Tiger In The Abstract

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Tiger In The Abstract

 ( a 55)

 

 

"Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."

~unknown, attr Mark Twain

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tiger walks a crumbling flow

stippled with blood, scratching scree.

 

Wind is crying in the dead-branched tree

tears of a fatal innocence

while the lamp of moon burns low. 

 

Soft sharp paws in avalanches

are pacing out his pestilence;

rocks fall like raindrop lances

in fragrant inundations,

 

dry waves of murder-dances

upon the crushed carnations. 

 

 

 

July 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images:Fifty Abstract Paintings..Three Lenins..Head Of Royal Bengal Tiger,  1963, © Salvador Dali Fair Use

Carnations, 1891, © Joaquin Sorolla  Fair Use 

 

Parabola

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parabola

 

 I've clerked all my life 

in the Ministry of the Moon,

a fixed point on her long ellipse,

recording her perigees, her apogees,

her slow apotheoses,

while she lays

 

her lean silver arms across

the back of my chair, penciling in 

corrections on my sedulous tallies

of tides the heart has taken in

given out, or given up.

These are not erasable

 

but sometimes she

strikes out a line

changes my totals

with her flickering hand,

all in pencil, all by moonlight remote

and hard as hammers;

 

but the sun is her bright clown, only

on fire to fill her midnight eye,

so who am I

not to dance along?

 

 

 

 

last day of June, 2025 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List at

Shay's Word Garden 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Aurora vortex, author unknown, via internet   Fair Use

Dark Dancers, ©Gina Jacob     Fair Use 

 

 

The Sway

 

 

 

 

 

The Sway

(A Love Poem}

 

 

So many years I dripped

your jade-clear love, my absinthe on

a melting sugar dream.

I knew the greenest green

that thrives above the ossuary

sprouting summer flowers made from bone.

Grey birds, their long legs trailing,

flew above the estuary. Water blue as

babies' eyes threw back the light of day

like knives to blind us as we rode upon the Sway.

 

You were born

to sit a wild-eyed horse in panic run

through the rainwater of a subsumed road,

to write the outlines of what never was

across the broken tips of Time's last rhyme,

to pick me like a lily in the dawn

then pass my velvet shadow to the moon,

gone like summer light that winks away

when caught in flagrant congress with the day,

like laughter floating out into the Sway.

 

So rock, sweet night, again tonight

as you have rocked so many times before

across the green expanse of yesterday.

You have a keener eye than bird of prey,

more melody beneath the fallen sun,

more teeth than any soft umbraculum

who tears the coral's painted skin away

and sucks its sweetness from the drying gore.

Rock before I wake and lose the way

just before I follow Love into the Sway.

 

 

 

 

May 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: Umbraculum umbraculum, common name the umbrella slug, is a species of large sea snail or limpet, a marine gastropod mollusc ...found in tropical to warm temperate parts of the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, where it feeds on sponges...It has roughly 10,000 teeth in its mouth at any one time and will go through approximately 750,000 teeth during its lifetime of up to ten years..."~wikipedia  (I have used my recently renewed poetic license to substitute coral for sponges.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Green Fairy, artist unknown, via internet     Fair Use

Blue and Green Music, 1921 ©Georgia O'Keeffe        Public Domain

 

 

 

 

Canned Tulips

 

 

 

 

 

 

Canned Tulips

 

 

 

There was deep night asleep behind your eyes

black as the moon's turned face that lives

cold and dead behind her shine

but still like her, you smiled the sky.

 

Our vices were soft clinging things

pink and innocent as a child's clean hands

petulantly pulling at the dolls of our virtues,

lead angels falling on their sparrow wings.

 

We drove to Texas for the secret stones

but we only found the hardrock end.

The Gulf rains erased our cartoon faces,

the sharks circled in and ate our bones.

 

When the ambulance came you stood alone

with no can-opener for all the tulips you'd canned,

peeled like an orange to your soft sweet core,

while I cried a pool in the sand's sucking bowl

 

for the sky to come down

in your smile and make us whole.

