Tuesday, March 2, 2010

What I learned at four from Topo Gigio

You can set out
for the moon,
but you won’t
get there.
There is the girl
mouse, the boy
mouse, and between
them a very whiny
worm. Puppets are too
stupid to notice
that carnivals are
scary, or that if the guy
looks bad, he is.
Mice keep wishing,
worms keep whining.
You will walk
out of the theatre
sick
to have watched so
much struggle.

6 comments:

Francis Scudellari said...

Those are some lasting lessons. For me, puppets were always a bit scary... and dolls. I like the straight forward voice in this piece, peering behind the illusions.

Anders Enochsson said...

"Puppets are too stupid to notice that carnivals are scary,"

I really like the rhythm of the poem; how it moves. Puppets are a bit scary.

Jenny said...

Fine piece, Claude. And puppets can be very scary. But dolls are even worse, I think. When I was about 5 I vistited a waxworks museum. Yikes! The wax dolls looked human, but their eyes were dead. Dolls still give me the creeps.

Megan Duffy said...

Your use of puppets is powerful and telling. Yes, puppets are stupid, but the best puppeteers will say that puppets make more human movements than humans.

A great and interesting poem.

Obsidian Eagle said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Obsidian Eagle said...

Hahaha! I had all but forgotten about that show (thought it might have been a childhood fabrication). But now that you mention it, I learned a lot of those same lessons. Particularly about the moon!

Thanks for refreshing my memory and teaching me how to spell that elusive name from a distant past.

:)

- ItzQuauhtli, Herald of Quetzalcoatl