dora the explorer saves the mermaids

Go ahead,

clean the beach of debris. But there's  this  problem.

There exists no lavender universe,

those of magical pearls, of fences driven in

the sand  of sugar paste

where the saturated sky

of milchig dance is a warm solution

of misty tricks. Nowhere!

No women to wish for

with Greek cheeks and one single

dolphin thigh; waving from

some nautical distance.

The honeydew I left unprotected,

the one consumed by the family Erysiphaceae

is the woman hovering as gas,

the neighbors whose cucumbers

have leached over the mighty doom of the horizon:

I can stand and look thru the empty house next door

and recall the man working on his car

and a TV going louder. Yet my ancient love of

color, where midlife turmoil leaves me stranded

along the river of a clams netherworld,

of midmoist mist, of something sacred I call blue  now. In my first

apartment there was a couch and an end table

that my father carved, and all the surfaces

any young man could dream of.

Reviews

[jacob erin-cilberto]

fantasy swims in debris, but the debris is no fantasy...life is full of pollution, literally and figuratively...

and it will take us sooner or later, and there will be many empty houses...where once life bustled...

i remember a time more simple....a time when we made our own furniture, took lots of time, but was worth it...

what now?

quick fixes, and loud TV's---

[JC]

you are a true writer... sometimes we wade through debris of words just to find the treasure of a true mind...I'm finding it difficult to put into words now how much I relate to your work here, but it's there...
where midlife turmoil leaves me stranded
along the river of a clams netherworld,
Sartre soul you have my existential friend.

[h d e rushin]

i'm exploring my inner child here my friend..the one who see's the future in a parallel plane,
then tells their friends what they saw.......dana

[waif]

Makes me think of how we evolve as humans. The optimism of youth giving way to the more pessimistic or realistic thinking of those years when we inch closer to midlife. And beyond. When we're young, like our good friend Dora the Explorer, things seem simple -or at least solvable and then we reach the end of a pier where there are no boats, no rafts, no logs that present themselves as means of escape.

As children we can save the mermaids, the myth with kindness and imagination. As adults we watch documentaries that make the hopelessness of action seem as abundant as the particles of oxygen and CO2 floating around us. Finding the place in the center where it's ok to act -on anything- even if it yeilds little -is the difficult part.

This is one road your poem led me down. There are others that I will discuss with myself. Great work.

[emmajoy]

Colours can be carried not only within vision and mind but the heart and, maybe, that's how you see past and present mapped on the same tonal latitude? For some the colour red would be 'danger-beware', to others it could be 'living life energetic' -, for the colour blind sad or intended, that colour's tinged with personal influences perhaps. We all see and feel, nobody wrong or right, intelligence, sense of humour, moods, temperaments, imagination et al create magic or morbidity, thrill or kill. Our debris is self made by everything within as well as without.

And that's how i interpret your writing here, a stretch between A. and B. but a heck of a lot more than two letters in between! Great thoughts.

[Emily B]

fabric and pattern are laying on the kitchen table, my youngest wants to be a Greek goddess for Halloween . . . as she goes begging from house to house for chocolate I will have a mysterious smile, these words will be with me

[Delmar Cooper]

I was told, by a person of good reputation and acknowledged authority, that mermaids do not exist.

"What a fool," I thought.

[Corset]

I always fight the urge to adore you or bop you on the head, I can never settle on just one emotion, there is indeed a purple world of dreams, one that can be made like a bed, one where it doesn't involve debris or the prisoners in orange with stick poles, "we will not be slaves, but we WILL be conquers" (Warlords of Draenor)
lol) Dana, you are ever brilliant regardless of your lack of love for milk products and pestilence.

[W.k.kortas]

The lines between reality and that we see as plausible in our fantasies and that which is just the stuff of pure fantasy blur and shift like tectonic plates on the backs of the gods or twitchy giant catfish. It takes a magician to pull the rabbit from the head in a way to inform and yet still leave us amazed; well, lookie here...

[Horizon K.]

Ah, but this is why we write, why we storytell, why we read fantasy novels and watch Sci-Fi television. This is why there is a whole world of people who go and create thier own purple universes, full with mermaid occupants, because they were missing from this world. To dream texture onto flat surfaces...

Profound, Dana. We need to dream, daydream, to stay young at mind...

[The Twin Arenas]

yeah, crazy.

so great. the end of this, ha, and the rest of it.

stopped me cold.

the title and everything. "one single dolphin thigh" is some of the best mermaid writing I've seen, and I'm a sucker for mermaids.

yeah, this is great. thanks.