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