Sevenling (The New Day)

Sevenling (The New Day)

Through the white wind I fly my broken bird

head on fire, wax wings worn wide, shedding

singed feathers, ground a heaviness pulling from below

and then I wake again to the next life of this day.

Plucked naked, flame out, no wings to be seen;

a reprieve, or something harder than earth

stonier than the end?

May 2012

posted for    real toads

Open Link Monday

This poem is a sevenling. I first heard of this form through Marian (runaway sentences) when it was referenced on real toads. Here are links to one (two) of her own sevenlings posted on her blog, and also the explanation of the form, derived from a poem of Anna Ahkmatova, at The American Poetry Journal.

Image: Impossible Flag CXVI, by procsilas, on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 License

Mother's Day Flowers

Mother’s Day Flowers

They grow in pots

or wildly not, frosting the sides

of buildings, flung

across the roadside wastes

draping a softening cloth over 

what would otherwise be a corpse.

Unmothered, unfathered

from seed that falls from the dead

they’ll never know

the way they will their bee lovers

the kiss of the rain and stroking

of the wind, spreading under

golden light

the color of their beauty

infinite and abstract and complete.

So why are they gathered

by men who need money

killed by a cold knife

cut and tied into bunches

to make a gift of fading beauty homaging

an act they can’t conceive or

replicate, stiffly filed and vased.

Is it because they say so much,

or because they cannot

speak at all?

May 2012

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Image: White and Blue Fanflower, © joy ann jones 2012

Amor Ex Machina

Modern Rhapsody~Salvador Dali

Amor Ex Machina

I look at these rigid fingers

with their metallic sheen of

imbricated scales, once supple, articulate 

now so resistlessly futile
tapping out my obsolescence

not an antique

not an artifact

only a throwaway construct wearing out

for which parts are no longer available.

When my clanging gears
manage to change up and wheeze 
into a facsimile of engagement,

I make a soft slipping murmur

to you in the infinite dark

into the empty parking space,

the crackling void's blue box

beneath my fused wires.

Your name's evensong, I whisper it 

into the loop of a no longer

optimally functioning receiver

and on the flickering screen of

my headset, your face flashes on off

off on impossibly still close

though that must be an error.

There’s no answer in the
whistle and squeak night

because you do not speak

or I no longer hear. 
Yet should such a random soundbyte
force an auditory response to

somehow occur, and should 
the machine record it,

data at hand indicates

it  might be discovered that
a great many remaining parts

are still in working order.

May 2012

Posted for   Meeting the Bar   at dVerse Poets Pub
Charles Miller hosts today and his theme is Machine Dreams.

Header Image: Modern Rhapsody, 1957 by Salvador Dali

Copyright may still apply.
Footer Image: Anatomical Drawing of the Bicep Function, Leonardo da Vinci
both  via wikipaintings.org

The Collector

The Collector

I am a collector of

the poetry of death
of its fusillade barrages

of its subtle lingual dagger

of its dancing damascus blades

patterned like lost sonnets, even

the fat cannister whose prostrate poison

creeps silent over the lambstongue,

rhyming the skeletal with the skin.

               

Sharp by sharp

through the flint-flash labyrinth

where the iron blossoms of

synchronized sidearms pound

the percussion of the butcher's ballet,

the bomb's verse writes me a language

of ancient echo, splintery stabs

of the flung broken, the cellular scream itself

that is the breaker of worlds.

In the center where the bodies fold

every sword’s a stanza, every

barrel a ballad, each soldier a

poem crafted to parse autumn light
on shafts of wheat, to appear and fade

before the sickle’s edge,

springborn fodder for the beasts,

relentlessly gathered 
into red sheaves.

May 2012



Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Process note: "Damascus steel was a term used by several Western cultures from the Medieval period onward to describe a type of steel used in swordmaking from about 300 BCE to 1700 CE. These swords are characterized by distinctive patterns of banding and mottling reminiscent of flowing water..." ~wikipedia

I have used the idiosyncratic term lambstongue to refer to lambsquarters, or pigweed, an edible weed in the goosefoot family. 
The second stanza references Oppenheimer's quote  from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." when the first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945 in New Mexico.

Image: Antiquarian, by Petteri Sulonen, on flick'r

Used with his kind permission. Thank you, Petteri, for the picture which inspired this poem.

Petteri's photostream

Petteri blogs on all things political, social, Buddhist, photographic and horological, as well as anything else that catches his interest at his eclectic and always instructive site, Come to Think of It.

The Freeze

The Freeze

"..she's stoned said the Swede
and the Mooncalf agreed.
 I'm like a viper in shock
With my eyes in the clock...

......and as my mind unweaves

I feel the freeze down in my knees.."
~Robertson/Helm/Manual

Where do the

wounded go when

triage is  through the madhouse?

To huddle in smokefrozen anesthesia

corners dark with a banked combustion

that smolders hotter unseen

where witch doctors dance

in feathers around  bodies

full of plague, skeletal
grotesqueries of fever shadow.

Dragon-lit campfires 
built of bone can only

be extinguished by buckets of blood, 
by the cold complete

chemical foam of annihilation.

Take that clubbing drumbeat

anodyne, opiate organ key visionquest

plectrum plucked purple haze

and mainline it; vicarious junkies

of the undying beat.

