Dancing With Crabs

 

Dancing with Crabs

Little crabling bastard

what makes you think
you matter

 

a million like you

hatched a day

for the chef to batter.

You chase what you can’t have;

you get what you won’t own,

a tin can for a hat

 

a scuttle down the sand

sideways slow alone

to lose what you never had.

 Little crabling baby

you know that you’re
half crazy

to want what women have

to love what makes you mad;

to dance, a hermit crab

 

in a white parade of swans.

Little baby crabling

ballet's not for crustaceans.

So borrow from the oyster

loneliness the pearl

that adorns any station.

Last Day of November 

2011, revised August 2023

posted for Lonely Town

at desperate poets

Header Photo: Black Eyed Hermit Crab by Dan Hershman on flick'r

Footer Photo:  Swan Lake by Bella Lago on flick'r

Both shared under Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

Brujeria

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brujeria

 

I don't know what fetch

was living in his hair

but there was always something

 

when it blew back in the hot breath

of the redtangled hills; new-hatched snakes perhaps

curling from the small broken shells of his words,

 

tendrilous avatars in those nights that hid

the color of blood so well;

or soft rain-threads each sweet as a sugarfall

 

on my open face as we made love,

for the medicine painting, not la brujeria,

skintalking the Healing Way.

 

Whatever it was, it

wasn't the mild dog in his eyes,

not fur, not a tail-wag.

 

It was syllogistic, sensate, restless;

hungry as a hopping flea.

whose tiny itch is only felt later.

Perhaps it even had Buddha nature,

or something else

 borrowed from Kali.

 

It was one of those things about him

that taught me to look away.

I saw only its soft brown habitat

as I slipped my fingers through

felt its satin dance

against my touch

but what lived there never left

like all the other things I tried to disappear.

I could feel them breathing

though they never made a sound

not even now when

they ghost him back to my dreams.

August 2023

posted for Odd Little Things

at desperate poets

 

Art nouveau lithograph poster 1903 ©Alphonse Mucha  Public Domain

Man with Long Hair, ©Odd Nedrum    Fair Use

 

Inflection

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inflection

 

 We drew the breaths 

of butterflies in high June,

beings never still

whose feet are small

as whimpers in our sleep,

light as the gauze of

a first-hour dream

until it falls,

a blood-splashing guillotine.

Butterflies

know nothing of blood

except the blood of flowers and that

is what we sipped, flitting from one to

the next because life must

spread or be stilled;

we never thought we

could ever be stilled

for we had no thoughts,

so new, so insubstantial

and ingenuous were we, certainly

not one that whispered

"Here is the starry inflection of

Love's extinction event," as we deep-

drank our liquor from the meadows

drying beneath us, even as the vapor

of your breath closing to me

dried on my lips

 

in a sigh, tenuous and bright

as wind-floated pollen,

your mouth soon withdrawn

to suckle the next flower's mouth

until flowers and memory and all their savor

 too were gone.

 

August 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Tipped at

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled(Landscape With Butterflies) 1956 ©Salvador Dali

Butterflies ©Odilon Redon

 

Objectivist Free Will Bootstrap Nightmare

 

Objectivist Free Will Bootstrap Nightmare

Last night I dreamed

Rand Paul walked up to me

as I sat working at my desk,

in his suit and wide red tie,

curly hair oiled

like a delicate machine.

He tipped up my chin, grasped it firmly

and planted a kiss on my lips

while I froze.

"My god," I whispered,

"I've kissed a libertarian."

and sunk my face in my palms.

A wave of shame consumed me,

as I sat deregulated,

more broken than an oil spill;

Mr. Paul smiled a small

bomb-thrower's smile,

and walked on to the next desk.

~ January 2015

slightly revised, July 2023

old jokes posted for the desperate satirists at

desperate poets

Images/memes via internet  Fair Use

The Nature Of Fire

 

 

The Nature of Fire

"The  great desire of a flame  is to continually burn.

 The nature of fire is that it always wants more."

~Corvidus the Elder

Under the wing of the Crow

hides a feathery system of madness;

students burn syllables of darkness

spat into the alembic of sanity,
turning gossip of  metaphysicians
wanly cadaverous by starlight,

whispering quicksilver clues.

The philosopher's stone still eludes them

though they work with the frenzy of madmen

to dry the cold humors of water, push
a natural progression of vileness
to purity using the flame.
The nature of fire is that it's immaculate;
the mourning of fire is that it always wants more.

