We All Live in a Yellow Submarine

We all live in a yellow submarine
floating through impressionist water lilies.


The blended blue and green strokes are slowly being caked
in gooey psychedelic yellow and pink ooze,


before Lucy starts to dance a waltz on their petals.
The yellow and green cellophane water lily flowers


sway, rippling the water with bright, crystal lines of white.
Our yellow submarine drifts under a bridge


past tall rockinghorse people.
I wave and politely refuse their offerings of marshmallow pies.


They look too similar to Alice B. Toklas' brownies.


Instead, I walk over to Monet and ask if he's thought about
painting Rouen Cathedral lately.


I love water lilies, but cathedrals have always been more my thing.
He says he painted those yesterday.


He shows me one, and as I stare in awe,
I say that, in the future, where I'm from,
his paintings are definitely here to stay.


I've never seen anything like them in all my life.
I know I'll never lose affection for impressionism.


Then, Monet is sucked up into a whirlpool of
solid-colored cubes and squares and signed urinals.


I wave goodbye as the yellow submarine floats me
towards a wall of paint splotches and lines.


A smoking pipe sticks out of the ground,
but somehow I know that it's not really a pipe.
Maybe that's because it's in a sea of melting clocks.


There's a little boy frozen in black-and-white space holding a hand grenade
on a flat, solid wall of green grass.


I wave, and his face contorts in anger.
Marilyn smiles as I pass the Cambell's soup factory.


Honestly, her lipstick and eyeliner scare me.
I miss Monet and his umbrella lady.


The marmalade skies morph in front of my eyes--
they're no longer a rich orange color,


but instead they're white, and the word SKY
is simply written across them in 48pt. Times New Roman font.


One of my fellow submarine passengers--
I hadn't noticed him before--
explains that we're supposed to use our imaginations
and to picture the sky the way we personally relate to it.


I don't quite buy it.
I really miss Monet now.


But in an instant, a lady starts to float away from our yellow submarine.
"I relate better to life from a cruise ship," she says.
And off she goes.


Then, one by one, everyone floats away.
One guy's on a dolphin,


someone else has a warship, and suddenly
the Cambell's soup factory explodes as a torpedo hits it.


Some other guy rides off on a water horse,
my best friend goes off with some Italian guy on a speed boat.


I look around--
there's only one guy left on the yellow submarine.


We shrug and smile at each other,
turning the wheel back towards our favorite impressionist water lilies.


As we drift back towards marmalade skies, I wonder
about the other forty-two lonely passengers.


Maybe they're all with multi-colored Marilyn
or stuck eating tomato soup for life.


They'll find their own ways, I guess.
After all, wasn't that why they left?

 © 2015   Abby Danfora