Fantasia in November

"Oh yes, it's a pretty little scene; charming little houses nestled among charming little trees...."

a wabe of grass stretches
beyond on either side
cluttered with talking breathing
books and bodies all
in paperback bindings
a snicker-snack of heels
strike the brick path
past the Colonnade Club
and the chapel bell
strikes two

toddlers and children
galumphing past the diamond-wire
fence, the ballpark, to that
great Jub-Jub bird, a WWI
mechanical wonder
raising Abel too from death
howling, laughing
flying
with their after-school imaginations

a manxsome figure slides
betwixt shadows steel
or glass glimmering in its
hand beneath the shabby streetlight
it's dark now
when the slithy toves gather
in the parking lot of
Cherry's IGA their
sour-mash breath cheap with beer
and the women who accompany them
insults, despair and mischief
whisper through their eyes

Brown's Mountain looms
over Route 53, a drugged
Jabberwock
formidable, quiet
with but a winterish chill
whiffling over its shaved head
a winding racetrack of an impass
snakes up to the slave quarters
where, warmed by an open-hearth fire,
friends gather around Irish coffee
in mugs twice the diameter of my hand

"... Somehow it makes you want to put your fists right through it."

-- TLPatten (1986, rev. 2005) (quoted sections from Maxim Gorky, "The Barbarians")