perception
is reality
by Hezekiah Allen
Taylor
Take your mother now, a highland woman
and straight from home--her own father and mother
believed in fairies, and when I put it to her like a joke,
she'd shoot her jaw and shut her mouth like a window.
And she'd say, "There's things that won't stand reason,
but are so, just the same." I'll take a wager your mother
filled you with fairies before she died.
--John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown
there are things we all see
but don't admit to
except in the cloaking, clinging night:
phantoms, Romanticism, the poet within
I think every poet is filled with fairies
of every sort and every connotation:
of Irish leprechauns in jaunty green fedoras
dancing jibs and jigs around Porky Pig
in that old Warner Brothers' cartoon;
of the English garden variety, floundering
above rose lips overwrought with dew and worthy--
finally, after so much waiting--of John Donne;
of Halloween plastic wings floating
suburban byways and begging for Wonka's
greatest invention; of staggering, flaming
gay men reminiscent in true reality
of dear Mr. Roper's limp-wristed Tinkerbell
impression from early episodes of Three's Company.
Such a mixture of mythology, of fiction,
of fantasy, of sexuality--good poets swim
in a heady ambrosia, poured up full to the brim
as if someone unknown had packed tight
a metal garden pitcher and watered us
consecutive and concurrent
in zigzag patterns
dropping a fairy from
pouting metal spout
to open, hungry lips
still bloody from their last morsel
gossamer-winged (but smartly clipped
to prevent flights of fancy).
Francine's Version
-- Hezekiah's Version -- Inspiration
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