Pummeling

[PrinceMyshkin]

My apologies if I already posted this





Why, it's love! It's love
--calling to us
like a banana-boat in the night.


(But where is the glint
of native iron from the shore?)

The boat is low in the water.
The long oars dip, and dip again.
The wind is fresh, but with the taint
of something heavy on its breath,
and the downstream ocean
licks at the river,
wooing it home: "Come hooome."

On the bank, palms sway.
The boat creaks. The crew shifts,
ready to earn their danger pay,
then

a stammer of moonlit spearheads
arcs across the water. "Jettison the cargo!
"Speed! More speed,"
the captain cries,

and hunchbacked bananas
shoulder apart the water.
The prow lifts, and the crew,
dirty and eager for home, clash oars

and go pummelling away in the night.




J. Newman Sudden Proclamations copyright 1992

[Pendragon]

I like that one, Jerry, but every time I here the words "Banana Boat" I recall an old time radio program called "Escape" and one particular episode: "Three Sleleton Key." A lighthouse crew are trapped by a shipload of rats when a little banana boat touches the isle. The rats take the boat, a harmonica goes eeriely silent, and the survivor at the lighthouse knows that there's a banana boat out there with a cargo of staving rats...

[PrinceMyshkin]

I like that one, Jerry, but every time I here the words "Banana Boat" I recall an old time radio program called "Escape" and one particular episode: "Three Sleleton Key." A lighthouse crew are trapped by a shipload of rats when a little banana boat touches the isle. The rats take the boat, a harmonica goes eeriely silent, and the survivor at the lighthouse knows that there's a banana boat out there with a cargo of staving rats...



A banana boat with starving rats
is some sort of metaphor, I guess,
for so-called humanity
adrift on a trackless sea...

Had Marx only known of this
he might have begun his manifesto
otherwise: Rodents of the world,
unite! You have nothing to lose
but your hunger, your filth,
the contempt of all other species!
"Rats," they call you, thereby condemning you
to the damp, dark basement of our dreams.
Had they but called you “angels”
how different things might have been!

[PrinceMyshkin]

Every hunter is marked.
The mind, in the end,
gets them all, laying bait
across its tracks, then doubling
back along its own
rank trail.





J. Newman Sudden Proclamations copyright 1992