Where The Mad King Disposes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where The Mad King Disposes

 

 

 

Asleep as far as Night's pen clerks

its long lined lists, where nothing we know is king,

a winter king who never works;

 

still there I see what the mad fool chooses,

veiled and warped with the sharpest taking.

The blue snow seems full of the light it loses

 

forming your face from the flat candle flame,

blowing your form in the billowing drapes,

come back from the dead with a stranger's name.

 

Asleep is a far land laked lucid and deep,

iced out by the ghosts of too many fades.

Where's the sun's blood to break my sleep,

where's the warm substance the shadow makes? 

 

 

 

 

 

~August, 2024

posted for WGWord List

Image from La Chute de la Maison Usher, 1928   Public Domain

 

 

 

Chimera

 

 

Chimera

When I left all I asked was peace 

of the starry void, that

every shrewish hope be finally silent 

yet after me you sent one white bird

only marsh cloud singing,

too soft, too frail to fly far.

I dreamed of you last night--

did you call me?

No, it was just my broken eyes

wanting to see the old calligraphy

strong and alive on the blank page but

that will never be again.

You were dream's pale clerk

troubled, frowning at the paper

on which many things were written

none of them my name.

I stood by your shoulder;

you turned, walking through me.

Waking, I couldn't say which,

you or I, was the ghost.

The gift of sleep

is taken back and I sit staring

at the wrinkled day, at walls falling

in this helpless place of the dead

where I've washed up,

already chewed by the chimera

stung by the manticore,

wondering what white wings will come

out of the siren darkness, 

what ghost bird is left.

 

 

June 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend #143

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image: Chimera, by Gustave Moreau, 1884, watercolor

Public domain, via wikipaintings.org 

At The Hospital

 

 

 

 

 At The Hospital

 

 

Pendants of light

reflections reversed

bent on slick white tile

random voices

in chained rooms

living out their untold

fortunes. Are fortunes told

or are they read,

written in a book of days

all numbered

not visible except

through curving crystal?

Or are they droned

the same tune every time

inside the skull,

mortality's earworms?

I am indifferent.

The gypsy broke my cup;

my tea leaves spilled.

 

 

 

 

circa 2019, rev. March 2022 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link #131

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sun In An Empty Room, 1963, © Edward Hopper   Fair Use

The Fortune Teller, 1933, © Brassai            Fair Use 

Positions

 

 

 

 

 

Positions

 

 

You sleep flat in

the fire of all that was

and never burn;

ice doesn't.

I sleep on

the ashes; a body in

a prehistoric grave,

with stones, ivory rings

and broken pots,

curled tight to shield

all the soft things

that rot away.

 

 

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Quadrille Night

at dVerse Poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Bronze Age Pot from prehistoric burial, Southern Urals © Finn Shrieber  from article 

Neolithic skeleton of a woman, from 4500 year old burial in Germany, by Archaeros, from article

 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

 

 

Black Apples

Black Apples

I was a daylight shadow,

a bride of drought

cast over the mounded world like

a prophecy of night,

living on dandelions and dead leaves

until you gave me,

sour and hard on the flat 

of your incubus palms,

a dozen black apples. Keep them,

you said, for a year. I only ask

that you throw the bones

far away from this dry country

from the death dance of wheat

the victory of locusts

the smoke of the Beast.

Disappear us too close

to the rifting abyss

where the wind's sullen heat

turns the Catherine wheel of change,

show me the hiss of

the scythe in the clouds,

the minarets folded in sand
whose pierced towers pour out

the last blood of solitude sung by
the owl. All our ghosts will join hands.

There's the crack of your laugh;

a ragged breath of earth

to bend and break the dead trees;

the witch-year's burnt up. You and the

drought have gone and I

sit tasting unmourned

the twelvefold sweetness of 

black apples of the storm.

March 2020 
This poem has been slightly revised since first posting.

posted for earthweal Open Link

and Shay's prompt at the Sunday Muse

Arkansas Black Apples

Catherine wheel:a firework that revolves on a pin, making a wheel of fire or sparks; pinwheel.

~dictionary.com

Images: Untitled photo, by Horst P Horst for Vogue Magazine, 1930   Public Domain

Arkansas Black Apples, ©sweetsandlife via Atlas Obscura   (see link)   Fair Use

Winter In The Blood

Winter In The Blood

The harvest is lost in the fields

when you're riding the crest of the flood;

spring is forever gone south

once winter gets into your blood.

Do the spirits you send me at night,

who twitch in the day's flame of dream,

long for a life behind glass

where their grief-mirrors silently scream?

I hang up their bottles by noon

as the mist leaves the prickling wood;

how it crawls where the heart cannot come

for winter has got in its blood.

Don't haunt the dead doorway tonight.

Don't put your white worm in the bud.

Don't look through the glass like you know

that winter was born in my blood.

August 2019-January 2020

a quick singsong, for Fireblossom at

The Sunday Muse:

"In old southern tradition, hanging bottles from a tree is intended to catch or confuse negative spirits.."

Images: Lace and Ghosts, 1856, drawing © Victor Hugo Public Domain. Manipulated.

Bottle Tree,  Author Unknown. Fair Use.

Bodyless Parts

Bodyless Parts

My heart is pale

as the daylight moon hiding

in the pines, trying to be full

with her south end sliced off;

a bent lamp to light

a ghost's foot.

My mind's black as soil

where skeletal leaves fall

from century's last rose, in the

color of memory wisteria blue, or

lavender as lamb's ear in thick sticky spikes

that trembled like your hand

with the loving of bees.

I would tell them you've gone

put out like a lamp, or a moon

snuffed to new;  bees like to know

but they're husks in their hives

with their fat queen's stilled hum,

legs stiff as your lips so unsaved

by sacrifice, or perpetual labor

deep in the rose hips.

My eyes drip a mirror of scarlet birds.

I'll watch through the glass til all of us die

til our pink watery ghosts flow up and fall,

haunts with the bees in rose sunset sky.

~January 2020

posted for Ghosts

at earthweal

Process notes: 

1) It's a longstanding tradition dating as far back as medieval times for beekeepers to go to their apiaries and inform the bees when someone in the household died so the bees could also mourn.  

2) There is currently a worldwide pandemic of honey bee deaths, thought to be caused by pesticides and resultant weakening of the bees' immune systems. 8 species of bees are on the endangered species list, but not as yet the honey bee. Nonetheless, there have not been any honey or bumblebees in my own garden for at least the last three or four years.

Images: Wisteria and Bee, © Ohara Koson, 1930, Public Domain

Weird Sky, 2015 ©joyannjones

Eye Spy

Eye Spy

I spy with my little eye

a unicorn on a piece of pie,

an iron cross and a butterfly;

I spy the day I die...

Asleep I was

a wasted storm, a wandering

rain in stony void, blowing

over shabby

sparrow bodies on the scree,

over cast-off rocks

warm from the hand of lust, thrown to kill

in hunger and in pain, keyhole-seeing,

bent, your face again.

I awoke

rigid in a night

of fallen birds, back

still pressed on the wheel of love,

your bear-brown eyes, your

warmth on mine, your laugh as close

as dawn to day

before the waking

breaks it all away,

alone then, and more alone to come

locked in a crime no exit wound explains,

for the angel and the demon boys agree

they'll never open doors for the likes of me.

~January 2016

posted for   real toads

Bits of Inspiration; Weekend Challenge

Images: Sanctuary, 1965, by Max Ernst. Fair use via wikiart.org

That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do, 1931, by Ivan Albright.

Fair use via wikiart.org