Made In Hell

 

 

 

Made In Hell

 

 

Her face was one-way glass

blank-innocent as a child's mirror,

her baby-blues welling soft,

winking not revealing

the opposite who watched

from the other side. She made her play

in a liar's crimson night where rain

greased the sidewalk smearing neon light

on the moon-hidden passage she shaded in her wait,

cigarette drooping smoke like San Francisco fog

above her golden gate.

 

His eyes matched her lipstick, hard as bathtub gin,

clear and extinguished as only eyes can be

that have seen the life go dead too many times,

suckered by patriotic chords that march

the rotting feet of war with tunes

suitable to aim your bullets by.

All that was over now 

or always here to stay; a grin

is only smoke 

curling in the shadow 

of a tipped fedora's brim.

The kiss was never meant to be a trap,

but it snapped her leg and crippled him for life

neither able to ever run again, tangled in

booze and the dicey bed spread with ice-cold aces

and eights. And when the children came

they never could make the change;

just learned they had to

pretend to be

someone else.

June 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for I Wake Up Screaming

Desperate Noir at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Still from Secret Beyond The Door, 1947 Public Domain 

Manipulated photo dated 3-7-1949 from personal collection ©joyannjones

 

Running By Winterlight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Running by Winterlight

Midnight called me up from my rifled bed

where I’d searched in vain for sleep’s last hiding place.

I went out to look at the fraying brindled clouds

taped to the far ice moon, and the Hunter's sword

once Freya’s distaff weaving the raveled world.

And I knew beyond my doubts your soul ran free

parkoured from star to star canopied above me.

I saw the aching dumbshow of what’s past, 
a flickering stereopticon of days 
each one still a sharpness of blinding glass

stuck in time’s deep gut, the bleeding pass of 
a dance above oblivion’s shifting cracks.

Light of my heart, you make a fine traceur;

one slip's enough to kill, yet you endure. 

Clouds cry ice, sweep in the shaking void

with its black mouth wide, its bone-white lich’s grin.

I’ve made myself so small, so fine a dust

plaited baleen could never seine me out,

just lose me where the cell-shed seeds sprout green. 

What's lost flies out and floats on seven winds.

What’s left puts down its root to live again.

February 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Open Link #9

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process notes: Parkour...is a training method which focuses on rational movement [where] the focus is to move around obstacles with speed and efficiency...to move through the..environment by vaulting, rolling, running, climbing and jumping. Parkour practitioners are known as traceurs.~wikipedia

The last lines of the first stanza refer to the constellation of Orion, a Hunter in Greek mythology whose belt of three stars holds the Orion nebula, representing the point of Orion's sword, and in Norse mythology, the distaff (a spinning tool) of Freya, goddess of love, beauty, fertility, war and death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Man From Planet X, ©Edgar Ulmar   Fair Use

Orion Mosaic, ©Derrick Lim Photography courtesy NASA   Fair Use 

 

The Potato Selkie

 

"...I am a man upon the land

I am a silkie on the sea
And when I'm far and far frae land
My home, it is in Sule Skerrie.."

The Silkie Song, Joan Baez

The Potato Selkie

 

 

 

He came frying to earth

on a feather not feather,

a float of an idea soft

as a potato, begging for form.

I put him to age

in a metal-bound cask to see

what he might eventually be;

something playful

and deadly as vodka,

or a poor-mind's pierogi

 to be gnoshed then spat

like sawdust-wurst. I sunk the cask

beneath a wave (New Wave, they say) 

and soon saw a man upon dry land

who dreamed of a selkie on the sea,

a million miles from Sule Skerrie

With a slick-metal sheen, he

sang to me in a lilt and croon

like potato mash, shapeshifting

 animus to idiot maximus.

In his strangle, only heat and dead air

still and dry, a trembling reflection

a shimmer of no-light, a clockwork cry

as he grabbed for my pen

with his fish-breath mouth,

jumped in the sea

and drowned

again.

 

 

June 2023

posted for Poetry Slam at The Singularity Corral

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top Image: The Hand, ©Salvador Dali 1930   Fair Use

Ai generated image sadly failing to be a selkie of any kind but at least forlorn about it.

Dream Of Wyverns

 

 

 

 

 

Dream Of Wyverns

 

 

 

The plane of grief is unrelieved

by fence or furrow, tree or cliff. It

stretches out a flight of new moons,

a river of crow's wings

hiding its eyes.

 

In the distance wyverns pace, their

asp-tongues a piercing, their growl-song sharp

as a whispering sting

poisoning dark.

 

To walk this plain

you must step over bones,

speak the language of ravens,

earn the kisses of crows

 

see the colors like bats

flat and profound

forever dependent on wavering sound

as it pours from the red well,

a bucket of misses splashing cold drown.

 

Everything here is

a secret of night. Black

angels drop like char on the snow

in peace as they fall

on the crow's nest below.

 

 

June 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Open Link #8 at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images are taken from the internet, artists unknown.  Fair Use 

The Infernal Operator

 

 

The Infernal Operator

The incubus is having

another rough night;

a bitter bell keeps ringing

between his horns, foreign, 

off-tempo, pounding like

the gallop of a three-legged horse,

or the arrhythmic crash of cambered granite

tumbling from a fallen cathedral,

and to top it off

there's an angel in the fire,

feathers burning acrid, ashy black,

dialing, dialing the clouds, asking 

the great silence left when the clacking

rotary wheel cogs home: Where is the bird-winged host, 

my alabaster birth brothers, the holy
triune fatherspiritson
to pull me out?

The incubus knows the angel

has landed in the wrong fireplace for this,

yet still he wishes

it would happen, to see at last a miracle 

not born of tormented flesh 

or the familiar's lascivious alembics,

 

and also so the noise would stop,

the pale, luminous eyes round as blue worlds

cease following him

from window to window as

he tries frantically to let out the stink.

Doesn't it care, this minister of grace, that

the incessant ringing, the billowing smoke

of its rendered virtue, distract him 

from his greatest opus?

(50 Shades of Damnation,

to be published next spring.)

Why doesn't its everpresent

compassionate disaster master save it?

Instead it burns and burns

as the phone rings on unanswered,

sweetly smiling, staring at him 

as if the lines weren't down

in a world on fire;

as if there was something

he could do.

 

 

 

~October 2015, lightly revised June 2023 

 

 

 

 

  

I couldn't as yet find any angels to wrestle, but I do have the incubus and his quandary here.(To read poems in this series, click the eponymous tag.)

posted for Wrestling Angels at desperate poets

 

 

 

Images by Salvador Dali, Fair Use via wikart.org

Top:Debris of an Autobile Gives Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone, 1938

Lobster Telephone, 1938

Cryptid

 

 

 

source

Cryptid

Was it your lover

you saw in the dream,

a spirit bear on fire,

or perhaps

the chupacabra, a steam

 given off/

absorbed  by

too-hot night?

Some cryptid regardless,

a cambion that comes

when eyelids fall down

before the stare of stars

dropped silent with a burn

from black sky

as morning turns to face you

cobra-hooded.

Fragments of him

of you

litter the lawn.

Meteorite dust

hangs in the air;

the smell of old longings

seeps from the roses

powdery as the skin's

 memory of a hand

that still feels,

of lips that know words

are the dark subsidence

down which you will tumble

to the place of live shadows

where two become one.

~September 2014

  

reposted for desperate poets

Top Image: Untitled by Abode of Chaos on Flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons License