Flash Friday 55 Reminder

Just a few words to remind everyone that the last Friday of this pre-apocalyptic month is almost upon us, and that while many things may be closed, unavailable or dangerous to do right now, poetry remains safely accessible, and the 55 will stay open as long as I can maintain it.

Sadly, some kink in the works of word press blogs is sending my comments to the spam folder. This Friday if that is still the case, I will leave a comment both on said blogs and here as well when you link your 55. 

~*~

Here's the first 55 I ever wrote, a decade ago, to get everyone in the mood. 

Dental Work

Closing my eyes

In the summer night

Clouds of gnats swirl up

Against the black.

I have no tattoos

Just some gold

To mark a place

And put a smile

Where something crumbled.

I live in hope

That when we tire

Of feeling sorry for ourselves

We’ll finally begin

To pity each other.

November 2010

Revenant

In honor of the forthcoming holiday, my all time favorite, Halloween, I'm reposting the third post I ever made at Verse Escape. It's one of my old poems, unrevised from 1991, the last year in which I wrote poetry before starting this blog, which turns one year old on the 16th of this month. (This was also the first post I submitted to One Shot Wednesday at the Old One Stop Poetry.)

Revenant

The cool breath of the dead sighs down the hall.

It peels my soul like an old potato,

thick slices of skin and soft woody flesh

dropping in a spiral on the kitchen table of this

tired life.

A speaking shadow stands at the door,

an empty replicant.

A grey curse hangs over him

like the sullenness of unshed rain

blowing past a withering crop.

Huddled in the closed grave of my bed

I compose my bones in paleolithic repose

with dry flowers, an awl of horn,

a broken string of red beads 

       drifted with earth,

waiting for the ending of that next birth.

O I hear you out there,

rapping, knocking, calling

with a mute vibration

begging to come in and have me.

O yes I answered last time and see

See me now.

Roll the rock and stop the door.

Put the holy symbol round my neck.

Only keep

    the shadow

                  out.

March 1991

Illustration: The Vampire, by Philip Burne-Jones  (1861-1926)
Philip Burne-Jones [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
 

Sonnet On An Old Nun

This is a repost I've reworked a bit to follow Samuel Peralta's  perceptive look at the marriage of form and free verse today at One Stop Poetry. It's a bit of a cautionary tale in attempting form, and as a purely defined sonnet it is a total technical failure, yet I learned a lot from writing it, and if regarded as free verse imposed on  and ignoring the form except for the on again, off again, mostly hidden sonnet rhyme scheme, as a poem I think it works. Someday I'd like to go back and make a true sonnet out of it, but that would involve slicing out half the words, and I'm too attached to them still to take up the scalpel.

Sonnet On An Old Nun

Vespers bring her walking up the mountain, 
to read faded ink upon a wrinkled page.

Waiting there her skeptical devotion,
chipped beads of all her lost bordello years

hand-held to tell again each burden’s mantra, 
sung  in the high snug nunnery of her age,

to hear again remembered laughter, 
mixing with the howling in her ears.

For this is no nunnery steeping Christ’s sad passion,

ringing Siddhartha’s hung serenity of bells,

but a hut cupped where a white witch danced old fashion

overlooking the coming ending to the tale that living tells.

Here’s no will, no last desire for erasure, 
nor plaint to be resurfaced of all sins,

no ash-pit push to suddenly be denying 
love found and freely used without permission,

no fugitive guilts, bright crimes of living squandered, 
to mount her by their ever-piercing pins

of tangled hair, soft cries and wakeful skins, 
no lies told by her soul to which she’ll listen

Just the whispered turning of a page

in this pagan nunnery of her age.

November 2010

Posted for Form Monday at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Originally Posted for Big Tent Poetry  

Monday prompt 11/22/10

Photo:  Untitled, by Oleg Dou

All Rights Reserved

Funeral Exhibit ~Memorial Day Repost

I wrote this last year for Veterans Day; reposting it today, for Memorial Day as I'm sure this same scene is still going on all over this country, and in one way or another, in many others.

Funeral Exhibit

Stopped bored at the tracks I look

over the fence into the cemetery

at the funeral.

Heads bared to the lucid November sun

on display to all who pass outside,

the mourners shift uncomfortably

around the sad slump of green

cloth that is the

next to last

shelter of the passed.

