Popsicle Kisses

A Haiku Series & A Prose Poem Ode

We surf scalding seas

With each wave, risk of wipeout

Sweat beads – shroud sequins

Balanced hope wobbling

Do crystalline shores await?

Sweet rainbowed coolness?

Beached, a whale thriving

Immersed in popsicle sand

Let’s French kiss coolness

........

Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. The Red Queen/Through the Looking Glass/Lewis Carroll

No! Not another day where an outward step through any door is a topple into a rabbit hole of rabidly accelerating heat -- feeling as feral as the leaves browned before their time, the crackled bones of parched earth, the wilting butterfly wings and zinnia petals falling with me.

The welcome mat awaiting at molten rock bottom reading Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate -- the Italian, as ever, giving me chills as I shower in its gorgeousness, scalded by its translation. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

But Alice wouldn't...and neither will I. The room's walls drip, drenched with sweat and despair -- I wipe my own from my eyes --

Yes! These doors need no keys -- stainless steel gleaming panoramas of starry skies, fairy-lit looking glass lakes, dappled shade. They are heart-readers, too -- opening in half a beat. Some, at bottom. Others, at top or on the left side.

All immersing me with moonlit dustings of snowflakes that have no bite. The biting-into will be up to me.

Ah, such an adventure awaits -- peopled with impossibly wondrous things called popsicles. Scores more than six, I will devour.

©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2022