Aardvark

 

 

 

 Aardvark

 

"..Don't put on any airs when you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue.

They got some hungry women there and they'll really make a mess out of you..."

~Bob Dylan, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

 

 

 

What were you to me back then,

with your tumbled hair and tequila?

Even Dali had his aardvark, led uncomplaining

 

through the dirty streets of Paris,

a glass-globe feast for insatiable eyes.

Impossible to know

what I was to you.

Your face was hinged,

 

a door at times standing open,

cracked to show the arid

 

arabesques of spiders 

smiling in Poe's palace. Others

locked and bolted, bare and flash

 

as clean brass before it's engraved.

All I remember is you held me

like diamonds worked into your arms' ring

there in the tedium of the shelter

among the do-gooders and the riffraff.

 

The cardboard walls flexed with our love

but when I slipped the rhinestone lead

from your sleek throat

 

you ran

and the streets of Paris

emptied.

~August 2024

 

 

 

 

 

Process note: The photo of Dali shown actually is of he and his pet anteater. Poetic license.

 

 

posted for WG Word List at

Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Dali takes his anteater for a stroll in Paris, 1969    Public Domain

The Smiling Spider, 1887, Odillon Redon, Louvre, Paris    Public Domain

Where The Mad King Disposes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where The Mad King Disposes

 

 

 

Asleep as far as Night's pen clerks

its long lined lists, where nothing we know is king,

a winter king who never works;

 

still there I see what the mad fool chooses,

veiled and warped with the sharpest taking.

The blue snow seems full of the light it loses

 

forming your face from the flat candle flame,

blowing your form in the billowing drapes,

come back from the dead with a stranger's name.

 

Asleep is a far land laked lucid and deep,

iced out by the ghosts of too many fades.

Where's the sun's blood to break my sleep,

where's the warm substance the shadow makes? 

 

 

 

 

 

~August, 2024

posted for WGWord List

Image from La Chute de la Maison Usher, 1928   Public Domain

 

 

 

Til My Ship Comes In

 

 

 

Til My Ship Comes In

 

 

 

 

 

 

Becalmed on a sea of smoke

a nowhere that could be anywhere

I made an indigo wind

to fill my sails.

 

"It's just enchantment, " you said,

"It's not personal." as

the voyage began

to tick down

 

kiss by kiss, bookmarks

in the wildness

floating your stopwatch eyes.

"Time's up!" you said,

and changed the rules.

I thought everything not experimental

was forbidden, but it seems heartbreak

will ruin a boat.

The shipwreck was easy,

but the distance to shore

was a bitch. Still

but still,

 

better to drown

than to straddle a broken bench

and bleed, bailing a sinking boat

with no bottom. 

April 2024

posted for WGWL at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Boat of the Mermaid, ©Sabin Balasa via internet Fair Use

A Rocky Shore, Iona  ©Samuel Peploe, via internet    Fair Use

Fairy Tale Of The Moth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Fairy Tale Of The Moth

(a 55)

 

 

 

In the Amazon there's a moth
who lives by drinking the night-tears
of sleeping birds.

By day she's folded asleep
in deep green chambers where purple frogs
sweat pearls of poison.

If she dreams, it's only by accident.
At dawn the birds fly up, eyes
open for song, tears given

without intent or knowledge
as I give mine, silver life
to the mouths of memories.

 

March, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted for WGWL at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process Note: Gorgone macarea is the moth referred to here, one of several species of Lepidoptera who pratice lachryphagy for survival.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image credits: Blue Morpho Butterfly, 1865 © Martin Johnson Heade 

Great Peacock Moth, 1889 © Vincent Van Gogh 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Empty House

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Empty House

 

 

 

The Parisienne within

sits gracefully bent at a small cafe not

three blocks from the Louvre.

The square is an old negative, each color

quenched in its reverse, as she sighs,

 

regards the croissant moon, a dangling puff pastry

pinned to a papier-mache sky some

rabid surrealist has daubed flat black, faintly

tinted by the violet blood of stars. She waits here

for her assignation: l'etranger dangereux

 

encountered by chance on le Metro. She savors again

the fragrance of strong dark tobacco

caught in his hair as they swayed far too close.

She waits many hours since her house is empty and

waiting seems better than that.

'And what is an empty house,' she muses

over her fifth vin de pays, 'but a cupped palm

dripping the bright constant stigmata of 

your own imperfections?' No amount of pancakes can

fill its hollow stomach. No birds will nest in

 

its unkindled chimney. There is only dust white

as milk, silence and dead flowers,

a dog that barks a heartbeat somewhere in the distance,

abandoned without music like the deserted cafe

the Parisienne has just left.

 

As the rackety clap of her stilettos

fades around the corner,

a tall shadow drifts over her table,

but there's only a thin thread of ghost-smoke

twining up from a stubbed-out Gauloise.

