Carousel: Poetry in Motion
As the story begins...
Each horse claims a child and each child claims a horse.
Shiny and sleek and speedy and steedy,
To cover vast distance without traveling.
Counter-clockwise rotations thrum showy,
Counting the right-handed children--
Counter-intuitive to the turn of a screw.
The sinister accept a dominant-hand world,
Reach harder for brass rings, but ignore the effort,
Arriving coincident with those who list starboard.
Standing-start vacuum collapses tintinnabulate
And ancient wiring sets ancient gears in motion--
Millenary crankshafts spur gallops.
The air bellows through wooden pipes and valves,
Lungs that wheeze melodic for the hangers-on;
A platen below turns in hoof steps with the music.
Sight and sound miscible with the air
Of winds forced through sieves making euphony:
This contraption lives and breathes in symbiosis with parasites.
Tiddlers and tykes follow pistons up and down,
Jockey in circuitous obedience hither and thither
To equestrian highs and lows and Coriolis thrills.
An island of the real world lies inert in the eye
The center hiding the masterminds of the spin--
Carneys with eyes and thoughts elsewhere from the eyewall.
Oblivious faces delighted to the motion
And the machinations of sound and variegation,
Noisy with steampunk rotodynamics.
As the story goes...
A different storm brews in friction--circuits, short;
Portentous ozone inundates the ambience
As precipitous circumnavigators ride into the sunset, on fire.
Sirens play with ill winds, blowing amok,
Teasing with news eclipsing wars and famines and acts of God--
No details, just that a place-for-children, burns.
Terror without details capitalizes Terror--
Don't even think that My God! don't even--
Everyone rushing to the circus of horror.
Attracting saviors like a spinning black hole
Of conflagration and tragedy,
The fireline intensity luring the perimeter of crown scorch.
Through the flames--movement!
A stampede of lifestock running for their lives;
Who do they carry into that sunset--will it ever set?
Calor and dolor and punksteamroller
Radiates a broil at kW per meter--the brilliance of physics,
Unrestrained, blinds hosers and stokers.
All there with fire's enemy, give and take,
A tug-o'-war over a pit of pedicide?
Back and forth and maybe and maybe not...
As the story unfolds...
Conflagration--hopeless; noble steeds' fusion,
A round sarcophagus of ceramic, fiberglass...and flesh?
Don't even think that My God! don't even--
Each horse claims a child and each child claims a horse
Some horrors are juggernauts that bring up supper
And the bile that comes after
And the soul that follows, to die,
Due to thoughts of miniature corpses clinging desperately
To their noble steeds' necks, molten together.
As the story ends...
The children all cried when the carousel burned down. I, too,
Because it was closed that night--I cried for days,
Otherwise catatonic in intolerable gratitude to this universe.
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This is based on a microfiction (https://theprose.com/write?postId=739380) I wrote that went nowhere.
I figured maybe verse might capture the emotions better. The thought of children dying is the most horrible thing any parents could contemplate. [spoiler:] Turning it around to a happy ending of gratitude for lives spared seemed the perfect solution to evoke the emotion without actually succumbing to painful thoughts. This turns it from what was lost to what's at stake and worth celebrating every otherwise insignificant day.
The microfiction piece as well as this poem inspired by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcRm7hgpaXY.