Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood

Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood

O I know you loved me

like the tiger loves the goat

and that was why we went to sea

in a cask that didn't float.

That was why you talked to me

with jungle in your throat

and crooned so comprehensively

each note the wild things wrote--

but when we broke up in the foam

it was plain I was a bear,

and you--just a heavy honeycomb

I'd pulled from a tree of air.

~May 2016

 (Homage to Dali for title)

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Weekend Challenge

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Study for Honey is Sweeter Than Blood, 1926, by Salvador Dali

Tiger in Love, 1979,  by Corneille(Cornelis Guillaume van Beverloo)

Fair use via wikiart.org

The Broken Gate

The Broken Gate

Tenderness

except in dreams

has dried up like

moon's twin-horned stream,

extinct as Australopithecus

or the seventh kithera string

strummed by the plectrum of Astarte.

Trust mis-grunts the tongue of trolls

nor is it fluent in spirit. It

teaches forests the growl

in the chainsaw's throat,
spreads the dryads' legs,

smiles when the owl

of Athena's beheaded.

Love is a rumored magic

removed from the act,

a legend of the dead,

a plagiarism of runes

marsh-candled on bone

yet brighter in the eyes of the wild
for being lost to sight,

light unfleshed, undressed, discarnate;

ghost-wrack on the high wind

that breaks the last gate.

~May 2016

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Weekend Challenge

kithera--seven-stringed musical instrument of the ancient world, ancestor of the guitar.

Above: Ruin with Head of Medusa and Landscape, 1941, Salvador Dali  Fair use via wikiart.org

Below: "The original complete skull (without upper teeth and mandible) of a 2.1 million year old Australopithecus africanus specimen so-called Mrs. Ples, discovered in South Africa.
Collection of the Transvaal Museum"  Courtesy wikimedia commons

Incognito, Indistinct

Incognito, Indistinct

In the killing fine fabric

of inflorescent flame

we walk, we burn,

dwindling from kindling

to inglorious smut

alone in a dark

our dying lights up.

  

Murderers in red

boil a soup from the dead.

In our hollowed heads

honed hidden things move,

their inhalation our blood,

their exhale the air

where the fire fed.

~May 2016

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Flash 55 Plus

Image: The Return of the Flame, 1943, Rene Magritte

Fair Use via wikiart.org

 

 

Rainbow Wrapper

Rainbow Wrapper

I'm just the torn wrapping

from a pre-packaged rainbow,

a rider in the sky's pocket,

mischance given breath.

I'm the flare of a spark

struck between strangers

burning alone

in the slums of the storm--

a pinwheel, a Catherine wheel,

a somersault of fires

not safe to play with,

not warm and not yours.

~April 2016

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Challenge: Words Count

Image: Lichtkreise (Kosmischer Regenbogen) (Cosmic Rainbow), 1922, Otto Freundlich

Public domain via wikiart.org

 

 

The Dark House

The Dark House

"Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, 

deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do;..."

As you like it

so it will be.

So we said in cadence each to each,

dark and deep our eyes' forsaken night,

smoky our sighed, incited, worn insights,

and yet nothing was; indeed

nothing could be,

for we were whips alone, and well

deserving of the darkest home.

Now the sixth age flips

its skeletal slippery pantomime,

the mirror's jest, the frankly fumbled lines;

never jealous enough

in honor or enough bold,

sans heart, sans mind, 

sans everything but role.

(Do you not know 

I was a woman?)

So I speak to myself in this room of the voided cheek,

as false as the vows made in wine I used to seek.

 “Men have died from time to time, 

and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” 

 ~April 2016

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Challenge: Hat Tip To The Bard

Both quotes from As You Like It, by William Shakespeare, as well as several other lines extrapolated here, including the ones concerning the sixth age, the woman remark, and of course, the last lines.


Image: So Long As You Like It,  ©  Liz Huston via internet. No copyright infringement intended

Thunder In Mourning

Thunder In Mourning

Thunder mumbled all night,

thunder subdued, a cello played

by a sobbing storm,

or the beat of a drum: an elephant's steps

on the following walk, trunk to tail through

the wrong end of the kaleidoscope

up the curved wall and

down down again toward the moving end.

As the stained-glass lights blind,
she shows me the way

to balance my bulk

up on a ball, on one oak-like foot,

small eyes sunk and kind

too old for my mind.

She's a thing born for trust

despite what we've seen

from killers and users,

pale abusers who'll never hold
the blowing rose that drops away

as they push close.
She knows

all our possum secrets,

our summer fades,

how we murder our minutes

to buy our day.
She sways, a grey

forest that grows wild and wide;

she blocks the dead light

that increases night.

She'll let my feet slide

down the dodger's paradigm

towards the planet that struggles

to be a star, to the music

womb-warm but

played from so far. She bends
down her great head

to let me ride, for going there

might take a fall, and all

that's left of our lives, drums in the rain,

footsteps patient--cello gone soft

thunder subdued,

thunder in mourning.

~April 2016

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Challenge: Elephants

Images: Top: Warrior Mounted on  an Elephant Overpowering a Cello, 1983, Salvador Dali
Fair use via wikiart.org
Bottom: author and source unknown No copyright infringement intended.