Oxygen Vine Dreamscape
a voice was singing
Oxygen vine
sweet life of mine
o how you twine
oxygen vine
You began to turn me leaflike
browsing me in slack moments,
a subscription of yours, a pastime.
I saw a skewed wall in a lunatic jungle,
undeciphered petroglyphs
scrawled over by flaming flower graffiti
dark hands of roots, celladon vineshadows,
utterly unreadable
a nonsense song
Oxygen vine
trace me a line
o how you twine
oxygen vine
I was deaf from the reverberations
of collision when you told me
I was a wall against whose
resistance you built your self, but
I was only flesh behind a wall
etched with the sigils of an unknown cabal,
its vines and shadows
become my skin
in the deep night
Oxygen vine
black columbine
o how you twine
oxygen vine
Love is a cannibal you explained.
His first goal is to kill and eat the other
then make tuneful bells from the bones.
Just so you grew your tensile intoxicant ribbons in me
so hungry and alive, tickling, strangling
composting accommodating flesh till I was friable ooze
root-fractured, absorbed into your sucking shoots
root-fractured, absorbed into your sucking shoots
flensed down to my skull for a drum
sweet notes pulsing
Oxygen vine
razors in wine
o how you twine
oxygen vine
I was wined and twined
cut so quickly
I never knew when my smile lost its lips.
You pierced and numbed me
bubbled my blood out with your own
beads of verdant air, an antagonism of life support
careless of the red drops’ splash
or my cyanic throat
rattling and humming
Oxygen vine
ventilator’s whine
o how you twine
oxygen vine
Autumn brings a bonfire.
Dry leaves and twigs burn tinder fast
thorns and flowers flaring farewell
in a temperature that crackles,
twining flames fed hotter
by an inrush of escaping air exploding
black under the lids into
smoke blown like seeds on the wind
vanishing
Oxygen vine
darkness define
your ashen design
into silence
March 2011
Posted for One Shot Wednesday at the inimitable OneStopPoetry
Photo: Trellised Hand, by joy ann jones, march, 2011
love how this builds...the seduction, entangling, winding, the losing oneself, the energy and then...silence..
ReplyDeleteLike a swan song of praise to air, life, and light—all in fleeting wonder and multivariate complexity proving, undefinable yet understood through the emotion conveyed. "composting accommodating flesh till I was friable ooze" What I like best are the notions and decomposing descriptions that work on both biological and literary levels.
ReplyDeleteI climbed down your vine of visceral images in this poem, losing more and more breath until I could feel the final choking in the smoke before the end. Frightening and marvelous!
ReplyDeleteThanks for visiting my blog.
Ah There you are again lady taking us readers to places we can never get so far as yourself... but what poetry is all about...
ReplyDeletevines can get to do so...
This was entering another world entirely, a darker world but perhaps clearer for all the darkness. Good poem.
ReplyDeleteReally stunning piece. Loved it!
ReplyDeleteDark, powerful piece. One might choke on the vine leading us along, if they're not careful...such a build, of both emotion and image. There is a vibrancy inherent in the form as well - it grows on us, such that in that final stanza, the sudden shift in the chorus, and the separation of the final line - the breaking of that structure - make them all the more powerful in delivery.
ReplyDeleteLoved the build up and imagery. :)
ReplyDeleteA wonderful cavalcade of imagery and emotion. I feel like I wrote about a ducky and a horsey in comparison.
ReplyDeletewow this winds round and round...actually would you mind singing it for us...i kinda caught a tune as i was reading and i just want to see if it is the same...making bells out of the bones...tight...with visuals like that i might want a toke on the oxygen vine...
ReplyDeletethis is hypnotic...it reels you in and paralyzes
ReplyDeleteJoy Ann, there is a tune in your words here.
ReplyDeleteBrian is absolutely correct.
I love this part:
"I was wined and twined cut so quickly
I never knew when my smile lost its lips.
You pierced and numbed me" this brings some
powerful images to mind.
Pamela
The song "Love is like oxygen" kept going thru my head as I read this - yours is the dark verse...