They speak these glowing desires

in the tongue-twisting gibberish of blackbirds,

court the devilish salvation of  oddity,

vulgarly cawing of victory in the

soothing-sweet chant of the damned.

I cannot credential this lunacy

despite my degree in Catastrophe.

I toast it instead with the elegy

of a memory;

our glasses hold legions of flames' flickered casualties

like ladies lavish with luxury

pile amusements in portmanteau'd  piracy,

 

knowing fire will always want more.

 ~December 2013

 

lightly revised, July 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

reposted for desperate poets

   Woe For My Spurs

Original process notes: Poe prefaced many of his short stories with quotes, and many of them were ones he made up, as I did here with my  excerpt from the works of the imaginary alchemist, Corvidus The Elder.   

 

"The philosophers' stone or stone of the philosophers (Latin: lapis philosophorum) is a legendary alchemical substance said to be capable of turning base metals such as lead into gold... It was also sometimes believed to be an elixir of life, useful for rejuvenation and possibly for achieving immortality." ~wikipedia   And what deserves an elegy more?

 

 

Image: Alchemy the Useless Science, Remedios Varo

 

 

Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have learned to live

for very little

to accept what shows however small

however inadequate

to sit with it in friendship

but there is still

 

something else.

There's a light I crave

that shapes mountains and willows,

a radiant mind flaring each morning open

though it paints its gold on all alike:

the long claw of the

 

promising horizon-smile,

the stiffness that

came into your arms

as you held me, the

little dark murderer's bird

who pecks the grains away.

 

It's still that light

sifting bees' wings

across sage to kindle the flowers,

lambent as slanting love itself

in earth's witchwild eyes as she holds

in her unprisoned prism'd heart

 

even us;

 

even our coarse

demanding

insatiable selves

she will teach the one word:

 

enough.

 

 

 

 

 July 2023 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for desperate desires

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Cottonwoods III 1944, ©Georgia O'Keefe, 

The Thief 1996 ©Jamie Wyeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walking Summer

 

 

 

 

Walking Summer

I've been here before

too long ago, too short a time--

encircled by this walking summer, 

where song is never done, where walls

are built from air and touch, where invisible

love strolls in, the unexpected fragrance

of mimosa thrown like gauze across her face,

pollened with invincible yesterdays,

intricate and insubstantial as

the manual labor of a rose.

I know this place

so clean, so far, so obvious--

this moving room where nothing

was ever allowed to stay, yet a

wayward welcome whistles in the

nag of wind that blows my steps this way

to thin path's end, where sun is made

and broken in a day,

a dropped brick like me, once high,

ruined in a cobble of clouds.

These skewered eyes

so still, so heart's-desired when

I stole them from the chimera,

open starry wide at last
to blink up the mist, the mazed

particulate of missing pieces that

mortar so well with tears the

pressed-together whole, and I 

wonder if there soon could be 

a granting of what's needful;

for I only hope to find the lost--

the tilted corners of a child's smile

the absence of regret, the whim

of walking summer that clings

like mimosa gauze to

the shifting faces of my ghosts.

~November 2015

posted for desperate poets

(" finding comfort in the beauty around us, whether it is as vast as the sky or as small as a dew-covered spider-web, on a cornstalk by the back fence in the early morning.")

Photos:  Mimosa, © joyannjones 2014 

Rosa 'Nearly Wild,' © joyannjones 2015

Made In Hell

 

 

 

Made In Hell

 

 

Her face was one-way glass

blank-innocent as a child's mirror,

her baby-blues welling soft,

winking not revealing

the opposite who watched

from the other side. She made her play

in a liar's crimson night where rain

greased the sidewalk smearing neon light

on the moon-hidden passage she shaded in her wait,

cigarette drooping smoke like San Francisco fog

above her golden gate.

 

His eyes matched her lipstick, hard as bathtub gin,

clear and extinguished as only eyes can be

that have seen the life go dead too many times,

suckered by patriotic chords that march

the rotting feet of war with tunes

suitable to aim your bullets by.

All that was over now 

or always here to stay; a grin

is only smoke 

curling in the shadow 

of a tipped fedora's brim.

The kiss was never meant to be a trap,

but it snapped her leg and crippled him for life

neither able to ever run again, tangled in

booze and the dicey bed spread with ice-cold aces

and eights. And when the children came

they never could make the change;

just learned they had to

pretend to be

someone else.

June 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for I Wake Up Screaming

Desperate Noir at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Still from Secret Beyond The Door, 1947 Public Domain 

Manipulated photo dated 3-7-1949 from personal collection ©joyannjones