For All I Know

For all I know

For all I know your earthen eyes

have long been lidded, stopped

pouring light into the world long ago,

or perhaps not yet.

On the barren moon, no air

to lift the empty dust, no motion

except the blows of cosmic debris;

is this the derelict garden

where we will never meet again,

a passive absence, slapped silence, stillness

round nothing? Little matter if it is

you say, we’ll never know

as we don’t know now, and there,

Laocoön-like  in the curves of the wyrm, is

where we worry at the strangling knot, no more 

than huddled kobolds over a scroll

in which we are forever illiterate

and which in our play we deface.

Perhaps even cobalt darkness is better 

than black if within it we can put lights.

Here flat stones to cover us, carved to

mimic all the layered leaves of lies,

tell us, wait for the day

when that beam of unlight, unflesh

will pierce us all and hang us

on its string, a blowing ornament

in the solar wind,  eyes wide open,

each pupil some bright new star,

or else, perhaps some

phosphorescent decay.

April 2011

Photo:Face of the Moon, 
Courtesy of Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA

FURTHER COMMENTING DISABLED ON THIS POST DUE TO SPAMBOT ACTIVITY

Three Fetches

 

Three Fetches

Three fetches came to the door last night.

I  watched them come pouring,

pale blood from the world’s wounds,

toward the pearlgrey house of self where I live

but do not own.

There where I sat writing

at the convex monocle of the front window

my eyes pushed against them,

hoping to blink them out, away, back

somewhere, anywhere,

yet still they slithered, ternion missiles

faster than white fire consuming a paper leaf,

than the killing icemelt of cataracting waters,

a sepia triad of naked grue and clutch,

bony fingers long as the last mile.

Before I could run, they slid 

crawling on their bellies, inevitable as the tic

of thunder to lightning, three vapid mouths spreading 
in a parody of breath, closer, faster, to the only door 

on that blur of a street that never was.

They had no bones, they had no souls, 

no voices, only infinite need, 

an abyssal void to fill and the means to fill it.

I screamed. I screamed your name.

I screamed: “Three Fetches!”

You laughed,

you told me it was just

Anita, and Raul’s wife and

the soldier’s widow, coming to the dead house

where you let them in.

I looked before we went down

and saw no wives or widows

nothing named

just the cold wet dripping teeth

the black unblinking amphibian eyes.

April 2011

Alternate post for real toads steampunk challenge

(Originally posted for Friday Poetically  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry)

Image: Release the Ghouls,   by ~pixiepoof

courtesy deviantART

fetch2  ~noun
wraith ( def. 1 ) .Origin:
1780–90;  perhaps short for fetch-life  one sent to fetch the soul of a dying person  

dictionary.com

Friday Flash 55 ~ Science Fiction

Who Are These People?

26 percent of Republicans say they would vote for Donald Trump.*

41 percent of Republicans say they're not sure if the U.S. President is an American**

37 percent of Americans say they‘re not sure if Donald Trump is an American***

Intercepted Venusian message finally decoded:

“Invasion going as planned- expect total domination by earth year 2012”

*Public Policy Polling

**CNN Poll, August 4^th, 2010

***Gallop Poll @538.com

  



 Trump cartoon by Mike Lukonch source link

Science fiction that's a little too close to non-fiction,

Posted for   Friday Flash 55  at the G-Man's

Blue Masque

Blue Masque

We took a break from the butcher’s ballet

to dance a few steps where the bank met

the whittling river.

You wore your blue mask, your milky skin,

your matchbook eyes

umber and ruminant.

They lamped the meadow,

illuminant for all the wayward

menagerie of my fancy

there in the black

New England midnight

when the fireflies began to burn.

Your cloak your russet hair in dark folds stippled your face

that day, the day before I cut it for the road. It

hung the shadow in my eyes, blew like dying stars

on the long wind, snapped across the night

to catch in my lips, give them a taste

of salt surprise and you a veil

for the look you always had to blur.

The balefires burned while the world hissed and spat

nowhere near that shingle of void where we kissed.

Lives came and went, the planets placed a pirouette

rippling in your face that showed only

the crabshell mirror of the halfmoon’s smile.

