Wind Storm

Wind Storm

The sun is a bleeding blur, an unsliced

orange at mold, floating sangria’d in sour wine

on a bent stem of grey horizon banked with

mazy clouds, single eye dull as dead fish.

For two days and two nights

the wind has fought the chimney, jousting

with a lance of dust red air in quick

berserker wheezes, stiff blows, rattling

roaring, grinding the limbs of the stainless steel rose

against the guttering with harsh metallic shrieks.

The trees, the tentative plants on the patio and I

all are learning to live sideways.

For ten days and ten nights

I’ve tried to say goodbye

into the hollow where you were

to let the wave wash over me

to let my heartbeat pound alone

to dig the drifting sand away from your last

stone tablet and read what's written there,

but the wind blows in circles

moans and pelts my eyes with sting

till I give up, open my hand to

let the last grain of you

fly off on its back.

May~June 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Prompt by Brian Miller:It's a Matter of Choice

Audio:

wind storm by Hedgewitch O'theWilds

Image: Landscape in Stormy Weather, Vincent Van Gogh

chalk and paper study, 1885

Public domain via Wikipaintings.org

Oxygen Vine Dreamscape

Oxygen Vine Dreamscape

 a voice was singing

Oxygen vine

sweet life of mine

o how you twine

oxygen vine

You began to turn me leaflike

browsing me in slack moments,

a subscription of yours, a pastime.

I saw a skewed wall in a lunatic jungle,

undeciphered petroglyphs

scrawled over by flaming flower graffiti

dark hands of roots, celladon vineshadows,

utterly unreadable

a nonsense song

Oxygen vine

trace me a line

o how you twine

oxygen vine

I was deaf from the reverberations

 of collision when you told me

I was a wall against whose

resistance you built your self, but

I was only flesh behind a  wall

etched with the sigils of an unknown cabal,

 its vines and shadows

become my skin

in the deep night

 

Oxygen vine

black columbine

o how you twine

oxygen vine

Love is a cannibal you explained.

His first goal is to kill and eat the other

then make tuneful bells from the bones.

Just so you grew your tensile intoxicant ribbons in me

so hungry and alive, tickling, strangling

composting accommodating flesh till I was friable ooze
  root-fractured, absorbed into your sucking shoots

flensed down to my skull for a drum

sweet notes pulsing

Oxygen vine

razors in wine

o how you twine

oxygen vine

 

I was wined and twined

cut so quickly

I never knew when my smile lost its lips.

You pierced and numbed me

bubbled my blood out with your own

beads of verdant air, an antagonism of life support

careless of  the red drops’ splash

or my cyanic throat

rattling and humming

Oxygen vine

ventilator’s whine

o how you twine

oxygen vine

Autumn brings a bonfire.

 Dry leaves and twigs burn tinder fast

thorns and flowers flaring farewell

in a temperature that crackles,

twining flames fed hotter

by an inrush of escaping air exploding

black under the lids into

smoke blown like seeds on the wind

vanishing

Oxygen vine

darkness define

your ashen design

into silence

March 2011 

(re-) Posted for   Meeting the Bar: Where in the World?   at dVerse Poets Pub

Charles Miller is hosting Meeting the Bar today at the pub, and asks us to try to create an alien world or landscape. This poem came to mind, so I'm reposting it. If it appears familiar to some, it's probably because it originally appeared for One Shot Wednesday  at the gone but never forgotten, and ever inimitable 

One Stop Poetry.

Photo copyright joy ann jones 

 

Transit of Venus

Transit of Venus

Slowly as a frost stunned fly

walking on lemonade ice

black Venus crawls across

the great sun's face.

He twitches a helix of gaseous muscle

yet she is not so easily brushed off

on her jubilee promenade between

that burning heaviness and our green world,

her last flirt with those of us now alive

reserving the wine of her next communion
for another age of fools.

She'll take herself back

to that unbounded void of which
she is mistress, blushing shy at sunset,

then wearing her hard morning mask

glittering intermittent vacant promise, remote

and unconcerned in her comings and goings

as the love she rules,
inconstant in the darkness

as last year's lover;

a great display and then forever

gone in an hour's time.

June 2012

posted for   real toads

Challenge: Out of Standard

Izy's very creative challenge was to take your favorite break-up song and write something from a selected line which was *not* about the ending of a relationship. I'm not too sure this is actually fulfilling that goal, but it's the closest I could get. Here is my break-up song, from Joni Mitchell, and the line I've culled out and slightly altered comes from the first verse:

Image:SDO's Ultra-High Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit
by NASA Goddard Phot and Video, on flick'r
Shared under a Creative Commons License

Odin's Day Night~Repost with Audio

Odin’s day Night

I wrap a poor turn 

of grizzled hope

around the moon

so frayed

I wrap it in the too 
opulent velvet 
of a voice

so dark

singing the

old

sagas of inamoratas

journeys' endings

rhymes of baldur's fall

monks' canted fragments

figments of

gods and demons

queens and fools

past and future

love and death.

