Face In The Storm

Face in the Storm

The lantern trees shone,

upturned goblets

of chartreuse shimmering

brimmed over with the pursuing

stormlight loping behind them,

closing fast.

Unremitting as a child witched wild, trolls

of thunder chewed rocks, slouched under

the great cloud bridges sending

sweeping white slash after slash

of electric clapperclaw flash skydown to

consummate their mountain splitting noise.

Then the wind fell upon the world

more ravenous than any March bear, hungry as

the spirit of war, and tore

the lace veil from the branches.

In the dismay of their naked disarray I saw

the face I most long to forget

laughing from too wet lips

light of my sorrow its liquid eye

so with a sigh I rose and closed

the curtains on the rain.

But all night long

I felt the stare.

May 2012

Image: Into the Clouds, by LLudo on flick'r

Photo taken June 13, 2008, Norman, Oklahoma

Shared under a Creative Commons License 

The Strange Serum of Professor Foutre au Cul

The Strange Serum of Professor Foutre au Cul

It was late, approaching midnight, when Professor Foutre au Cul made his final decision.  The wind through the open shutters wavered the gaslight in its isenglass globe, casting blood dark shadows over the scattered pieces of dirty laboratory equipment, making them seem like instruments of torture, as indeed, in the professor’s case, they were. But, mon dieu! he had no time for that now, not when he was so close.

At last he felt his serum was perfected, the serum that would transform the laboring underclass into willing slaves, obviating the need for expending capitol on wages, or those clumsy robots the dwarves were always bragging about, and which always rusted into oblivion before the warranty expired. Professor au Cul had a bit of a poetic streak, and thought of his potion as "The Foutre au Cul Ultimate Obedience and Indifference Induction Elixir."

He had as yet to come up with a marketing slogan. “Watch Them Drink and Obey!”  perhaps. Or “Save a Fortune on Scullions and Automatons! Make Your Wife, Regardless Of How Formerly Intractable, the Perfect Domestic Slave!” or, alternatively,  “Transform Your Drunken Sot of A Husband Into A Responsible Wage Earner!” 

The possibilities were endless.

No matter that the earlier concoctions were a mixed success at best, causing the loss of several typists. He’d been forced to terminate them when they removed their bustles and began a bacchanal procession through the lab, completely indifferent to both social mores and the terms of their employment but alas! no more obedient than ever. While not wholly averse to the former manifestation, it was not the reaction he was looking for.

But at last, after the introduction of tincture of mercury, the reduction of the grain alcohol component and a ticklish adjustment of 27 different herbs and spices, the serum had reached the stage where human experimentation was vital. He was the only one left, and he owed it to Science to finalize his amazing gift to mankind by making himself the last trail subject. He had no fear. He knew his process was flawless.

He upended the delicate crystal vial, and rapidly drank off six ounces of vile, murky grey fluid. It was only after enduring hours of agonizing bellyache and acquiring a raspberry rash over 86% of his body, including parts best not thought of, that the professor realized he had no way of telling whether the serum had actually worked, as he was already totally obedient to his own every whim, and complete indifference to everything else was a natural trait.

Back to the drawing board. Perhaps this time, something in a little blue pill?

May 2012

Posted for    real toads

Kerry's Wednesday Challenge: Steampunk

A bit of a departure for me; normally I find writing prose to be like pulling teeth, but in this case, the thing refused to be a poem, (I linked an older one of those if preferred) so there you go. Apologies for the length--it didn't want to be short, either. 

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: Goya Attended by Doctor Arrieta, by Francisco Goya 1820

Public Domain, via Wikipaintings.org

The Old Pier

The Old Pier

Once absence meant nothing;
everything leaving came back.

Now things unwanted are

                                             washed

into the wake to sink.

The bollard is fixed in place

in a silted harbor

rusted, paint chipped, frayed rope

collar long since snapped, still

something sailed here once on a whisper,

moored snug then lightly spit

a last smooth pebble on the cairn

where hope drowned coming to port.

The knot was cut in haste

the wind drove all before it seaward

leaving a stone, a bollard

fit for the cast of a mooring line

that's soon slipped loose,

stowed safe aboard by the departing,

gone long before the pier collapses

into the gull darkened sea.

May 2012

Posted for    OpenLinkNight   at  dVerse Poets Pub

Image: bollard, by frankh, on flick'r
old pier, by lisa cee(Lisa Campeau) on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons License

Off the Shelf Archive~May

As usual I've procrastinated insufferably on this feature, waiting till the absolute last day of the month to change out the Off the Shelf selection. Again I'm falling back on a poem I've lived with for the last few decades, one from Octavio Paz, called Beyond Love. I couldn't tell you how many times I've read this one in a dark midnight.  

