Sunday's poem - "Leftover Baloney Sandwich Blues"

 

Leftover Baloney Sandwich Blues

Glenda at a Swiss conference clad in a starry Milky-Way-patterned black sequin flapper dress, diamantine aquamarine cloche hat, and looped with lustrous strings of beads, facetimes me, head thrown back in dental libertine laughter

Doing an antique dance of abandon, she phone-poses under a mirror ball spraying time dimension visual cacophony into my dim-by-comparison film noir kitchen with one bare hungdown bulb

At least she seems delirious - at most she is wanded to an old world beldame High Priestess of Shriek; I am the failed Atman of the leftover baloney sandwich blues in my stained and slept-in, threadbare white undershirt

Hey Glenda, what the frig passeth?

I ask, but she just starts singing German to tin-pulsating music as dancers wave dreamlike like reeds in the silvered background swamp– until the screen swiftly freezes, then blips to a fortunate emptiness

I open the 1958 Frigidaire to glumly behold the sandwich

Hey Bolo, I say, let’s take a walk – he levitates from canine-throned leisure and we bumble-blank in outward radiating white daylight

And now, hapless pal Philbrick bewails his inert lawn equipment, so I pass him the leash and clear fuel lines, clean filters, set sparkplugs, clean housings, refill fluids and Goop the area clean to set him humming back to his cherished lawn work

Down home, Bolo and I again face the sandwich

Anneika and her four declared tasteless sisters may be border-hopping to shirk prison, but I call Zildja, sister three – un-convicted, and she throatily croons assent to a downtown jazz soiree as I think, she’s almost Glenda

In a mohair jacket, knit tie, and glowing white shirt, and Zildja in her beatnik sphinx get-up we listen to a hard bop trio of gangling hipsters, and we look unutterably cool while sipping martinis and never feeling so phantasm categorically clued-in

At home after the plastic, cascade night of dynamic scenes Glenda ringtones and screens a charcoal-sketchy look, all black stain and stripe, flattened hair, gray face, swollen eyes, smeared lipstick, and unusual-for-her: doom; Warning: some of this video is troubling.

Come on down, I say (still looking dapper), I left the remaining baloney sandwich blues remnants just for you.

That baloney sandwich is money in the bank