The whispered words, the sentient fingers

flicked lingering on my stops so much more

fluently than on your instrument of brass,

the reed of my desire that ever bent between

your tongue and will, all of me you caused

to make that music never heard on stage;

the truth that spilled like blood,

the plangent harmonics

beyond the bordered breaths,

the sighs, the cries, the tears

coming to us unseen

walking on the riptide of the years;

that was the blue masque we made

the music we played there before you blazed.

Then, while the bonfires of war

burned brighter and the mill

of the gods

ground small.

 April 2011

Top Image: Fireflies II, by ~Quit007
courtesy deviantArt

Skywriting

Skywriting

Crows sky high

above the blank road

eighteen wings

trampoline

into parabolic glides

brash applause of caws

Push of wind

today's instructions

       marked in black      

crow letters

  against a chalkboard of cloud

fly away, cry high

April 2011

Posted for  OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Meiosis

Meiosis

The whole subsuming

mackerel smelling abyss:

with a few words I can unmake it,

change it to a wine-rich wave’s warm kiss

let the disconjunctive dark forsake it.

But when the neon tide comes rolling in

the bloated bodies float and the gulls scream

and there’s the sharp swift pierce of a bone pin,

heart nail pounded in a dream within a dream

resuming.

Kaleidoscopic lenses bend

the light, red icestones throb beneath the unquiet lid.

Greensick invaders pulse, fluoresce on the march.

Alien guerillas the cortex can’t forbid

blow the bridge and deconstruct the arch.

A turn of the wrist and everything goes black,

the limbs arrest, the sutures come undone.

The hands spin round but the hours can’t fall back

to that which was so ardently begun.

The colors change and change, without an end.

April 2011

Posted for Magpie Tales #63 

Uncredited photo provided by Magpie Tales removed.

comments closed due to bot activity 2/13

I am Stylish Now

 

Shay(Fireblossom) at the Word Garden  has nominated me for some oddball award these crazy young whippersnapper intertubes people pass around, which requires that I bare my soul to a universe of prurient strangers. Oh, I don’t have to write a poem? No, I merely have to list seven unusual, unknown  things about myself. Apparently this process conveys an automatic gift of stylishness which will overcome all natural laws hitherto prevailing in my life, which is about as stylish as a wen on Kate Millhouse’s cheek would be. Oh, it’s Middleton? My bad. Anyway, here are seven diverting and deeply secret things about me which should disqualify me for any kind of stylishness accolades, but seemingly, like so much of life, have the opposite effect:

1. I have never had a manicure. Well, when I was little, my mother sawed my nails off with a dull scissors, and painted them fire engine red a lot, but I’m assuming that doesn’t count.

2. My first pet was a cricket which I caught under the streetlights one night when I was about nine and kept in a little cardboard box. I was devastated when the  Mean Little Boy in the upstairs apartment told me it was not a cricket but a gross giant waterbug. My budding interest in entomolgy died at that point.

3. I have named all my cars. And bikes. And computers. My current computer is called The Beast, and my car is V*ger, as in the Star Trek movie.

4. I  am not a packrat per se, yet I find it impossible to throw out articles of clothing I have worn in some positive and happy context, which have long ago ceased to fit me or ever even remotely have the possibility of being worn again unless we have world famine and I also contract a wasting disease. I have a red velvet mirrored Mexican Wedding Dress from 1969 that is only recognzable as a piece of clothing by supreme efforts of the imagination, yet still sits in my closet, barely holding together enough to stay on the hanger.

5. I had a horrible maiden name which is so secret in my whole life I have only told three people who didn’t know me then. No, I’m not telling it here, either. Suffice it to say, all my married names have been words of one syllable. I won't say I actually chose my husbands for this reason, but it certainly didn't hurt their chances.

6. I love reading and won a prize for reading the most books in my entire school over the course of a year in fourth grade. It’s one of my proudest accomplishments.

7. My least stylish secret: when I was twelve  I promised my grandmother (born in the early 1900’s) never to wear make-up. This request came about because of my mother, who liked to shock her with-- you guessed it-- fire engine red 40’s style lipstick, plucked eyebrows, coal black mascara and bright green eyeshadow. I kept that promise as long as she lived, and seldom wear anything but powder and a little neutral lip gloss even now when I probably desperately need a full paint job.