You'll find it here, in the Off the Shelf archives for July.

And here is a biography of the man, in my opinion one of the great Spanish language poets of our time.

So without further ado, here's last month's selection for a final read before it enters the archives, an even older favorite of mine by John Donne, 

 A Valediction; Forbidding Mourning:

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning 

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun. 

~ by John Donne

Image: Carlysle Wall(The Lovers), 1853,  by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 

Public Domain via wikipaintings.org 

Amnesia Anesthesia JuJu

© Daryl Edelstein

Amnesia Anesthesia JuJu

Since you showed me
so truthfully there's no forever

in the flesh, I see, I see.
Since I cannot be real, let me be
let me be a haunt. 

Let me be the night's illusion

of everything you want

and cannot feel.

Let, let your restless bed

be troubled by the unquiet breath,

let, let your feckless life

be troubled by the lightless death
I wear, the tattered gravedust gown

that pulls me deeper down, to drown

dance unwound in a turquoise vortex;

sucked up, quick-chewed, spat out gone.

But like an invisible fool

performing

before a blind audience

softly snoring,
I expect the truth will be

ironically
not even Papa Legba 

can haunt an amnesiac’s memory.

May 2012

posted for    real toads 

Sunday Photo Challenge:Daryl Edelstein

Process notes: "In Haitian Vodou, Papa Legba is the intermediary between the loa [spirit world]and humanity. He stands at a spiritual crossroads and gives (or denies) permission to speak with the spirits..." ~wikipedia

Image: Mosaic art by Isaiah Zagar, as photographed by Daryl Edlestein

Used with permission

Too Long At The Fair

Too Long at the Fair

A Cautionary Tale 

with a  Happy Ending

You put me on your midway

you dressed me in a sack,

you gave me beads you’d won at bottle toss

then promptly took them back.

The cotton candy kisses

didn’t last  outside the tent

but the marks you brought to see me,

they never seemed to end.

You made me tell their fortunes

all miserably the same,

charged a dollar for admission

and a quarter for each claim.

They chewed their grease like cattle

as they pointed at my face

where your words scrawled as graffiti

had taken reason’s place.

I left your crooked shell game

where you always hid the bean

and ran off with the carny hick

from the Tilt-a-Whirl machine.

Now we’ve seven strapping farmboys

in our fields under the skies

and each night I get a corn dog

that would win the Fair’s First Prize.

May 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Claudia is hosting a fairgrounds rollar coaster ride over at the pub today. Come join us--the gates stay open at 3:00 PM EST through midnight Sunday.

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: Salome, by Alphonse Mucha, 1897
Public Domain, via Wikipaintings.org

Doors

Doors

O fate always opens a door they say

for every hinge or hand it blasts away;

O no, for every door that leaks cracked light

I say, another slams instead,and right

into the shattering face of a schlepp

who is never quite quick enough to step

back before cartilage snaps and blood gouts

coppery down his unexpecting throat.

The stinging smart of each hardwood denial

opens only doors for tears to fall in file,

a damburst that's impossible to plug

with any amount of reason’s tarry mud.

So much more sensible to sit and say

I didn't want to go there anyway.

May 2012

Posted for   Fireblossom Friday   at  real toads

Challenge: Stress

Header Image: Behind Door Number Three, by anyjazz65, on flick'r
Footer Image: Door knocker I, Carcasonne, by Stepheye on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons License

Piñata

Piñata

I woke up in the thunder, remembering when the shitstorm broke over my dog killing your new woman’s kitten, or so she said though no one was home at the time and it was her word against the dog’s, as her wheedling rat whine proclaimed her own Weimaraner’s yellow snake-eyed innocence. Our dog now my dog hung her head like a dead flower. Rain hit the windows hard and she made you buy a very expensive parrot who relentlessly paced clack KLACK clack skitter his claws like lunatic castanets rattling on the hardwood floor when I came with the baby for those few nervous visits because we were adults, 

and cocking his sly slit eye at me, shat on the bookcase but I didn’t mind keeping the dog because I loved her more than you and I knew which bitch was the killer.

