Salamander

Salamander

It’s easy to say

lick me as deeply as these flames cling

to what they devour

crawl on fire across the dry

husks of tenderness, rustle and spark
in my bed of shed skins

and watch me be consumed

but this is a country of cold

of ashes, where the green moon

looks down with basilisk eyes

to this polar waste where
nothing can burn

except the heart

skewered for the auto da fe,

up in vanity’s smoke

crackling and spitting its fat

into the roasting flames,

built to fuel a heat that mocks

the end of fire.

So bring your napalm skin

let me be the burning ballroom

where the salamanders dance

and I'll give you spark for spark

flame for flame

before the cold dawn

blows us out.

January 2012

Process notes: In medieval and occult lore, the salamander was thought to belong to, if not actually be, the element of fire. From wikipedia:"Leonardo da Vinci wrote the following on the salamander: 'This has no digestive organs, and gets no food but from the fire, in which it constantly renews its scaly skin...'  Later, Paracelsus suggested that the salamander was the elemental of fire..."

Footer Image: Pinup Model: Erika the Texas Timebomb(in 55 Thunderbird), by christopherallisonphotography.com, on flick'r
Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Non-Commercial License 

Broken Cored

Broken Cored

I think about that black

gas oven night;

how you  talked me into it

the delirium, the smoke

and the insanity

how you changed me

from riches to rags

reluctant to retread

oblivious to obsessed

before you left.

One broken spoke

brings down the ferris wheel;

one rancid memory

spoils the whole barrel of

dreamapples.

January 2012

55 apple slices for the G-man

Exercise in Metaphor

Exercise in Metaphor

Under the trashcan my rosemary lies, concealed to

endure bleeding hell in this intractable garden,

so far removed from your wild conception as a weed

for Aphrodite’s aromatic cloak, spun of the sky god’s seed,

living dew of that Attic sea from which the goddess rose

before Athens, white limbed and cold as fear.

You were her mantle of living warmth, austere.

You lived on sea spray and sun in the maritime dunes,

wild and free as the piping of Pan.

Your  needles mimic tongues philosophers ran

standing where grey pillars capped words of gold

now debased and traded from your native land.

You eke out your life a  commodity of man

in each fold of this foreign world that seeks your savor,

still giving your pale shy flowers to each rutting bee.

Here you’re made to stand against the burning lee

of American days, feet bound in clay unaccounted,

damped with calcareous tepid water shorn of salt.

When hard times come, I cage and darken you in a vault,

make you winter a cold that wracks your bluegreen bones.

Wind sucks them dry and bleeds you like a blade.

Still in death you give what’s asked from what you’ve made,

that undying and remembrance-laden scent

that releases mnemonic prisoners from their cells.

But all’s forgotten now of what your fragrance tells;

how once you were the herb of fussing alchemists

boiled to bouillon in precise alembic wells;

for sweet union men once begged those body-spells.

Your arms were crowns in countless lost endeavors.

Even crushed in death your juniper lingers.

Tonight the front freights down with frozen fingers.

Blue express of oblivion, dark wailing wind.

Across millenniums the sky god gives and takes.

I bind you in  burlap, secure the shroud it makes,

cover you with a  plastic catafalque

meant for the dregs and detritus I buy,

and your last freedom, daughter of the sky,

is to choose if it’s better to live like this or die.

January 2011 

Posted for real toads

Kerry's Challenge is to write a poem in which flowers do not appear in a cliché'd way. I hope this one works. It was originally posted at One Stop Poetry, about this time last year, when I was struggling to keep a rosemary plant alive, and boggled at the state of our democracy (both things coming to us from Greece--yeah I know, a stretch.) Whether this metaphor is appropriate or not--who knows, but the plant in question died.

.

Image 1: West Front of the Parthenon, Edward Dodwell, 

1821, Views from Greece. 

Source: wikimedia commons.

Image 2: Rosemarinus officianalis

Source: wikimedia commons

Study in Indigo

Study in Indigo

The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
~Edgar Allan Poe

deep

indigo blue the lake

as her dress of sighs and sky

just the relic of wrinkled skirt

showing above the snow's white line

when he came walking down the beach

across the scrabbled sleet

to see her face beneath the lace thin

ice, the past with a

frozen scarf of present

over her snowblind eyes

deep indigo

blue

January 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub



Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: Snow, by Julian Fałat, 1907, oil on canvas

Julian Fałat [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Knotwork

Knotwork

When the fever comes I always think

in strands and balls of ifs and whens

rolling, biting, weaving, choking;

I cut through them with a whimpered cry.

They're ligaments that severed, pain

and cripple, yet born of fever so are born to die.

Still love runs bright, there in the maze before me

self-contained and whole as wild things are

desired more than breath until she’s caught

to burn the lungs with all her embered stars;

but in this dream we’re infinitely more

than we could be in sanity before.

Dry as thirst’s bones, braiding sheets to chaos,

I speak sweet life all night in liquid tongues

dancing the map of flesh that only mimics

our minds’ soft burnished labyrinths unrolled,

roads and ways in rubric, ever knotted

bound inward in a winding beaten gold.

As journey’s end returns to sunset fire

so waves of dreams break on the beach we are.

There are ligaments that severed, pain

and cripple, born of fever, born to die

and some that twine forever and remain

the knots of lovers, twined as lovers lie.

