Don't forget Secretary's day my ceo friends...or it might be your end!
Send me your secretary songs?

The Battle of the Hysterical Brain...letters from the war torn

Post War

When morning's palpitations lament
He exits a drowsily constructed tent
a clown tired of the juggling maze
rather be inhabiting a Hendrixian haze
erase conciousness from his temple's altar
inevitably, the brains soft shell cracks and falters.

Words parachute like skydivers delcared heaven spent
He's asked by his "friends the media" what's his bent?
Do child prodigy conformist rebels go through phases?
get taken in by the latest fads or fashion crazes
or every five seconds dream of women wearing halters
Will you smile like the fish who reeled in his potential captors?...

Micah Zevin 2007

Through The Cracked Looking Glass...

Department Store Mannequin Returns From the Front

I jumped from behind the display glass
With my automatic rifle and my righteous words
Yet behind the vortex,act crass, smoke lawns grass
Presently, I'm rolling in foreign dirts turds
Ravished at the images of your sacramental curds

What if electrical currents ignited deadened fingers
Would the moment justify burning law to the ground?
Somehow, I can't let more fascists infidels linger
Without a bodies young comforts, you're lost not found
Open these security gates danger, release the fiery hounds

I say burn all the pornography with bomb blasts
Save me the audio, I like to study the perverse sounds
I am at the ship's wheels directing my animal spawn
How to live in harmony with the savage man
Who must improve others, no plan, not so fast, will it ever last?

They sent my mannequin to the desert unequipped
He wrote me letters about he'd been so gippped
His helmet was made of plastic, his shield of play-doh
He said he was issued the same gun as cartoon G.I. Joes
I wailed when he said he'd lost his big toe

I wrote lucky you're a mannequin, you don't feel a thing
The next morning, in my ears, there was a constant ring
I smashed all the alarms with my bare fist, my girlfriend said
I told her, last night I dreamed her head exploded,
and while I tried in vain to stop it, my cracking bones imploded

When my mannequin returned from the front
He was alive barely likea fake plastic man flesh beaten yo-yo
Shocked! He could feel his fingers, even his phantom toes
What was it they said, he had felt like a sitting duck on frozen pond
Except for flashes of schrapnel that made breathing like a stunt

He remembered being a child mannequin window runt
People exploded bombs ignited by oh so pious tongues
And his troop labelled all of them inhumane evil ones
Stepping over the quite dead and their living ghosts, loves
on invisible rungs
You'd be captivated by the hoax, sheltered from the blunt

Why was he trapped in this fragile mass?
It was better in a mannequins silent morass
Then to burn in the nightmares of your high school class
He was so smart, so brave, he was the leader in the musical cast

Maybe, it was time to go inside glass and beyond
Become a new tadpole morphing into his new pond
Until flesh no longer bleeds he's a man missing appendages
Now, I'll take off these invisible man bandages
Until they pack my parts away in boxes, like careful sausages

Micah Zevin 2007

All department store mannequins write me a letter about your life battles?
When will you return from your war front?

When Exiting a Dream State

Tell Nightmares

In this nether,
In the blanket high
Of brown declarations
Fake sugar sized holes
Hide behind the flash of
Many flashing monitors
Flashing the daily schedule
Of drama in your tennisCourt
of collapse.

These morning seditions drill
Oil rigs into waking states
Transport rain showers
Court ordered murder
Terror delirious and understated,
Calmed by maple syrup laced
Oatmeal.

Turbulence decompresses
Blankets silencing alarms
Needle stuck music on repeat,
Spinning backwards into
the Supposed deliverance
of Subliminal letters.

All that they cherish is burning
Coal fuels warts eroding what
Is left by the Sand-weaver
Whirling restlessness,

Conducting surgery on R.E.M. delirium
Drooping until mixed cereal consumed.
You are no longer upright bat, until juices
Ignite irises distorted, cracked pupils,
Followed footsteps creaking through iridescent serenity.

Not the kind of reverie for which you
Were stitched together—the purpose of
Soul repair,
Or tampering

Micah Zevin 2007.

Tell me your Nightmares, morning or otherwise...
send them before you fall asleep heh! heh! heh!

Stupid is as Stupid does....

Just Idiots Not Savants

Tweedle-dumb and Tweedle-dumber sure know how to punch
Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dumber are really out to lunch
Tweedle-dumb thinks he's everyones boss man
Tweedle dumber will curse him when he can

Tweedle-dumb was born on the day of the beast
Tweedle-dumber's parents let the crows have a brain feast
Tweedle-dumb knew all about prying eyes
Tweedle-dumb thought football jerseys was a unique disguise

Tweedle-dumb always gave unnecessary advice
Tweedle-dumber's brain was the size of mice
Tweedle-dumb treated Tweedle-dumber like an angry child
Tweedle-dumb did not care if Tweedle dumber became reviled

Tweedle-dumb liked to spend lots of money he did not have
Tweedle-dumber's wife turned him into her personal money slave
treated like a wild animal forced to live in a cave...
Tweedle-dumb came to work as sick as a foaming mouth dog
Tweedle-dumber played video games all day and ate lunch like a hog...

