My Cardboard Balcony

Royal Court by Belinda Roddie bring me the disenchanted jester who stumbles on his heels and fumbles with the criss-cross of hyper phrases thick as fire and strong as whiskey. I want him to sing me a dream-caught fantasy that I've saved in my dresser drawer all mottled with cobwebs and muddled with dust and with pepper scalding his tongue and spice spraying ever outward, all while the bells on his cap scream help us please we're nothing but pretty he will bring reds and blues to my mostly swollen black and pale purple afternoons.

There once was a boy who literally stole people's thunder. Everyone in town had a jar of thunder, unscrewing the cap just a little each night to let the percussion rumble beneath their feet. It was so they could be spooked and get blood pumping through their veins and feel the cold adrenaline begin to warm up like bubbles on top of a thin broth. But the boy stole it all, sucking it through a tube into a large glass container, lit up by the night sky as it rained.