Ballad Of The Earwig

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Ballad Of The Earwig

(a 55)

 

He was the earwig come up through the drain,

she the rosebud ruined in rain,

 

she the actress losing her looks,

he, strutting hero of unreadable books;

 

they a brainstorm dying in rage,

they, two monkeys shaking a cage.

 

I am the pony who runs with the storm,

you, blue fire that burns without warmth. 

 

 

April 2025 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Earwig, metal sculpture, artist unknown. via internet   Fair Use

Blue Fire Wallpaper, artist unknown, via internet,   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

Seedpod

 

 

 

Seedpod

All your cars had names. You could have

called me a knotted whip, waiting just

off the Sulphur exit for Argon to pull up, 

her aqueous sides mottled with Dallas dust.   

When you showed, we were bleak as

strangers till we forgot how lame things lie.

Then, we'd never parted. Hand-fast laughing,

we brazened the blue hole's perilous beauty. 

You picked me the seedpod of a water-lily,

catacomb of caves on a stick

rattling full with brown-eyed pearls.

They watched me from a vase for twenty years.

 

The day was hot as rooftar in the pot,

the wet air a greasy mop

as we deployed, Argon starting

with reluctance--all your cars

started with reluctance--

disapproving of me there 

in her too small seat.

We drove and talked the sun 

up the noon sky, down its back 

in trickles of salt, sat on rocks 

compliant as clouds by Turner Falls,

talking by touch, by feel, 

by nerve and luck, 

words splashed on dry fields  

dust before and after,

your ribs under the blowing shirt

white as nightlights in the dusk.

Radium midnight in the tent;

I didn't know how

I could ever let you go back.

I cursed

what made me fall like water, 

pour out suddenly yes forever, 

cursed what made you fly so high,

the wind that fills the windsock and blows on.

And so, I never found that place again

a quarter mile from the Sulphur on-ramp

bright in the heat-breathing beauty of morning.

I spend instead my pale days waiting

 

empty as the chair I've prepared

with your books and candlelight, empty as a  

dry-rattle lily pod whose pearls

fall one by one on stone.

~May 2014

 

 

Process note: Turner Falls is a waterfall on Honey Creek in the Arbuckle Mountains of south-central Oklahoma..With a height of 77 feet [it] is locally considered Oklahoma's tallest waterfall...Turner Falls and the blue hole [directly beneath it] are dangerous and have claimed people's lives every year. Only experienced swimmers should swim there..~wikipedia

 

 

originally posted for    real toads

Out of Standard: The Poem is a Curse

Isadora Gruye  (The Nice Cage) asks us to write a poem involving a curse.

reposted and revised October 2023

for

desperate poets

 

 where Brendan asks us: "For this challenge, write of DESPERATE BEAUTY. You can use one of Van Gogh’s paintings as a starting point, or you may find all the required colors in another painter or poet or from your personal palette. How does a poem render the beautiful? What hues must it choir? How does strangeness improve beauty? What are the limits of beauty? Where or when does the desperation come in? And why is it alone infinite?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Water Lily Seed Pod, Bobbye Wolfe  via Pinterist

Windsock via google image search, author unknown.

Paul Gauguin's Armchair ©Vincent Van Gogh

Turner Falls, Oklahoma,   via Wikipedia

 

The Silver Song

 

 

 

 

 The Silver Song

(a 55)

I don't remember when

the Black Fear came; it seems

it's always been here, a broken

rotted smell under the floor,

invisible but disruptive

as catching on fire.

Bright-piercing in the night-oak,

a bird too small to see

sings quicksilver notes.

 

Which more unexpected,

that it sings at all,

or that I hearing it

rejoice?

September 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Fireblossom's Desperately Different (the unexpected)

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled (Blurred Figure) ©Zdzisław Beksiński   Fair Use

Blue Tit, ©Karl Martens  Fair Use

 

Century Song

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Century Song

For a hundred years

it seems

I've waited here, wasted here,

full of parch and motion, a salty throat

from drinking too much ocean once

though it's been

no more than a lifetime

or a breath

held under a thousand passing thrones

of aqua-green

where I counted days as quicksilver fish,

as coral bones, marked each dagger flashed in

 mouths of sharks, each scale, each whale

singing to all her kin while I

I drowned alone.