Many thanks to my dear friend Shay, especially for listing me among her favorite poets, and I am passing this stylish award on to Sherry Blue Sky, at StarDreaming, and even though he's a guy, the most stylish-est of bloggers, Galen (aka the G-Man) at Mr Know-it-All


If this award were instead for most serious, substantive, topical and diverse blog, I would pass it on to my friend, writer, photographer and post-modern Renaissance man, Petteri Sulonen, who runs a little place called Come to think of it, as well as helping me here with my technical issues. He writes on everything from politics to Zen Buddhism with insight and clarity. His current post is on renewable energy, well worth reading.

I'd also like to thank one of my favorite poets,and one of the most gifted, Brendan at  Oran's Well, for including me in a list of twelve recommended online poets. The entire list is well worth exploring for those who love poetry, not least of all  Brendan's own site.

Out Of The Gate

Out of the Gate

My bike was a pony once.

Lacking all originality,

I called her Buttermilk, after

Dale Evans’ fairy buckskin,

but after all, I was only

eight.

We rode the trails of north chicago

cantered through long-armed elm-roofed tunnels,

barely escaping their scrabbling fingers,

across acres of glass-strewn treacherous

desert concrete, along the weedy mountain ridge 

of the el. She picked her way with intelligent care, 

one delicate black hoof after the other

through the perilous car-infested rapids

of sheridan road.

Wherever we roamed on that big range

she never let me down.

She stayed like a quarterhorse

when I dropped the reins

and ran like a thoroughbred out of the gate

when I raced her with Donny

whose bike had no name at all.

Now I’m on a new pony, waiting

at the gate, under a leafless roof

looking down the long stretch,

sitting slumped in the saddle

surrounded by fences,

no legs to pump the peddles

but, still…

I wonder how fast

she can go?

April 2011

Posted for OneShootSunday at the inimitable OneStopPoetry 

Title Image: Photo by Greg Laychak

On the Lam/Rant

On the Lam

The math police have found my poems

and tell me they do not add up.

Something is missing O not meaning,

we don’t read for meaning, just for obedience,

for the drumming of integers, 

the solid thumping of cadential boots

the singsong buzz of stinging stresses strung just so.

Unsequential imperfect necklaces must be 

snapped and broken

and the  beads of lapis words

that drop crushed underfoot.

I slink to my hidden den of vines,

wild witch dodging the hobnails

aimed at my pagan bastard's

face. All my life I've run 

from the dominion of zealotry.

There's only death for such as us
in the mind that closes around what it knows

and sees nothing else.

Here in words, there in ideas.

And what do I care if my iambs are lost lambs?

I hang my lines, my life, to fly a banner

not build your pillars of fault.

What matters is that the words stick

like a hooked seed in the fur

of  thought, barb themselves in

till they release in comprehension

shake loose, or rot.

The words are eggs not clockwork birds,

sitting on a mental wire in a robotic row. 

However scrambled, they invite a broodiness.

So I dip my finger in sour yogurt

and write graffiti on a white wall

where only the flies 
and the one who comes to clean

get close enough to see.

I come and go to whisper and sigh,

laugh not replicate. I've run from the shapers

since the day I dropped from my mother's womb, 

and it's my pure pleasure now

to flip them off, along with their droning coercion

to give, give, give

the asked for thing

the wanted word, demand for justification

and my own invalidation in a

graceful surrender, useless denial,

automatic agreement

and/or respectful silence.

I’m old and

done with that.

I'm on the lam, baby. 

And I've got 

one more silver dollar.

April 2011

Image courtesy Scientific American

Musical Interlude~King Harvest

Discussing my last poem, Yellow Moon, put this song in my head and it insisted on staying. Kind of suits our drought right now, as well as the whole Union busting movement raging currently also, so I'm sticking it up.  King Harvest appeared on the eponymous second album from The Band, released in September of 1969. Lyrics are by Robbie Robertson.

Yellow Moon

Yellow Moon

If I could write the moon tonight

I’d write it full and round where it rides so near

 a circled teardrop of sunny ink 

to carry on black sky paper, my own balloon

of yellow, a whisper from a friend in a noisy room,

a school of chambered magic 

for those who do not sleep,

teaching the one who drank the blue rain

from yesterday’s boot

 that not only the sun drops golden light,

not only boats sail, beans sprout, but

old worms turn, old sorrows burn, sour can be sweet 

enough to eat, 

and lead an old woman's feet 

from here where there is no sound

to a green dance and music by a pool of dreams.