 April 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

and

 

 

D'Verse Poet's Pub

Opening Lines

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Tulips in a Milk Carton, 1989 ©Paul Wonner   Fair Use

Sharks, ©Utagawa Kuniyoshi    Public Domain

 

Ballad Of The Earwig

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Ballad Of The Earwig

(a 55)

 

He was the earwig come up through the drain,

she the rosebud ruined in rain,

 

she the actress losing her looks,

he, strutting hero of unreadable books;

 

they a brainstorm dying in rage,

they, two monkeys shaking a cage.

 

I am the pony who runs with the storm,

you, blue fire that burns without warmth. 

 

 

April 2025 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Earwig, metal sculpture, artist unknown. via internet   Fair Use

Blue Fire Wallpaper, artist unknown, via internet,   Fair Use

Reading With The Fishes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading With The Fishes

 

 

 

For many years I lived

in a hollowed-out book

before I was eaten by fishes.

 

I can't say how

they found me. I thought

I was safe there

 

wrapped in my blanket

of words, deep in the good

leather smell but

 

fish it seems

are surprisingly quick

and genuinely hungry.

 

At first it was nibble and tickle

but soon my eyelids were history,

and I won't be needing lipstick any more.

 

After that, I took my words

and went to live

with the animals.

 

We have an understanding: they

don't write poetry, and I

don't have them for dinner.

 

 

 

 

 April 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

My second copy--wore out the first

 

 

 

 

posted for the Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Fisherman's Shack, 1994 © Jacek Yerka    Fair Use

Immortal Poems, 2025, ©joyannjones

 

 

 

The Spot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Spot

 

 

The black spot came on a sunny day.

It was small but full as a school for ants

each one learning to swarm, to eat, to

serve the next. Where will I go when they

finish with me, in autumn rain when

I fall like a leaf

from the tree of my life.

 

All my souls will be flying on the wind,

a storm of stories ahead of the wavering night.

I trace with a crow's feather the map

they travel on my skin 

the winding and the blowing away. Which

dark bird dropped it, what ink has dripped it

on time's page, the black spot that came

 

on a sunny day

and will not go away. 

March 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for the Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images:Ants, © Dunja Zubak  via internet   Fair Use

Crows in flight, via internet author unknown    Fair Use

Crazy

 

 

 

 

Crazy

 

 

 

The psychiatrist sat
in his belle époque chair,
his beard a quenched fire,
crossed leg a hot wire.

He stared at me fixedly,
flirtatiously, fictively.
I closed my face another notch;
crushed haven on the velvet couch.

The questions were wrong
denser than dusk, older than insects,
each one packed with boxes
full of white mice and foxes.

Can you remember? not Can't you forget?

So much smoke and hot ash;

and after all that, his cigar

was just a cigar.

 

 

 

March 2025 

posted for the Word List

running with the bureaucratic theme this week

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image: Woman Leaving The Psychoanalyst, ©Remedios Varo  Fair Use

Judas Hand

 

 

 

 

Judas Hand

( a 55)

 

March howls its broken promise

to erase the extra decades in your bones;

 

you're spent in bed still feeling

the burn that made the ash.

 

The ghostwind cuts

your lips with a dead man's kiss.

 

You forget hummingbirds are coming

like children cured by the sea

 

and wish you'd never bet

on that judas hand.

 

 

 

 

March 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for the Word Garden Word List 

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: a poker hand of black aces and eights with a card in the hole is called a dead man's hand, after the hand held by Wild Bill Hickok when he was shot in the back of the head in Deadwood, Dakota Territory 1876. It's also known as the judas hand. Alternatively, a judas hand can be three tens, representing the thirty pieces of silver Judas Iscariot received for betraying Jesus Christ.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Landscape in Stormy Weather 1885 ©Vincent Van Gogh  Public Domain

Display in Deadwood, South Dakota with the dead man's hand (here given as A♠ A♣ 8♠ 8♣ 9♦) Vidor at English Wikipedia.Public Domain

Pandaemonium

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pandaemonium

 

 

 

Lucifer's a pudgy angel now,

carrying around a clockwork hook.

