Internal Monologue ~ The Hellspawn Neighbor

Interior Monologue ~ The Hellspawn Neighbor

I curse the day my old neighbor sold his house

and let a drugstore farmer infest the block.

His waist-high grass harbors tick and flea and mouse,

a few copperheads for that cardiac paddle shock.

He came out to chew the fat and shake my hand

about the time he stopped cleaning out his swimming pool:

"We're holistically subsistence farming the land."

(must eat weeds and empty mulch bags, the damn fool.)

"I'm sorry those starving guinea hens got free--

and tore up all your flower beds like that.

Have I mentioned that I have an advanced degree?"

(was that in Freakazoid, or just Asshat?)

"..and something seems to kill off all my bees

in that hive I stuck in triple digit sun…"

(that you ignored, under dropping-limbed dead trees,

and all summer never watered even once?)

Now he's decided to mow just the front yard (half)

piles sour clippings high in giant piles.

Mosquitoes breed in his pool tarp's sagging raft

Is it wrong to hope it's him who gets West Nile?

~September 2012

Dead Hive~Note the Never-Filled Water Bottle.

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Kerry's Wednesday Challenge: The Internal Monologue

Kerry asks us to carry on an interior monologue which illuminates our feelings towards a human irritant with which we must deal. For me, that would be Idiotman next door.

VERY Optional Musical Accompaniment,

 cuz, Ten Minutes--still, a great song.

Photos © joyannjones

 

Double Shot of Drought

Drought I.

(55 dustdevils for the G-Man)

When it's hot 

as the devil's kitchen

week after brazen week,

grass fires with a sigh at spark's 

lightest touch, ash tornadoes fly;

fields' green finish turns to 

crackled glaze, the bones of the corn

 soften and flop, emptied by

a marrow-sucking sun;

oh

it's too late to pray for rain

but still 

you do.

~July 2012

[Those playing the 55 game, feel free to stop here. Toads, continue on.]

 Drought II.

The heat came when the fear of it had passed

and made the land bleed dust. Dry coughs, fretful nights.

Often we sat drinking with the bees till past dark, laughing crazy

our faces rolling with the stars and the night more blue than black, and your
eyes fever bright.

Days, the hot southern wind lapped on our cheeks but it was too dry to spit. Hungry as a deer, it licked the boiled-out salt our bodies gave in the sun's long leathering. 

I remember that August the full moon came twice, like a young man or a ripe woman, and it was called blue, still round and silver as a coin. No reason why.

The green fingers of the hills put on gloves of red drought, leaves paper trees brown. Their scent tastes copper flat as blood, dead as stone. Work always, but the baby laughs.

I don't know when the last rose faded, when my face changed with the dry earth. Skin crackled like glaze on an old cup, and I was painted in place with all the colors of forgotten weather.

~August 2012

An attempt at an okyfied  zuihitsu exercise for Kerry's Wednesday Challenge at   real toads

Process Notes: August 2012 will contain two full moons; this is relatively rare, and is the origin of the expression, 'once in a blue moon.'

I've grouped these two pieces together because the second grew directly out of the first, which I had written earlier this blistering hot week for G-Man's Friday 55 prompt. Then I tried to do the same subject with a 'running brush,' random-style, and it escaped and went all over the place. I don't know if I've really fulfilled Kerry's prompt properly with the second piece, but this is what happened when I tried--thanks, Kerry, this was challenging for my very non-oriental, non-prose-prone brain, but it was fun.

Image Credits: Drought I: Drought, by arby reed, on flick'r

Drought II: Unknown Found Vintage Photo, Tulsa, OK, by imarcc, on flick'r
Footer: Crackled Rose, by Big Gray Mare on flick'r
Shared under a Creative Commons License

Witch's Broom

© Mama Zen Photography

Witch’s Broom

This is the motherland that once

raised outlaws, took in

orphaned indians,

hard dry land glad to get

hardluck sodbusters, mail
order brides, snakeoil
salesmen,abdicated gamblers
lost cause gunmen,
backslid preachers

all desperate some determined

to settle down;

but the blood never settles.

Wild it was

and wild it is,
thick and crazy

in mazed veins newborn

to the task of casking it.

Faults crack her red plains, 

bootleggers become

meth labbers, outlaw thugs
gladhand politicians, medicine show 
preachers preach tea, believers
still empty bellied, indians ground

fine as powder still fighting, and 
always the rule of the gun.

Prairie grass in plumed heads flags

the verge of wheel ruts schooners cut,
now blacktop well oiled where

each growth is history and testament, 

some strong and taking, upright
shadows bible black,

some bent, twisted, killing 
slow, curling into oblivion.

The body settles but

the blood never will;

each generation throws out

its witch’s broom anew

dark spores spit careless on the wind.

April 2012

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Sunday Challenge: Photography of Mama Zen

Process Notes: Witch's broom is the name given to various diseases causing deformity and unusual growth in shrubs, woody plants and trees, often showing a distorted fanned out shape or drastically tangled, contorted appearance. I've stretched the definition by applying it inaccurately to grasses (and humans) here. 

Header photo: Horses, by Mama  Zen

Used with permission.

Footer photo: Ziziphus microonata, By Rotational (Own work) [Public domain], 

via Wikimedia Commons