A young black sailor stands frowning

in uniform on the outskirts of the grey white family,

stark as a banner of war in a country of peace.

His white cap floating above the composition

like an artist’s touch of cloud on sky

placed by design to draw the eye

away from the politely concealed

hole in the earth.

It seems obscene for me

to watch from my car

the flag folding,

the mortality party

to which I’m uninvited

but no one seems to care that

a few feet away the world

drives on.

In the rearview mirror

I see the sailor extinguish his cap

in a sudden grasp,

bow his head.

then they’re gone.

If only it was really

that easy to pass on.

November 2010

Veteran's Day

Photo credit: Veteran dedication marker, Elmwood Cemetery, Barre, Vermont ©2008 Kimberly Powell

Three Flowers

Photo by Fee Easton

Three Flowers

In the clearing two horses endlessly cable

the moon, white shadows blown

before a hooked wind on a black plaster sky.

A flying worm lights its brief light;

a little boy tries to wear it on his shirt.

In the forest bare twigs chatter against

the bony branches shaking wet snow

down upon the field rat’s muzzle

stopped ten steps from life under the

white owl’s eye.

Two sparrows splash in the birdbath.

The sun is a haze through green locust leaves;
 in the clearing a winding horn finally
blows to summon the storm-dispersed hunt.

In the boneyard by day and by night

three flowers bloom red:

poppies named
Yesterday’s,

Today’s,

 Tomorrow’s Fight

to forget

the thing that lies buried here.

August 1988, revised November 2010

 

photo by joy ann jones  2010

Posted for OneShootSunday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Header photo used with permission

Friday Flash 55 ~ Spare Change

  Spare Change ~ Two Tankas

I

Dawn to dusk he works

all his life but work’s not done.

Gold’s a slattern wife

hard to keep, easy to steal

always laughing while she cheats.

II

The world is waiting

for signs and comets and change.

Only signs appear

in the hand, flashed on tv.

Change, comets, can’t be written.

February 2011

Posted for Friday 55 Flash Fiction at the G-Man's

Image: dragon center jumpingym coins, by Kam TANGO  wikimedia commons

Two Shadormas on Gloves

Two Shadormas on Gloves

I.

You left your

gloves behind the day  
you left me.
I put them

on, wond'ring if this was the

best way to hold hands.

 II.

Nature pairs

hands, gloves, wings, mates, eyes

to function.

Unpaired things
oppose--night, day, death, life--or

fall to randomness.

December 2010

 

The shadorma is a syllabic poem form, probably from Spain. It has six lines with a syllable pattern of 3/5/3/3/7/5 .

Posted for Magpie Tales #46
Uncredited photo provided by magpie tales removed

Also posted for Friday Flash Fiction 55 at G-man's  

Hedgerider's Lament~Part 1

Hedgerider's Lament~Part II can be found here
Hedgerider's Lament~Part III can be found here

The Hedgerider's Lament

Part I: Yule Sestina

It’s the time when amber green light soaks the sponge of mist,

Dripping softly where worlds rub shoulders in vast night,

Dreaming in the nest where brown eggs shift and crackle in the air,

Where I’m looking, looking, hearing soundless bells in the blue.

The grass bends, the sparrows talk, and magic guards this place

As I edge myself along the walls of the razorleafed hedgerow.

I see them all, patient, living, bent to purpose in the hedgerow

Waiting where the edges are sharp, or under the amber green mist.

Horehound lolls silver tongues, mint droops, amanita puts in place

Spotted red chairs for sprites and roofs for toadlings. Shadow night

Hides monkshood in its cobalt cap, telling me something fatally blue,

And ladyslippers wait for mousewomen where foxgloves dot the air.

My skull is a tangling rootball of hair and bone and air.

My skin is ambergreen bark against the razorleaves of the hedgerow.

My eyes are storm clouds flickering outwards, grey and blue.

My rabbit nose is twitching, pink in the dripping mist,

Breathing in and out, sifting and shaking the smells out of the night,

Passing hands above the edges, feeling leaves for the right place.

I see a medicine fire drifting the air with grey, burning in the place

Where a fallen piece of star has struck a match against hard air,

Making sage smoke and sweetgrass smolder in the night,

Like tobacco in the pipes of gnomes carousing in the hedgerow.

