Snake Eye

Snake Eye

Your eye, that reptile jewel hung yellow as

a sunken sun, your talk a

cloudy snakeskin strung with pierced pendant hearts--when

it  passed idly over me, measuring

and rejecting

the price of that collecting, you

almost said

 you loved me, but remembered

a lie will cause a reckoning more

 often than it saves one.

~January 2015 

















Optional Musical Accompaniment

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Weekend Challenge: Flash 55 Plus

Kerry once again brings us the 55 meme,  and her optional Plus this time is to write it in the form of a Herrick Stanza (word count 8-6-8-6-2-6-2-5-7-5.) This made for some weird enjambment, but I kind of like it this way.

Image: The Eye of  A Green Tree Python, copyright Joel Satore
Source

Objectivist Free Will Nightmare

Objectivist Free Will 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

controlled happy smile,

and walked on to the next desk.

~ January 2015

Yes, I really dreamed this. Not much of a poem, but it cracked me up, so thought I'd share.


Edit: Forgot to add for those not into U.S. politics, that Rand Paul is a republican-libertarian Senator from Kentucky, and  son of Ron Paul, de facto founder of the Libertarian Party.

Scrimshaw Sonnet

Scrimshaw Sonnet

I am a woman only of earthenware

bare as windy hills if not as pure.

Your every thought to me bore the potter's mark

stark from a god's-eye that's never yet met mine,

fine and barb-hooked as if on a fishing line,

vined in words that pulled like hungry sand.

Bands of ivory cloud meet a starving knife,

life drips enough to wet the driest grave.

Save the lesser light of windflower spring;

bring the lamps of your eyes imagining.

Sing like sheaves of whales under blue-white wool.

Pull from your sleeves the darkness between worlds

curled away in sighs, then suddenly spilled,

filled to the brim before all things are stilled.

~January 2013

slightly revised. 2015 

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The Tuesday Platform

revisiting a poem written two years ago... this is in chained rhyme where the last word of every line rhymes with the first word of the next.

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Process notes: This is deliberately written in a somewhat non-traditional sonnet form.

scrimshaw  — n
1. the art of decorating or carving shells, ivory, etc, done by sailors as a leisure activity

~World Dictionary


Image credits:

Header image: The Rocks with Oak Tree, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

Public domain, via wikipaintings.org

Footer image: scrimshaw is awesome, part II, by staveitoff on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons license.

 

The Hourlass Of Crowded Demons

The Hourglass Of Crowded Demons

With every

grain that pits my sleep 

a demon falls, sliding past 

his subatomic twins

down the chute 

of  another

narrowing night

to rattle in a pail of dreams

that rouse themselves and shake,

wet cerberi of dullness or desire

carrying each his bleached 

memory-bone to the fire.

~January 2015

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Kerry's Weekend Mini-Challenge: Word Substitution

Kerry O'Connor (Skylover, Skwriting ) once again picks two titles in her mental shellgame of word substitution, asking us to make something appear where least expected. (In the spirit of the mini-challenge, I have made this one quite mini.)

Apology: I just realized as I was tweaking this I changed the original title which was The Hourglass of Dreaming Demons--sorry Kerry. I did keep the dreaming part, tho.

Images: Top: The Hourglass Nebula, (" MyCn18, a young planetary nebula located about 8,000 light-years away, taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).) by Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger (JPL), the WFPC2 science team, and NASA/ESA" ) Source

Bottom: Skull Hourglass, by Brynhilder on deviantArt, shared under a Creative Commons License.

The Winter Door

The Winter Door

We sat together in the cold starmelt

close as blackbirds murmur in a leafless tree
or spaced high and still on a windy staff of wires,
when you brought out the wine that opens doors

and thawed my throat enough so I sang it all,

as if it were the last chance secret freed;

everything you'd want in words or need

witch-written jade in a moon white snow-- I sang it all,

curving in its loop the necklace for
a much softer pillory than the one I wore.

After the seventh glass, you gave out a flame

that threw its sulphur flicker on the deep,

flew your bright oriflamme of crippled grace

that shivered as it blew, and turned your face.

I had to guess it all from one lowered glance,
what hard secret hid below ones freely told
shadowed on a window where behind
some changeling moved---before it turned its face;

still, words are not a thing that blackbirds know

who pose no avatars in jade or snow.

When we sat in the light that fell

before it rose, in a country

cobbled crazy from a broken spring

to float its leaping green on silver ice;
when we laughed

to watch the way it is time bites

the coldest decade down to a burning drop

star-beaded for Orion's gut bowstring,

we were then as we are now, translated stark:

two who find their doorways in the dark.

~January 2015

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Fireblossom Friday: Winter

The ever-blazing Fireblossom asks us to examine winter without any naturalist's delirium, and of course, absolutely not with a haiku.

Image: Blackbirds, © joyannjones 2013

Cactus Eye

Cactus Eye

The cactus eye is watering

watching, thinning,

its saving all in vain.

The needed day is now;
unindemnified, unsanctified

the indifferent sun will magnify,

will dry the drops of living

at its root,

and the bulge it held so long, life

parsed from long-fingered air, will shrivel

split the skin and spit the spines,

consume itself the nectar 

hidden in its wounds. The hungry dark

will fall like sharp-faced birds

and the cactus eye will close

at last dried blind.

~January 2015

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Weekend Challenge: The Poetry of David Huerta

Grace (Everyday Amazing) brings the work of the Mexican poet David Huerta to us for inspiration. Reading  the poems she shared, as well as some of those in her linked translation of Before Saying Any Of The Great Words, led me here, though I'm not sure how.

Images: The eye like a strange balloon goes to infinity, 1882 by Odilon Redon

Public domain via wikiart.com  I have slightly tinted this image.

Photo of the northern lights seen from space, author unknown.