Micah Zevin 2007 (to be continued...Maybe?!!)
this poem is in no way shape or form based on anyone in reality(copout!)
it is just a creative riff on an antiquated nursery rhyme for the postmodern era
Tell me your wild and zany accounts and I will surely publish them...Not!(Just Kidding!)

Crazy Neighbors....

The Lady in the Apartment Next Door Lives in Perpetual Fire Hazard

The Landlord hears complaints of smoke rising and infiltrating
this is untenable. The lady says she is a woman of worship,
that this is a an attack on spirituality, her right to light candles
and incense to the Virgin, and have messages travel
in signals of Saintly fire rings and burning flesh erasing humanities
sinful habits. This is the point argue tenants, you can have your
heaven or hell, just purchase some common sense—“We don’t
all desire to voyage the way of the ashen, We do not all
make fetish God’s breath outside doorsteps. Here we pay rent,
returning from fatigue ridden days for body and mind’s renewal,
time together or alone with ourselves, not to perish at frail hands of
repentance, or a kingdom yet formulate its intentions…

Micah Zevin 2007

Write me about your crazy lady or men or transgendered person stinking up your building
in the apartment next door...in nutjobs and eccentrics we will unite! Hi ho!

Abort Mission!

I took out my portable respirator
I said, I'll build my own incubator
I will bare my own little terminators
They will never know my true identity
They will obtain manufactured memories

Blasphemy , blasphemy, I'm waiting for your acrimony
I didn't date anyone, I owe no alimony
The moment ripens to replace old body parts
New blood is required to expand baboon hearts
Suddenly, I feel like climbing a pine tree

My box is inside out and ready to jack
Do not be intimidated by the looming stacks
After another of our contentious fights
I'd erase myself to break away from this years cage
Form wings of honey glazed cynicism, then take flight

I will draw myself into steel plated garbage pails
Inside, I can hide from infants persistent wails
I'll kill your god if you'll kill mine
Who cares if I found a cure for the disintegrating spine
I will pray to oblivion by candlelight without fail

I do not even claim to exist right now
Has your microchip brain shut down howling holy cow!
Give me a vanilla milkshake I will crow
Because I am an invisible man I won't take a bow
I'll just sneak out through your bedroom window...

When will I get to sew on my new digital skin
I've been lost for seconds in email's perpetual trash bin
Why haven't those fatso's on Roosevelt Avenue eaten me yet?
I pointed at one scurrying away with my business card
In the city, its not kosher to blink an eye, cry or fret

You simply curse your comically drastic luck
Also, pretend like you don't give a fuck
You'll go have a cappucino in an Astoria cafe
Waiting for your atoms to travel to your next day's fray
When you wake on Steinway street in a pool of drool
you feel like a schmuck...

One day my essence was absorbed by a paper towel
I lashed out, clawing like a despondent fowl...

Micah Zevin 2007

What missions would you have aborted?
Send me your poems, complaints and diatribes...

Shelf Life: A Poem

Shelf Life: The Poem

Steve and Isaiah pretended to be robots
When they were young and willing to scrape their knees
Long ago, they had outgrown those mediocre Gobots
They’d been force into life and now carried their degrees
On their tight backs like paper produced by smokestacks disease
They wondered what it was like to be machines and push money down slots.

Steve’s curiosity searched for products of a manufactured past.
Isaiah dreamed of questions why do bells propel minds blast.
Both wanted to observe the assembly lines
So again scarring their ancestors weakened spines.
They sail down the East River with a ship and a mast
What would it be like be like to forever fast?

Not on the holiest day of the year, they said.
In a way, if you oiled our digital gears, we’d be fed.
What will we find in all these automated smells?
Not merely fortune cookies and green hair gels,
But electric currents and elasticity
Many lost their fingers…have you heard of reciprocity?

Steve tried to climb on top of Costco’s roof
Isaiah attempted to track down the netherworld’s great proof
Next to the sculpture of dog poop in the grass
Steve thought maybe we should film the release of my gas.
Seriously, they considered acting detached and aloof.
We are making an art film, a philosophical spoof?!!!

Do not attempt to imitate our monotonous routine lives
Our shadows of consumption and production
Are they merely manufacturers of jagged steak knives?
Eating instant meals with strawberry sauce reductions.
Isaiah and Steve wondered who would of sewed their torn sleeves…

Isaiah felt like one gigantic allergic Astoria, Queens sneeze
Until he committed himself to the role of the librarian
Steve said, do you mean another disgruntled Septuagenarian?
No stupid, I meant another anal-retentive librarian.
Let’s go to the sculpture park and hang from the sculptured leaves.