April 2011

Posted for Friday Poetically at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

(The exercise was to write a poem using a list of words taken from Shel Silverstein's  child's poem, One Inch Tall )

Image: Yellow Moon, by Martin Cathrae, posted on flick'r

Martin Cathrae's photostream

Friday Flash 55 ~ Crapshoot

Crapshoot

The gust front swaggers in,

bankrolled like a Texas oilman,

inviting spring to the big crapshoot.

They smile at each other but neither 

speaks the other’s language. 

Someone's bound to lose.

Just like that 

the tree’s pulled from 

the ground,

a long-stemmed 

flower

laid 

on the roof.

The dice are loaded, 

and spring's rolled snake-eyes.

April 2011

Posted for Friday Flash 55 at the G-man's

Image: Bridge Creek Oklahoma F5 tornado, May 3, 1999

source link

Dry Spell

Dry Spell

The drought is a dead mother, all silence and negation.

It breathes the void and makes inaction action.

It gathers up possibilities and reduces them by fraction

to a still cipher that sucks the multiples from creation.

The drought owns nothing but the dead empty and a name.

As green falters and begins to change its mind,

the bright is bleached out grey, limping down a stony wind.

The sky is stripped. There’s no giving left to find,

except the gift of wind not breath, just scorch, the whip of flame.

Serial and sere, Ceres surrenders, hushes and renders

her variegated voice silent that sought to sew the cloud

to earth in her soft singing seaming, terrestrial to celestial.

Instead the steel wind has dry lightning on its fenders;

it drives the wildfire down the highway, smoke impenetrable

and all the still or wavering things are burned up in that shroud.

As I’m burning through this empty coughing dream

of nothing where your song once sewed the seam.

April 2011

Image: Texas Wildfires, 2011, courtesy CNN video footage,   source link

Compost of Earthly Delights

Compost of Earthly Delights

When you think there are no horrors left

that’s when the real horrors come.

When flesh is wrung and sense is numb,

and it’s a joke that a tear could be wept,

then the stone is wet where the killing’s kept       

and your spindly withered legs won’t run.

Then the rabbit's eating the toes of the nun,

and your silent scream is all that’s left.

When the scarf enfolds and frames your face

a delicate beauty, balanced, right,

that’s when a roach crawls out of the lace.

That’s when you lose your appetite.

When you think no monster’s there in the night,

that’s when the bed starts to lift in place.

April 2011

Posted for  OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Image: The Garden of Earthly Delights, inner right wing detail, by Hieronymous Bosch, Oil on Panel, (circa 1450-1516)

courtesy wikimedia commons

Evening Song

Evening Song

Sing me far a song tonight;

take from me these things I know.
Fly my soul a summer bird

the wind has asked to fall like snow.

Sing me far don’t stop for breath;

take away the things I’ve done.

Let my heart break up at last

a sea fret gone in ragged sun.

April 2011

Photo: Wind and Rain, by Petteri Sulonen

Petteri Sulonen's flickr stream

Blue Nowhere

Blue Nowhere

Riding a blue wind

into nowhere

she hangs on the sea line, blowing

like a sail from the rippling filament,

above the ever torn and ever mended waves,

and nowhere peace.

The wind has stripped her will,

the shadows and the sun have

blinded back the black and vacant rocks,

given restless wrack and seething foam

a splashing spurious pirate gold,

but nowhere peace.

The perfect angled arch, the symmetry

is hers, the art and all

the making hand of man,

the walls that crumble,

the bleeding words that ran,

and nowhere peace

except the peace

her being brings

unknown, past measure.

April 2011

Posted for OneShootSunday at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Image by the gifted poet and photographer, James Rainsford

 

Something Small

Something Small

something small

faceted, refracting, chucking

hot white splinters to wince the eye

winking from the country of the dead

where no light stumbles except

to be changed changed changed again
in that crystalline splitrail corral

something small

a silicant irritant a tiny mote

gets under the skin encysts

insists itself and carpenters

its own infected radiant bliss

taut ruddy and inflamed the setting

drops the pearl

something small

crawling flat to feed

glossy grey and many legged

inserting its needle nose into the skin

drawing out what makes it fat

to bursting, obscene itching resistant 

to removal except by fire

something small

a point of steel a tiny blade

hard as the trickster’s heart

so thin, so almost invisible at the cut

except for the drip drip drip

of ruby it leaves in its voiding 
wake of words

April 2011

Photo: Bug on Lacebark, by joy ann jones 2010 

Friday Flash 55 ~ Casting the Runes

Casting the Runes

You ask but how can I explain?