But I do wonder why life made up its mind without thinking always to be that way rip wrapping gifts, all the candy in a hard concrete shell no bat is going to break, all my good dogs crying where someone else kicked them and some poor kitten dying for a drama queen and acrimony and accusation exploding like favors from a minor imp’s piñata every time standing under it blindfolded asked to explain what I don’t know a damn thing about. All to get what rots my teeth chewing up a punchline of sticky blame in the whole lame artificially sweetened standup act and leaving after leaving in the night without a word, as I wake up and its raining hard on another empty morning to peel back off a stack of bloodstained morning killers wagging tails belly up staring snakeblink yellow eyes, ad infinitum.

May 2012

Posted for   Meeting the Bar   at dVerse Poets Pub 

Victoria's prompt: Stream of Consciousness

Image: Feliz Cinco de Mayo by garland cannon, on flick'r

Down On The Coast

Down on the Coast

Three ragged rocks in the bay of the heart

smoothed and seamed by the tailoring spray

now pressed flat as the long wave fades

the water stills, the tide splays

with all its faery flotsam 
pulled to a deeper decay.

Eleven pouting lemons in a cobalt blue bowl,
secret and sullen as xanthic mollusks

bitter suns curdling morning to fractions

piercing the tongue with sour satisfaction,

as if to say I told you so

but you just had to keep adding sugar.

In the dim gaslight of a half-sincere dream

the medium saw the house burn down, beam

by beam, red walls glow to nothing, saw drawn

in charcoal ectoplasm all the  burnt debris
daguerreotypes of you, of me

wet framed in blackened ash, ruined before time for tea.

Tonight I dream your absinthe aftertaste

gulping loss, coughing up your waste
choking on the acrid gnosis
with each indifferent clumsy phasing

in and out, never whole in either placing

as you make and unmake the myth of a masked man's face.

Three rocks in the bay of the heart;

name them as you please or will

smoothed and seamed calm; still
mirrors glinting days that in the dark

will founder any sailor lost at sea

who seeks to come to anchor in that lee.

May 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at Dverse Poets Pub

Image: I've once again borrowed the work of my friend Petteri Sulonen, whose images often inspire. Thanks, Petteri, as always for the use of this shot:

Calm Day, byPetteri Sulonen on flick'r

Petteri's photostream

Petteri's blog

Gemini

IMAGE USED TO ILLUSTRATE THIS POEM REMOVED DUE TO EXCESSIVE SEARCH ENGINE(BOT)ACTIVITY. HUMANS WISHING TO SEE IT FOLLOW LINK BELOW.

Gemini

Antidote to evil is the peace in sleep

that comes when all hope of it is gone.

That resolution of night into light,

the bawdy eye of a grackle

in its ungainly dull body 

glittering

perpetuation.

Surrender to destruction

makes impermanence eternal.

Life many formed and changeful

mounts a fluid resistance,

saying the yes now that will later be no.

You like a burning under the moon,

freezing the sun,

a bonfire burned down

to banked coals of life,

translucent in the fitful frost of death.

Servant tool or instrument of neither,

only the twinned image of a dual contradiction.

September 1988,  
Revised  2010~2012

posted for   real toads

OpenLinkMonday

Had another repost up, but after seeing the Gemini theme at real toads, decided to go with this one in honor of all my Gemini cohorts there. 

Image: (c)  Dean Bertoncelj 

 All Rights Reserved

His Commercial Site

Unspecial Delivery

Unspecial Delivery

One

night it

arrived, a

perfect package    

though so many are damaged in transit.

The carrier ignored the sharp return

to sender scrawled

resenting

on the

face.

In

deep black

two stars fall

overnighted

express, and still she sees only junk mail.

April~May 2012

posted for    Poetics:Tools of the Trade  at dVerse Poets Pub 

Karin Gustafson hosts this weekend, and she's asked us to pick a profession and write a poem using the verbs associated with it--or using an occupation as a springboard. I have sort of mixed up the whole prompt with a Cuisinart, using the terms of a postal worker's lot at random.

and for    real toads

Kerry's Mini Form Challenge: Tetractys

Quoting Kerry: "Tetractys, a syllable counting form invented by Ray Stebbing, consists of at least 5 lines of 1, 2, 3, 4, 10 syllables (total of 20). Tetractys can be written with more than one verse, but must follow suit with an inverted syllable count." This is a triple one.

Photo: starstruck, by kiera faye, on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons License

The Tattered Bard

 The Tattered Bard

Tattered, sorely tattered the old bard lay

his velvet voice spilled out in disarray,

his ivory hands once smooth upon the string

now knobbed as sticks, his throat too dry to sing.

A thousand dead men’s tales his faun’s eyes tell,

his heart a cracking cup for a bottomless well.

