Chaos Spoon

Chaos Spoon

The figures made the clock work

or were made of clockwork

themselves on a flat plate desert

burnt umber with hunger

where anaplasia is served

with a big chaos spoon.

Fried eggs through the window

shells crushed to dust:

They knew the time

They built the place

where the Handmaid of Fire

and the Blinded Face

kiss with the long drawn

howl of Fate under a black-holed sun

on a scoured afternoon in July.

Those who live by the Lie

will die by the gun, but not before

they make us a bed,

too hard, too long

in  the dreamkiller's cell

feed us rotten red meat

from a toxic pail, pour us

too much dry air from

the poison well. It's a nightmare in time

to lose the door,  but it's better by far

to have a dead fire than to make

the world burn for a dime.

 ~August 2016

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Challenge: Fireblossom Friday
I only wish ALL of this was a dream.

 Optional Musical Accompaniment

anaplasia : n.Reversion of cells to an immature or a less differentiated form, as occurs in most malignant tumors.

~The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary
Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Image:The Meeting of the Illusion and the Arrested Moment - Fried Eggs Presented in a Spoon, 1932, by Salvidor Dali  Fair Use via wikiart-org

The Night Bee

The Night Bee

The night bee flies alone

while the drones doze at home

and few will ever taste

what she brings back to the comb.

Confused by the moon

and the closed rose,

she crawls harlequin walls

where starlight froze

where jasmine twines up

through a sweetness of bones.

The night bee flies alone

while the drones die at home

and few will ever find

what she brings back to the comb

what she keeps in her black throat

stolen from the flower

that closes at dawn.

~August 2016

Optional Musical Accompaniment

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 Weekend Challenge

Caveat: Despite the amazing similarity to Magaly Guerrero's poem for her challenge, I honestly came by these words on my own, as I never read anyone's offerings before I write to a prompt (and in fact, 3 days later I am just now reading hers.) Still, it's a crazy coincidence that our two poems should be almost identical in so many ways. I offered to take mine down, but Magaly has graciously said to leave it, so I do, as an illustration of poetic lightning striking twice.

Image: The Tempest:Ariel and the Bee, illus. by Edmond Dulac

(Colors inverted) Fair Use via wikiart.org

The Third City

The Third City

The orange grey sky,

the maple that reels like a punchdrunk boxer

under the fists of the wind,

the metalpunch that's moved in

behind my left eye,
the icemaker home

in the specimen bottle,

floating in a pious pickle, little pig fetuses

taken unborn from my pen;

this is my city of day

but under my bed is a highway
blurring lights, sleeping

up the staircase green hills

blackened by night and a fogfull sky,

from the golden-gated park to

the golden-girled beach looking for your dark eyes,

deeper than the mines, in the City

that needs no name

nightwarm and whispering California,
curled like a child's fingers

round the hand of my heart;

but in the crosshairs of dawn

my feet greyed with sharded dust

from the madman's white temples, I'm here

in the City vanished, the City made flat

as the infinite Horizon of Aten

by the sledge of centuries

remote as the moon

wiped clean of the gods

and all folly of men, home

where the parch-wind and the murderer sun

and endless night and I have come to live forever
in the dead sky, nowhere left to run.

~August 2016 

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Challenge: Get Listed

Notes: The City: A term used around the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California to describe San Francisco.

City Of The Horizon of Aten: "Amarna (Arabic: العمارنة al-‘amārnah‎‎) is an extensive Egyptian archaeological site that represents the remains of the capital city..built by the Pharaoh Akhenaten .. and abandoned shortly after his death (1332 BC). The name for the city employed by the ancient Egyptians is written as Akhetaten  in English transliteration. Akhetaten means "Horizon of the Aten[sun disc] "    ~wikipedia

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Top image: dustbowl sky  © joyannjones 2014

Footer: Small temple of Aten, Amarna, by Einsamer Schütze, via wikimedia commons
manipulated

Lacunal Dialectic

Lacunal Dialectic

They gave the wide-eyed eccentric

the wild electric

because

there's a  price for every metric,

every loggorheic epic

showing we pull from world-bone

a hole

that goes systemic,  

and fill it,

anthropocentric.

So they made

his dialogue enteric,

scaled to monosyllabic

microbes:


hurt            love           scream          want

                           dead

changed everything he said

and killed his head.

~August 2016

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Flash 55 Plus

Notes: I often used to add abstruse words to my 55's to tease the G-Man, who would pretend he didn't get it, but of course, we knew better. So this one in particular, despite its rather grim subject matter, made me remember him.

"Ernest Hemingway, American author, committed suicide shortly after ECT at the Mayo Clinic in 1961. He is reported to have said to his biographer, "Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient...." ~wikipedia

Electro-convulsive therapy (electro-shock) is still considered a valid treatment for depression and other mental illness, despite mixed evidence of its effectiveness, and can still be administered without consent in some situations. You can find a list of other famous people who have undergone it HERE.





Top image: Brain, author unknown,  source
Footer: 'A Bergonic chair, a device "for giving general electric treatment for psychological effect, in psycho-neurotic cases", according to original photo description. World War I era.'~ via wikimedia 

Bells And Bars

Bells And Bars

In the grey cellblocks

of the circus maximus

there's a mad girl listening

to a bird singing,

a soft wind-ringing of lily bells.

The notes are trickled

from a carillon throat

in a dark made of rock;

the crowd flickers its shadows

at the last hour of day.

Outside the barred columns

the notes of the thrush

candle the dusk

like glow-worms signaling stars.

Nothing moves 

but the sinking bright pillars

of burnt-out sun, prison-harsh, and the

wing-blurr of a thrush to show us

what now is a ruin

once was a song.

~August 2016

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Challenge: Voices, Spaces & Songbirds

Bird Singing In The Moonlight, 1939,  © Morris Graves, Fair Use via wikiart.org