They rummaged through their cerebellum’s unmentionables.
Isaiah felt the words on twisted tongues squirm.
Steve fashioned his silence a comfortable noose
Always digging for controversy peering behind his caboose.
Nothing would ever be untouchable
This life of machines had become their new worm…

by Micah Zevin 2007

"A Confused Librarian Poem" (Is there any other kind? Not!)

i stamp
and collate,
i arrange
and disseminate
discuss and
advise
with my lower half
hidden.
at the top
i feel
dizzy as
a pinwheel
but not half
as bright;
half of me
steadfast
and the other
a whirl in
perpetual
spin.

Allison Escoto 2007

The Prescription

The Prescription #555

Did she have the right dosage in these jars?
Elixir of life from lifelessness
Would it solve her loneliness?

She’d find a man scared of killer bunnies
He didn’t need to have any cash
To prove he’s real, his nose must be runny
He’d hand her his soul in a flash

Does he have to pretend to possess a beating heart?
She’d never heard him utter a fart
She must escape from her studio box
Her job of setting endless cuckoo clocks

It was never the right time to end her strife.
She’d flip out at the wrong toss of a dime
Think about committing a heinous crime
Why did her alarms chime, control life?

She set out to burn her cubicle a toasty ash
Slapping lighters from hand at sorely needed cash
Accidentally, she scalded her fingertips
And timidly placed them on her chapped lips

She had the thirst for a draught of something strong
While she filed some papers, she sang a mourning song
She had to deliver a report to her new boss
On the relative benefits of flavored floss

She always felt at a loss to explain
The holographic coffins running through her brain
A sleeping man was smiling, remembering her refrain
What was true but her disdain?

Now, she was trying to be her own woman and her parents no longer persisted.
She would run her own time-sharing company as if they never existed.
But, there was this one quiet man who glimpsed at her like he had a plan
She would build her own flames if there were not any to fan

She could walk outside and feel safe in the night of all returns
And go to bed as if she had never been shaken and spurned to self-immolation
She would no longer go by herself on vacation or regret her chosen vocation
She would draw herself a future, paint herself a sprite, be born again and burn

What she required was a court jester
Not a work of modern sculpture
He could be nothing like her Aunt Hester
Only ever appreciating the best mess of her

If by chance, he plummeted from the sky
She’d ask him the meaning of his endless cries
He’d have genuine innocence and grace
To end her sighs and retire her mace

She dreamed she was drowning in a bowl of whipped cream
While manhandling a department store mannequin
She’d driven her train through the office to blow off some steam
She’d told her therapist it was not another of his Freudian harlequins.

In the basement of her parents house, she’s discovered her sexual mouse
Then, how would you explain these shaking cars?
Clouded spells of chemical hypnosis,
Would it help her find a prognosis?

by Micah Zevin 2007

Do you need a Prescription...You probably do...tell me about it!

Weapon of Choice?!!...

Weapon of Choice

I understand the need for naps
The mind can’t swim without sleep
Hibernate in caves with the bears
What is left of me in winter?

The mind can’t swim without sleep
It can only hold on like tadpoles
What is left of me in winter?
Plodding showers of congestion

It can only hold on like tadpoles
Plaster face to television sets
You will wake up all grown-up
There is no time for reflection

Plaster face to television sets
Everyone has their choice weapon
There is no time for reflection
All covet something unattainable

Everyone has their choice weapon
Use cake, tea, pills, peace or bullets
They might pay for a brief respite

Use cake, tea, pills, peace or bullets
Hibernate in caves with bears
All covet something unattainable
I understand the need for naps

By Micah Zevin 2007

Editors Note: If you want send me your own "Weapon of Choice" poems...What do you consider your own weapons of choice...?

Poe on Crack...?!!

“Poe on Crack”

Why is there no safe haven?
For a Neanderthal spaceman like me?
I’d prefer not to smoke with defeatist ravens
Who act so stubborn and so phony moaning
Until they get to act like such cruel bores
They poke your shoulder until it bleeds more
Then, you grab them by their brittle wings
And throw them out the door
Or they are struck by pendulum swings
Never, never, Nevermore
I won’t kill you. I won’t eat your metaphors
I’ll just make you a part of my stark folklore.

The Neanderthal man tried to lumber far
From the raven perched on that jam jar
Yet all he could was grunt hungers wail
And try to capture it with a garbage pail
He was trapped in the raven’s basement
Painting his dreams on the caves wall
Even in his head the bird knew how to stall
The clock was ringing the rats were ready to brawl
The raven was chanting oh! Cave man soon you will bawl
The spirits will prance upon your brain’s pavement
Anointing him with the claw of his sacrament
His eyes were cracked. Paranoia would call.

Annabel Lee, Annabel Lee, where’s the apothecary?
I’ll conquer like a worm in my haunted palace
No! Don’t make jokes about my tiny phallus
Like yours is one powerful mercenary
You realize the spirits in my head
Have been shivering in kaleidoscopic dread?
At the prospect of falling in that black pit
Wait! I’m alone, I’m gullible, I’ll have a fit
Do you believe in abnormal psychology?
Because I just named my black cat Pathology
I saw my other half licking a bloody axe in the mirror
Why doesn’t anything seem to be coming clearer?

by Micah Zevin (2007 )