Tiger In The Abstract

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Tiger In The Abstract

 ( a 55)

 

 

"Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."

~unknown, attr Mark Twain

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tiger walks a crumbling flow

stippled with blood, scratching scree.

 

Wind is crying in the dead-branched tree

tears of a fatal innocence

while the lamp of moon burns low. 

 

Soft sharp paws in avalanches

are pacing out his pestilence;

rocks fall like raindrop lances

in fragrant inundations,

 

dry waves of murder-dances

upon the crushed carnations. 

 

 

 

July 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images:Fifty Abstract Paintings..Three Lenins..Head Of Royal Bengal Tiger,  1963, © Salvador Dali Fair Use

Carnations, 1891, © Joaquin Sorolla  Fair Use 

 

Pandaemonium

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pandaemonium

 

 

 

Lucifer's a pudgy angel now,

carrying around a clockwork hook.

He glistens like the night-sweat of

a troupe of drunkard clowns.

The hook is busy swinging in one hand,

heavy and sharp, catching this,

piercing that, while he smiles,

extending with ersatz camaraderie

 

the other flat, empty palm. I would

send him a letter, but

he's disappeared all the pens

commandeered the keyboards

burnt down the paper mills,

so it can only be written

on tombstones with a broken crucifix in

my blood, and it's doubtful he will read.

 

I need my blood

for better things, like

watering the apple blossoms

shot pink with spring fire, and

bleeding a banner with a new chorus

 for the mongrel choir

throat singing back to him the

National Anathema. 

 

 

February 2025

 

Posted For Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

Pandæmonium ...is the capital of Hell in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost...The name stems from the Greek pan (παν), meaning 'all' or 'every', and daimónion (δαιμόνιον), a diminutive form meaning 'little spirit', 'little angel', or, as Christians interpreted it, 'little daemon'...Pandæmonium thus roughly translates as "All Demons"—but can also be interpreted as Pandemoneios or 'all-demon-place'..John Milton invented the name in Paradise Lost (1667), as "A solemn Council forthwith to be held at Pandæmonium, the high Capitol, of Satan and his Peers" ~wikipedia

 

Throat singing

Images: Pandemonium, 1841, ©John Martin

The Fall Of The Rebel Angels, 1562 © Pieter Bruegel the Elder 

Four Hours

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Four Hours

 

 

Four cold hours

far from dawn

I sit in

manipulated darkness

waiting to see

what will come lie down in

this coffin of a moment,

 

thieving the spray of rosemary from my hand.

 

I've followed

the spark

all my life

seen it birth and kindle

seen it flicker deep

in eyes dark-sweet as berries

when all other light

 

was taken

 

but there is

nothing in this roving 

black behind the blindfold tonight

not a single reflection glancing bright

off the book of stone; only that absence

which is the certainty of death

its witchlight capricious as hope

 

with no thing fair about it.

 

Why have you

brought me here now

to such circular endings, to

this museum of

stolen seeds, false gods, burned

fields, raped children?

Four hours cold

hold too much

 

too many graves

too much

silence.

 

 

 

November 10 2024 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: This includes words from both this word list and the previous one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Black Bowl, 1907  © George Seeley   Public Domain

Curse the Darkness, ©Thomas Dodd  Fair Use

The Hell War

 

 

 

 

 

The Hell War

 

 

Hades crowns the flight

of dirty falcons

with scarlet galaxies

spilled by hell's black tusk

 

above cities cracked,

 broken-backed

in that glittering metaverse

where truth wobbles itself

 

into lies, idiots become geniuses

and poets wolves,

their meat

the bleeding revolution.

In the shadows, all that's left

of softness

rocks the experimental child

who cannot cry.

March 2023 ~ a 55

 

 

 

posted for

Word Garden Word List

Images: Untitled (Hell Tower,)  © Zdzisław Beksiński  Fair Use

The Molars of Leviathan, © Wayne Douglas Barlowe  Fair Use

Lonely As A Dream

 

 

 

 

 

Lonely As A Dream

 

"Everything's a dream when you're alone."

~Wes Craven

 

 

If

you come through the door 

you see at once it's an old woman's house

smelling of apples, eucalyptus

and yellow books rhyming by size.

