Piquée

Piquée

There’s a little grey snake most cunningly faced,

curled up in cleaved breasts, well hidden in lace.

It’s only as long as a tailgunner’s song

only as thick as a Semtex stick

but it bites to the raw with a jaguar’s jaw

then tucks its head down and keeps drilling.

Sometimes it slithers outside on warm fingers

disarming observers with its plastic display.

Others the poison tongue drips out and lingers

soaks through the lace in a green disarray

to the sponge in the core

that echo'd reservoir

the little grey snake’s slowly filling.

February 2012



Posted for   real toads
Open Link Monday

Images: Photos of Femme Piquée par un Serpent (Woman Bitten by a Snake)
1847Auguste Clésinger (1814 -1883)Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France  by fmpgoh on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

Desert Trip

 

 Desert Trip

Dust for dinner

in the day end bitter and

nothing to drink but a glass of sand.

Bare souled and dry mouthed

plodding shredboot through hoop

after hoop of unrolling heat, horizon

radiant with mirage mirror lures to

push me from the path

cut through the fantasia of quince colored

coral curled cactus. Behind me a torn trail

of shed skins, miles of peeled naked 

shins fondled by creosote shanks
corkscrewed and toothy, my airs 
leaking from memory holes

spined through raw scars, burnt lashed,

blinking blue coals under swollen lids.

Ahead a whirl of drab dirt devils

dance down a blind mountain's ashes 
to the parched hellfloor where I am not going.

Pooling improbable greenery shines

lush O surely too much a skirt of

turquoise and lemon on a stone doll

to be so stubbornly alive, brushing

jade shadows where the new dwelling sits

with no guards, no guards at all

except the length of hardscrabble slope

pulling world worn flesh
step by ebbing step to the

moon's seat, the hidden well

that holds all I can drink

before darkness so
tenderly falls.

February 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub 

Brian is hosting today, and has brought on board the expressive photography of Reena Walkling to get the word pump primed and flowing. Come join us. 
Link in is live till midnight Sunday.

Image: Photograph by Reena Walkling  (c) 2012

Used with permission

The Woodwife

The Woodwife

The woodwife fled

when none could see

and went where none

but she could go.

Green were her sleeves

in the howling snow, out

from the halls of Kingswinter

when no moon shone.

Ashen she was as the grey

before break of day

from living where no fire

could stay, or sun's ray pierce.

She’d come to learn

the celestial dance, practice

the arts with a man of air

for the time that never came.

She tired of the silken crucible,

cameos cut with  quicksilver scissors

and learned instead to laugh confetti

from chains of handfast paperdolls

tossing their snow as she ran, to fall

on dead hearths, blow for eternity 

round empty halls, behind the cursed

blind windows of Kingswinter.

.

February 2012

Posted for Meeting the Bar  at dVerse Poets Pub

Based on a dream. We all have our own heroes.

Image: Morgan le Fay, by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys 

[Public domain], via wikimedia commons

Night Light

Night Light

Luminous the globe

around my hope, a diamond

phosphorescent fish

that undulantly beams along

darkest ocean floor,

gleaming

or in meadowed night

a child’s eye

swimmy deer gaze

peering through the heart’s glass lantern

stuttering, fluttering, dancing,

burning the fitful wick

that lights my way to you,

whoever wherever

in this dark place

you are.

March 1990

55 eyeballs gleaming in the dark   for the G-Man

Note: This was one of the last dozen or so poems I wrote before stopping for ten years. I've revised it today a bit here and there, and cut a few words to get it to exactly 55. 

Image: Owl Flame, by Darkr, on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

How Hansel Ate Gretel

It's Valentine's Day, that most commercially candy-coated of holidays, and the day when Love in all its sweetness is celebrated across the land--except, of course, at Castle Hedgewitch, where instead we have a twisted cautionary tale for hungry young lovers whose eyes may be bigger than their stomachs, and a retelling (with customary poetic license) of an old feral, er...faerie tale from the Brothers All-too Grimm.

How Hansel Ate Gretel

Looking back, as I make off into mothering trees

I see your trail wind under their stooping knees,

snake of cherry heartbits beneath the moon

and know it for what it is, your pheromone croon

baiting the sweet biological trap up on the heath

where every heedless sacrifice drops its spore.