March 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for 

WGWL 3/4/24 at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hungry Ghosts And Thirsty Spirits

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hungry Ghosts And Thirsty Spirits

 

 

 

 

Nine snow-white candles to ward my bed

as the Hunter's Moon glares against my door.

 

Rowan and hyperion at foot and head

but your fetch is strong. I need much more.

Last night I could tell it would need to be fed.

I felt its cold lips that the flames couldn't kill

 

pressed on my skin like a waxen seal,

saw its stubbled neck scrawny, stretched and too real

as thirsting you came, crawling over the sill,

but the gods in their mercy allowed me one grace:

 

to never again have to see your face.

 

 

 

 

October 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

Open Link Weekend at desperate poets

 (inspired by Night of the Desperate Dead)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process note: Rowan and Hyperion(St John's Wort) were said to be protective against evil spirits and witches and were often hung indoors or planted at the doorways of houses:

 

"The European rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) has a long tradition in European mythology and folklore. It was thought to be a magical tree and [to]give protection against malevolent beings.. It was said in England that this was the tree on which the Devil hanged his mother..British folklorists of the Victorian era reported the folk belief in apotropaic powers of the rowan-tree, in particular in the warding off of witches...Sir James Frazer (1890) reported such a tradition in Scotland, where the tree was often planted near a gate or front door. ~wikipedia

 

"The common name St John's wort comes from the fact that its flowers and buds were commonly harvested at the time of the Midsummer festival, which was later Christianized as St John's Feast Day on 24 June. It was believed that harvesting the flower at this time made its healing and magical powers more potent. The herb would be hung on house and stall doors on St John's Feast Day to ward off evil spirits and to safeguard against harm and sickness to people and livestock. ..Because of its supposed potency in warding off spirits, the plant was also known as fuga daemonum (loosely "demon-flight").."~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Title unknown,  ©@coven of ceridwen via internet  Fair Use

La Mort: Mon ironie depasse toutes les autres! 1889 ©Odilon Redon   Public Domain

The Myrðaling

 

 

The Myrðaling
A Ghost Story

Cold across the portal

through the shadow of the veil

the child shivers before me,

wild-walking the mirk.

She's thin as she'd never been

when she lay there, left,
tiny feet kicking in a stiff skin wrap,
taller too than when her kicking stopped

alone in the bramble where the broken light fell

as the snow wound blue around her like smoke.

Now she can walk miles

through the night from the black

back corners of the winter that rides

before and after all things,
for she's passed the doored rock

to the slaughtering shadow

that splits the soft loam, where

she blows like a seed that won't be sown

but must be milled on the stone of years

with a river of bones floating on tears.

She opens her mouth

and sings like the plague

for a name of her own to give her a grave.

Take mine I say--it's all I have

for a night sister here in the dying year,
where we've gone too far

to turn around, where too soon
we'll eat the bread of the dead,
where spirit can weigh
as heavy as flesh when the veil thins away.

Then the moon-girl came out of her pale disguise;

I saw my twin smile, and close her eyes.

~October 2014

revised and reposted October 2023 for Night of the Desperate Dead

at desperate poets

Process notes: In Scandanavian folklore, a myrðaling, (from Old Norse, 'myrða,' murder) or more properly, myling, was the ghost of a child killed by its mother in infancy, usually  the child of an unmarried woman, or of a poor family unable to provide for it, abandoned in some unfrequented place and forced to walk the earth seeking burial. The myling might appear and reveal the acts of its killer in a song, or call out for a name, when the hearer could save the spirit by saying "take mine' so that it might then rest in consecrated ground, (as in this poem) or it might vengefully possess the living, jumping on their backs and forcing the victim to carry them to a graveyard, growing heavier with each step. You can read more in this wikipedia article.

Image: The Strawberry Girl, 1777, by Joshua Reynolds

Public domain via wikiart.org

I have manipulated this image.

 

Creature From The Black Saloon

 

 

 

 

 

 

Creature From The Black Saloon

 

 

His eyes are dead moons

that call up typhoons

where old sailors will die

on the devil's hot spoon,

dished up dressed in red for the Day of The Dead,

mouths whiskey wild and well off their heads.

 

He sparks a burned light

that cracks holes in the night,

calls witches to bonfires' sulfurous light

for the Dance in the dark, the Blood in the cup,

the black horns of the Beast

who will drink them all up.

 

His tongue drifts like quicklime

on a seasonless wind

in desires that die before they begin,

over the flesh that twitches and yearns

to dissolve into hexes the old gods that burn

just under the skin all mottled with runes;

I've met him. I've loved him

too long to refuse.

October 2023

posted for Creature Seeker at

desperate poets

Note; This may have been slightly influenced by attempting to watch Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem last night.

Images: Standing Figure, 1970 ©Nathan Oliveira  Fair Use

Dark Dancers ©Gina lacob   Fair Use