The truth and beauty; neither parse.

What hides itself in a sea of pain,

I ask, but how can you explain?

Not every fish is for the seine.

The drama flops when played as farce.

We tell our own but can’t explain

the Truth. And beauty doesn’t parse.

April 2011

I've taken a bit of liberty with the triolet form here and let the runes fall where they may.

Posted for Friday Flash 55 at the G-Man's

Gypsy Witch Cards source link

Spoils

 

Spoils

So few times

I haven’t had to pretend.

Under the scrub oaks once

one time

when the spider had barely begun

to spin the hex 
of change and decay

when above us there was blue

around us there was smoke

and beneath us there was earth

earth that was enough

but even then

there was a buzzing

like a bluebottle

singing his carrion tune

a tiny smut in the sky

a rent in the web

a jet blowing

grey airdirt from its tail

where there should have been

only a noiseless hawk.

Dead people write better poems;

lessons, like all the spoils, are easiest

taken 

from the dead.

April 2011

Photo: Blackjack Oak at Sunset, joy ann jones 2011

Stormy Monday

Stormy Monday

Drunkard’s kiss, a used beginning,

a try for that embrace that seems to promise

what no human hand delivers.

We took the long riff into every alley

and found beneath the ground the big abyss.

That life and you are dead and gone,

child of pain, long gone

with the crazy smile, the amber trusting

thousand mile stare.

When I first met you I fell hard

into your painted desert 

whose beauty held no peace,

tumbled laughing down the graffiti'd walls
and hit the hard valley floor,

where the only thing to drink 
in all that stretch of badlands

was a bubbling whiskey river snaking through,

where the only stars that shone in the cold

perpetual night were the flickers and splinters

that came and went

in your liquid red rimmed eyes.

We were never alone, never still

with Johnny Walker and Johnny Winter,

B.B., Muddy Waters and Stevie Ray at the long party.

The eagle flies on Friday, Saturday we play. Sunday

never came and day was night and night day

in our crowded moving house where the music played on
the faces grew pale and formless
and time was spun forever in a whirlwind of denials.

But you were never made to wear the harness.

I remember when we blew two weeks pay on

those cases of pink champagne from France,

sweet under the bed in a room with no heat

and drank them in a week without glasses;

how you always traveled with forty dollars

in your pocket and 16 wine coolers

in the trunk of the Monte Carlo

(for emergencies) even when we
were running on empty.

And after all, you kept every promise.

I was the one who gave out like

a rented mule, a deathbed conversion, 

you who knew where all the kisses went

who kept a golden box of all the hours

who gave your back at the last for me to cross,

a bridge to span the deep abyss

from which you watched me walk.

Some nights I still can see you where I left you

looking up as if you’re seeing

something bigger than a kiss.

April 2011

Enjoy the music if you care to. There never was a day without it in the life of the man I wrote this for, gone on to the last party in 1992.

Epistemology: Angels

Epistemology: Angels

What do we know about angels?

We know they have wings.

They are not us but

they fly and sometimes

they fall.

They are so much

softer than clouds, 

harder than diamonds,

because they know everything,

and need to feel nothing.

Their bones are fog and lightning.Their eyes 

stare blindly. They carry the message

under their tongues of fire,

choose when, know who,

aren't saying why.

They are able to be all white,

not black not grey not devil red,

never blue nor orange,

never mixed never solid, only beings 

of air and distance.

That is what we know

about angels now.

But we don’t remember

all of angel time

when angels first saw

the daughters of men

and found them more beautiful

than god, beautiful as you, my love

with your silent tongue of fire

and pale wings.

We know

nothing 

about angels.

April 2011




Posted for OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry




Image: Archangel Gabriel at Doge's Palace, posted by  valix on flick'r
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valix's photostream