About the toys that still sleep on my bed
A poem-
plushie religion
plushie roads
plushie poverty
plushie economy
teddy bear grandfathers
ragdoll grandmothers,
their underwear frock rears on his soggy
slumping cushiony paws
eyes staring at nothing
but
my blue repainted checkered walls
like its chipping and the florescent bulb was a cloudy heavenward superstition
heralded by mothball infidels and mosquito angels that circle their sewn cellulite.
You’d call them a Parkinson’s grandfather,
a grieving grandmother in the middle of knitting, staring at something
as intently as if it were the hands of a clock
or a cross, a Jesus
for a clown’s red honking,
white chalk snot dripping wax nose.
Sometimes their heads tilt into their plastic tea cups,
legs kick against the princess-themed teapot I set so gingerly on my ruffled bedspreads,
one buttered toast made of plastic circulated,
like a secret pact orgy buffet,
and I,
making conversation as concrete as the threads coming loose from my rag doll’s furry dreadlocks,
sometimes take their tea cups away,
empty as I placed them on their cotton crotches
and
empty as if they’d drank them
and set them aside in my pink wallpaper house,
sitting on wicker chairs for each.
The crumbs of my lunch
create a stubble of dirty grey pavement
for the economy of the New York pacing dolls,
the cathedral,
prescription drug over-the-counter tops, cash registers,
my pillows often missing pillow covers become
for sweaty burly heaving scampering mouse-like plastic toy managers
of a crowded bakery that topples flattery and overpriced goods
over queues of the economy
that always have to be somewhere in two hours or two days
but seem to chatter as lively and young as a screening,
as they giggle while they sweat over the delicacies
like they’re stagnant and pudgy as puddles of fresh paint on a canvas
that dry and turn as shiny, ideal as resin.
The horizontal pink striped socks of the dolls,
their manspreading sitting because of silicone mechanism
can’t make them sit with their legs crossed,
or ankles buckled together to stink up and hide the lace of their underwear,
that they look amongst the metropolitan of my mattress’s busy yellow flower bedspread like
lazy day job hookers dragging themselves by the sleeve of their thick mascaras
and their contortionist beauty onto the mattress streets
as if the smog of the hookah-puffing automobiles
were curling their eyelashes
and the electric poles were hangers
for their silicone nylon hair pretty.
I hold each by their legs
like they were chickens grabbed from the coop pantry
for the butcher doctor’s surgically inducing restaurant slaughter
and shake them till their hair gets poofy enough for me
to use pink plastic combs and recline their heads onto my lap,
like
they were in a salon,
getting their hair washed in a dome basin,
except I just combed their nylon hair till half of it came off
and then tied it in shabby ponytails, pigtails
topped with plastic hair accessories I’d never come to use.
Oh, how I used to pick them apart,
shuffle their shoes,
their clothes in my palms when I was five,
like I was automating fashion by bingo ball raffle,
churning,
circling,
turning the wheel
till a shoe dropped out and a skirt dropped out,
and they were lying, plastic,
naked,
lips, noses now pink or green as the silicone against the sketch pens were rote,
lying around in anatomical orgies
like a coop of clucking slaughter chickens,
Five-years-old
and I twisted one’s head in a position I wanted
or was trying to get her out of her jacket in Rubick strategy with her glued limbs,
that I popped her head out of those silicone sockets and joints
like a cork from a bottle of champagne,
and my wails fizzed over my parents’ eight pm TV time serenity
and bubbled and made a puddle over their accommodating nursing patience.
Committing research,
surgery, fashion shows,
modeling agency nakedness,
fat designers and their plastic models
looking at a wall’s distance
as a drape is pinned to their shoulder bone.
When I tried to stop eating to get skinny,
the cellulite around me displayed anatomy and bones
in sockets and joints in naked angles
I never realized could be fashioned,
I felt like I was five, as I stood before the mirror,
lifting knees,
stretching feet
and curling them like pigeon’s twig toes,
lifting armpits and staring,
ripping a doll’s dress
and testing her elastic legs and thighs
into a back arching split,
and yanked her head till her hair touched her back
and looked more like a hunchback
to an empty clothing rack
than a dainty body.
I couldn’t lose the belly fat.
And when I was six I learned,
I couldn’t get every toy on the rack,
even though I grazed a glancing touch of a yearning finger on a face,
through the plastic on the fur
and thought I was on my mattress,
or the couch,
playing as the TV went on and dinner
was being clacked, chopped, yelled
and steamed and fought and cursed at in the kitchen,
when it started from my father’s favorite couch.
And just as I stopped eating more,
cried more,
started liking boys like my skinniness was a permit for it,
I kicked my feet across the shelves
in guitar shredding,
cord tangling,
shrieking,
jumping jack tantrums under the false ceiling of the toy section,
when my mother said
it was too expensive to buy
and my cheeks were pinched into a stifling red,
and I was dragged across aisles
to the billing counter
with furniture or statues in the cart
that I didn’t understand much.
Couldn’t keep consistent with the starving
or the puking
or the water-binging
or the contortionist, waist molding exercises
like my tantrums,
and soon enough,
hunger and loneliness pinched me on the cheeks,
that was rosy with delusion
and I started to eat,
as I started to scrunch my nose at the toys
I cried and begged for my mother to buy
when I was five,
although I still own the broken clucking duck toy
I once ran into the wall,
till its key snapped out and its twig leg came off.
I own and preserve all of my toys from when I was five,
and fiddle with the crinkly, crisp baby food matted in their fur,
plop the doll’s head back into her body,
and don’t touch it,
rub at the sketch pen marks with a damp wipe
till the soapiness imagines
having faded some of the green and the pink.
My teddy bear had its guts torn out,
till its stuffing came out
and my suspicions of plastic or garbage
wrapped within the sticky, frizzy cotton
like some egg-coated chicken kebab,
were as paranoic as the mothball eyes of the infidel toys
that still stared at the wall ahead, passing by my vision,
like an
estranged New York City stranger
on the street.
And I almost gained all the weight I lost
and gained even more
than I was
when I decided to starve myself at fourteen.
