Mothwings and Moonbeams

3 years ago
64

My longtime collaboratrix Monica Bergo and I sing a story (sort of) from one (or more) of the interpenetrating and mutually contradictory alternate universes that make up our current Reality. With big nods to the old-time circus, the Second Amendment, and Rudyard Kipling! And if anybody needs to know:
Gadjo = Gypsy for non-Gypsies. Think "Goyim."
Planck length = in Quantum Mechanics, the smallest possible distance. Infinitessimal but still, as the mathematicians say, nonzero. Has nothing to do with the board the pirates supposedly used.

A gypsy girl ran off to join the circus,
Same lifestyle, just a different caravan.
She separated gadjo from their money,
The sideshow freak magician was her man.
Yet sometimes she would dream a strange existence,
A settled house, a more prosaic him.
But sometimes he would disrespect her gypsy,
And sometimes she must fear for life and limb.

She woke with the dawn,
Said, “Which world am I on?
The one that my eyes see or one that my blood knows is real?”
But she knows to get by,
(in her own strength)
Just how much to deny,
(to the Planck length)
And the times and the places where dreams leave deep traces to feel.
All those fine interfaces between silken graces and steel.
********
In a corner some lightyears from Paradise he sits and he ponders,
Chuchundra the Muskrat who played Rikki-Tikki’s own game.
He killed several snakes, and courted fair ladies far distant.
But they all turned him down, with his muskratness always to blame.

He courted the gypsy, and said, “This time will be different.”
She rejected him just like the rest for his water-rat’s tail.
So he went on with life. Oh, how unheroic!
But even a hero must know when it’s time to just bail.

Are they mad? Are they sane?
Will they try it again?
Is it wrong to seek possible joy ‘gainst impossible pain?
Are they two? Are they one?
(choice is insane)
Are they through? Not begun?
(and on what plane?)
Full of second-hand sci-fi dreams charging with phasers on stun.
Made from mothwings and moonbeams and seeking their place in the sun.

Rig the odds. Jump the gun.
Praise the gods. Still not done.
Such a team that’s still seen on the screen when the movie has run.
Made from mothwings and moonbeams and seeking their place in the sun.

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