His love’s a sighing flame fed by hollow grass

lighting a nightwatch breath, then spent and passed.

Yet in the living dark he feels the pull

and drip of words from a moon that's overfull.

A mimosa dryad comes to fetch his sigh

and he hears the roar of music that won't die.

And still from miles around the lasses come

to bring him bread and honey, or sometimes none

but only a white breast pillow to hold his head

where he can believe he’s old, but still not dead.

May 2012

For all the old poets

Posted for   real toads

Kenia's Challenge

I cheated a bit on this prompt, which was to take a line from a poet you felt you should like more as a way to get into his/her poetry; however I patterned it after a poet I actually do mostly like,  John Keats, but whom I find very stylized and florid compared to modern poets. But this little rhyme seems to play off that style to me, so I hope it qualifies. 

(Here's a link to a Keats bard poem for reference.)

Image: The Bard, by Benjamin West, 1778, oil on oak

Public domain  via Wikimedia Commons

The Wild

The Wild

In a tangled midnight trap

I had a dream I could not stop,

a madwoman's dream of you the impossible

coming back to me the irretrievable

coming back to me though I know 
exactly where this leads; it's
an appetite that grows the more it feeds.

I wore the pale denim skirt that falls to my feet,

skin blanked smooth as past erased. You sat

on the sofa, wild mahogany hair shadow sweet

over the upswung deer's eye flash of spark.

I walked right up your scarecrow legs

splayed straight out for miles in the dark, you

wrapped your thin player’s fingers

tight round my elbows, quaked my thighs

looked in my face as if I were

the last good thing before

the apocalypse. Your ember eyes,

your banked laugh ran me through

hot and sharp as a live wire, lit up the blue

deep hollow so long unoccupied

save for the slack jawed creature on the slab 

waiting for the dubious gift of life,

all the corpse parts sewn up cunning but drab

put back together clumsy, cold to the bone

without that lightning touch. Now stark alone,

waking, electrocuted questions still twitch

and crackle in its never-animate place;

how do I quiet that black wildness

begot by the fear that owns me
find the wildness that you've shown me

that unmakes the dark's insensate fight
makes dead hearts beat all night

worlds breathe and turn again
beyond my sight?

May 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Optional Musical Accompaniment

 As always, blogger is playing headgames. This time I can't get the video to play-if it won't play for you either, refresh the page and click the "watch on youtube" button and you'll get it on a new tab. It's worth listening to, though it has a long meandering instrumental intro to set the mood.




Header Photo: Cascadia 2009, by  Gord McKenna on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 License

Sevenling (The New Day)

Sevenling (The New Day)

Through the white wind I fly my broken bird

head on fire, wax wings worn wide, shedding

singed feathers, ground a heaviness pulling from below

and then I wake again to the next life of this day.

Plucked naked, flame out, no wings to be seen;

a reprieve, or something harder than earth

stonier than the end?

May 2012

posted for    real toads

Open Link Monday

This poem is a sevenling. I first heard of this form through Marian (runaway sentences) when it was referenced on real toads. Here are links to one (two) of her own sevenlings posted on her blog, and also the explanation of the form, derived from a poem of Anna Ahkmatova, at The American Poetry Journal.

Image: Impossible Flag CXVI, by procsilas, on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 License

Mother's Day Flowers

Mother’s Day Flowers

They grow in pots

or wildly not, frosting the sides

of buildings, flung

across the roadside wastes

draping a softening cloth over 

what would otherwise be a corpse.

Unmothered, unfathered

from seed that falls from the dead

they’ll never know

the way they will their bee lovers

the kiss of the rain and stroking

of the wind, spreading under

golden light

the color of their beauty

infinite and abstract and complete.

So why are they gathered

by men who need money

killed by a cold knife

cut and tied into bunches

to make a gift of fading beauty homaging

an act they can’t conceive or

replicate, stiffly filed and vased.

Is it because they say so much,

or because they cannot

speak at all?

May 2012

Comments are disabled on this post. Thanks for reading.

Image: White and Blue Fanflower, © joy ann jones 2012

Amor Ex Machina

Modern Rhapsody~Salvador Dali

Amor Ex Machina

I look at these rigid fingers

with their metallic sheen of

imbricated scales, once supple, articulate 

now so resistlessly futile
tapping out my obsolescence

not an antique

not an artifact

only a throwaway construct wearing out

for which parts are no longer available.

When my clanging gears
manage to change up and wheeze 
into a facsimile of engagement,

I make a soft slipping murmur

to you in the infinite dark

into the empty parking space,

the crackling void's blue box

beneath my fused wires.

