Mahakali's Kiss

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mahakali's Kiss

 

 

I'm told it rained on the day she was born,

a January Sunday on streets of snow

that melted away like the life she wore,

like time's black kiss, like a riot of crows.

She makes each thing with a blind innocence

that starts a smolder in a long-dry field

just to leave an ash that cannot rest

til love itself belongs to the dead.

So fill your mouths with her acid, boys,

that seems to taste as sweet as mead.

Fill your arms with her empty husk

whose midnight touch will make you bleed

and when lips rot and skin weeps red

remember her smile and the charm she said

to reap your heart in her willow bed

where she dies of cold as soon as she's fed.

 

 

 

December 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted for the Word Garden Word List 

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process notes:  Mahakali means 'Great Kali,' and is the honorific title of the Hindu goddess of Time, Death and Liberation, Kali, whose name translates as "she who is black" or "she who is the ruler of time." wikipedia: "Mahakali, in Sanskrit, is etymologically the feminized variant of Mahakala or Great Time (which is interpreted also as Death). Mahakali...serves as the agent who allows the cosmic order to be restored.." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image: Goddess Mahakali, Delhi Museum via wikipedia   Public Domain

Soldier

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soldier

 

 

 

I am a soldier pledged to the sky, become
a sword in her blue pockets, my threadbare fatigues

marked with the grit of worlds. I fight on
because she wears time so much better than I
and vaults the earth with her mother-colored mantle
unwavering, unchanged, uncommanded forever.

Tho Night has drawn his obsidian blade
and pierced me with his heartkiller spear, tho I 

am older, diminished, my moondrops that pooled on

white grass all drunk in the sun's tarnished cup; tho
I howl my warcry unheard in the inkwell dark,
still the hole in my breast

is soft-closed with moss and silver straw
and silence that seeps out
from the green forest floor,
til dreams and signs pillow my head
and swim like sweet fish as pale as winter
through the tears on my war-stained cheeks.

 

 

 November 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Portait of Maude Abrantes, 1907 ©Amadeo Modigliani   Public Domain

Borage and Blue Sky, ©joyannjones

 

 

Four Hours

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Four Hours

 

 

Four cold hours

far from dawn

I sit in

manipulated darkness

waiting to see

what will come lie down in

this coffin of a moment,

 

thieving the spray of rosemary from my hand.

 

I've followed

the spark

all my life

seen it birth and kindle

seen it flicker deep

in eyes dark-sweet as berries

when all other light

 

was taken

 

but there is

nothing in this roving 

black behind the blindfold tonight

not a single reflection glancing bright

off the book of stone; only that absence

which is the certainty of death

its witchlight capricious as hope

 

with no thing fair about it.

 

Why have you

brought me here now

to such circular endings, to

this museum of

stolen seeds, false gods, burned

fields, raped children?

Four hours cold

hold too much

 

too many graves

too much

silence.

 

 

 

November 10 2024 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: This includes words from both this word list and the previous one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Black Bowl, 1907  © George Seeley   Public Domain

Curse the Darkness, ©Thomas Dodd  Fair Use

Sabbat

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sabbat

 

 

 

I saw the moon in the devil's eye

when October rode in on her horse of bone.

The night began to weave the sky

dark and darker, cold and high,

in deep black strands from a witch's comb.

The heart of a bird pierced on a knife

hides a ferric flute and a rusted ladle.

Her blue feathers dropping, her downy white,

leave her butterfly bones to the freeze in the night

while the moon shines bright in the devil's cradle.

Nine shadows come and then three more

to swing five times round the balefire's flare.

The wind robs the roof and opens the door,

puts a wet salt skin on the bedroom floor,

slips on a sorrow too old for despair.

Wash him with blood and dry him with silver.

Float him away on a lye-thick river.

Cross his red forehead with your gnostic brand

but the moon still shines from the devil's hand.