Nothing is new.

 

Incense

burns in the bedroom

for the sake of a man's memory

smoking and braiding in soft light

that slips through heavy drapes

like a thief. There is silence.

 

Peace

is there, and emptiness.

The ghost has learned to

keep to its corner, and seldom speaks to

the woman who gambles with words

in the hunger before dawn. 

She's

 the laugh no one hears

at  the midnight carnival,

the road no one takes

winding back on itself, the sprout 

light's pulled too thin, too tall

in its mirror, shadow.

Besides 

the dream, she knows only 

a sky flat with heat

that eats birds and rain,

a plague without cure

that stretches its dead skin

to infinity.

But 

everything passes. To all things come

this tension of maximums

just before the breaking

and the letting go.

 

 

 September 2022

posted for

Word Garden Word List

and earthweal's

Open Link #134

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Doorway © Suzanne Moxhay, All Rights Reserved   Fair Use

Dangerous Laisons, 1926,  © Rene Magritte  Fair Use

 

 

Crow Call

 

 

 

 

Crow Call

(a 55)

 

We always wear black

the crows and I,

call our skies

with a half-born crack,

shadow nests where our treasures lie,

 eat skeleton suppers with glass-star eyes.

 

Never look back.

Never look back

 

at bones we've picked

bleaching dry,

at red we've beaked

with black tails high,

dead in the darkwood

with summer's sigh.

June 2022

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poet's Pub

Open Link

Images: Satellite 2014 ©Bryan Holland, via internet, Fair Use

Antlers, author unknown, via internet, Fair Use

 

Warfire

 

 

 

 

Warfire

In the killing fine fabric

of inflorescent flame

we walk, we burn,

dwindling from kindling

to bullet-bruised smut

alone in a dark

our dying lights up.

  

Murderers in red

boil a soup from the dead

in our hollowed heads

hidden hired thugs move,

their inhalation our blood,

their exhale the air

where the fire fed.

~May 2016

rewritten and reposted for DVerse Poets Pub

OLN March 2022

Image: Ukrainian State Border Guard Service site damaged by shelling in Kyiv region, Ukraine,  handout picture released February 24, 2022. (Press service of the Ukrainian State Border Guardvia Reuters)   Fair Use

On The Bright Turning Page

 

 

 

 

 

On The Bright Turning Page

 (A sonnet)

 

On the bright turning page of spring's uproar

when the ferry sailed from day to dreadful night

with one upon the deck, one left on shore,

an annotation jotted down in stricken twilight,

I heard the winter laugh like truculent swans,

as white lilies bobbed their lovely idiot heads;

I saw a volume could be made of broken bonds,

the long ballad of peace sent hungry to its bed.

 

The bear brings ash upon its ailing breath

when fire flies from frightened children's hands.

When two forces clash in a quarrel to the death

no stone, no garden wall or house can stand;

 

but awash in azure sky, flowers of the sun

grow wild beneath the smell of smoke and guns.

 

 

 

 

 March, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted  in solidarity with Ukraine

for Shay's Word List #15:

Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: many of Millay's poems are sonnets, and she often used the first line as her title. I've borrowed that stylistic aspect here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Lilies, © Constantin Artachino     Fair Use

Sunflower, 1965 © Georgia O'Keefe           Fair Use

Dead Silent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dead Silent

 

 

 

 The buzz cut off in the flower's throat,

the crunch of green in the hornworm's jaw

gone, and that was the first silencing.

The roadrunner's raspy morning cough,

the thud and peep of the grey toad's hop

stopped, the second silencing.

The bagpipe gliss too high to hear

deep in the whales' wet meadowlands,

the third thing silenced.

Science sucked into apathy's muck,

sense and sanity duct-taped dead: 

the brutish silencing.

 

The white noise of fools, the grinder's carouse of greed

eating greed, the barker's pitch for fresh trash and blood

plays loudest where breathing is silenced.

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Compound Word Verse

at dVerse Poets

and earthweal's

Open Link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

gliss: abrv, glissando, a glide from one pitch to another

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Wing Of A Blue Roller, 1512, Albrecht Durer   Public Domain

Untitled (Firetower) © Zdislas Beksinksi   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