"Home on the Strange"
Riding a plodding Shetland pony
With mustangs and unicorns
bucking rambunctiously in his brain
Through the valley of galleries
Selling giclees of cliches
by Thomas Kinkade,
Who copyrighted light
Into Old Orcutt,
(Ol' Dorkett, as I call it)
Heralded, as we pass, by the barks and snarls of hardened guard dogs
And the battering of their bodies against all of the rickety, driftwoody fences
That line every sidewalk
Where you never see those dogs walked.
To the old-time mother-in-law house
We lease
Where
Ev'ry day my vinegar-lion and I
Stand around and scream
And watch a vulture
Pacing restless circles in the sky
This is not home.
**********
Home,
Home on the page
Where I play.
Where often is scrawled a fantastical word
While the clouds drift through the skies all night
**********
Trying to reach the next done
Over the next dune
Sitting in my sandbox set-in-the-desert
Unfathomably submerged and surging forward
Clutching the dorsal fin
Of an Endorphin Dolphin
Then, on land again
But in a Xanadu savannah
Lapped up by Lionesses of Happiness,
Purring powerfully,
Then
Taking a lift from a magnificent gryphon
To elope with a hopeful jackalope...
A lot of different stuff came together in this poem.
The "valley of galleries" is not neccecarily the Santa Maria Valley, where I live, or anywhere in particular. However, there is a Thomas "Painter of Light" Kinkade gallery in the Santa Ynez Valley, not far from here. There's also a ranch in that valley you pass on the highway where I've seen Shetland ponies.
Old Orcutt is a small community next to Santa Maria where I used to live a few years ago with my then-girlfriend, who is basically who I was thinking of when I wrote about the "vinegar-lion." There's actually a very eclectic gallery there, that does not sell "giclees of cliches", but hey, this is a poem, not a travelogue
.
We rented a small old house that was right next to a similarly painted larger house. We were told that it was what was called a "mother-in-law house" and probably built for someones mother to come live near the family that lived in the bigger house. "This is not home" refers to that house, not where I'm currently living, which *is* home.
As in my previous poem, "Nebulous Nocturne", a verse of this poem was created by reversing the meaning of lyrics to a song from a Broadway musical. In this case, its a very well known classic song from Broadway's "Golden Age". See if you can guess what it is. BTW, it's not the "Home on the page" verse, ("Home on the Range" is an old standard, not from a musical).