He glistens like the night-sweat of

a troupe of drunkard clowns.

The hook is busy swinging in one hand,

heavy and sharp, catching this,

piercing that, while he smiles,

extending with ersatz camaraderie

 

the other flat, empty palm. I would

send him a letter, but

he's disappeared all the pens

commandeered the keyboards

burnt down the paper mills,

so it can only be written

on tombstones with a broken crucifix in

my blood, and it's doubtful he will read.

 

I need my blood

for better things, like

watering the apple blossoms

shot pink with spring fire, and

bleeding a banner with a new chorus

 for the mongrel choir

throat singing back to him the

National Anathema. 

 

 

February 2025

 

Posted For Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

Pandæmonium ...is the capital of Hell in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost...The name stems from the Greek pan (παν), meaning 'all' or 'every', and daimónion (δαιμόνιον), a diminutive form meaning 'little spirit', 'little angel', or, as Christians interpreted it, 'little daemon'...Pandæmonium thus roughly translates as "All Demons"—but can also be interpreted as Pandemoneios or 'all-demon-place'..John Milton invented the name in Paradise Lost (1667), as "A solemn Council forthwith to be held at Pandæmonium, the high Capitol, of Satan and his Peers" ~wikipedia

 

Throat singing

Images: Pandemonium, 1841, ©John Martin

The Fall Of The Rebel Angels, 1562 © Pieter Bruegel the Elder 

Maleficium

 

 

 

 

 Maleficium

 

 

 

 

By dark lantern, by crimson candle, in

an absence floating in wine without bread,

the Necromancer toasts in mandrake hopes

the golden miracles of his dead.

 

His chamber is fumed with dubious pasts, an

offering's smoke where the last choke occurred.

His breath has gone dry as his corpse-woman's eye,

ceremonially opened with a theurgic word.

 

But that eggshell gaze is blind as stone, her

songs of the oriole fluttered away.

The nods of owls and mnemonic howls

work a brittle sequence no cello can play.

 

The final shriek puts grit in the lens, so

it never divines what time's drown erased.

The owl and the oriole dice for his soul;

every spirit that rises wears his own face.

 

In my dream you've left fetches and dust behind.

You stand by the door of a bridge's arc,

the wild blue river in flight from your quiver,

your shades all spent arrows that killed their marks.

 

 

 

 

February 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Necromancy: "..the practice of magic involving communication with the dead by summoning their spirits as apparitions or visions for the purpose of divination.." ~wikipedia

Maleficium: "the practice of malevolent magic, derived from casting lots as a means of divining the future in the ancient Mediterranean world"~wikipedia

Theurgy:".. the ritual practices associated with the invocation or evocation of the presence of one or more deities..."~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Necrophile. 1965, ©Jean Benoit        Public Domain

The Blind Man of Toledo, 1906, ©Joaquin Sorolla       Public Domain

 

 

 

Glass Of Darkness

  

 

 

 

Glass Of Darkness

 

 

 

I see the tall glass of darkness

putting out a pot of cinders and ash

where too many cooks have spoiled

the serenade, sweet high song

of sun's guilt evening

to the kicking horse

that must be shot

before it can be free.

 

I sing along, blind in

this bare attic, but every note

that jumps in my throat

lies, dropping bloodless on the

broken map where cities blur

like stars whose cream light curdles

in a dead sky of greysmoke ghosts;

where nothing is ever free.

But I can't stop.

They say every skull will sing

if the wind blows

just right.

January 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images:San Francisco, 1906 post-earthquake © The Atlantic, archives

The Penitent Magdelen ca 1640, Georges De La Tour     Public Domain