Crossroads

Crossroads

Crossroads 

splay out

 the holy Way,

under the 

pale aureole

that scarves 

the moon,

across the 

endless breast where every twin must meet or pass with one cold kiss

 to that bitten, black on white incision preceding the unspooling decision.

 The lunatic moon's a dangerous perfectionist in her every golden fraying,

softly flaking, tearing silvery pages from the weeks of her waning diary,

swelling toward a spring remembered on the other side of a dead nerve.

 Choose quick

in the breath 

you center

where change  

and addiction

cross, seeing

 bright 

the killer's 

hilted sword, 

the crusader's

red-stained 

oriflamme, 

on a white as

innocent of

the deceits of

 opposites as a

 straight-edge 

looking for 

geometry in  

 the razor-sharp 

fractals of chaos.

Choose, and know on your back

you wear the wind that never blinks.

~January 2013

posted for   real toads

Challenge: Get Listed!

Fireblossom produces a mysterious anonymous word list from her secret sources, and asks us to write to its promptings. I don't often do this, but had a difficult bear of a poem that seemed to need some surgical insertions, so gave it a fling. Many thanks to FB and her always creative source, who shall be nameless. You can find the word list at the link above.

Header Image: Finale(Sonata of the Sun) by Mikalojus Ciurlionis, 1907
Public Domain via wikipaintings.org
Footer Image: Crusade, by Albrecht Altdorfer
Public Domain, also via wikipaintings.org

Undocumented Mist

 Undocumented Mist

The night exhales a coolness

that seems foreign after the

hammering heat of the day,

an alien breath wetbacked across

a dangerous border,

speaking another tongue.

So age comes to me running crouched

across the river, buttons missing,

wearing her threadbaring gown,

breathing lines, bending flesh

to slope and flow at gravity's whim,

calling her wares from the rocktop of

a round calcite egg turned silvered stone, 

grit-pocked and bubbled with imperfections,

dirtied in the hard guttered smut of too many

days blown out, all the soft splattering away

from the sun's falling diamond drops.

She's hungry. She's tired as the hour after birth.

I look at last in her eyes, see only another night visitor,

an undocumented gypsy marched thru a hundred

dry gullies carrying her heavy pack, looking for work,

speaking the language of the cool breeze

that mists itself up from the fall

of a too bright day.

July 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Prompt: Whatever the Weather

Stu MacPherson is hosting today and has asked us to write a poem in which the weather figures in some way.

If you would like to hear a rather unprofessional reading of this poem by the author, who got tired of re-recording after many tries, click below:

undocumented mist by Hedgewitch O'theWilds

Image: Day2: Night Sky, by Jeremy Zilar on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons License

Desert Trip

 

 Desert Trip

Dust for dinner

in the day end bitter and

nothing to drink but a glass of sand.

Bare souled and dry mouthed

plodding shredboot through hoop

after hoop of unrolling heat, horizon

radiant with mirage mirror lures to

push me from the path

cut through the fantasia of quince colored

coral curled cactus. Behind me a torn trail

of shed skins, miles of peeled naked 

shins fondled by creosote shanks
corkscrewed and toothy, my airs 
leaking from memory holes

spined through raw scars, burnt lashed,

blinking blue coals under swollen lids.

Ahead a whirl of drab dirt devils

dance down a blind mountain's ashes 
to the parched hellfloor where I am not going.

Pooling improbable greenery shines

lush O surely too much a skirt of

turquoise and lemon on a stone doll

to be so stubbornly alive, brushing

jade shadows where the new dwelling sits

with no guards, no guards at all

except the length of hardscrabble slope

pulling world worn flesh
step by ebbing step to the

moon's seat, the hidden well

that holds all I can drink

before darkness so
tenderly falls.

February 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub 

Brian is hosting today, and has brought on board the expressive photography of Reena Walkling to get the word pump primed and flowing. Come join us. 
Link in is live till midnight Sunday.

Image: Photograph by Reena Walkling  (c) 2012

Used with permission

Further Down the Road

Further Down the Road

Every trip eventually

takes me back to that one, its

eternal highway unrolling

a black and white flash through the smoky night.

Your yellow eyes shone a light down the center

as every few minutes you told me,

“Just a little further to go.”

No forgetting that road trip

in a borrowed black bus with the band in the back,

late and frantic, over the speed limit,

your hands hot on mine and the wheel

when with eyes shut or open

we saw more than we wanted. 

Always a little further to go,

a turnoff missed, a half-empty tank

always a little harder to stop,

ask directions since it was only

 a little further to go.

Through the windshield
that swollen moon rose, turned alien sun

poppy red in the smoke blackened night,

shining its sick ruby light,

hanging in the smog over Gary,

dreaming us on

a little further and gone.

Last night in my bed, the one

that became the destination,

 I saw that husk of moon again

without windshield or window, closed  my eyes

on the castle'd smokestacks shooting fire

through the restless wall.

So many trips since then

so many other hands on me and the wheel.

Yellow desert days, white nights,

mountains like songs, forests of rain,

green gardens blowing bantam sequins of life;

but that bloody moon's a bright brooding still, 

a celestial fixture that hangs itself scarlet 

in every sky. And I

have

just a little

further to go.

December, 2010

Posted for One Shoot Sunday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry


Based on a fragment from 1973
Image: photo by  Andreas Feininger,  1906-1999