Other nights I lift a glass, beg them wash their beards in mist

But tonight I cannot stop to joke for the place is near,very cold and blue.

I can hear the worlds sloshing in their shells, spinning by in the blue

Almost touching, noses pushing the membranes towards the place

Where the new year sleeps in the old year's arms,damp with mist

And the quick bear the dead upon their backs, howling thru the air

Silenced by the heavy hand  of what dwells in the hedgerow

Because the time is not yet, though it nears in the shortening night.

                    

Day has sighed and gone, spent from matching itself to night

So perfectly. My hair jigs up in Tesla’s dance, jumping white & blue.

I feel them creeping, riding the top of the razorleafed hedgerow

Where it's thin as my skin. Now all but my hair is frozen in place.

Burnt tumbled smells, the soft horse muzzle of the night air

Nudges them at me, while at last the steelsharp leaves begin to mist.

                         

Now I can see you blur and move, in mist waves of ribboned night.

I reach out to the air.There where the thorns have turned  blue

Is the place I can pull you from your lost world, thru the hedgerow.

                                                                       

December 2010

Posted for One Shot Wednesday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry

With thanks to Rabbit
The first of four sestinas loosely based on the neopagan festival days of Yule, Candlemas, Beltane and Samhain.

Off the Shelf Archive - December #2

It's long past the time for a refresh on the Off the Shelf page, so the excellent Echo, by Christina Rossetti, is placed here for a final viewing, and a selection from the contemporary Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, takes its place. I'm mostly familiar with Atwood from her novel The Handmaid's Tale, a bit of dystopian feminist-ish sci-fi I read back in the early nineties, but I'd never read her poetry until recently.  I stumbled on this one quite by accident, and am passing it on.

Follow this link to read Sekhmet,The Lion-Headed Goddess of War, by Margaret Atwood.

As always feel free to comment here on either poem, as comments are disabled off the main page. Suggestions for next time are always welcome. Older selections can be accessed by clicking the Off the Shelf Archive label under Tags in the sidebar.

And now, a last look at Echo:

Echo

Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low
As long ago, my love, how long ago.

Christina Rossetti

Image: Woodcut Cover illustration for Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and Other Poems(1862,)  by Dante Gabriel Rossetti    wikimedia commons

Ordering Worlds on a Christmas Night

Ordering Worlds on a Christmas Night

Making a world it's what we do

with lights with noise, with flags and glue

with a mask for each and every thing

sometimes two.

Making a world for what we are,

a dome whose rafters are strung from a star

just some LED lights, some watts, some string

in front of a strip bar.

Making a world that changes the way

we’ve made ourselves think or we came to play

is harder than math and cold as bling.

It's done every day.

Making a world, it's what we fear

that we hold off with sparkle and sentiment's tear.

Soldiers of plastic blow horns in a ring.

The Savior is here.

Making a world, we want it more cute.

A Disneyworld planet and a Times photo shoot

shiny with order so we don’t leave a thing

to show the  dead root.

Making a world. it's what we plan

an unrisen bread from the kneading of man, 

though the hunger persists we use what we bring

And forget what we can.

December 2010

Posted for One Shoot Sunday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry 

Also posted for Poetry Potluck, at Jingle's

Photo courtesy of dustus @Onestoppoetry

Slightly edited to improve lack of cheerfulness, 1:28 pm

Ghosts of Christmas Past

The

Ghosts of Christmas Past?

Absurd;

they're never past

at all.

Passed, perhaps,

they linger in the hall

a scent unseen

a sight unheard, a laugh unlaughed

Watching drinking playing rapt

unwrapping revelries they  made

when they had form.

Some were torn

away too soon and swept too far

still hearing laughing cries not sudden tears

And once each year

they show their hidden smiles

 smoky, floating, gone but smiling still

Laugh? perhaps they will,

make a sudden joke, a flame 

leap up, or old remembered song

and then

(perhaps)

a new dance will begin 

free from old sins.

December 2010

A Very Merry Christmas, A Happy New Year and additional Happy Holidays of Any Variety Not Previously Mentioned

to all my pixelated internet friends and readers who make this world a little brighter with their own 

ability to shine

This is as cheerful as I get, folks. Enjoy.