 

 

~October 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List at

Shay's Word Garden 

where she asks us for a bit of rhyme this week

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Walpurgisnacht,© 1923 by Heinrich Kley  Public Domain

Skullshot © joyannjones

 

Two Triolets In September

 

 

 

 

 

Two Triolets In September

 

Bright wasp-stings of light, yellow afternoons

that summer has given, October soon takes

with her quarrel of grackles and pale hunter's moon;

a wasp-sting of cold on a yellow afternoon.

Ferry winds will carry the gold leaf-wing soon.

Forgotten the spinner, the empty web breaks

with a wasp-sting sigh on a yellow afternoon.

What today has given, tomorrow soon takes.

 

 

So came the soft touch so soon to be lost

that folds poppies' faces to green nodding skulls,

sealing their seed-thoughts til the first killing frost,

in that last soft light so soon to be lost

where I dance alone with a fluttering ghost

with summer's warm vices consumed and annulled,

with scent of soft smoke so soon to be lost

and the red poppies' faces turned to green skulls.

September 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List~Autumn

at

Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Oriental Poppies, 1928,  © Georgia O'Keefe

Poppies in seed, via internet. Fair Use

 

Aardvark

 

 

 

 Aardvark

 

"..Don't put on any airs when you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue.

They got some hungry women there and they'll really make a mess out of you..."

~Bob Dylan, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

 

 

 

What were you to me back then,

with your tumbled hair and tequila?

Even Dali had his aardvark, led uncomplaining

 

through the dirty streets of Paris,

a glass-globe feast for insatiable eyes.

Impossible to know

what I was to you.

Your face was hinged,

 

a door at times standing open,

cracked to show the arid

 

arabesques of spiders 

smiling in Poe's palace. Others

locked and bolted, bare and flash

 

as clean brass before it's engraved.

All I remember is you held me

like diamonds worked into your arms' ring

there in the tedium of the shelter

among the do-gooders and the riffraff.

 

The cardboard walls flexed with our love

but when I slipped the rhinestone lead

from your sleek throat

 

you ran

and the streets of Paris

emptied.

~August 2024

 

 

 

 

 

Process note: The photo of Dali shown actually is of he and his pet anteater. Poetic license.

 

 

posted for WG Word List at

Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Dali takes his anteater for a stroll in Paris, 1969    Public Domain

The Smiling Spider, 1887, Odillon Redon, Louvre, Paris    Public Domain

Where The Mad King Disposes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where The Mad King Disposes

 

 

 

Asleep as far as Night's pen clerks

its long lined lists, where nothing we know is king,

a winter king who never works;

 

still there I see what the mad fool chooses,

veiled and warped with the sharpest taking.

The blue snow seems full of the light it loses

 

forming your face from the flat candle flame,

blowing your form in the billowing drapes,

come back from the dead with a stranger's name.

 

Asleep is a far land laked lucid and deep,

iced out by the ghosts of too many fades.

Where's the sun's blood to break my sleep,

where's the warm substance the shadow makes? 

 

 

 

 

 

~August, 2024

posted for WGWord List

Image from La Chute de la Maison Usher, 1928   Public Domain

 

 

 

Til My Ship Comes In

 

 

 

Til My Ship Comes In

 

 

 

 

 

 

Becalmed on a sea of smoke

a nowhere that could be anywhere

I made an indigo wind

to fill my sails.

 

"It's just enchantment, " you said,

"It's not personal." as

the voyage began

to tick down

 

kiss by kiss, bookmarks

in the wildness

floating your stopwatch eyes.

"Time's up!" you said,

and changed the rules.

I thought everything not experimental

was forbidden, but it seems heartbreak

will ruin a boat.

The shipwreck was easy,

but the distance to shore

was a bitch. Still

but still,

 

better to drown

than to straddle a broken bench

and bleed, bailing a sinking boat

with no bottom. 

April 2024

posted for WGWL at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Boat of the Mermaid, ©Sabin Balasa via internet Fair Use

A Rocky Shore, Iona  ©Samuel Peploe, via internet    Fair Use