ReplyDeleteYou do it well
Thanks for your support of One Shot
Oh what music you know and what poetry you teach. Dustus right about two levels - probably more. Dark and revealing, choking and exhilarating, sexy in its climactic building and smothering way, and ultimately creating a clearing where only words seem to matter. WOW! Thanks to you, I learned a new word here - and what a witchy word and I wonder I never new sigil before.
ReplyDeleteehrr should be "knew" can I claim sticky keys? (smile)
ReplyDeleteThanks all. It did have a tune, the refrain part, when I first woke up; it was literally singing in my ears...but it since has evaporated. I'm not minding much, either.
ReplyDelete@Gay You need to read more dark fantasy fiction. ;-) I have 'sticky keys' all the time--infuriating not to be able to edit these comment thingies.
ReplyDeleteA dark and intiguing piece of writing...that pulls you in like this vine...you have a way of creating images and a world that many just never see...and the risk of going there produces somes brillant pieces...thank you...bkm
ReplyDeletesuch a unique write...the essence captured in the physical nature of vines...the wrapping, the attachment...all wonderful techniques within this write...very impressive, as well as beautiful
ReplyDeletePeace, hp
thank you for stopping by
I would call this delightfully inaccessible to the average reader. That's a compliment. Such intense dark and enthralling language-- a redemption, tour d'force, a valentine in reverse, a rose in a forest of weeds for this reader... xxxj
ReplyDeleteIf nightmare is the source of this poem, soul is at work darkly, puncturing and insinuating its choking tendrils into an ego, perhaps a heart ... In the oxygen vine I get the paradoxical or oxymoronic sense of the suffocating lover, more demon or vampire than beloved, who attempts to suck the life out of the speaker in order to survive and thrive. Certainly there are such icy pricks out there, wounds become a need to wound, to savor the crust of scab ripped open again and again with predatory zeal."Wined and twined" indeed. The demon lover is like a booze one knows a single sip of will lead to badness and madness beyond all measure, yet is irresistible to bring to the lips and savor. Of course, he could be Poetry, or Odin, or one's own ancient damage like a witch cawing in one's ear upon awakening. The poem takes a while to sound and untangle and insinuate into -- how glad we are (or pray) that one person's nightmare does seduce itself off the page into our eyes and ears. I cross myself and leave four pairs of sharp garden shears on your poetry potting table. They're bladed with shell, flint, bronze and steel, according to which bum weed from which aeon of soul needs a proper pruning ... Brendan
ReplyDeleteDang it, insert the word NOT between "does" and "seduce" in the third-to-last sentence. Not. NOT! O crap, too late ...
ReplyDeleteI came back to this to try to comprehend how you sang it, such remarkable wielding of language here.... And, I really love Brandon's comment. You and Brandon have a connection via your work, I wager. I find his spellbinding and also that Fireblossom wrote of vines today...xxxj
ReplyDeleteSo begins the gardening and getting everything as ready as you can for spring eh. Either that or I hope that oxygen line vine isn't needed to long.
ReplyDeleteLove is a many splintered thing. Love morphed into sucking, choking, consuming fire. Epic.
ReplyDeleteA dark, haunting and complex poem today...and from a nightmare more than a dream?
ReplyDeleteThe rhythm is superb and you have taken something everyday and made it otherworldly.
Amazing poem, but this is what we have come to expect from you.
Lady Nyo
I'm not sure I can construct a comment that compares to the emotional complexity this poem evokes. I mean to say I identify with it, the silencing from having one's very breath strangled. The seductiveness that precedes this kind of death and then the ash remains. "Amazing" just doesn't say enough. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteMercy. Show off! I'm not going to read the other comments until I comment myself. First, I'm glad I didn't attempt this last night when my brain was fried. This is a feast, there is so much going on here. I had to go back and see how in thunder you done that, girl.
ReplyDeleteI love how the alnmost nursery-rhymish sections go from light to dark through the course of the piece. The entire thing is so ambitious...an increasingly alarming trip through a weird green Wonderland of relationship heaven/hell (or at least that's how I read it) from the rather big-eyed innocent beginning to the deadly, negating wipe-out at the end. To use something so innocuous and slight as a vine to illustrate it all is brilliant. One has to be made to le tthe guard down, to expect somethuing else, as the subject does, and then, wham, by the time the reader knows the tone has shifted it's too late.
