Gizmo Girl’s Touristy Snapshot
Two senoras, thirty-somethings,
sisters or girlfriends on Sunday’s day off,
working girls, maybe office staff, off-duty
hip to hip on a white tile banc
beneath a potted royal palm
flourishing on the Cienfuegos esplanade.
They’re hunched over smartphones, striking
the universal pose; they texttexttext efficiently,
chatting up their low-cost black market minutes
to Miami, to their cousins-cum-smugglers
who’ll soon visit laden with Androids
for nieces in Trinidad, nephews in Habana
who suffer serious Facebook envy.
Already Verizon aims to cut into the deal,
become the newest techy status symbol
of connectivity— but VZ’s coup shall fail,
no nuevo Yanqui here, senor, only us,
the people’s guerrilla network thriving
under corporate radar building
the underground superhighway of nations,
the game of capitalism played by Cuban rules.
Doctor La Guerrilla
He blew Cohiba Esplendidos’ smoke in the glazed eyes of greed and
dazzling glitter of mammon;
he laughed a bellyful of spicy rice and beans at gringo saboteurs and
cringing provocateurs blancas;
ever in constant motion, yet he paused to kiss the spy’s festering culo and
her anesthetizing cheek.
Thus he made the unripe apple fall from tyranny and rot.
Brain-Scan Suite in Twelve Scherzi
I. Got It
The punful neurons of wit?
Still fully functional.
II. Details
New names, today’s date, fall
into fresh holes in the cheese.
III. Slowed
Obama is president
he thinks. Hesitantly.
IV. Cerebral Certainty
Each atheist synapse
ever finds a godless cue.
V. D.O.M.
His limbic now claims
we haven’t made love all winter.
VI. Borderless
Morning’s REM-sleep dream
persists into reality.
VII. Not This Again
One cluster of aging gray matter
does déja-vus.
VIII. Doc Martin Redux
Some antique cells foresee
entire unseen episodes.
IX. In the Vicinity of the Infondibulum
Organ secretions subconsciously
prognosticate.
X. Involuntarily, Courtesy of Medulla Oblangata
He recovers lyrics
of good-old big-band goldies.
XI. Autumn, 1950
In secret fornices:
his long-lost poem of regret.
XII. Amygdala’s Love
Reductio ad absurdum
ad infinitum.
( in memoriam Roger M. Weir )
The imagination of Homo sapiens sapiens
is not subject to foreclosure, short sale, or repo,
nor is it prone to logomachies with itself, ergo
our imagination invents its own codes—
secret codes, dress codes, codes of honor
and conduct, et al., replaced by euphoria.
The brio of the mind is its will to bliss;
the élan of the brain when pleasured
is poetry.
About the author :
Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 600+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 12 books to her credit, the newest of which is Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel to Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills), which received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye (based in Vancouver, BC), a member of Just Poets (Rochester, NY), the Florida State Poetry Society, and The Author’s Guild. Her blog site is : Vagabond Poet, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.