We’d all be dead if it wasn’t for the music,

for the broken who gave it to us

dead vessels walking, bright stars of loss

poets, addicts, drunks, wild

flaming madmen, incandescent blue

desolation sibyls desperate to see

something  alive behind the

corpse's eye, looking for diamonds

finding carbon's blackened

ash, poisonous and filthy

drinking the bitter cup so we didn’t have to,

my abandoned generation of cripples

settlers and compromisers
slaves and drones, cowards and loons

scarred, abused, never healed except

when made into angels 

by that insubstantial

medicine that fades

from the air

but not the heart.

May 2012

Process Notes: My title as well as the line above referencing "the bitter cup" are both drawn directly from the lyrics of Chest Fever. The surreal organ on both this and the cut below is played by Garth Hudson.

Levon Helm, drummer for The Band and  the vocalist on both these heavily drug focused songs and many others of far less depressing tone, passed away last month at the age of 71, which says something to me about the persistence of hope over despair, that one can walk away from choosing death, and that art is a better drug than any chemical for treating inner wounds..

posted for    real toads

Marian's Challenge: Dirt Farmer;Levon Helm

and

Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

where Stu McPherson will be hosting a prompt on music starting at 3:00 pm EST

Restless

 Restless

I'm looking for peace but night is nervous 
as a pacing man. Instant as I sit my

ears are popped by the self-important buzz 
of an overfed junebug, senselessly, repeatedly
dive bombing the lighthouse

beam of my darklantern hair so

confused that even grey looks bright

here under a muddy sky with no moon.

On the farm behind, a welded gate swings

wide, squealing a pig noise

once twice again. Things rustle

while I stop the scratch of pen to hide
from potential mayhem, outlaw ghosts or 
just a lost drunk tired redneck
wandering in the haunted cow yard 

at 3:00 AM.

The air is overloaded with
an arrythmic rasp of frogsong 
pierced by the bored yap of outcast dogs. 
Only the stars covered with cloud
beautifully make no noise.

Soon the train will come shouting

with its ripping air horn drowning
the murmur of the farmer’s wife saying

“Come in, Come in,”

to someone 

and every third word I write 
I get a slap

on my ear 
from the bug.
All that's left is sandpaper questions
and a world that won't sleep.

May 2012

Photo The Haunted Cow Yard  © joy ann jones 2012

Night Thing

Night Thing 

I see that I’ve become a night thing now,

that even lust burns out, both song and vow.

When candles gutter down too many times,

when stuttering love has used up all her rhymes,

when darkness sucks out colors' hoarded breath;

then I the night thing learn the face of death.

I even put it on to try the fit;

so tight, so stiff, but I’ve grown used to it.

I take it off when daylight pales the sky

but find it needful under night’s ink eye.

Two dogs and I come haunt this vacant lawn

where two fires burned but one of them is gone.

The mouse cries shrill and then the barnowl hoots.

Age clicks the thirty eight before she shoots.

May 2012

Posted for   FormForAll   at dVerse Poets Pub

Samuel Peralta's Challenge: The Clarian Sonnet

The Clarian sonnet is named after 18th century English poet John Clare, and consists of seven rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter.

Image: Owl, by $holydevil on flick'r

I have cropped this photo which is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Only License

You can see the unaltered original here.

Personal Myth, Extended

Personal Myth, Extended

(Part Two, for Beltane)

This is the house of enough and more

that cannot be written.
You enter as one blind never to leave,
fingers finding sense from stucco

feeling out that every lover

wears one face under the beaked masks

that make ravens turn to doves, 
touching love's tumbling fall

to dancebraid Mayday's flower ribbons

in a wildfire burning over the wall

whose back the fool straddles

nailed in mid jump

to a cross of forgiveness

fresh split as any poppy

by the desire of the bee

first to ravage, then drawn to reverie.

Under the lintel I’ve buried 
the bones of the ogre

made an urn from his cyclops skull, 
one burred hole for drainage

and in it planted rowan to mistress the door

of the room where the moon makes up

the wide galleon bed we favor 
till the narrow one arrives, where the back 
is never turned, where the sound of no,

not now is never heard

where there is only blent music, 
sonata of surrender settling
pianissimo from burnt umber dark,

played on tortoiseshells of spine, primed

in murmurous pantomime.

No one else is left to pay us 

any mind, or listen over locusts' skythrown hum
even the woman who presently
will bring us tea on the balcony,

where I'll fold myself in your hand

and hold your cry in my palm
talisman and tribute to this night.
The rising sun melts storms we leave behind

bulwarked in a house of smoke
far from that tempest place
where each day is a feeding wave

that eats away another set of cells,

each softer, more chalk-white than the last
sucked off the gnawed self's skin

till bitten lips give up their skullthin grin.

Instead we sip the rosehip cup 
with heartbeats pink as leaping salmon,

thoughts quick as seals         

below winter's creeping ice, and
gaze into eyes that have no bottom

here in the last gold morning 
before the wrong century tries to define

us flat as the grapes of a sour wine.

April 2012 
 revisions, May 1st

Posted for  OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Again apologies for the long and rambling nature of this piece, and a nod to Emily Dickinson for the last lines of the first stanza. This is still a far from finished poem or even series, but I thought this part of it fit the spirit of the pagan holiday of Beltane, which falls today on the First of May. 

Header Image: The Blind Man of Toledo, 1906, by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida 

Public domain, via wikimedia commons

Footer Image: Two Lovers, 1888, fragment, by Vincent Van Gogh

Public domain, via wikimedia commons