The Well

The Well

The well is full of fear,

and every day we have to

drink poison, bathe in it. 

We know the well

is broken and fearful

but pretend we do not know

what broke it.

The village is clamorous drunk with

senselessness, blank and softened in that acid bath,

so that the pale flickering light

that shines sly behind every curtain

burns indelible images on damaged corneas

and rumbles an echo of wardrums into half-deaf ears

to sell cornflakes and cars.

Every soul must buy a badge and

every house have a plague cross on the door,

marked red or blue, and at primetime a bell rings

to bring out the ones we wish dead--

The Socialists or

The Patriots or

The Illegals or

The Not Real Americans or

whoever we've learned to hate today--who?

They're already gone

hauled off and dumped

in the dead waters that feed the well.

Every day the fear gets louder, the blue light stronger and

more curdling, the water less able to quench

as drinking it becomes sweeter.

It makes the mind dizzy and eager to

congratulate itself on its sapient foolishness, or

buzz with an insectile thought-erasing rage, as it

stings reason to death.

The well is broken, but we drink from it anyway.

Soon now it will be drained by the thirst

and the bucket will go down

deep down into the heart of dissolution

and come up not just heavy with

mud and iridescent sludge 

And venom that

clings like grief to the mouth,

but with the secret that lives at the bottom of the well:

that we are the ones

who broke it.

November 2010

Written for the Monday November 8^th Prompt at Big Tent Poetry, which was to use a book title from the New York Times Bestsellers List. I chose Broke, by Glenn Beck.

Welcome to the Lost Island of the Technologically Challenged

This post was originally my attempt to add a backlink, and now it won't go away, so to avoid a dead spot sitting here uselessly asking for comments, I've posted an old picture of me in a funny hat with a fishhead, because, Why Not?

Enjoy.

Chaos Theory

Chaos Theory

 You 

are human.

A hot light caught in flesh

bound to the necessity of choice,

given cloudy human eyes

and told to make life.

There is no happy

refusing.

The imperative is toward order

so that every fleck

and piece

party to this planet

can cohere in purpose.

Undone it bends the back,

with the weight of chaos

too heavy to fight,

only visible

as a glowing lie 

that slides

quick or slow

towards an extinction

where

the intent to kill

meets the need to die.

You,

you chose long ago.

You know the force that swings 

the hangman’s rope,

the grave that grows the flowers we become.

 You know

the rot that must be cut within the rose

You even know 

how clean to keep the blade,

    every potion to hold back decay, every weapon against waste,

every fire that burns in the winter of the heart.

The need to die

called your name and you refused,

because you know these things

without words.

because your answer

was to live.

April 1991

Also posted at One Stop Poetry   for OneShotWednesday

Lacebark Elm,  photo © joy ann jones 11/8/10

What We Bring

photo by  Andy Ilachinski

What We Bring

The human

bit by the seawind, bleeding warmth

stands on the bleach-grey beach,

walks the line of detritus and empty shells

discarded by the tide

sees the void in her heart magnified

in drops of salt coating the kelp strands

across acres of bleak and endless grey

nothing

and wonders

how the planet’s birthing table

can be so cold

and empty.

The oysters, the clams, the fishes and mussels

the gulls, the algae and plankton by gallons

meanwhile

eat and mate and die and are born,

borne on the same rocking table

living as easy in the shine and the silver,

the liquid cold and wrapping black

as in tomorrow’s

hot red sun.

November 2010

Written for One Shoot Sunday Picture Prompt at One Stop Poetry, 11/7/10

Nonsense Rhyme

Nonsense Celebration

What makes affinity

Is what makes thee thee

And me  me, she

she

And he 

free to be who we see.

Brothers, skin sisters, teachers 

and creatures

of habits and hobbits of chance shires colliding

traveling east south and north, 

up down back and forth

round the nautilus shell,

with a Maydance as well

for marsupial nuptials and manticore riding.

Babies in blankets and cousins with trinkets,

and mothers and uncles down under the table

with the seventeenth gable

set on a roof that covers ten countries where twelve-month millennials

are hardy perennials

that hide from the frost so nothing is lost

but the note of a name, a picture, a frame,

a face or a form,

above the black ocean

but there’s always the warm

calling look or the motion

of thoughts that reflect like suites in a deck.

Ten of hearts, ten of spades

Ten of clubs are relayed,

your knave is my jack, her king knows the knack

of trumping the queen

without any spleen, so the numbers can fall

in sequence and all

to build a card house and shelter a bard mouse

who wiggles and sings

while plucking small strings

'neath a cheese moon of white 

that lights the starred night.

And still in the dream a pink piglet team

pulls a coach made of gourds

to carry the hoards

on their long rainbow bridge above the dry ridge 

til that fey light shines free

for thee, she and me.

October 2010 revised 11/6

The Garden Rat

The Garden Rat

Under an arc of liquid ice,

streaking the window behind,

clashing on the canna leaves,

runs a black stripe of being

fast and blurry as

a faint memory passing and lost

in the midst of children’s calling clamor.

It’s the mysterious

Garden Rat.

Every day I don’t see it

move, it’s just passed me,

disappearing behind the trunks

of the crape myrtle, secret

but

disturbing.

I hunch myself defensively

when I reach to pull a weed.

It’s undefined, yes,

but it’s huge.

(For a rat)

I’m sure it has teeth

bigger than these spider eggs

I’m brushing off my glove,

and sharper than

old quarrels.

All summer I worried

and tried to avoid

The Garden Rat,

dark and diseased,

and hiding in the soft shed petals

of the black-eyed susan and

the weeds I was now

afraid to pull.

Then fall came, and the leaves fell.

The cannas crumbled to the ground.

I went one day to rake the remains,

and from behind the mummy of stalks

flashed the mysterious

black and rapid

Neighbor’s Cat;

The Garden Rat.

Pandora’s Cat.

November 2010

Posted for Jingle's Thursday Poet's Rally, Week #32

Image from npr.org  Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Off the Shelf Archive - October

Each month I post a few poems by other authors on the Off the Shelf page, which doesn't allow for multiple posts or comments. So I've decided rather than have them disappear, I'd archive them here in the regular stream, by month for reference, where people can find them, comment on them, read them again or for the first time.

In October there were two Off the Shelf poems:

I.

CONCERT IN THE GARDEN

It rained.
The hour is an immense eye.
Inside it, we come and go like reflections.
The river of music
enters my blood.
If I say body, it answers wind.
If I say earth, it answers where?
The world, a double blossom, opens:
sadness of having come,
joy of being here.
I wander, lost in my own center.

Octavio Paz

II.

The chatter of a death-demon from a tree-top

The chatter of a death-demon from a tree-top

Blood -- blood and torn grass --
Had marked the rise of his agony --
This lone hunter.
The grey-green woods impassive
Had watched the threshing of his limbs.

A canoe with flashing paddle,
A girl with soft searching eyes,
A call: "John!"
. . . . .
Come, arise, hunter!
Can you not hear?

The chatter of a death-demon from a tree-top.

Stephen Crane

The Knife

The Knife

Sharp, gleaming,

cutting to the bone.

The love that’s forever outside

can only enter as a blade

piercing the skin to the heart beneath.

I send it back,

that outside love,

the knife

that cuts the hand that wields it,

as surely as it cuts me,

the blade that enters the heart

that craves it

in such an other way.

But the knife knows only cutting,

and so I send it back.

I keep instead

inside that unpierced globe,

the love that pours like water, that

cleans and floats

the heart, that could

wash the blood

from a hundred knives.

October 2010

photo: Voodoo Knife Block from gadzooki.com