Violet Crush

Violet Crush

"Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."

~Mark Twain

Your hope's a hoop

swallowing its tail, your

forgiveness a rosewood

casket, shut   

on the smell 

of something gone.

You can't peddle your

punk beacons here

as the peace of light,

buzzing the moon's ears

with one-eyed drones.

Here I build silence

with the end of strength

so there will be time

for the truth.

~June 2015

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Weekend Challenge: Flash Fiction 55

Kerry's Plus to the 55 factor this time is to use a quote from Brainy Quote's Quote of the Day archive. I have pulled mine from their vast reservoir of the master of quotable quotes, Mark Twain

Image: White Violet, copyright joyannjones 2015

Dream Of The Golden Monkey

Dream Of The Golden Monkey

It was the time

of the Golden Monkey, dancing

down a stairway of petals and coins;

a flourescent idyl of creamery light

sinking sweetly into the indigo cup

of black coffee night.

We reached up to
the little gold god as He dropped
a basket of yellow-eyed anemones;

He was more real than the Golden Calf

(of which you'd politely taken half,

when I'd refused to eat.)

A voice in
my monkey mind

laughed and told the rose

to fold me in her clothes;

when I picked the lily's child, she gave
no more fragrance than your smile

while the Monkey blinked His

peonie-pink eyes, quite pleased 

to caper despite His fall,

lightly balanced on a gracile haunch

just one opposable thumb away

from the Golden Branch.

So we sat for
an age between day

and past,
beneath the swinging sign at last

of the Golden Monkey,
flowers in our pockets, pollen on our lips

watching the moon reflect His shine,

gilding the curled petals floating 

on our summer-flowering wine.

~June 2015

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Challenge: Floral Explosion
Susie Clevenger (Confessions of a Laundry Goddess) showed us some images of an amazing rainfall of flower petals flooding an area near the Irazú Volcano in Costa Rica as a promotion. Stunning.
 I'm not exactly sure how this poem appeared out of that, except to say it was originally a dream, and therefore hopefully doesn't require a logical explanation.

Process notes: The Golden Branch is a French fairytale about the sometimes illusory but transformative powers of desire, and also a play on the title of Sir James Frazer's comparative study of myth and religion, The Golden Bough. Zen often refers to the distractions of our senses and superficial thoughts and desires as the monkey mind.


Images: Palazzo dei Priori-Assisi--Grotesque, by Wolfgang Sauber
Shared under a Creative Commons License, via wikimedia commons
Detail of Annah the Javanese, by Paul Gauguin, Public Domain

Plague Sonnet

Plague Sonnet

A bite of the flea and the plague is caught;

what he sent away always came home to him.

Tho she begged for a healer, she got what she got.

With fifty snuffed candles the room stayed dim.

From a book of dead suns he read out the shade

and the scream that whimpers before it goes.

She stole new eyes but they soon were greyed

as turquoise fevered in a cold-played flow

of impossible truths, of believable lies.

He put traps in the trees, blood on the stones

with his limp blue gaze where the Kingdom dies;

there could be no bridge in a rainbow of bones,

just the smile of the mouth-pit scarring the lawn,

and one last mistake, to make a girl gone.

~May 2015

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Challenge: Bout-Rimés

Bjorn Rudberg (Bjorn Rudberg's Writings) asks us to play a game which evolves a sonnet from given end-rhymes. I have done what I could, though I am not much of a sonneteer. I had no luck with the words, 'glade'  and 'tones' so they have been altered--apologies.

Image: title & author unknown      source
No copyright infringement intended

The Love Life of Water

The Love Life Of Water

The land's an old lover

of this water,

the bold blowsy flame who

blows into town
on the back of a riot.

The land's not really sure

he wants her back,

at least so much of her,

but after a wild night

he finds her seaweed hair

on his pillow anyway,

grey eyes bloodshot with lightning

 devouring his face,

her dirty dissolving fingers

exploring every fissure.

 Everything moveable here is hers,

and she will take it;

the land knows

all about that, because

she's been this way before

too many times.

The  last kiss is roughest, the overflow

 that leaves him drowned and gasping,

with the hard morning of living coming on,

while she smiles and makes a sound
like bells exploding

and moves her mirrors, her floods,

her funnels down the road.

~May 2015

It's been raining here for forty days and fifty nights--or so it seems. 
Listening to rain hit the walls as I write.









Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image credits: Frontyard flood, copyright joyannjones 2015
Street Flooding, Oklahoma City      courtesy KFOR News source
No copyright infringement intended