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

 

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 

Asylum

 

 

 

 

"..Let the doctor and the lawyer do as much as they can.
Let the springtime begin, let the boy become a man.
I have wasted too much time 

just to sing you this sad song..."~James Taylor, 1971 

 

 

 

Asylum

 

 

 

In the madhouse

on beds of daggers

we slept like crickets

chirping to ourselves

while they tried their best

to make us cannibals.

 

The nuns were worse than

lawyers, praying like accordions,

tracking their sins into our soft 

wax skulls, wheezing like roosters

when one of us cried, laying the greasy ribs

of Jesus on our plates.

They kept you behind

door number six. I'd go to you

with a stolen key, when the noon

smelled bright as carnations, 

when the nights were

more purple than the jacarandas.

 

You spoke of your father

dead of snakebite,

a clockwork marvel with

his million-dollar suit of skin,

and your mother

with the viper between her lips.

I remember your kiss

astringent with reason

as bitter lemons, and the way

your hair blew back from

your dog-brown eyes like poisonous

smoke from the oleanders.

I thought these things

as beautiful as angels

whispering in the dahlias

when I was lost in the asylum,

when the doctors did all they could

to see that we ate each other

down to the bone.

April 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Inspired by the words of Federico Garcia Lorca,

and a dream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Madhouse, 1812-1814 © Francisco Goya  Public Domain

Vase with Carnations, 1886, © Vincent Van Gogh    Public Domain 

 

The Last Afternoon

The Last Afternoon

It was a day where even

the rain holds a grudge.

I'm too dry for rain

to do much good; too old

for paper castles

to wall out

the night coming,

the grey wolf walking.

Only love can do that,

on the last afternoon

when I'll

hold her head
heavy with wolf-dreams

on my knees.

February 2020

a 55 for

The Sunday Muse

(and a reminder that the Friday 55 will be next week)

Image: photo-manipulation © Sarolta Ban    Fair Use

Friday 55 October 20 2017

Welcome, all, to the Friday journey, where we tip a hat to that great host of infinite possibilities now passed on, Galen Hayes, and build our own word-ships for sailing the seas of confusion, with 55 verbal planks of poetry or prose, no more no less, linked in the comments below. The rules remain the same, in that there are no rules, no strings and no obligations. Maybe you feel like playing this week, maybe you are otherwise occupied. Maybe you feel like commenting and visiting and maybe you hate it. None of that is important, except that you write when you are ready, because this is simply a writing exercise---for craft, fellowship and fun. As always, comment moderation is on to keep things real, and the prompt remains live from Friday through Sunday.

And so let's begin...

Leadlight

These words,

these broken bits of

stained glass, stained

as summer's love;

cinnabar, gold, sky cerulean;

fractured light that slants

notice of the

dead end of the year.

Faces are flown 

from the high window

 (unconsecrated now)

 their smiles

a scattered puzzle;
these October words

fall like
frostburned angels,

only good

for whispering to ghosts.

~October 2017

Note: Leadlight or leaded lights, are windows made from small sections of glass supported in lead frames, a generic term now often extended to all stained glass work, though earlier used only for simpler window or domestic casement art.  ~wikipedia

Image via internet search. Manipulated. Fair use.

Last Act

Last Act

A pared face, a false peel, a sliver

above silver seamed stars;

who will call the waters

now that we've broken the moon?

In the windowed night,

 love's widow
walks her hushed graveyard,
where the white skirts of memory

 rustle around the turn.

Who can say

what time it is; only that time

never stops.

 ~November 2016

posted for real toads

Flash 55 Plus

Note: I cheated here and used the first 55 words of a longer poem, hoping it stands alright alone--anyway, only for those interested, here is the rest of the piece:

 Last Act

...

Who can say

what time it is; only that time

never stops.

 

Answer

the midnight door--perhaps a dead king 

disinters to go dancing,
or the palest child, cold,
is offering in the dark

a chance to finally pay your debt;

hear a script with no speaker,

a performance careless of audience,
a whole cosmos
that gestures and moves

as the void declaims before it,
tapping its teeth in the final soliloquy.

All we are is cut from this paper,
cellophane over the footlights.

Who is that 

singing by starlight

now that the players have gone?

~November 2016

Images: Night, 1905, by Mikalojus Ciurlionis Public domain 
via wikiart.org 

A Graveyard in the Tyrol, 1914, by John Singer Sargent  Public domain 
via wikiart.org

Both images slightly manipulated.

Hunter's Wish

Hunter's Wish

I see you in dreams,

arms akimbo clutched one-handed,

a beige on blond bending

two-dimensional distortion,

Modigliani-stretched 

or a cave painting:

Hunter, missing one forearm.

Thin as the spear

you no longer throw,

reluctant to grasp

anything at all, 

or pick up the wish

so long on your table,

staring you down,

sealed or smeared,

perhaps just trash or

scratched in a code

mathematically impermeable.

Yet I with no math,

no science, no separated brain

can read,

flat and open as a daisy,

the plain letters curved as

salmon's backs leaping,

your wish for hunt's end:

only be good, it says,

(in antelope tracks, in burnt bones

in crumbled earth,) 

be good

to yourself.
Don't forget how to use
the hand you have left.

~May 2016

posted for     real toads

Challenge: Fireblossom Friday

Image: by SiefkinDR :Photo of outline of a human hand, dated 27,000 Before Present Era, dsplayed at the Musée d'Archéologie Nationale (Museum of National Archeology). in the Chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye via wikimedia commons