Toxic Waste

Toxic Waste

I'm floating dirty bombed in a mermaid sea

flotsam'd with promises broken unspoken, ducking

the twin-eyed turrets swiveling sweetly

siamesed from the face of the Ace of Storms.

My brain beneath its sponge infection

recalls the first inflection of those liquid fingers

so lyric on shifting skins; impossible to know

they'd stiffen on the chain of gold, pull, snap the thin

links, all destroyed but the red line left cutting my throat;

yet I sing on in a song that cannot stop.

So many clouds on the cards,

bleeding so close, spitting their pretense

of earth-splitting power, then racked by

the trump of the sun, useless to shorten

my half-life or untie a single atom; even you  

the last worst hurricane of a terrible season,

only swamp with your dissipating ebb

leftovers of fission pooled on the reactor floor

in a lake of toxic effluent as

dangerous to use as it is to jettison.

Don't think you can dump it

in those pitiful hollow drums,

sink the poison weight forever beneath

the dark of that Mariana trench which is

your everliving night. It is not there where

no light comes, but in the air beside you,
the black water beneath you,

released by rust, glowing with death

come to finish what you started

when the soft sickness began.

June 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub
I'm hosting tonight at the pub and hope you'll come join us. The doors opened at 3:00 PM EST and will stay wide, barring a thunderstorm, till Wednesday midnight. 

If you'd like to hear the poem read by the author, click below:

Toxic Waste by Hedgewitch O'theWilds

Header Image: US Nuclear Waste Stored Uncapped Underwater, by Blatant World.com on flick'r

Footer image: 11.055SkullValley 019, by Rylan S L, on flick'r

Odalisque

Odalisque

This striptease of self

dance of seventy veils

works only in a poledancing vacuum

where there’s looking not touching

talking not feeling

and so, sinuous and alive as it appears

to a disordered mind,

is a sterile transaction,

a pastied charade, grimed

as the crumpled bills shoved

in a stripper’s thong,

good for another busride to hell.

And this scrawl

isn’t love

only its black ink breath

sighing out the tired gestures

not of an odalisque but of

a broken dancer.

April~June, 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Image: Rashaka Dancer, by fallingwater123 on flick'r

Shared under a creative commons license

Broken Cored

Broken Cored

I think about that black

gas oven night;

how you  talked me into it

the delirium, the smoke

and the insanity

how you changed me

from riches to rags

reluctant to retread

oblivious to obsessed

before you left.

One broken spoke

brings down the ferris wheel;

one rancid memory

spoils the whole barrel of

dreamapples.

January 2012

55 apple slices for the G-man

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

Getting Clean

Getting Clean

You found me at a party,

somebody else’s drink

unclaimed.

I fit your hand.

I could never have been a junkie.

My veins are too well hid,

like thin filaments of ore 

running deep beneath stone;

besides, my flesh shies

from the puncture, from the loss,
rolls away.

I could never be a junkie

except for you.

The first time it was free,

spooned at a fire of smiles and skin,

kind words, hot words in tongues

to me unknown, 

and hands.

 I 

got so

high.

After that, I paid.

The disease of you I learned

to live with, crave the dirty needle,

but the withdrawals

contracted, racked me; in  nightsweats

malarial waves of wanting left me

twisting, hanging

fever hot;

you baked my bones,

waited for the crack and sucked the marrow,

let them cool in your indifference till

I screamed 

to have the fire back

again.

And you would burn me then

with such delight,

lick me with blue flame and sweet pain,

then 

doctor me,

         read to me

play for me,

                 tell me your

                          way

but I

could never be your junkie

in the end

because I couldn’t

pay for it

any 

more.

April 2011

Image: Flaming Cocktails, by Nik Frey, courtesy wikimedia commons 

Poisoned Apple

Poisoned Apple

Green like money

Red like hell

Golden with promise

Eat the apple, innocents...

You won’t feel the poison

till tomorrow.

Before then you have time

to buy a box of gold

some ammo

to keep the brown ones down...

Plenty of time to

take a warm bible bath

move the constitution 

to your toilet paper spindle

use that flag of your fathers

for a blindfold

and kill my enemies.

You don’t have to grab, my child.

It’s all yours, my gift...

Shriveled dead skin.

Rotted pulp

Fermented and infested.

Did you like the apple?

Why don’t you answer?

January 9, 2011