THE MARVELOUS FLOATING BOOKSHOP AND VIRTUAL ICE CREAM EMPORIUM

THE MARVELOUS FLOATING BOOKSHOP AND VIRTUAL ICE CREAM EMPORIUM


[to my sister Sharon re our childhood dream of founding a bookstore/ice cream parlour/toyshop, couldn't fit the toys in, sorry
but you know I tried]

the poem with the caramel icing
turned out right
though no one knew about it

and nobody ever saw
the Marvelous Floating Bookshop and Virtual
Ice Cream Emporium on Earth
(except perhaps, me)

though I promise, it was there
painted cherry vanilla
on the little lilac lane that

only came into view
on the left hand side of the bus
when I was the only one looking out
in that direction.

and you dropped the day in your merriment
melting like a creamsicle on the blossoming sidewalks

where who could ever tell them from the flowers,
night children blowing in a garden- thick in the shade
of lime trees

and lavender blue at midnight
every blade of grass bent toward us
as we wandered into a strawberry frothy feeling 

the Marvelous Floating Bookshop and
Virtual Ice Cream Emporium:

four paperbacks, 25 cents each
wrapped in brown paper tied with a string
and no string theory and free, free, free
lusciously malted through and through and

I'll have a cherry phosphate stylish Rose said
in a book I read
crackling new

with a papery perfume
like a box of penny valentines just opened
and every heart

for you at the singular page
only you will decipher dear readers
still and still and still

you wander or you will among vintage illustrations
toward the drugstore racks in dreams that squeak
when you turnstile turn them:

content is a fizzing fountain coke
and the odes of poets never before heard from on earth

mary angela douglas 8 july 2013;22 june 2022