January 2012

Header Image: detail of the Uppland Runestone  (#U871) dating to the 12th century, originally located in Ölsta, a village in the county of Uppland in Sweden. Full image below.
By Mceder (Photo by Mceder at Skansen May 2005.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 

The entire runestone. 

Process notes: The knotwork on this runestone I found through a random image search is very similar to, or perhaps just reminds me of the visual images of a rather tortuous maze from the dream that seeded this poem. It was colorized for protection by the Swedish government in 1991.

Dead Man's Curve

Dead Man's Curve

“ Live as if you were already dead”

~unsourced “Zen” saying, as quoted by poet Marvin Bell.

“You don’t come back/from Dead Man’s Curve…”

~20^th Century American Pop Song by Jan & Dean

The Dead Man as Poseur

The Dead Man is living as if he’d been alive, because he has it all backwards.

The Dead Man is primarily a pretentious but not harmless twit, prowling the internet, squinting at some tasty wisdom he thinks he can consume like a burrito.

He likes the way the monks' robes swish as they rake the rocks
in the sand gardens of sleeping neurons deep within an electric foreign tranquility, and thinks he must just totally must, 

have that app.

He’s staring at his navel, and sighing over the Bodhi tree; a plastic green predecorated scotch pine in the window of the home warehouse store.

Of course, there’s no reason he couldn’t sit beneath the tree, but he worries about store security, and really, he just doesn’t have the time, even though he’s supposed to be Dead 
for quite awhile.

His watch hasn’t stopped, on it tocks, so he’s still late. (If you’re pressed for time as a corpse, certainly you have no time to lose.)

But he can’t tell time very well anymore, what with the being so Dead and all.

If his eyelids hadn’t rotted, 

if his eyeballs weren’t a crow’s canapé, 

he still would look at everything and see nothing.

More about the Dead Man as Poseur

There is no more, except a Dead Man’s ego that stalks cyberfinity

and hides in the picture of a prettier girl smiling in her prom dress.

There is no more, except the Dead Man’s maw of ever gaping hunger

that dips ink brushed parchment into chocolate, and deep fries a butterfly on a stick under a maraschino cherry tree.

There is no more, except the Dead Man’s fear that the bottomless void

will suck the Dead brains right out of him and spit them into a peanut shell.

There is no more, because someone 
buried the Dead Man alive.

December 2010

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Sheila Moore is hosting this week, and her prompt is to write a poem using the poetic device of onomatopoeia.

Process Notes: Hi, all. I am enduring some kind of nasty crud that leaves me unfit for poetic composition, or sitting up for long, so I went looking for an existing poem for the prompt. Apparently I don't use onomatopoeia much in my writing, but I found a little bit of it here, in a poem originally written in response to a prompt at the now defunct Big Tent Poetry, to write a “Dead Man’s poem” a la Marvin Bell, who's made quite a thing of this form. There are four of his Dead Man Poems at the preceding poets.org link if you want to see what they're supposed to be like--I'm afraid I found the whole thing pretentious and went off the reservation in this satire of the genre.

~*~

Disclaimer: I cannot find any source in Zen Buddhist literature for the saying Mr. Bell has used to create his genre of Dead Man's Poetry. Internet searches on these keywords will return only Mr Bell as a source. While this does not detract in any way from the independent merit of his work, I would take the assumption that it has any real citable source in Zen tradition with a grain of salt. It seems more likely to me that this is a corruption of the famous quote attributed to Gandhi: "Live as if you will die tomorrow." But that's just me. 

Totem

Totem

Spirit eater

White waltzer

secret inside my skin

snailcurled in snowdrift

sleeping, black lips closed over

teeth big as carrots, dark poppy pod eyes

shut, REM flutter stilled

silent as the melting flake;

in dreams you

come to eat the gold yolk

from the half-egg moon called

winter’s sun.

Wake

when the hunter comes

lift up your chainsaw paws and

show your ivory yellow teeth

scrimshawed and snagged by

the obduracy of your kills;
shake 
his bones from your throat
with a growl.

Ice orphan, 
White diver

            my only protection now.           

All arctic summer you sidled closer

in your need, your frost breath

following me across another country.

All summer you harvested

the sleek black bodies

of grief, turning the ice

salty red with your patience;

only the fleetest fled unfurrowed, 

melting a path to

 that stonecold 
immeasurable abyss.

When the dark time came 

and there was 
nowhere else, you wooed me

 with garnets and alabaster freshcut from all 
the sorrows' spawn you'd slain

 for me. 
So I gave you

sleep in the black heartcave

content to barter away all

yesterday’s skins

for the talisman necklace

of your ebony claws.

January 2011

Posted for   Fireblossom Friday   at real toads

Header image: Post card. Bear totem on grave. Ketchikan, Alaska.

Source: US National Archives, series: Photographs of the Inhabitants of Metlakatla, British Columbia and Metlakatla, Alaska, compiled ca. 1856 - 1936
Public Domain via wikimedia commons

Rats

Rats

I dreamed the big storm

finally came.

The crippled tree

came through the roof.

It wasn’t bad;

it let out  all the rats,

scrambling up the

streaming branch to blow

in the screaming whirlwind.

All but the

tiniest heartheld 

within

who raised his

demon’s white snout

for an eyeblink,

then went back 

to chewing.

January 2011

55 rats plus one for the G-Man