I'm stunned by what you've done here. To set out to write this would be admirable. To pull it off is really amazing.
PS-- today's word is "flensed" ;-)
Having read the other comments now, I have to say, I had to look up "sigil" myself. Cool word indeed. *plans to use it*
ReplyDeleteThis is a song...an intriguing one.
ReplyDeleteThanks all. Your time and comments are all greatly appreciated.
ReplyDelete@Brendan : Thanks for making your correction--I was a bit puzzled. Very irritating not to be able to touch these comments up when one has spent so much time honing a thought. This poem is indeed about an old lover, long gone now, that a nightmare refreshed in my memory. Still, we are always going back to the past to find the meaning, however burned, dead (or undead) and buried it seems to be, and your clippers will come in quite handy on those occasions. There was death there, but also life, and also a decades long experience of what your own poem posted yesterday spoke of--that intolerably overriding longing for what one can't possess, and the ignorant inability to believe in the failure of ever completing it.
@FB Thanks for your ever-perceptive and spot on analysis. This really did follow a dream very literally at first, then morphed in the writing from a nursery rhyme to three separate poems braided into one. If I had actually set out to do it on purpose, not sure I could have. Only the third and uniting braid, the lines that stand alone to introduce the refrain, was planned. Glad you like my two witchy words, 'sigil' and 'flensed'--they are the kind of words that carry a weight of meaning.
Damn, this is dark and ominous and brilliant. Lady, I believe that you really could make tuneful bells from bones.
ReplyDelete"Oxygen vine
ReplyDeleteventilator’s whine
o how you twine
oxygen vine" - what a tragically sad lament. It will haunt me.
Like Mama Zen, I believe you could do that - and more - with bones.
Vivid and . . . wow. . . just wow. Great stuff.
ReplyDeleteWhat a smooth (albeit tense) flow!!
ReplyDeleteFrom attraction, to love to devouring to deception to utter hatred! I like how the poem progressed (although I would never want this to happen in reality...SCARY THOUGHT) ...a daaaark journey indeed...
Well constructed, Joy...
"I never knew when my smile lost its lips." -- this line just blew me away!! Stunning! How easy it is to forget ourselves in the name of a love that doesn't exist.. (sigh)
"Love is a cannibal you explained.
ReplyDeleteHis first goal is to kill and eat the other
then make tuneful bells from the bones."
Where has your writing been all of my life? Ha, in all seriousness, I didn't get a chance to read the aforementioned commentary, but this is worthy of a poem for "Poison Ivy" via the Batman comics. Delectably dark and visually beautiful congruence.
"tensile intoxicant ribbons in me
ReplyDeleteso hungry and alive"
What a stupendous image. Whatever the source that particular passage really hooked me on the poem. Read it through a few times to soak in the picture you paint and all I could think was "Wow." Fantastic!
crb.
A magnificent poem! I feel inadequate with words to say why I think it is. It is in the structure, where the narration pauses as the chorus hints at what's next. It is in each word, each line constructed out of feelings to build a tensile grip on the devourer and its devoured. It is the image of the vine and its demon, both of which to me is one but which in this poem are separate so much so that the vine that to me has always been the 'strangler' turns into the strangled, the juiced, the vanished. Poetry I would never have imagined I could experience but I met you here in this space, Joy, and now I can say, it is real! Thank you, but what paltry way to express how I feel.
ReplyDeletean epic poetry.. and your words were so beautiful from the beginning.
ReplyDelete'You began to turn me leaflike
browsing me in slack moments,
a subscription of yours, a pastime.'
later on you raised the tempo... to a great heights.. I liked this one very much..
ॐ नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya
http://shadowdancingwithmind.blogspot.com/2011/03/whispers-winter-dew.html
Twitter @VerseEveryDay
Outta Town?
ReplyDeletePlaying HOOKY?
No Inspiration?
Loved your poem BTW
hey there...hope you are feeling better...read over at g's about the whole dog/back thing...ugh.
ReplyDelete