AMARE

I found a stray wish
on my doorstep last night;
its breathing was ragged
and it looked terrible,
fur all matted and soaked
through by the cold rain,
emaciated and scared;
it mewed weakly at me
and I wondered to myself
if this was an abused wish,
if this wish had run away
from a heart that didn’t love it;
it looked like it was afraid
to let itself trust me
as I reached down to pick it up;
it fluttered in a panic in my arms
as I carried it home
cooing to it softly, shushing it gently
and I wondered if I was wrong,
that perhaps this wish was not abused
but abandoned
and didn’t know a soul
never knew a soul
and then I realized
that I wanted it to know me
and to trust me to love it
like no one ever had before,
so when I got home
I fed the wish some soup
and some good meat kibbles
and then I gave this wish a bath
until its coat was shiny and pink again
and then I let the wish lay down
on some quilts by the fireplace.
I let this wish catch its breath
and fall asleep through the night,
feeling safe and feeling as though
there was someone in this world
who loved it very much,
someone in this world
who it could love back
and think of as home
if it ever wanted to.

Today, the wish spent every hour
by my side, purring and all aglow,
until the afternoon darkened
into the first long minutes of night,
until the time came
for it to fly away
to become what it was meant to be
and to accomplish what it was meant to do
and I tried to be strong;
it never did see my tears
as it looked at me
from the cradle of my open palm;
I nodded to it,
told it to be free
told it to remember where I was
and that it could come see me
any time it wanted to
and then I heard it mew
and then it flew,
leaving my hands
light as a feather
and I looked up
just as the raindrops
started to tap and ring
on the ground all around me;
the wish was flying up
and getting smaller and smaller,
away and away
like a little pink kite
jellyfishing its way
softly, up and up and up
into the syncopating,
violet meadow
of a night-time sky
in a storm.

AND YOU WERE THERE, AND KIERKEGAARD WAS THERE, AND IT WAS RAINING BUT IT TURNED OUT THAT THE RAIN WAS WINE

You could be the one
to make my dream come true.

All that you would have to do
to accomplish what no one before you ever could
is 1., have skin that’s kind of a rubbery silver, and 2.,
meet me by the giant Olympic-sized swimming pool,
that one pool that’s the size of about a hundred Olympic pools,
and then, take my hand and run with me
as policemen who are actually enraged, small-town chipmunks
wearing policemen uniforms
chase us off the campus of the Heathfield College for Advanced Psychological Studies,
where a conversation between me and one of the department heads
did not go so well because he tricked me
using psychology-based conversation tricks
into confessing my one secret shame
that I would never tell anybody,
no matter how close they got to me,
and in a panic I grabbed a brandy snifter
that was on his desk and smacked him in the face with it,
only it turned out I was stronger than I thought
and my smack caused his brains to go flying out of the back of his head,
which is kind of ironic when you think about it,
since he talked all smoothly and Freudly at me
and caused me to tell him all about myself,
while I had to use brute force
and all that got me was his moist, gray-green mind
splattered all over his library.

I know it’s late, but please come on over;
I don’t want to be alone.
I really think you could be the one
who makes my dream come true.

DAT AMBULANCE

I try not to be angry
at the ambulance driver,
but I cannot help me.

I see the ambulance
careen down my street
going vroom so I boom.

The thing I think of in me
is how come I don’t get to go that fast;
I imagination blow up that ambulance.

Dat ambulance.

The ambulance driver
makes a sudden noise in my life;
I don’t like the sound
of the ambulance driver’s existence.
The weeeooo-weeeooo is not a bird song
and I angry at the weeeooo-weeeooo;
I angry at it.

I imagination
a concrete ramp suddenly appearing
in the path of the speeding ambulance
and then the ambulance somersaulting in the air;
I imagination good.

I know the difference
between an ambulance and a fire engine;
an ambulance is white
and it has red stripes on it
and it contains a person who is crying.
A fire engine is big and red and it has silver on it
but I don’t know what the people on it are saying.

