The Harpies

The Harpies

No beaks

only claws

the flap of wings like old clothes

stinking in the murdered hope sheen

of black slum soot rain.

In front of me 

the table is spread with chalices

bread of life support smelling

round as a kept promise,

fat cheeses laughing on the board.

My stomach's gone bitter as april snow

inured to inanition, yet mouth
like dead eye still floods with useless water

staring across to where they snatch and fly;

tireless banality of the cruel.

Born full, their striptease satisfaction

slobbers the unendurable table,  plugging ears

with the noisome smack of smirked lips
pressed facedown to the plate,

gobbling, gabbling, dripping.

This is the punishment of the gods

for having foreseen

all the wrong things.

O how apt and kind of them

to keep our choices blind.

~October 2012

If you would like to hear this poem read by the author, please click below:

the harpies by Hedgewitch O'theWilds

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Process notes: Writing of monsters seems suitable to the season. In Greek mythology, the harpies were messengers of the gods, used to punish crimes. They took the form of winged women above the waist and birds below. They are most well known for punishing Phineas, who was blinded and exiled by Zeus for the crime of prophecy, by perpetually stealing the food from his table before he could eat. My personal belief is that they also come in human form.

Header image: Photo by tom clearwood on flick'r

of a bust of the Harpy Celaeno,  1902 -by  Mary Pownall
Marble - Bequeathed by Alfred Bromed, 1944

Kelvingrove Art Gallery - Glasgow - Scotland

Footer photo: The same bust, photo by seq, on flick'r

Photos  shared under a Creative Commons License

Tribes

Tribes

The past is romantically rotted,

regularly rewritten

the vampire sucking at the future;

we know we can’t go back

and forth from the grave

yet still we cling to his blood clotted cloak

for that deathsmell high he sells,
the lie we can't live without.

We bathe in the black essence of a thousand

million compressed reptiles' tarred blood

fatten on the pretense a pigmentation

a language, a way of walking, 

a perfume, a feather,

a red dress, a neighborhood, 

incubates an alien immune to 

thought or grief.

We eat the spiders of our tribes and

call them good beef, though it’s closer

to soylent green, suck out the phantom

succulence from the compliant citrus

of our senses, and always always 

we worship a golden coined god

whose paper horns 

nod and approve.

January 2012

Posted for  Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Victoria is hosting at the pub today, and has given us the art of Columbian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero to work with. Come join us. Link in is live till midnight Sunday.

Images: El Conquistador, and Man Drinking Orange Juice, by Fernando Botero, have been removed due to possible copyright problems. They can be found through a google title search if you want to look at them.

Grasshoppers

Grasshoppers

The grasshopper turns

its liquid opal eye upon the leaf.

Where the eye goes, the bent tripod feet

the grass-shark jaw soon follow.

Where the jaw goes

death dances along

eating alive the tiny green

bodies

down

to

veiny bones

all that celadon succulence

murdered and swallowed

to hatch a hundred

more grasshoppers

begotten only to unbind

each lamina

from petiole

then start 

again.

 There is no end

to the hunger of the grasshopper

staring, staring at the waving

ocean of grass it cannot comprehend

only destroy.

September 2011

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Join us for 24 hours plus of nonstop poetry sharing, hosted this week by Joe Hesch. Doors open at 3:00 PM EST and link in is live till midnight Wednesday.

Header Image: Grasshopper eating Eggplant Leaf,

Photo by and (c)2008 Derek Ramsey (Ram-Man) (Own Picture.) [GFDL 1.2 (www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html)], via Wikimedia Commons 

Friday Flash 55 ~ Gluttony

Gluttony

With a mouth of fire, the sun’s too near
blowing his bombast

at earth's adverse ear
in a quarreling blast
all the neighbors can hear.

Pushing out his glutton's tongue,
licking leaves, collar undone,
he laps giraffe-like, drooling heat,
strips the green limb
withers the bloom
without even
the excuse
of
needing to eat.

June 2011

A summer nursery rhyme in 55 words

posted for    Friday Flash 55   at the G-Man's

Image of the sun courtesy National Weather Service Space Weather Prediction Center