The night sky is freckled

with perseid’s white splash,

droplets of star burning

strained through the alembic

of a staring nullity

defining my preterition,

sizzling like the rasp

of some old god’s laugh

rough from a silence

passing paleology.

How their light runs

fleet suns of Perseus

skittering across

night’s spread table

a howl on the ripped nail

of moon splintering

on Odin’s day

night as remote

as the face behind 

a blue electric vow, 

close as

the corvine quark

tumbling sable japes.

That laughter in the air, 

yelling from the beaks of crows   

falls high above 

beyond the circling light;

how the void must ring with it

time out of mind

IN PERPETUUM.

August 2011


I've included an audio file below of me reading the poem out loud. It's my very first attempt at this, and I apologize for the background buzz and  the rather faint volume; you may need to adjust your volume level up



Odin's Day Night by Hedgewitch O'theWilds

Image: 2005_1011night047, by peadar on flick'r

Shared under a creative commons license

Phantasm

Phantasm

In the days of my delirium

I stroked your phantom hair

gently back where it brushed

the deep ore seams of your brow,

crown of a life’s hard mining

for a fool and spirit king over

the boundless land of no dominions.

I traced the lines and lies of your jaw

as sharp, insinuative, as much a vehicle for
drugged response as any needle

and drifted flying on that wave, in

a megacosm beyond any freight

the day had brought me, 
loaded in her barrow of

dirt and dearth.

Even now your star shines high

soft and inarticulate as fur, its light a web

of hairthin silver spun over the bald world,

far above this quicklime field where ants and I

grunt out the elaborate cosmic prank
of one more day. When vision doubles,

my fever fixes on its irrational display, 
sailing insubstantial across a dark
temporal ocean, empyreal and seductive

as that resolution I can

never know, wavering with intermittent
incongruous compassion, a

wayward balloon blown high to pop 
on your tall stonehearted wall. 

Falling in a losing wind, I take

a last sip of dream,  just one;

tooled as an orchid’s convolution

rare as a black diamond,

sweeter than any drug.

May~June 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Images: Evening Star, by Camille Corot

Orchid, by Mikhail Vrubel

Public domain, via Wikipaintings.org

Building Goodbye

Building Goodbye

Building the best goodbye;
when so many leave, it 
has to be done.

Should it be of blooded steel

solid as a shield wall or

should it be smoky glass

jagged and slivered sharp?

I thought to make it oak

keeled from the green heart

of a tree that lasts longer

fights harder to live

than either you or I,

but willow as she bends down

woven white and pale

will hold better the salt of tears,

the madwoman's whispers,

twisted smiles and sighs

of all the best and last goodbyes.

June 2012

Posted for   real toads

Open Link Monday

Image: basket, by  tracitodd, on flick'r

Shared under a creative commons license

Blue Sail

Blue Sail

Blue frosted as a winter berry

your eyes’ light and the freight they carry

heavy as the slamming fall of night

why should only a glance bring such delight?

Blue sail, silhouette of a free blown boat

against a sleeping lion sun that seems to float

caved and hidden where mare's tails cover care

drifting like fire on the clamor of air.

Blue dark as deep and soft as summer sea

pulls at my heart's locket of memory.

Blue song high and sweet no singer can sing;

blue candle against the dead this night will bring.

June 2012

Posted for   real toads

Sunday Mini-Challenge: The Blues Stanza

but though I love the blues in all its forms, it didn't want to cooperate, so this is the free verse option of the challenge, to write on the color blue.

 Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: Impression,sunrise, by Claude Monet, 1873

Public Domain, via Wikipaintings.org

Odalisque

Odalisque

This striptease of self

dance of seventy veils

works only in a poledancing vacuum

where there’s looking not touching

talking not feeling

and so, sinuous and alive as it appears

to a disordered mind,

is a sterile transaction,

a pastied charade, grimed

as the crumpled bills shoved

in a stripper’s thong,

good for another busride to hell.

And this scrawl

isn’t love

only its black ink breath

sighing out the tired gestures

not of an odalisque but of

a broken dancer.

April~June, 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Image: Rashaka Dancer, by fallingwater123 on flick'r

Shared under a creative commons license