The Cambion's Tale

Dear  Readers: I had intended to take this month off anyway, but after some setbacks in the lumbar department, it really looks like it may be some time before I am well enough to manage much here. Please bear with me as I mend, and eventually I'm sure I shall return. I'll leave you with this little favorite of mine to chew on, and thanks, as always for everyone's concern and support. It means a great deal to me.

The Cambion's Tale

The wind rolls in the wildwood

tonight, teasing the last 

specklings of summer’s regret

from the moon-dripping trees,

fragmented friable tongues of 

henna and ochre milled to a dusty haze

that blots future and past, dead voices

rustling the leafsong that calls me to you

my hell born babe, heart’s delight

soul’s inquisitor.

Changeling and demiurge,

furred with frosted moss and mist

horned with bone, poised always 

to run; you regard me blinkless,

hermetic as a wild thing, gaze of

opals burning through the veil where

I pretend to be protected invisible

as Niniane, everlost instead

fate-tangled and resistless to 

the beckon of that blue unicorn eye.

So I come out of the night

for your lichen'd kiss, rain

cold, a drenching draft of rust

yet sweeter than any vintage

pressed from the sun's full flaunt. We're

as fallen as Rome remembered, love,

all my smooth green weight leaning

on the colonnade of whispers

you pull from some pocket in
the heart’s shallow grave.

My breath is gone again;

you’ve whistled for it. Lost

dog of my hollowed lungs,
it lopes at your heel, leashed 

tighter than the strangled chest

that knows its next gasp for last.

The night wind blows brimstone

around us, where the idol burns a

fading sandalwood smoke

bolted with blood, spiced with loss.

O there’s nothing wrong with us, love

that reincarnation won’t cure.

~October 2011

revised, February 2016

cambion: According to the Malleus Maleficarum, the offspring of a human male and a succubus, or a human female and an incubus. Caliban and Merlin are both assigned this dubious distinction.

*The last two lines are extrapolated from an anonymous saying passed around in the 60's.

Image: The Bathers, 1904, by Odillon Redon    Public domain. Manipulated.

Eye Spy

Eye Spy

I spy with my little eye

a unicorn on a piece of pie,

an iron cross and a butterfly;

I spy the day I die...

Asleep I was

a wasted storm, a wandering

rain in stony void, blowing

over shabby

sparrow bodies on the scree,

over cast-off rocks

warm from the hand of lust, thrown to kill

in hunger and in pain, keyhole-seeing,

bent, your face again.

I awoke

rigid in a night

of fallen birds, back

still pressed on the wheel of love,

your bear-brown eyes, your

warmth on mine, your laugh as close

as dawn to day

before the waking

breaks it all away,

alone then, and more alone to come

locked in a crime no exit wound explains,

for the angel and the demon boys agree

they'll never open doors for the likes of me.

~January 2016

posted for   real toads

Bits of Inspiration; Weekend Challenge

Images: Sanctuary, 1965, by Max Ernst. Fair use via wikiart.org

That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do, 1931, by Ivan Albright.

Fair use via wikiart.org

Occultation and Conjunction

Occultation And Conjunction

Our dance was like the firefly's with night,

sowing the black fields of plush eclipse

with frail and sulfurous intermittent light;

or like the dotted waltz of Moon and Mars

spaced ringing in the void on the ellipse,

made to shudder close and rebound far

to the heavy metal strings of sun's guitar.

So close were we, so paired where gravity slips,

to earthbound eyes it seemed we sometimes touched.

Yet one of us was always unconjunct,

occluded and deluded in the rushed

ambition of a self-rule lost to us

for in that moonlit field of anthracite,

what struts like a planet is really a satellite.

~January 2016

posted for real toads

Play It Again: Weekend Photo Challenge

Photography  © Daryl Edelstein

Mayhem Road

Mayhem Road

On the mayhem road

it's a long patrol

down and down,

where the bad seed drops

and lives to grow

where the black oil flows

where the rocket burns 

where the blood gold glows

where the dark star shines

in the falling fog,  cold

where the child is lost,  long

where the old can't find,  spent

where the young must hold
the killer's mad hands,   sprouting

strong

on the mayhem road;

broke down alone

in the monochrome,

their lips are black.

No color leaks

from the grayscale night.

The dun dust glides

a cloudy sheet

across the girl with no breath,

face we can't bear to see

of all we once were,

of the damned we'll be,
companions on the long patrol
to the dead that grow
the mayhem road.

 ~January 2016

posted for       real toads

Out of Standard

Official music video for Tis a Pity She Was a Whore, by David Bowie, from the album Blackstar. Lyrics here

Day In January

Day In January

This day

so cold, so grey, its icepoint knife,

its ashen-snowed walk-thru oblivion

where spirit steps freeze on fossil tar, raucous-

haunted by midnight crows, torn curtains of love

gone stiff in mid flutter ironed in sleet

that slants in through the windowed hole,

is a rose-colored palace, mottled red

by Mars, bleached clean by Venus

doored to the infinite city

quarried from stars,

growing up like an oak from

a foundation of rot

where what once lived ripens a

turned-under death for

another month to feed 

the secret green of possibility

with all its peculiar used atoms.

This day

where the ghost steps wander 

like a run-on sentence

under the widening moon,

the wolf moon, the hunger moon

made for the hunt.

~January 2016

Process note: wolf moon and hunger moon are Native American names for the month of January. Thanks to Josh Hart for the picture behind this poem.

Photo © Josh Hart, 2016 

All rights reserved.