Posted for Moondustwriter's Christmas Eve Eve Poetry at the inimitable One Stop Poetry

All photos from the author's files

In Clara's House

In Clara’s House

In your house

Christmas was always kept

my grandfather getting the tree

from the VA lot, cheap and scrawny,

you and I making it fit to be seen

before the sisters and the cousins came

to eat.

In your house

a discard was an ornament

something broken could be fixed

and used again.

something ugly could be cleaned

and put in a place of pride

unique.

In your house

African violets ruled in fertile hosts,

as big as geraniums, green guards with mauve caps

or cobalt, protecting every table, every window,

grown from microleaves I watched you cut and

place on soil like rows of crops from the farm 

you couldn’t have.

In your house

you set the table

carved and heavy, massive made,

covered with lace where all the family came for

groaning meals, and on off days

a child could hide between the legs

and be a lion.

In your house

a child with one mother lost

could have many found, in tales and talk

smelling like coffee and cardamon,

and soap, mother hands brushing princess hair,

braiding it into dragontails.

In your house,

Christmas was always kept.

The tree star watched while we were singing

and the casual blows and formal fear

the hidden anger and secret prisons

of that other house,

were nothing for awhile.

December 2010

Posted for One Shot Wednesday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry 

Photo of Clara Mathilda Carlson taken by Robert Studio, Chicago, Ill, 194?

Musical Interlude ~Journey Through Dark Heat~Dylan

I'm too tired to write today, but never too tired to listen to someone else who can do it like this. There are too many lines in here to pick from but I'm going to quote a few--the woman who's "drifting...like a satellite,"  the  "babe in the arms of a woman in a rage," who  "winds back the clock and turns back the page/on a book that  nobody can write.."  and  "..there's a lion in the road/there's a demon escaped..."  not to mention, " there's a white diamond moon on the dark side of this room, and a pathway that leads up to the stars/ if you don't believe there's a price for this sweet paradise, just remind me to show you the scars...."

and finally for all you Gemini's (of whom Dylan is one, of course): "I fought with my twin, that enemy within/ ’Till both of us fell by the way.."

So without further ado :

This is from the 1978 album, Street Legal

Arrow's Flight

The Arrow Shot, by Claudio Mufarrege

Arrow’s Flight

There is no singularity in this distress.

Winter babies know it as well as the scorched grass of summer,

which hangs its seed on the wind even in death.

I am arched  between two tunnels

mirroring forward or back to two separate worlds

poised for escape, unable to choose,

suspended till you are done with me.

It isn’t a choice I made, to love you,

to collect you, remember you part by part

and thought by thought,

to be always studying the lessons of your cells,

your everbrown eyes, cold and dark as frozen earth,

hot as a barn in July.

I don’t call you with a willed voice, or scheme, or plot,

but rather with the response of a recurring frequency,

or the pull of a particularly unwanted truth.

Truth, after all, is the master, come suddenly,

standing in the doorway with eyes of stone alight,

stronger than food or rain.

Love is only the servant, cleaning the soul,

who beheads the bird in the heart’s kitchen

or makes it fly surprisingly

like a paper bird thrown for a child.

You say it can be taken back, what’s been given,

but it’s living in your bones. It sees from your eyes

and twists in the curls on your chest.

And you are in me the same

like the wine is in the grape.

It is my same stubbornness you show me

as you turn to follow your own shadow,

as you fly like an arrow in the night from me,

as my hand lets go the bowstring,

as my own refusal to be known denies me.

These are things that can be named

but they are still not things that can be changed.

It can only be said that perhaps tomorrow will swallow them,

when all my molecules untie, spinning like dust motes in the light,

these pieces and atoms of you will blow like seed in the wind.

August 1991, revised, December 2010

Posted for One Shoot Sunday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry

Image: The Arrow Shot, by Claudio Mufarrege
Used with permission.

Dead Man's Curve

Dead Man's Curve

“ Live as if you were already dead”

~unsourced “Zen” saying, as quoted by poet Marvin Bell.

“You don’t come back/from Dead Man’s Curve…”

~20^th Century American Pop Song by Jan & Dean

The Dead Man as Poseur

The Dead Man is living as if he’d been alive, because he has it all backwards.

The Dead Man is primarily a pretentious but not harmless twit, prowling the internet, squinting at some tasty wisdom he thinks he can consume like a burrito.

