Creature From The Black Saloon

 

 

 

 

 

 

Creature From The Black Saloon

 

 

His eyes are dead moons

that call up typhoons

where old sailors will die

on the devil's hot spoon,

dished up dressed in red for the Day of The Dead,

mouths whiskey wild and well off their heads.

 

He sparks a burned light

that cracks holes in the night,

calls witches to bonfires' sulfurous light

for the Dance in the dark, the Blood in the cup,

the black horns of the Beast

who will drink them all up.

 

His tongue drifts like quicklime

on a seasonless wind

in desires that die before they begin,

over the flesh that twitches and yearns

to dissolve into hexes the old gods that burn

just under the skin all mottled with runes;

I've met him. I've loved him

too long to refuse.

October 2023

posted for Creature Seeker at

desperate poets

Note; This may have been slightly influenced by attempting to watch Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem last night.

Images: Standing Figure, 1970 ©Nathan Oliveira  Fair Use

Dark Dancers ©Gina lacob   Fair Use

Ouroboros

Ouroboros

The girl who grew old

in her sleep keeps her eyes

on a chain, afraid to let them loose

from the fingerwork of dreams,

stringing the beads of her sanity.

The machinery must turn, not

roam across every face

of cruelty, of beauty, that

comes now in the crowd

whose Fahrenheit flies

towards the boiling heart of the sun.

Voices with stones, medicine hands

 on eyes seared blind in acid clouds;

gunshot, brickbat and burning

sweep our shuddering house.

Tiny assassins make up

the bed where we fear to lie down

with our dusty farewells.

The crone bleeds hidden

gold watering her marigolds,

sees again in the glinting blue stream

 the great ouroboros return; 

Jörmungandr opens his mouth

to lash his tail and break oceans.

Now is the time for devouring 

 as Fenris howls

for the gods to come out and die.

June 2020

posted for The Sunday Muse

and Kerry O'Connor's Skylover Word List

Process note: "In Norse mythology, Jörmungandr.. is a sea serpent, the middle child of the giantess Angrboða and Loki. According to the Prose Edda, Odin took Loki's three children by Angrboða—the wolf Fenrir, Hel, and Jörmungandr—and tossed Jörmungandr into the great ocean that encircles Midgard[our human world.]The serpent grew so large that it was able to surround the earth and grasp its own tail. .. When it releases its tail, Ragnarök [the last destroying battle of the old world, translated as Twilight or Doom of the Gods] will begin.  Jörmungandr is an example of an ouroboros,...an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail..The ouroboros is often interpreted as a symbol for eternal cyclic renewal or a cycle of life, death, and rebirth..." ~wikipedia, condensed.

Images: Title unknown, by Alexandra Dillon  Fair Use

Alchemical drawing of an ouroboros by Theodorus Pelecanos, 1478  Public Domain

Oh Stars

Oh Stars

Faint sunshine

speckles the frosted

piles of slag

like colonnades of crumbling

carbon dust that line

the missing mile.
The great steel drag,

the rusting teeth and feral smile

have carved the lime

we delvers bring

to all our latter works

of cancelled spring.

The bites of life

we take regurgitate

some foolish tinsel'd

fail of poisoned joy

while in the east the

crescent shrinks to silver

sparks, night hangs the

spinning seethe of stars

our blind eyes block;

our smallness and our deathtoys mocked

by a brooding hatch of dark

and limitless shock.

Oh stars--gods'

eyes that laser out 

our fool's disguise;

what an underworld we make to hide our lies.

What curses can you break to turn us wise

when you come laughing 

on the wail of a newborn wind

so the wide green world can fill its graves

and breathe again?

~February 2020 

posted for  A Skylover's Word List by Kerry O'Connor

and for earthweal's 

Renewal

The images above are ©AP/Charlie Riedel, from this article: 

The Oklahoma town that produced most of WWI’s bullets is now a poison graveyard

"The chalky hills were a kind of town gathering point. The people of Picher, Oklahoma regularly picnicked there and rode bikes. Sometimes they carted the dust away and mixed it with cement to fill their driveways. Some parents added it to their children’s sand boxes. When a breeze picked up, it whipped clouds of the fine sediment through the air....For almost a century, town residents had no idea the dust was poison...

Around the turn of the 20th century, miners discovered Picher’s subsurface stores of lead and zinc. As America entered World War I, demand soared for lead to make ammunition, and Picher became one of the biggest hubs in the region’s tri-state mining district, an area between southeast Kansas to southwest Missouri. Roughly 75 percent of the American bullets and bombshells used in the two World Wars were made from this area’s metals; half came from Picher alone. At its height in the 1920s — when the town’s population reached about 19,000—227 mills were processing 10 million pounds of ore per day.

Miners carved into the earth underneath Picher. The lead and zinc ore they hauled out had to be separated from the limestone and dolomite rock that surrounded it. And the remains were piled into chat mountains around town, some 300 feet high. By the time mining ceased in the late 1960s, there were 30 piles totaling 178 million tons. The local school was built in the shadow of the hills, and the high school track team trained on them....
...in 2011, the federal government sold the massively toxic waste region, known as the Tar Creek Superfund site, back to the Quapaw Indian tribe, which had been forcibly removed from their ancestral Arkansas home and relocated to northeast Oklahoma in 1818. In 2017, the EPA granted the Quapaw $4.9 million in cleanup assistance..."

Picher is an uninhabited ghost town today. Millions have been spent to clean it up, but only time and the planet itself may have the power to do that.

Longship

Longship

A dream that runs

like a deer in a wolfpack:

men cluster round me,

coyotes by streetlight,

streams of bright coins

pour from their mouths.

They dig  up the world-tree;

I steal it back, water its

 hole big as the moon.

It bobs like a bottle:

dead wood floating

goes to make a live longship.

~April 2017

for Flash 55 Plus

Images: Yggdrasil, Longboat with lightning, authors unknown, via google image search