Toxic Waste

Toxic Waste

I'm floating dirty bombed in a mermaid sea

flotsam'd with promises broken unspoken, ducking

the twin-eyed turrets swiveling sweetly

siamesed from the face of the Ace of Storms.

My brain beneath its sponge infection

recalls the first inflection of those liquid fingers

so lyric on shifting skins; impossible to know

they'd stiffen on the chain of gold, pull, snap the thin

links, all destroyed but the red line left cutting my throat;

yet I sing on in a song that cannot stop.

So many clouds on the cards,

bleeding so close, spitting their pretense

of earth-splitting power, then racked by

the trump of the sun, useless to shorten

my half-life or untie a single atom; even you  

the last worst hurricane of a terrible season,

only swamp with your dissipating ebb

leftovers of fission pooled on the reactor floor

in a lake of toxic effluent as

dangerous to use as it is to jettison.

Don't think you can dump it

in those pitiful hollow drums,

sink the poison weight forever beneath

the dark of that Mariana trench which is

your everliving night. It is not there where

no light comes, but in the air beside you,
the black water beneath you,

released by rust, glowing with death

come to finish what you started

when the soft sickness began.

June 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub
I'm hosting tonight at the pub and hope you'll come join us. The doors opened at 3:00 PM EST and will stay wide, barring a thunderstorm, till Wednesday midnight. 

If you'd like to hear the poem read by the author, click below:

Toxic Waste by Hedgewitch O'theWilds

Header Image: US Nuclear Waste Stored Uncapped Underwater, by Blatant World.com on flick'r

Footer image: 11.055SkullValley 019, by Rylan S L, on flick'r

The Pixie

The Pixie

On the mound she danced in the 

moon's music turning; 

she spoke to the poor soul

lost in the gloom:

Come put lady slippers on my flying feet

fit my fringe of fingers in foxglove bells.

Skirt me with the trumpet of a

a honeysuckle bud and for a hat,

the fresh green acorn shell 

to cover and cradle my pale wee head.

See the blue lines designing my skin

that tie me tight to the lost limestone leys,

let your eyes wander their knotted tattoo. 

Get you drunk on the dew that pearls on the web

my cunning sister weaves for

the broodlings that gnaw in her womb.

Maylight shows a woman's face, moonlight a thing more cruel. 

Wind your white fingers down my slim stem 

and see which might be real.

Beneath the furled fiddlehead, feel the skull smile.

Beneath petal flesh, a hollow bone, beneath sudden stardrops

see the red, beneath the barefoot dance feel cold stained stone.

Come close love and put the lady slippers round

my quick curving toes till the moon won't spark, 

watch me dance all night, come watch, come bleed 

on the grey still mound while the weavers feed.

June 2012

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Sunday Challenge:Photography of Hannah Gosselin

Audio:

The Pixie by Hedgewitch O'theWilds

Process Note:Hannah's beautiful photographs of these woodland plants seem very fairylike to me, and inspired me to go back to take another look at an earlier piece, called Under the Purple Leaf.

 This poem is its sequel.

Both photos © Hannah Gosselin

Used with permission.

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