 

For a century

it seems

I trod this water milling, to breathe the years I knew

still held the spark, 

the flowers' poppy dream, the moths unflamed,

the coyote's bark

longing for the moongleam

on your reaching arms.

 

For a century

or two

the heat is master; 

the dust that birthed you,

the sun that calls you on.

It blisters me as the freeze of aeons

boils a distant steam, until night's mantle

 

falls across the blaze, and in the end perhaps,

too many too-bright ghosts and burning days

earn me a last cool breeze

 

a breeze and a flashing of that dream

 

where you

come back for me.

 

 

 

 

July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Waves, detail 1969 ©  Javier Torices    Fair Use

Study for the Spanish Dance, 1869  © John Singer Sargent   Fair Use

The Burning Tongue

 

 

 

 

 

The Burning Tongue

 

 

 

There is a burning that

makes the same smoke

from flower or flesh.

 

Air is dead.

Sound will not carry.

Words will not form

 

on a tongue blackened by 

summer's brass palm, for weeks

held radiant over earth's dry mouth.

Heat is a cloud-killer, builder

of invincible domes in steelmelt

sky. Dust catches fire.

 

Only the insect machines

still rattle. Yet every morning

in the stillborn dawn

 

there is a gasp of birdsong,

begging and faint, staccato, sharp,

freezingly sweet. 

 

In fever dreams

I gasp along, for every note,

for any word, for a charm

 

to make this yield

of burning tongues

sing out

 

in oldest music, 

wilder words,

the sparking chant

 

that death-heat kills even itself,

that someday it might

still be worth the parch

of trying to keep living.

July 2022

posted for earthweal

Wild Language

Images: Dead Woman's Crossing, Oklahoma  by Nathan Gunter   Fair Use

L'oiseau blue,© Marc Chagall 1968     Fair Use

Cat's Cradle

 

Cat's Cradle

 

 

All that summer you stalked me

with your tiger-flower eyes 

yellow as saffron,

ochre-flecked with 

an unknown pollen,

 

shining

blood-bright in

your weathered face,

and those few words you owned,

more rough than real.

Under the windy moon

light was as fickle and brief

as a glimpse of truth,

a falling star. Fish slid by

like lost ideas

 

dark as omens

beneath the emerald lake

that deepened the closer

I pushed towards shore,

their flat eyes swiveling back,

 

noodled to piscine

laughter;

they waited like me

for the hook

to pull them up.

 

We watched the sun

burn its last amber coal,

and gave back its mirage heat

to the night like the

pave-stones of Babylon,

 

all that jungle summer

when I closed my eyes to time.

May 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Poetics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Noodling is fishing for catfish using one's bare hands, and is practiced primarily in the southern United States. The noodler places their hand inside a discovered catfish hole in order to catch the fish...the origin of the term is unknown." ~wikipedia

My compound words for the prompt were moonlight, starfish and sunburn. I also used an abundance of additional ones not carved to order, just for fun.

Images: Night, 1905 © Mikolojus Konstantinus Ciurlionis    Public Domain

Tigridia pavonia 'Aurea" (Tiger flower) photographer unknown, via internet   Fair Use

Aubade Of The Scorpions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aubade Of The Scorpions

 

 

 

At night the little scorpions come down

to watch us playing at our poison kisses

to study from the dustbath where we drown

 

the sting that sinks the deepest when it misses.

I found flowers once where you had touched me;

black poppies sown in moon-distempered hisses.

 

Now the sun is crawling through the ivy,

its dawn a flickered fire burning wishes.

You're a green ghost spitting from a tree;

 

promises float away like silver fishes

and Love's a child who suddenly confesses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  April 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets:

Meeting The Bar: Aubade

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Crustaceans c.1873 ©Raimundo Petraroja    Fair Use

The Evening Gown, 1954, ©Rene Magritte     Fair Use

 

Home With The Diatoms

 

 

 

 

Home With The Diatoms

 

 

When I was a child

before sleep we prayed

for love to be shown, for safety to stay,

starved children in Korea to be saved.

