Flash Friday 55 Halloween Edition 2020

 

 

 Welcome all, to the All Hallows' edition of the Friday 55. In a year where almost every day has felt like Halloween, it may be hard to get into the spirit of this ancient celebration of the thinning of the veil between the quick and the dead. It may be too tragic to think of all those who were here and now are gone in this year of plague rampant and its utter chaos, with a dubious future ahead.

 

Nonetheless, this exercise continues, and let the 55 chips fall where they may, as we remember happier if not scarier times, and the originator of this meme, Galen Hayes, by attempting to have a writer's kickass weekend to a radioactive Jack-O-Lantern's glow.

 

The rules remain the same. Write a poem, piece of prose poetry or flash fiction in exactly 55 words, no more, no less, and post your link in the comments below. I will be by to read whatever has haunted you this week.

The meme will be live from Thursday at the Witching Hour til Sunday at 4 pm.

 

 

~ * ~

 

Here is my 55. We have had a historic and crippling ice storm here, and the ghosts of my trees are with me in this piece.

 

 

 

 

 Icestorm

 

 

 

 

 I woke in the dryads' dying hours

to the champagne-crack of their maple towers

falling; ice-winds honed a banshee tune,

a butcher's knife to carve the pumpkin moon. 

1000 suns of supple leaf expire

when winter kicks down summer's flimsy door;

a protean shift from sheeted ice to fire

to dryads' ash on Halloween's dancing-floor.

 

 

 

October 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Images: The Woodland Dryad, © Jesse T. Banfield, 1913 via wikimedia commons Fair Use

Redbud ruins, October 2020 ice storm, © joyannjones

Appaloosa Moon

Appaloosa Moon

You rode in from Calgary on

the appaloosa moon, all in white

above her speckled flanks;

another cosmic cowboy

looking for a decent rodeo clown.

You took my hand.

put it on your silver buckle.

I felt the corded muscle;

did my best

to dismiss the hat.

You were  sweet as margaritas,

flying god and sinking singer

at stud, a three-time winner

with a kick like

a government mule.

Some (not I)

might think you thicker

than a jug of home-brewed liquor,

but you had your existential

quandaries just the same.

I got it, alright,

you sometimes mumbled

slipping off my bridle, 

whispering in my wind-swished hair,

but it ain't consistent.

Nothing is, I said,

somewhat hampered by

the texture of your

soft-breathed reaching nuzzle,

except

hellfire and this hot-ass summer,

and they're not much use at all. 

And so I held you trembling

till the bell rang, the chute-gate banged, 

and the moon put her head down

while you laughed in the rain:

a horse, you told me, won't buck if it's in pain.

~July 2015

posted for    real toads

Ella ( Ella's Edge) 

asks us to reflect on something we will never outgrow--in this case, one's favorite memories. 

Process notes: "...However, while the implied argument ...is that pain is what makes the horse buck, in actual practice, irritants or pain generally interfere with a horse's ability to buck in an energetic and athletic fashion..A horse in pain will become sullen and not buck very well...' ~wikipedia




Images: Tail Swish, by Pretty Petal Studios. on etsy
No Copyright Infringement is intended
The Broncho Buster, 1909, by Frederich Remington
Public domain via wikiart,org

Nightmare Of The Leaf

Nightmare of the Leaf

I've forgotten how to dance.

In that panic freeze

something's wheezing behind me,
ponderous but light

on its feet
as a fat man
who dances like helium.

Big-Belly bumps me
 into a darkroom

whose unlikely window

displays a maple-leaf,
red

rhymed with diamond grief

just past my  hand,

a moment away

from falling

forever.

~November 2013

55 deciduous dream dilemmas for       the g-man

Image: Leaf Motif 2, Pattern of Leaves, both by Georgia O'Keefe
via wiki-paintings.org
May be protected by copyright. Posted under fair use guidelines.

Apples and Thorns

Apples and Thorns

A Pantoum

Love’s not an apple, plucked and discarded,

uneaten, Kallisti, some greed gloating prize.

