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

 

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

 

 

Brujeria

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brujeria

 

I don't know what fetch

was living in his hair

but there was always something

 

when it blew back in the hot breath

of the redtangled hills; new-hatched snakes perhaps

curling from the small broken shells of his words,

 

tendrilous avatars in those nights that hid

the color of blood so well;

or soft rain-threads each sweet as a sugarfall

 

on my open face as we made love,

for the medicine painting, not la brujeria,

skintalking the Healing Way.

 

Whatever it was, it

wasn't the mild dog in his eyes,

not fur, not a tail-wag.

 

It was syllogistic, sensate, restless;

hungry as a hopping flea.

whose tiny itch is only felt later.

Perhaps it even had Buddha nature,

or something else

 borrowed from Kali.

 

It was one of those things about him

that taught me to look away.

I saw only its soft brown habitat

as I slipped my fingers through

felt its satin dance

against my touch

but what lived there never left

like all the other things I tried to disappear.

I could feel them breathing

though they never made a sound

not even now when

they ghost him back to my dreams.

August 2023

posted for Odd Little Things

at desperate poets

 

Art nouveau lithograph poster 1903 ©Alphonse Mucha  Public Domain

Man with Long Hair, ©Odd Nedrum    Fair Use

 

Running By Winterlight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Running by Winterlight

Midnight called me up from my rifled bed

where I’d searched in vain for sleep’s last hiding place.

I went out to look at the fraying brindled clouds

taped to the far ice moon, and the Hunter's sword

once Freya’s distaff weaving the raveled world.

And I knew beyond my doubts your soul ran free

parkoured from star to star canopied above me.

I saw the aching dumbshow of what’s past, 
a flickering stereopticon of days 
each one still a sharpness of blinding glass

stuck in time’s deep gut, the bleeding pass of 
a dance above oblivion’s shifting cracks.

Light of my heart, you make a fine traceur;

one slip's enough to kill, yet you endure. 

Clouds cry ice, sweep in the shaking void

with its black mouth wide, its bone-white lich’s grin.

I’ve made myself so small, so fine a dust

plaited baleen could never seine me out,

just lose me where the cell-shed seeds sprout green. 

What's lost flies out and floats on seven winds.

What’s left puts down its root to live again.

February 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Open Link #9

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process notes: Parkour...is a training method which focuses on rational movement [where] the focus is to move around obstacles with speed and efficiency...to move through the..environment by vaulting, rolling, running, climbing and jumping. Parkour practitioners are known as traceurs.~wikipedia

The last lines of the first stanza refer to the constellation of Orion, a Hunter in Greek mythology whose belt of three stars holds the Orion nebula, representing the point of Orion's sword, and in Norse mythology, the distaff (a spinning tool) of Freya, goddess of love, beauty, fertility, war and death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Man From Planet X, ©Edgar Ulmar   Fair Use

Orion Mosaic, ©Derrick Lim Photography courtesy NASA   Fair Use 

 

Promises

 

 

 

Promises

 

 

 

 

 When I was first a woman,

a proto-woman, perhaps,

I fell into the sin

of promising.

 

A jumbled barter it was

of all I had, masks

and early roses and melodies

too simple to be songs

 

all, all underfoot in the

maudlin marsh of fool's dreaming

with braggarts croaking their

whisky throats like toads.

So, into the desert

hot and clean, clear and cold,

but there again I fell,

into the assassin's bed.

Every night I knew

his nerveless cunning,

slitting the throat of love

as I lay numb

listening to devils

laughing from the killing-stone,

waiting for your call to come

tenacious and startling-sweet 

 

on limpid air

as jasmine in the abattoir;

but in the blood-pool

only sticky silence.

Now that time has taken

all the gods and fools

that made me woman,

I see with a child's eye

grateful to be lone 

with meadow-wren and violets,

 promises of fairies, friend of

crows and stars.

 

 

 

November 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Word Garden Word List: Stephen Crane

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Woman with Mask, artist unknown, via internet Fair Use

Faery and Kingfisher © Jean-Baptiste Monge   Fair Use

Lion And Ravens With Unsettled Sun

 

 

 

 

 

 "..It is a wheel, the rays /around the sun. The wheel survives the myths/The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.."

~Wallace Stevens

 

~  *  ~

 

Lion and Ravens With Unsettled Sun

 

Two ravens circling in a spotless sky

on a warning wind with fire on its breath

soft but dangerous as a lion's hiss,

in dead grass gathered to burn a phantom's past

that now in turn burns us.

A feast of the senses is just

another place to die among strangers

hearing the hiss of lions trapped

in a body devouring itself

in camera, the dark heart.

Best to fall to the sudden sharp sword

of the god's divine panic, danced to dust

under his dusky foot, his pipes hissing like a lion,

a screech and flutter of ravens at the window.

Light is sliced to crescents dazzling at the edge;

nothing but the sun survives the myths.

The lion has no wheel behind his hiss.

Ravens flow in the tempest and its drum,

dark lettering spelling out the ride to come.

November 2022

 

 

posted for

Word Garden Word List

 

 

and

 

 

 

earthweal's

Open Link Weekend # 142

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: The Word List this week is taken from the works of Jim Morrison. He has always reminded me of a lion in figure and impact, though perhaps a bit more prone to roar than hiss. I've been reading Stevens again lately and somehow he got tangled up here, with more of a sun king's than lizard king's flare.