He likes the way the monks' robes swish as they rake the rocks 
in the sand gardens of sleeping neurons deep within an electric foreign tranquility, and thinks he must just totally must, 

have that app.

He’s looking at his navel, and sighing over the Bodhi tree; a plastic green predecorated scotch pine in the window of the home warehouse store.

Of course, there’s no reason he couldn’t sit beneath the tree, but he worries about store security, and really, he just doesn’t have the time, even though he’s supposed to be Dead 
for quite awhile.

His watch hasn’t stopped,it still tocks, so he’s still late. (If you’re pressed for time as a corpse, certainly you have no time to lose.)

But he can’t tell time very well anymore, what with the being so Dead and all.

If his eyelids hadn’t rotted, if his eyeballs weren’t a crow’s canapé, he still would look at everything and see nothing.

More about the Dead Man as Poseur

There is no more, except a Dead Man’s ego that stalks cyberfinity

and hides in the picture of a prettier girl smiling in her prom dress.

There is no more, except the Dead Man’s maw of ever gaping hunger

that dips ink brushed parchment into chocolate, and deep fries a butterfly on a stick under a maraschino cherry tree.

There is no more, except the Dead Man’s fear that the bottomless void

will suck the Dead brains right out of him and spit them into a peanut shell.

There is no more, because someone 
buried the Dead Man alive.

December 2010

Originally written in response to the Monday Prompt of 12/13/10, to write a “Dead Man’s poem” a la Marvin Bell, at Big Tent Poetry. This is explained in more detail here









Disclaimer: I cannot find any source in Zen Buddhist literature  for the saying Mr. Bell has used to create his genre of Dead Man's Poetry. Internet searches on these keywords will return only Mr Bell as a source. While this does not detract in any way from the independent merit of his work, I would take the assumption that it has any real connection to Zen tradition with a grain of salt. It seems more likely to me that this is a corruption of the famous quote attributed to Gandhi: "Live as if you will die tomorrow." But that's just me. 


Image of plastic zombie and flowers: yard art by Toscano, public domain
Second Image: Duncan Quinn suit ad, public domain

Mother and Child

Mother and Child


Such gentleness
To have launched a thousand wars
Such love
To have burned so many bundles of flesh
Such folly
To believe beyond compassion
Such hope
That things can be healed

Behind the mother’s mask
A child.
Behind the child’s mask
A flower.
Such ancient frailty
To remain
Evernew.

December 2010

Posted  for Magpie Tales  and also for  Friday Flash 55  at G-Man's place.

December 15, 2010

Uncredited photo provided by Magpie Tales removed

(Poem includes an old informal haiku I wrote earlier this fall.)

Tale Of The Nine-Tailed Fox

Tale of the Nine-Tailed Fox

Tale of the Nine-Tailed Fox

A Terza Rima

There is a fox, a kitsune cunning,

prowling the world I‘m dreaming unbound.

No hunter on earth can keep up with his running.

He hides and he smiles. He seldom is found.

His feet are soft sheathes for his adamant claws.

My fox has dark wisdom and tails that abound.

In the east he’s a seer on fleet spirit paws.

In the west he’s a trickster of convivial drifts.

In the snow he’s ice white until the world thaws.

Sometimes he’s a she, a vixen who shape shifts,      

who marries or buries her blind mortal spouse,

leaves a pup or a throat-bite and takes the man's gifts,

but always in dreams there’s a fox in my house.

Remote like all wild things from pity’s remorse,

my skin is his shelter, my heart his caught mouse.

My hounds all pursue him but can’t stay the course.

The red-coated Hunt fast becomes a wild rout

where dog falls on dog, and the fox beats the horse.

In his covert of flesh he hides safe from the clout,

then he grows a new tail and chews his way out.

December 2010

“...In European folklore, the figure of Reynard the Fox symbolizes trickery and deceit. Chinese folk tales tell of fox-spirits…that may have up to nine tails. In Japanese mythology the kitsune are fox-like spirits possessing magical abilities that increase with their age and wisdom. Foremost among these is the ability to assume human form…The more tails a kitsune has…the older, wiser, and more powerful it is. “  ~Wikipedia

Posted for OneShotWednesday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry

Image: Daji, ill-fated concubine of King Zhou of Shang, portrayed as a fox spirit, from the Hokusai Manga, courtesy wikimedia commons source link