Love’s a thorned angel, not a triumph awarded,

escaping from every trap that's devised.     

Uneaten, a  judgment, discord, greed's prize;

love is worth nothing, unless something tender

is running from every trap we devise

seeking that second of promised surrender.

Love is worth nothing without something tender.     

She knows that she comes to you only to go

seeking her moment of phantom surrender.

My love’s a burned angel colder than snow.

Knowing she comes to you only to go,

attainment’s a ballad for lunatic sailors

serenading burned angels lost in the snow

in pied tattered garments, since Harlequin tailors

attainments in ballads for lunatic sailors.

A song's not an apple, a swing and a miss

by fools in pied garments from harlequin tailors.              

Love’s a thorned angel with ghosts in her kiss.

A song not an apple, her swing and my miss,

for love’s a thorned angel not a triumph awarded.

Love smiles, my burned angel, a ghost in her kiss,

and I 'm the green apple that's plucked and discarded.

August, 2011

Posted for     OpenLinkNight   at  dVerse Poets Pub

Joe Hesch of A Thing for Words has donned the pubkeeper's apron tonight 

to host our fourth Open Link Night. Thanks to all the poets whose participation has made this event so successful and so much fun, and look forward to seeing you there tonight. Doors open at 3:00 PM EST

Process Notes: Kallisti means 'for the most beautiful one." It was inscribed on the Apple of Discord that forced the 'judgement of Paris' between three goddesses, and began the Trojan War.

Harlequin is the comic servant from the Italian Commedia del Arte,  lustful and florid, agile but foolish, dressed always in a motley patchwork of rags. Uncapitalized the word refers to anything dramatically varied in color, or a comic or jester.

 ***

This is my first pantoum and I'm sure I haven't done the form justice, but I enjoyed working in it very much.The  pantoum comes to us from Malaysia via France, where Baudelaire and Victor Hugo first popularized it. It's been adapted quite a bit from the original Malay version, and I've found varying rulesets for it. It can be unrhymed, or rhymed abab, or abba, but it's always written in quatrains, and the line repetition is characteristic, with the second and fourth lines of each stanza  repeated as the first and third lines of the next. This pattern continues for any number of stanzas, except for the final stanza,which reuses the third line of  the first stanza as it's second line and the beginning line as the last line of the poem.

Image: Green Apple, by Image editor, on flick'r 

Image Editor's photostream  

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

Payday Friday

Payday Friday

We left the bar to drive

to the nearest motel

like two kids ditchin school,

me and Hollywood, in his raybans at night.

It was Friday night, payday Friday.

All night he’d held my hand

across the table, laughed in my eyes,

pulled me close slowdancin George Jones,

bought me half a paycheck‘s worth of

butterscotch liquored chick drinks

basted me head to toe for hours in that

hot brown look, til I was more than willin.

All day out with the crew I’d thought of him,

eight hours of idle mind  on the brushhog:

chocolate eyes, lilt to the voice, laugh of a free man,

dark hair thick as moss, coyote smart.

He thought, I’m sure, of my breasts,

my long yellow corn floss hair, maybe

my hands, maybe my soul that knew

where he wanted it to go, without saying.

The bar was hot and rockin. All the guys from work

were there, all my crew and his, kicked back, all the ones

who’d warned me about him just shakin their heads,

smiles in their beers while we danced.

We never even turned on the light

in the motel room—there just

wasn’t  time, only time for wellspring kisses

smoky whispers  “Do you

love it?” barely time for the old soul story 
we told each other, substance over shadow 
in the big bed, smooth as the necklace of pearls
he strung for me

never put in pawn,

here in my jewelbox still.

Me and Hollywood.

I hope his wife treats him good.

July 2011 

A 3:00 a.m. runaway poem probably best at 3:00 a.m, with a nod to Coal Black for the dropped  g's, and the general proletarian ambience, and to Mama Zen for the chocolate. 

