Burning in water, drowning.

[Zelda regrets that she did not post on Friday. Zelda knows that she is getting behind, and she is going to remedy this quite soon, she promises. She is disgusted with the fact that she is quite unfashionable.]

Zelda has spent this weekend entertaining, and though she has had — and will still have — great and fashionable fun, she has missed Vivienne and TheHyacinthGirls.com and you, Dearest and Most Fashionable Readers, and fashion in general.

Whilst entertaining, Zelda and her Fashionable Friend spent this afternoon frolicking in the ocean, and Zelda must say that she looked quite stunning and fashionable in her Joan Crawford-esque one-piece swimsuit (the careful Reader of Fashion will know that this is the swimsuit Zelda purchased just last week).

Onward! To the FaOuLiPoWriMoFa poem of the day!

Dearest, Most Fashionable Reader: for some reason, I cannot get Charles Bukowski out of my head. Or, more specifically, I cannot get Charles Bukowski’s Burning in Water Drowning in Flame out of my head, for, ever since the beginning of FaOuLiPoWriMoFa (Fashionable Oulipo Writing Month of Fashion), I have had aforementioned book out on my table, and, since the book’s cover has all the subtlety of a traffic cone, my eye is naturally drawn to it. So. For this poem, I have taken Dearest, Most Fashionable Vivienne’s lead and have constructed an antonymnic translation of Bukowski’s “warm asses.”

cold asses

this Monday morning
the Canadian boys at the Protestant funeral
look especially bad
their wives are in the churches
and the Canadian boys look old
ostrich-nosed with kind weak eyes,
asses cold in loose trousers
they have been given somehow,
their wives are tired of those cold asses
and the old Canadian boys walk with their parents,
there is imagined happiness in their kind weak eyes
as they forget mornings when their homely women —
not now any longer homely —
said such ugly things to them,
ugly things they will always hear again,
and on top of the sun and in the dull of the funeral’s darkness
I see nothing and I sit loudly and rejoice for them
they do not see me looking —
the young nanny is not looking at us
she’s not looking at our eyes;
they frown at each other, talk, run off alone,
cry, do not look at me over their shoulders.
I run over to a booth
put a dime on number eleven and lose a vanilla cookie
with 13 monotone suckers stuck in the bottom
that’s unfair enough for a Protestant
and a naysayer of cold and old and used
joyful Canadian asses.