Après La Révolution

 

 

 

 

Après La Révolution

 

 

After the revolution we

became the aristos.

 

I fell in love with a

prince of the butterscotch castle

but I could never get past

the guillotine in his head, the wolf

hissing in his flock of noise,

the glitter-ship in his bottle

waiting each day to sail him away.

 

All the devils of summer

came to our parties, flashing

their ruby eyes in the dark, stealing

my stockings, hiding the postman,

eating the silverware. I made a centerpiece

from applecores, black horns and tail-spikes

and called it art diabolique.

 

When the winter night

finally flapped its starstained carpet

over the horizon, its patterns worn

and indistinct as we were, all

the stardust beaten out of us, I knew

we wouldn't make it to the end,

or even to France.

 

La révolution est morte.

Vive la révolution.

 

 

 

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

posted for 

Shay's Word List #17

Joni Mitchell

Images: Study for the Spanish Dance, 1879, © John Singer Sargent  Fair Use

Charlotte Corday, 1860,  ©Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry   Fair Use

Flash Friday Fiction 55 Special April Edition #4

It's time to reprise the 55 for the final Friday in April. This time, perhaps because of the current situation globally, I have really been thinking about Galen and his platform and how lighthearted it all was, and yet how it managed to bring many different kinds of people together in all the best ways, and inspire some truly funny and/or amazing poetry and flash fiction, along with all that camaraderie and kickassery on the way. 

So I ask all who were around at the time to remember him today as we play with Galen's meme.

The rules are the same, 55 words of prose or poetry no more no less, and link the url of your effort in the comment section.

The prompt will be live from

Friday at 12:00 AM to Sunday at 4:00 PM

Below you will find a link to a 55 of mine from 2013, including comments, to bring on some nostalgia for the G-Man and illustrate, perhaps, that time. I encourage all who have one

 to share an old 55 with comments as well if they wish. We do need to remember the good times in the midst of the bad.

~ * ~

My 55 from the Wayback Machine:

 

Fleck

~ * ~

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

Watch This Space for the Return of the 55

Greetings, all. 

I would like to welcome you to the revival of the Friday tradition of the Flash Fiction 55, the first of which will take place January 31st. The challenge will post at Thursday midnight and be good thru Sunday, on the last Friday of every month. Your entry can be in any style or form, prose, fiction, non-fiction, and of course,poetry, so long as it consists of 55 words, and 55 only.

I had been hosting this challenge for awhile in honor of its originator, Galen Hayes and his form that never fails until my husband's illness accelerated and I became unable to do so. Kerry O'Connor generously took it up and continued it as a once a month prompt at the now archived Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. Since that forum is no longer available, and Kerry has indicated her approval, I hope to continue in that format now that my life has calmed a bit. 

For many of us who spent years regarding the Garden as our own favorite site for poetry, with its uniquely intelligent and multitudinous prompts and features, and its inhabitants as our cohorts in literary crime, its retirement leaves a bit of a blank spot. Other sites, new such as earthweal, and  old, like d'Verse will surely help to fill that spot, but it's a large hollow space, and it seems to me there is room for this challenge as well to keep us writing and to keep our community together. Plus, I am a huge fan of the 55, and often when I feel I can't write anything, it will prove me wrong by popping 55 words up for me. So here's to Galen, the 55, and all of you whom I hope will participate.

See you on the 31st.

The Wizard's Gift

 

The Wizard's Gift

It came in a box.

Death wrapped in red foil

and silver ribbon

glowing with night's own light,

the dark knowing of its nature.

The wind brought her stiff broom

to sweep the air clean of brimstone stink

but you stood and laughed and reeked

in the midnight sun.

You wore those solemn robes

like stiff wings freshly feathered.

A pretense of hooded eyes cerulean blue 

shone tarry through the snarl of

each jetblack lash, yet under your

velvet calm was a constant rustling.

Anyone not spellbound in tranced oblivion

would see the barbed tailtip of your starved familiar

thrashing with a scorpion's steel sharp sting.

You held the ocean out in a crystal cup,

tiny hearts tied to the mast, a thousand ships

set sailing in the devil's brandyglass.

Windtossed I watched the mousemaid's fallen tear

grow the deepest pool in a black moon-strangled grove

where the winking fox set the crippled rabbit free

and one absent swipe rang the raven's dinner bell.

Down down went the chambered shell

to the scarlet aquifer;

you curved your fingered claws over my white hand 

until they twined

and flowed together as grains of sand

merge in a dune indistinguishable

and we pulled the fullness up

to our glittering husks from the butcher's well

to drink together the bloodred wine of hell.