A brushhog is a tractor pulling a large mower deck, capable of rough mowing right of ways and brushy fields. Fun to drive. Hot loud and dirty, but fun.

Optional Musical Accompaniment:

and in case you're in the mood for the funkier original, Lowell George & Little Feat, singing the song that got him fired from the Mothers of Invention:

Header Image: courtesy google image search
no credits available
 

Fruit Basket

Fruit Basket

When fruit hangs low and

swollen from the bramble,

does it know how many

bright beady eyes

are judging it,

as I know when I see

you narrow your gaze

and cock your

head at my remarks,

refilling my glass?

When fruit ripens

does it feel the sugar rush

to turn it from green to purple,

hard to soft and sweet

as I feel my blood pound through

from red to blue in the chambers

your key waits to unlock,

blushing in the face I cannot

keep secret and thin?

When fruit bursts

spreads out its seed profligate and pithy

dark against the succulent flesh,

does it feel the splitting,

the wet parting of self

into nothing

I feel when you breathe

your dangerous endearments,

your catnip questions

in my ear?

May 2011

Posted for  OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Image: Le Fruit, lithograph by Alfons Mucha, 1897 

courtesy, wikimedia commons 

Coming and Going

Coming and Going

Brown eyes full of gold.

that wink like a bird’s in wholehearted wariness,

rapid as a bird’s heartbeat

as you tip up your head to laugh

like a man upends his bottle
  for the last swallow.

We sat in the bar and you talked,

Canada and Molson’s cool on your lips,

my hands sweaty under the table in case

something I said might give it all away.

No part of you was safe

that day.

Like Doolittle’s magical beast

half of you is always coming toward me

and half of you is going away.

You can’t be told how much I want

or the coming half will become an ass,

merge into its mirror self and disappear.

I can’t say

 that I want

your voice in my ear so low

not even the mosquitoes can hear it,

your body a fever melting me to the bed,

memories burnt to ash

by your laser eyes.

A thousand birds may be chattering in my heart,

flowers may spring from your palm,

but I can’t say:

Love me again before it’s too late.

Instead I wait

to see whether you are

coming or going

today.

July 1991

Image: Molson Export Ale, Case,
By Molson Coors Brewing Company (Molson Coors Brewing Company) 
[CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], 
wikimedia commons

Arrow's Flight

The Arrow Shot, by Claudio Mufarrege

Arrow’s Flight

There is no singularity in this distress.

Winter babies know it as well as the scorched grass of summer,

which hangs its seed on the wind even in death.

I am arched  between two tunnels

mirroring forward or back to two separate worlds

poised for escape, unable to choose,

suspended till you are done with me.

It isn’t a choice I made, to love you,

to collect you, remember you part by part

and thought by thought,

to be always studying the lessons of your cells,

your everbrown eyes, cold and dark as frozen earth,

hot as a barn in July.

I don’t call you with a willed voice, or scheme, or plot,

but rather with the response of a recurring frequency,

or the pull of a particularly unwanted truth.

Truth, after all, is the master, come suddenly,

standing in the doorway with eyes of stone alight,

stronger than food or rain.

Love is only the servant, cleaning the soul,

who beheads the bird in the heart’s kitchen

or makes it fly surprisingly

like a paper bird thrown for a child.

You say it can be taken back, what’s been given,

but it’s living in your bones. It sees from your eyes

and twists in the curls on your chest.

And you are in me the same

like the wine is in the grape.

It is my same stubbornness you show me

as you turn to follow your own shadow,

as you fly like an arrow in the night from me,

as my hand lets go the bowstring,

as my own refusal to be known denies me.

These are things that can be named

but they are still not things that can be changed.

It can only be said that perhaps tomorrow will swallow them,

when all my molecules untie, spinning like dust motes in the light,

these pieces and atoms of you will blow like seed in the wind.

August 1991, revised, December 2010

Posted for One Shoot Sunday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry

Image: The Arrow Shot, by Claudio Mufarrege
Used with permission.