GRAFFITI 7, FROGS AND WHY: Two Poems

GRAFFITI 7:  FROGS AND WHY: TWO FINAL POEMS


She is back on the park’s toboggan hillock, / this time with the child he would not have. ---Graffiti 6, Triptych


1.
“Frogs” was never meant  for those happy children
toddling behind her whistling like the pied piper.
That sultry night on the hilltop, she whispered:
You will make a good father. I carry your child.

How? Why? We were careful. We had Trojan!
Did you not use the morning-after pill I gave you?
Rather frenziedly, he slalomed down the hill
on his bare belly like a frothing madman. No!

No! He whined. I am leaving for Harvard soon!
Left alone on the darkened hillock, she called
out to him:  Will you marry me?  The night
quickly swallowed him, even as he sprayed
FROGS! on the nursery school’s walls. FROGS!
On the hill, she said, her frog test was positive.


2.
Tracing the beginning and end of graffiti
on his path, the old man said: Voice, Love,
Peace. Why should it end in Frogs on a nursery?
Had he seen the quartet of trees with the tale-
end of those street graffiti, Will you marry me?
he would have guessed Frogs was never for those
happy children toddling behind her, a pied piper.

Nor would he have thought this bedraggled tramp
selling him condoms and contraceptive morning-
afters knew what on earth he was babbling when
he said: Frogs croak in positive frog tests because
they are toads that kill all lust, all love, all life!
You wanna buy protection on that hill, old chappie?
I knocked a girl up there one night. I got off. Pills?


                                                                             
---Albert B. Casuga
04-30-12

These are the final poems, Poem #30 and #31 in my poem-a-day project to mark the National Poetry Month (April). It is also the final graffiti poem (Graffiti Poems 1 to 7) that unravels the mystery behind Graffiti on the path of a stroller that ends on a quartet of trees on top of a toboggan hill and mistakenly thought to terminate on the walls of a nursery school. Some poet friends thought it would be interesting to follow the narrative thread behind the Graffiti poems. This accommodates their requests. ---ABC