I try not to be angry;
I try not to be angry at the person
who is carried inside of the ambulance
but the ambulance makes a noise
that makes me hear the color red too hard.

I imagination no more ambulances.

THE GREAT WILD BIRD OF THE OCEAN

Although they are often called
“The great wild bird of the ocean”
by well-meaning and amateur people,
the jellyfish is actually considered a primate,
so easy to see with its long, transparent hair
and its tendrilesque beard undulating,
and its snarling, mean stinger cells,
and its eyes that it doesn’t have.

In addition to its evolved and adaptive,
lascivious ability to both breathe and not breathe
under the water that is in the ocean,
the jellyfish has a lung capacity
twice that of a standard human being,
and can last underneath water
for up to thirteen minutes
before it must surface to desperately gasp for air.

People learning about marine life
for the first time, or even just normal folk,
are usually surprised to discover
that jellyfish are capable of speech,
and that they are rapacious eaters,
and that they are immoral.

Jellyfish possess an alarming, geometric
and ambidextrous temperament also,
and their bodies are composed of thousands
of organic and plasticene filaments;
sometime the jellyfish go boom.

When they learn these brand new facts
about the jellyfish,
most people begin to weep
and begin to have their water break
and begin to question if they are really experiencing
that whole learning-about-how-jellyfish-are-differenter-now
experience or if they are having some kind of coping
episode, after which time things will
return again to the normalcy
of the day before
they decided to learn these brand new facts.

If a jellyfish
was given human arms
in an operation that went well
and if that jellyfish was given legs
and feet and a mouth and eyes (also ears)
in another just as successful operation,
and if that jellyfish was given a gun,
like a 9-millimeter pistol or something,
and if that jellyfish was informed that
you stole some of its prized possessions
from the bottom of the ocean sea,
that jellyfish would be a very dangerous
and slippery person to be around.

GUESS WHAT THE BEACH LOOKS LIKE

(after Picasso’s “Bathers with a Toy Boat”)

You set out to show us a paradise
in ochre oils, faded, in cerulean dawbs;
your caretaker described for you
what he saw that day on the beach at Menorca:
two buxom women, unashamedly naked
and playing with a toy boat on the sand.

Though celebrated for your vision,
you were obviously born with blindness
and so needed to make your guesses,
estimations of what humans looked like.
And the people called your works cubist
as a term of endearment for your struggles.

What was it like to live celebrated
and yet never see the parades in your name,
and yet never know the sting of flashbulbs in your eyes,
and yet never see the nudes who posed before you?

You imagine what limbs, breasts
and heads must look like to sighted people
and you go from there; you make two bathers,
and then you add what you think of in your head
when you hear the words “toy” and “boat”.

Your caretaker must have told you
that stormy skies rumble and crack
fearfully in almost green light,
that there was a giant, deformed man
looming above the darkened horizon
and marching through the sea
ominously, silently towards the bathers.

Did you think to ask your caretaker
why there was a giant man standing
at the far, other end of the ocean?
Did you worry that you picked the wrong day
to go to the beach to do some painting?
Did the sunlight feel like moonlight on your face?
Pablo, honey, how much did your lips move
as you asked for the tube of azure oil?

A past member of five national poetry slam teams (Worcester, Mass. (x2), Washington, D.C., Wilmington, Del. and Albuquerque, N.M.), Rich Boucher has published four chapbooks of poetry and for seven years hosted an open reading and slam in Newark, Delaware. Since moving to Albuquerque in March of 2008, Rich has been performing and writing steadily in the Duke City, and is a regular contributor/editor and audio archive curator at localpoetsguild.wordpress.com. He is also an educator, adventurer and desert compound prophet. Rich’s poems have appeared in Adobe Walls: An Anthology of New Mexico Poetry, Fickle Muses, The Rag, Menagerie, Clutching at Straws, Shot Glass Journal, Mutant Root, The Mas Tequila Review, Borderline, and The Legendary.

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