~July 2012
edited, October 2015

(re)posted for    real toads

Tuesday Platform

If you'd like to hear the poem read by the author, click below:

Image: The Wizard, by Edward Burne-Jones

Public Domain, via Wikipaintings.org

House On The Hill

Image (c)  Erik Johansson

House on the Hill

I’ve built a  fine house on top of my head, grey

dormer windows, tall stories, preaching chimneys,

heavy boards of years across the door. 

It’s easier now, not going in and out,

and I needed a way to keep out the dead.

The time it's taken you'd never guess, to 

trim my ears into topiary frogs, meticulous sentinels here

by the door, crouched comical, listening and green

on the hair I’ve mowed smooth as a fog. Totems

well placed can help keep out the dead.

Of course, my eyes still stay outside, blind ovals in

the wild blow of storm, hit by each unseen coldslap surprise,

while inside my house, white incense smoke takes 

the sweetened song of a bird in a cage from attic

to hall, to ward the doors that keep out the dead.

There's the child in her room, lining treasures up.

See her bone beads of grace in a plastic cup gleam

rich red in an eyeglow turned in, flicker 

and spark giving light where there is

neither fire nor candle to keep out the dead.

She wears my mist necklace of disappearing jewels

clothes of umber leaves, shoes from old squirrel tracks

left on the lawn, paints my face with the scent 

of rosemary rubbed on the dark skin of dawn,

come climbing up over the living and dead.

And the view is good from the slanting roof,

laid on the summit of my growth, looking out

where my own eyes ever go, beyond my topiary ear

to the walled horizon of clouds and fear

the dead must cross to get to here.

~May 2011

A little Octoberish music from the past, which I was inspired to dig out of mothballs by a post at Oran's Well. I haven't revised it much.

The artist for the image at top, Revelation Fields, is Swedish photographer Erik Johansson. All rights belong to him. His website of amazing art is here, and his print store, here

For The Road

For The Road

He bought me a car

so I could drive it for him,

the Drunken Master, the Blind Buddha

high school wrestler with a karma

stronger than the Eight Immortals.

So I worked for my license,

drove my teacher (Eddie Sneath) to drink

with the stickshift stall and rollback of 

 San Francisco hills,

learned the caress and nudge of a tight clutch

the tap of foot/ hand glide/ accelerator slide,

but still, I always knew

it was easier

than learning to fly.

~January 2015

posted for    real toads

Challenge: Road Trip!

Corey Rowley (Mexican Radio) asks us to travel back in time to our first ride.


Process Notes: 'Eddie Sneath" was an alias and alter ego of a friend. The car was a '64 VW microbus named Ruby, purchased by my first husband. (She had the white and turquoise paint job pictured above, so Ruby described her personality, not her color.)When I was put behind the wheel one foggy morning on Van Ness, I had never driven a car in my life, but I learned. 
The flying, that was harder.

Optional Pop-Psychedelic Musical Accompaniment

Images: Authors unknown. I have slightly manipulated both. 

Source.

Flashback~No One Remembers Anything Least of All This

Flashback

No One Remembers Anything Least of All This

Do we find the cost of freedom
buried in the ground?
~Stephen Stills



It doesn't matter how high

the white dove flies.
The downplummet fall
is determined by
gunpowder and blood.

Where war meets money
there are only
unequal equations
and the black
hole sucksounds
of mouths
without wings.

~September 2013

Devil's Dictionary

Devil’s Dictionary

It’s good

to shut the red

book and be

myself again

after the delirium,

to no longer be

a vade mecum

for obstreperous

demons, tauntingly

misquoted,

a dictionary

for devils;

to see the colors

unprismed from

your illusive illustrations,

random wind ruffling pages

not your spirit’s soft

secret fingers;

to feel my hair

an animal’s satiny pelt

and not a misprinted

text of memories

written across

your hands.

It’s good,

this stillness, good

even to grow old

reading my

next words 

from a

blank sheet.

July 2011

A little nostalgia. This was originally posted for the Grand Opening at dVerse Poet's Pub on their  first Open Link Night, (and for the concurrent closing of the inimitable One Stop Poetry) back when I had the privilege of working with Brian Miller, Claudia Schoenfeld, Natasha Head, Joe Hesch, and the rest of the original staffers. It was an exciting and memorable time. Due to various life and health issues, I've been unable to keep up with the ever-growing community at dVerse, but I wish everyone, new and old, all the best tonight, on the first OLN of the pub's third year.

Posted for OpenLinkNight at dVerse Poet's Pub

Also posted for the Last OneShotWednesday at One Stop Poetry

which closed its doors with this final event.

The original Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce, was a collection of satirical definitions posing as an actual dictionary, and contains some of the sharpest wit in the English Language. I have used the term here in what I intend as a completely different context, but felt I ought to reference Bierce's work. You can read it online here at Project Gutenberg.