Your name's evensong, I whisper it 

into the loop of a no longer

optimally functioning receiver

and on the flickering screen of

my headset, your face flashes on off

off on impossibly still close

though that must be an error.

There’s no answer in the
whistle and squeak night

because you do not speak

or I no longer hear. 
Yet should such a random soundbyte
force an auditory response to

somehow occur, and should 
the machine record it,

data at hand indicates

it  might be discovered that
a great many remaining parts

are still in working order.

May 2012

Posted for   Meeting the Bar   at dVerse Poets Pub
Charles Miller hosts today and his theme is Machine Dreams.

Header Image: Modern Rhapsody, 1957 by Salvador Dali

Copyright may still apply.
Footer Image: Anatomical Drawing of the Bicep Function, Leonardo da Vinci
both  via wikipaintings.org

The Collector

The Collector

I am a collector of

the poetry of death
of its fusillade barrages

of its subtle lingual dagger

of its dancing damascus blades

patterned like lost sonnets, even

the fat cannister whose prostrate poison

creeps silent over the lambstongue,

rhyming the skeletal with the skin.

               

Sharp by sharp

through the flint-flash labyrinth

where the iron blossoms of

synchronized sidearms pound

the percussion of the butcher's ballet,

the bomb's verse writes me a language

of ancient echo, splintery stabs

of the flung broken, the cellular scream itself

that is the breaker of worlds.

In the center where the bodies fold

every sword’s a stanza, every

barrel a ballad, each soldier a

poem crafted to parse autumn light
on shafts of wheat, to appear and fade

before the sickle’s edge,

springborn fodder for the beasts,

relentlessly gathered 
into red sheaves.

May 2012



Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Process note: "Damascus steel was a term used by several Western cultures from the Medieval period onward to describe a type of steel used in swordmaking from about 300 BCE to 1700 CE. These swords are characterized by distinctive patterns of banding and mottling reminiscent of flowing water..." ~wikipedia

I have used the idiosyncratic term lambstongue to refer to lambsquarters, or pigweed, an edible weed in the goosefoot family. 
The second stanza references Oppenheimer's quote  from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." when the first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945 in New Mexico.

Image: Antiquarian, by Petteri Sulonen, on flick'r

Used with his kind permission. Thank you, Petteri, for the picture which inspired this poem.

Petteri's photostream

Petteri blogs on all things political, social, Buddhist, photographic and horological, as well as anything else that catches his interest at his eclectic and always instructive site, Come to Think of It.

The Freeze

The Freeze

"..she's stoned said the Swede
and the Mooncalf agreed.
 I'm like a viper in shock
With my eyes in the clock...

......and as my mind unweaves

I feel the freeze down in my knees.."
~Robertson/Helm/Manual

Where do the

wounded go when

triage is  through the madhouse?

To huddle in smokefrozen anesthesia

corners dark with a banked combustion

that smolders hotter unseen

where witch doctors dance

in feathers around  bodies

full of plague, skeletal
grotesqueries of fever shadow.

Dragon-lit campfires 
built of bone can only

be extinguished by buckets of blood, 
by the cold complete

chemical foam of annihilation.

Take that clubbing drumbeat

anodyne, opiate organ key visionquest

plectrum plucked purple haze

and mainline it; vicarious junkies

of the undying beat.

We’d all be dead if it wasn’t for the music,

for the broken who gave it to us

dead vessels walking, bright stars of loss

poets, addicts, drunks, wild

flaming madmen, incandescent blue

desolation sibyls desperate to see

something  alive behind the

corpse's eye, looking for diamonds

finding carbon's blackened

ash, poisonous and filthy

drinking the bitter cup so we didn’t have to,

my abandoned generation of cripples

settlers and compromisers
slaves and drones, cowards and loons

scarred, abused, never healed except

when made into angels 

by that insubstantial

medicine that fades

from the air

but not the heart.

May 2012

Process Notes: My title as well as the line above referencing "the bitter cup" are both drawn directly from the lyrics of Chest Fever. The surreal organ on both this and the cut below is played by Garth Hudson.

Levon Helm, drummer for The Band and  the vocalist on both these heavily drug focused songs and many others of far less depressing tone, passed away last month at the age of 71, which says something to me about the persistence of hope over despair, that one can walk away from choosing death, and that art is a better drug than any chemical for treating inner wounds..

posted for    real toads

Marian's Challenge: Dirt Farmer;Levon Helm

and

Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

where Stu McPherson will be hosting a prompt on music starting at 3:00 pm EST