ManicDDaily

Andy with Elephant

I am posting this in response to a dVerse Poets prompt to write something about Pop Art.    My illustration above has (ovbiously) quite a bit to do with Pop art, but nothing with the poem below.  (I couldn’t resist it.)

The poem has less to do with Pop Art, I suppose.  My excuse is that the prompt talked of writing about a cultural phenomenon.  I don’t know if this qualifies, so my second excuse is that I think of Pop Art, some times, as complex juxtapositions flattened out upon a page.  Here goes:

Train of Thought

I am thinking, as I sit upon the train,
that the person who invented rubberized eggs,
that is, those eggs that are scrambled, squared,
and then somehow boinged, for easy sale,
should be shot, or at least, forced to eat them, when
a woman with a rubbed-out face
steps onto my car.  She’s been burned badly,
her face segmented into angular wedges of scar that
web from one ear to the opposite cheekbone.
Hard to read the history
in the hieroglyphics.
An explosion on a stove?
Acid thrown in warning?  Retribution?
Her skin is tan, hair dark, but any particulars
of ethnicity scratched out. I go
for the acid, knowing that whether or not she is a woman
purposely victimized, there are such women.
She stands, her face turned
so that I can see only an edge of eye (though her eyes
are almost all edge).
I want to give her my seat, but the gesture feels
intrusive, a stare made physical, so I do nothing but wonder
about a world in which eggs are turned
into seamless elasticized squares, women’s faces into
a stitching of stiff triangles, and how our minds can hold such things at once–
the trivial, the tragic, this train. 

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