Mary had a little lamb, a little house, a prairie, starched pure white all buttoned tight, a contrary sanctuary. For everywhere that Mary went, puberty publicly followed, flying high on Junior High, nursing rhymes soaked in sin like a hymen’s hymn.
Because just like Jesus’ best friends, Mary exists, or does do did, since was is shall will ever be and we are altogether now. A living nursery rhyme, a day in the life of time, a shooting star jumping over the moon, spooning the cow as the fiddler jams “Stairway to Heaven” on a roof-topped 80s’ luxury van.
Legend takes whatever it can get. Apparently in 1830, a prairie girl named Mary fell head over summer’s salt in love with a motherless lamb, sweating schoolgirl desire like Ritchie Havens’ divinity in a Woodstock sun. Living up to being a legend long after her time, Mary took the lamb to school one day, stashing lamb chops under her coat like some dime bag of schwag, sticks and stems and seeds as white as snow.
‘Cause the smell of lamb follows you for days, Mary got busted and dazed in a lamb-loving haze as all the children laughed. The teacher discovered when Mary’s lamb lived up to a poem, following Mary around like some religious nut bugging Jesus for His autograph. A preacher’s kid wrote it all down and gave the poem to Mary, making nursery rhyme history, immorality’s reality against a sea of forgotten graves. For off the God boy went to Harvard with this literary gift, where he upped and dropped dead of tuberculosis, never even getting close to writing his thesis.
True story. With a moral. Give it while you’ve got it ‘cause you’re gonna be dead. Tell that story to the next four-year-old in bed, and maybe, just maybe, he’ll take his own life serious enough to live, actually give blood sweating blues like a rift, like Dr. Teeth is his Jesus, gliding high in a double-decker Muppet Magic bus doling dayglow to the masses.
Yes, Mary and her lamb lived real flesh and blood, riddled in acne, 12-year-old blues, out of key puberty in prescription elevator shoes. Like Jesus Abraham Lincoln Abercombie & Fitch, Mary had problems, bad days, down and out dues, hoping to God this world’s blues pay something in the end. Thank God it does, as whoremongering hormones score golden orgasms of sin, like smiley faces in the Special Olympics of life, dark deep thoughts growing hair on their hands as everyone goes blind. Buttoned down in mutton down, Mary couldn’t see a thing.
Maybe Mary masturbates an afterlife of glowing red fire to Buddha’s dark blue hue, but what I want to know is, why’d they have to burn her house down, Mr. Death?
Six six-packs of Schlitz may have had something to do with it. Last summer, two rednecks from Clinton torched the house Mary grew up in. In a flash of fire and brimstone nursery rhyme arson, Mary’s innocence burned down to the ground, like some distant memory of a 3-parred, 9-holed ancient Indian burial mound.
But innocence dies as soon as we’re born. From that first brilliant moment of God’s holy orgasm of prepubescent blues, we’re all born gods and demons, wrestling the wheel of this ethereal areoplane, nose diving or shooting high into Buddha’s blue Zen. Get your kicks while you can, but believe in oxygen. Everyone soars into the same blue Nirvana wind, whether sky blue oceans or ocean blue skies, all ending as one, buy and by.
