Poem: Slight Confusion: Why not 1 M&M, 2 M&Ms?

Louis, the Grand Dauphin

This is ends up a proofreader's poem. Wherever I was headed when I began writing, the annoying apostrophe in M&M's was an endstop. Why not 1 M&M, 2 M&Ms? I observed the "turtleneck /descending a three-year old who / yanks and stretches" on the west coast.

Much of this short poem, unfairly asked to bear up under the weight of my commentary, was intended as reaction to a book I'd read about Grimm's tales (which my ma burned, as I wrote in When My Mother Burned a Book). The analysis was written by a professor at Santa Cruz.

The brothers Grimm, folklorists, embellished many stories, perverted source material which they alleged true to the folk, volk, peasants they'd interviewed. And that's why, okay, conjecture, those stories are so violent a testament to the human imagination gone wild and mean. I didn't complete that poem. This poem emerged from its ashes.  And the M&M's?  In the seventies I spent an afternoon ferrying them back and forth, one-by-one, while my friend R. drew circles. Hallucinogenics were involved.

Slight Confusion

Wait’ll you hear this one pulled
over your head like a turtleneck
descending a three-year old who
yanks and stretches against her
world briefly dark as brown bears
in a skyless cotton firmament
claiming to be all she’ll ever
know of horizon. Wait’ll you
hear the wolf snicker and wait’ll
Sleeping Beauty over there lights
up while you escort M&M’s across
choppy waters of your bungalow.
A nobleman eyes that apostrophe
wrested from the grieving Dauphin.
___________
Sarah Sarai. From The Future Is Happy. Buy it at SPD or Amazon.