Image: Still Life with Rarities, Jan van der Heyden, 1712, oil on canvas

Jan van der Heyden [Public domain], via  wikimedia commons

The Wild Hunt

 Edin Chavez

The Wild Hunt

All the day I ran

to catch you

outsmart you

outrun the rattling feet 

disappeared in the dark,

flown before me.

Crouched in the thicket panting

watching,

learning your ways;

where you are hard and canny,

where a sudden strike might find

the heart.

Under the standing sun
and under

 the dying moon I tracked you,

nosed your faint spoor till I dropped on the rocks,

hot with the calling of the blood, hearing

fever chattering its teeth in the empty night.

Down

in the village a dead woman lies—

so you’ve been this way

noiseless and gone.

In the torchlight her face at last unfocused

seems to smile.

Must I avenge her

 now she's free,

though she was the enemy?

though you and she

are neither real,

live nor dead,

but only running shadows 

where some hellhound passed me

on the grassy hillside hiding.

November 1987

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub
 

This is an old poem, written in my late thirties, very lightly revised, originally posted back when I first started blogging here at Verse Escape. Forgive me for all these oldies--I'll hopefully have wrestled some of my current victims into submission by next week.

Photo Courtesy of Edin Chavez

Used with Permission. All Rights Reserved

Edin Chavez Photo Gallery

Green Sword

Green Sword

Beneath your lids the brown

walking earth waits to be displayed

the witchfire light it sheds and steals

blots out the darkness with a thicker shade

white, white hot shine the orbs within

like Armageddon’s heart of fire

where all things are to be consumed

entire

why does this sight unroll me in  accord

as  the swelled seed unrolls her green sword?

October 1984

A hectic weekend with no time to write, but an old journal scribble from a planet distant in space and time is offered up, for whatever it is, or isn't. The only revision done was to shorten the ending couplet by a few extraneous words.

Dark Matter

Dark Matter

Love so long my intimate,

my reasonable master

now buffets me with alien force.

Each day a new division

slits my mind, anisotropic splits,

tangled strands, green kindling I leave

to be idly picked apart by your hands,

your hands that dread all work

and all possessing.

Yet I let gravity pull me to

the lightless prison at your heart,

cosmic dust of sin and spin,

a wobbling globe starry with relief 

in your human smile upon me,

your hair the wind lifts, your eager dismay

to absorb me quick as now becomes past,

futureless, floating on the knife-edge

of cold molecular storm

born to be parted in a moment

of repulsive expansion and galaxy shift,

giving up our brief blue light

as darkness births its worlds.

March 1991

revised September, 2011

This copyrighted image was originally used to illustrate the poem and is worth a view:
Dark Matter in a Lamda CMD Universe, 

simulation by Dave Bock, National Center for Computing Simulations

U.of Illinois Champagne-Urbana

Payday Friday

Payday Friday

We left the bar to drive

to the nearest motel

like two kids ditchin school,

me and Hollywood, in his raybans at night.

It was Friday night, payday Friday.

All night he’d held my hand

across the table, laughed in my eyes,

pulled me close slowdancin George Jones,

bought me half a paycheck‘s worth of

butterscotch liquored chick drinks

basted me head to toe for hours in that

hot brown look, til I was more than willin.

All day out with the crew I’d thought of him,

eight hours of idle mind  on the brushhog:

chocolate eyes, lilt to the voice, laugh of a free man,

dark hair thick as moss, coyote smart.

He thought, I’m sure, of my breasts,

my long yellow corn floss hair, maybe

my hands, maybe my soul that knew

where he wanted it to go, without saying.

The bar was hot and rockin. All the guys from work

were there, all my crew and his, kicked back, all the ones

who’d warned me about him just shakin their heads,

smiles in their beers while we danced.

We never even turned on the light

in the motel room—there just

wasn’t  time, only time for wellspring kisses

smoky whispers  “Do you

love it?” barely time for the old soul story 
we told each other, substance over shadow 
in the big bed, smooth as the necklace of pearls
he strung for me

never put in pawn,

here in my jewelbox still.

Me and Hollywood.

I hope his wife treats him good.

July 2011 

A 3:00 a.m. runaway poem probably best at 3:00 a.m, with a nod to Coal Black for the dropped  g's, and the general proletarian ambience, and to Mama Zen for the chocolate. 

A brushhog is a tractor pulling a large mower deck, capable of rough mowing right of ways and brushy fields. Fun to drive. Hot loud and dirty, but fun.

Optional Musical Accompaniment:

and in case you're in the mood for the funkier original, Lowell George & Little Feat, singing the song that got him fired from the Mothers of Invention:

Header Image: courtesy google image search
no credits available