Paella and Pentagrams

Paella and Pentagrams

I'd had enough of your paella and pantomime

and bad wine

in a pretty box, enough of your

buttery tongue and salt pig's cheek,

your pinwheel eyes, your lame surprise.

You filled your moonsaucers far too full

with winks and soliloquies

dug from old grooves

so when light and dark danced,

they slopped over my shoes.

I knew I had almost no time left as I rattled off

the spell:

Fire dog, lap my face.

Fire warden, keep me safe.

Make the melting suit the burn.

Make the black book's pages turn

to the laugh at the end of the line.

Pour out the pentagram from my mind.

But I had forgotten you were what you were.

Now there's a bird in the ashes
who looks for a nest,
a thin woman holding
the one I love best.
There's another long day
without any rest,
another fire to burn up
the unconfessed.

~April 2013

Image: Illustration: The Knave of Hearts, by Maxfield Parrish, 1925
via wikipaintings.org. All copyright belongs to the copyright holders.

Dust Devil

Dust Devil

Beyond the wall

 

I don't dream

the sandy apricot brush of your mouth,

the delicate red claws that cat-stroked me

to rub-raise the crowding close arch, your burnt

dissembler's drizzle of aloe purrs and creosote yowls.

I dream fourteen days of desert

with two days of water, improbably

wallowed python ruts, cratered crust

foot-dots drilled delirium deep from

the cesium crawls of metal-fed ants 

over ridge to dehydrated plunge.

Then I lie awake and wonder

how many hurricanes can dance

on the head of an angel,

how deep a well can go

before it pumps copper

salt and dust; in eye-flutter fugue

 

I call up your fetch,
the horned deacon of nightmares

and tedium

taking interminable notes

on a lecture of fire
extinguished long ago.

~April 2013

Image: Cliffs Beyond Albiqui, Dry Waterfall, Georgia O"Keefe
All copyright belongs to the copyright holders.

Plague Ship

Plague Ship

In the dying twilight time

after the machine gun wedding

after the brotherhood of the bomb

after the last furrow fails in the fallout

when nothing prospers but wasting,

the damned have a dance they do

on the deck while the plague ship glows.

After the falter of centuries
they remember the helix of plague twists,

sail hard on the blood of a rat pack, 
raise masts rigged with plastic explosives, 
wear their red masks over the lesions, 
landfall a corpselight cotillion 

docked at the irradiated port of blue ruin.

The straw man is playing the bone flute.

The jackal is drooling, the deaf mute

feels up the fat girl by the bat tree

and Pan is perplexed in the pantry

where the death watch beetle clacks

in all the joints and cracks

the music of the end of the world.

~April 2013

Image: Ship of Fools, by Heironymous Bosch, 1500
Public Domain via wikipaintings.org

Pieces of Moon

Pieces of Moon



Four Lunes

The wind's a stiff broom

tears of snow

clean the scratched moon's face

~*~

The heart's star falling

just a spark

in sapphire void

~*~

The unwise lover

did as told

but the moon still set

~*~

Water rolls off old

fingerprints

 greasy on the soul

posted for    real toads

Sunday Mini-Challenge: Lunes

Grace challenges us to write a form invented by poet Robert Kelly to make the intent of Japanese haiku more natural to write in English. The form, called the lune, is three lines, with a syllable count of  5-3-5.

Photo: Drops of Storm,  © joyannjones 2012