Then the light would go off.

I'd put my real bed

of conches and nautilus twists

under the toss of the night's waves.

Regal on the seafloor

shells poked their bubbling heads

up out of snow-sand. Aquarelle fins and

gold-grey eye-globes blinked around me,

all greeted with a princess flip

of my green-scaled tail.

Reclined with coelacanths,

eyes blueing in my head,

all my mother-cut hair grown

long as a squid's arm,

I waited to swim into sleep,

watching the shadows of

far-above gulls mottle the green ceiling,

alone yet blanketed in

life watching over me, drowsing

to the epochs' stereopticon flash.

When we met in the deluge

you called in a lost language

for that nightspell to rise, to link us,

to sink us completely

in diatoms, wave after wave,

kissing underwater, not afraid to breathe

not afraid to drown, kelp-hair

in the undertow fanned and fluttered

summoned by a sea-fire of peace

to make ashes of fear.

 

March 2022

posted for earthweal's weekly challenge:

Shelter

Process note: "..Diatoms are unicellular [microalgae]: they occur either as solitary cells or in colonies, which can take the shape of ribbons, fans, zigzags, or stars..Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the Earth's biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year,  take in over 6.7 billion metric tons of silicon each year from the waters in which they live, and constitute nearly half of the organic material found in the oceans..."~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Bright Liquid, © Edmond Dulac    Fair Use

Pink Shell With Sea Weed, 1937  © Georgia O'Keefe    Fair Use

The Night Circus

 

 

 The Night Circus

 (a 55)

 

 

You told me

my eyes

were lanterns.

 

You stood them

around the bigtop

while you brushed

 

the clouds into my hair,

then on the highwire,

where you washed

 

in the moon;

but the wind came

and took their fire.

 

The night-circus burned.

 My hair flew up

in silver flames

 

of moon-twisted sun,

 

and I ran.

 

 

 March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Head in the Clouds, photomanipulation © Thomas Dodd  Fair Use

Paysage Orageux, 1901 photographer unknown  Fair Use

Axe, Maul And Wedge

 

 

Axe, Maul And Wedge

 

When you first brought me to the farm, you taught me how to

turn wood into fire. 'To part firewood fiber from fiber, to

 make it small,' you'd say,'you think you need an axe. 

An axe is sharp and  showy; an axe has blade

and bite and swings like the

pendulum of god, but

 

 what you really need to split the wood is a wedge.'You

smiled your wisdom-imparting smile, 'after all a

wedge was the first machine.' Where the

axe falters, beaten, the maul with blow

 after blow pushes the wedge deep

between the weave of atoms

til wood breaks,

 

 forced away from itself, no longer looking like anything

that was once alive, dryads' home, birds' harbor,

just kindling meat. And then is the time for

the axe, flying abrupt and wild as

 a silver moon of cyclone through

 the dry strings of bark and

 heartwood.

 

And when it came time for the

 splitting of us, you might say

you were the maul, she

was the wedge and I

the gaudy axe

 

attacking the last

tough fragments

of what we

 were

 

to provide for

the next

 fire.

 

 

 

February 2022

 

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

Images: Wedge, by user Shakespeare, public domain via wikimedai commons Fair Use

Photo of axe via Sunday Muse Fair Use

Factory Girl

 

 

 

 

 

 

Factory Girl

 

I remember that midwife year

you found me at the factory

holding the hand of water and

making shadows for the moon.

It was the year of cakes and blood

 

when everything was sharp with fear

waiting to be lost or born back to me

piecemeal in a box of sand.

You had a gambler's gift for tongues; fortune

loved to ripple where you stood.

 

Three times I turned a rose to tears.

Three times I spat your sugar melody

on the ground. Three times I made a man

from fire to fit your form; too soon

I saw the fourth time was no good.

 

Now I have no dreams, just hands

on fire for the work expected by the moon,

and faces in the ash I never understood.

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Poetics:Rimas Dissolutas

and including words from

 The Word List #7

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Record Breaking Workers At The Factory ©Pavel Filanov  Public Domain

Lightning and Volcano, unknown artist, via internet.  Fair Use