 

 

 

[lyrics begin at 1:12 mins]

 

 

 

Images: Lion, 1492, by Albrecht Durer   Public Domain

Samhain Night 2014, ©joyannjones

 

Starlorn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Starlorn

(a 55)

 

 

 

The black dog runs

on the wind that

reaps the world.

 

He bites starlorn

at the moon who knows

his teeth will find marrow.

 

Behind him comes

the scythe that cuts tomorrow

down to bone.

 

Moon must learn to bleed,

monkeys to eat snow,

man to live on tears

where the black dog runs.

 

December 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Dverse Poets

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Moonrise, 1884, © Stanislaw Maslowski   Public Domain

Wolf-Dog, manipulated, 1976 © Jamie Wyeth  Public Domain

Will O The Wisp

 

 

 

 

 

 

Will O The Wisp

 

 I walk tonight

and wish to be

the burn in a lantern;

I walk tonight

in the darkness.

In the darkness

with a black moon

on a path you can't see,

in the darkness

following me.

 

Following me: all

 the days and the years

in bright dresses

swallowing Orion,

coming to me.

Coming to me

with the twist of a moon

gone black in the sky,

coming to me with

wishes and bones.

 

Wishes and bones

are all I am,

and lantern's burn.

Wishes and bones and

fire in darkness.

 

 

 

 

 October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: This isn't a form per se, tho it's something like second cousin once removed to a cascade. I just made it up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Deadlight, 2010 ©joyannjones 

Lantern photo via Sunday Muse   Fair Use

 

Hungry Ghosts And Thirsty Spirits

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hungry Ghosts And Thirsty Spirits

 

(a sonnet)

 

 

 

 

What gift could the dead of the living want

if not to pour again the living's light,

that whiskey warming throats of dreams they haunt;

to sing, to laugh, to lose their drowning night.

My dead are old yet various and new,

the dancing sparks of a youth that ran away.

The love we had so tenuous and blue

flickers out the past and so transforms the clay;

but when you come you paralyze the soul

with heart-remembered cold like glacier melt;

a frozen thing so trapped by pure control

will feel the same negation we once felt.

Take back the miseries living in your eye.

Don't bring me where the sun forgets the sky.

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  (with apologies to Poe and the entire 19th Century)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 a little something for All Hallows, at dVerse Poets

Open Link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Images: Styx,  © Marius Lewandowski  Fair Use

Author and title unknown, via the internet.  Fair Use

 

 

The Accordion Man

 

 

 

 The Accordion Man

He stands in my head

where the music once lived

like a tongue in a bell

when the ringer is dead,

corroding a little bit more every day.

He came down from the crossroads

with a small spotted dog.

He plays in my ear

til my dreams turn to fog.

The dog wags its tail and then runs away.

His shoes are like blimps.

His face is like claws;

his hands push the buttons

that work the bonesaws,

to slice out a song no one wants him to play.

He won't ever go.

I know that by now.

He plays in my head

and it chirps like a crow

his accordion clatter of skulls on a tray.

He chants all my names. He adds seventy to nine;

but the worst is

his eyes

are sadder than mine.

I could watch them all day.

~August 2021

posted for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image © Guido Vedovato   Fair Use

 

 

 

The First Kingdom

 

 

 

 

 

The First Kingdom

 

I dream of

the first kingdom

empire of four

water wood earth and sky

when we knew

 we did not rule,

when a hand outlined

 in ocher

tried to make us real;

when water set to boil

in the round womb of the cauldron

gave magic,

when our skin was honeysuckle,

our tongues fluent in bird,

our hands for making not breaking,

each others' blood too precious to shed

except in the green sacrifice.

 

Now I watch

the black beyond night

billow out.

The poison steam of brittle brains

evaporating madness

cracks the cauldron.

Sacrifice is colorless.

The lie of ownership replaces

creation's light in our eye. This empire

of assassins, where love is only

an argument of muscle and bone,

where the last fires burn and

birds drop dead from the sky

must pass away, its darkness carried

from the earth, before

the first kingdom can become

the last.

 

September 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Fireblossom at

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: in Celtic mythology, cauldrons symbolized many things magical: birth, death, endless plenty and the strongest magic of resurrection. They've been found in many Iron Age burial sites, and later Christianized in the concept of the Holy Grail.  The Cauldron in Celtic Life

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Hand Painting, Chauvet Cave,circa 32,000 BP

Title unknown, by Brooke Shaden  Fair Use

Friday Flash 55 for June 2020

Welcome all. 

I know this is a difficult, even overwhelming time for many of us, 

especially when it comes to writing. I offer the 55 as an aid to composition, as a celebration of times gone by, and for my own spur to write, and I have no expectations of anyone but myself, so if you wish to participate, that is great, but if words do not come, not even 55, I understand that as well.

The rules are as always: 

write a poem, prose poem or piece of flash fiction on any subject in exactly 55 words, no more, no less. Post the link to your entry in the comments, and I will be by to read and comment on what you have written.

Having a kickass weekend is not obligatory, but always advised.

The prompt will be live from midnight Thursday til Sunday at 4:00 PM.

~*~

My 55:

War Of A Thousand Battles

Here's the war

of a thousand battles,

a hundred years,

war of roses

and dust.

Fight to standstill

ten dozen champions;

sometimes a win

if winning is

fighting again, 

sometimes a loss;

but always on guard in

the bloody brawl

til old soldiers

throw down the gun

and wait for

the last wave to come.

June 2020

Images: Head of an Old Peasant, 1874, by Ivan Kramskoy      Fair Use

The Night Guard, by Odd Nerdrum             Fair Use