See your sisters all come running to hide from death

and instead become your food supply, nothing more.

Your candy call draws the lost ones, wild to eat 

the gingerbread house with sugar hands and feet.

Each famished girlchild sucks at white icing's sweet

slick, swallows glazing and dreams the full child's dream

inside the cage made to plump her up as the oven heats.

With luck, the last one's fallen bones gnawed clean

make a silent deceit to a blind eye’s need for meat,

pinched to test what's forever incomplete.

Still, gingerbread girls will always let you start

those hungry cannibal gulps that crumble the heart

but what surprises is the discipline you show

sparing some of the half-baked morseled dough

(bitten off, those cookie legs can’t run like flesh)

to pull and scatter speck by speck as you refresh

that trail that tells the strays just where to go.

O we all need to eat, so I don’t mind the meal 

or being dessert that's thoroughly lost in the woods,

nor the  sandpaper licks I took so I could feel.

It’s the marker you make of every spit-stained crumb

to bait your sweet-breathed trap for damaged goods

that freezes all I have that’s still not numb.

February 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Note: I've significantly altered this old tale to suit my  fancy, put it into a  valentiny rhyme scheme and fictionalized first-person form, removed the stereotypes of the wicked cannibal witch-hag and evil stepmother and made poor innocent Hansel, who was the original victim, the villain of the piece. That's what happens when you let feminazi witches rewrite the history books.

Image: Late 19th century illustration  of Hansel und Gretel, by Carl Offterdinger, photo by Harke [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 

Repose

Repose

It is in changing that things find repose.

~Heraclitus

Between this breath and another

is that atoms' dance that abides forever

intrinsic parity, growing in declension

and likewise myself constant in tension

now new now dying change and remain

endlessly negated perpetually created

ocean sunned, a steam of water meeting flame.

Restless blue remakes the river drop by drop;

time's dry file rasps on vanity's hide

as friction cooks the soul to snakes of smoke.

All things set free their savor in a smolder

of the sum to nothing, intangible but plain;

we're brought to know each essence

by the brazier and the flame.

Rosehips and lemon wet on my lips

only kindle the dancing blaze, a salamander

that cleans itself with coals, whose breath turns anything

to a wild wisped arabesque of incense,

the airgrace  and deathgift of fire the same

from a  pinched wick as from a burning slum,

all rising from the identical artist’s flame.

So these lips, only tasted now by time, kissed

only by citrus, salt and hips of roses,

exhale their essence; between this breath

and another, spirit dies and comes again

as it did before the world moved on and does

once more, sweet as any smoke of mutable flame

that finds repose in what is born to change.

February 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Charles Miller of Metanoetic Poetics  is hosting at the pub tonight, and his theme is the exploration of philosophy through poetry. Come join us. Link in is live till Sunday Midnight.

"If all existing things were smoke, it is by smell that we would distinguish them."

You can find these and more of the words of Heraclitus which influenced this poem here at wikisource.

Image: Heraclitus, Detail of Rafaello Santi's "The School of Athens" (1510)

by Raphael [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Wayfarers' Tale

 Wayfarers' Tale

The Watcher and the Wanderer

and the Wayward Child

walked hand in hand across the Moor

in the midnight wild.

The moon was only a distant eye

that looked the other way.

The Moor was only a frying pan

that cooked the heather grey.

The Watcher kept her eyeless watch,

the Wanderer went astray,

the Child thought it saw another child

and ran after it to play.

Night grew long and the cats all wept,

till there was nothing left

but the empty path across the Moor

and the watch the Watcher kept.

February 2012

Posted for    real toads

Prompt: Photography of TALON

Image: Photo by TALON

Used with permission.

Jasmine Rain

Jasmine Rain

The front rolls in as I’m

drinking the jasmine

from your silver eyes.

Hearts and clouds kaleidoscope,

revolve, shine, shred

to murk; storm

falls, petals tattoo

waves of night white 
with hurtsweet fragrance.

Bruised away are all

the broken things

that can't outlast

the big blow;

but 

every storm ends

even 

jasmine rain.

February 2012

55 torn petals for the  G-man

Image: Stratocumulus by Darkr, on flick'r
Shared under Creative Commons 2.0 Non-Commercial License