Rainbow Wrapper

Rainbow Wrapper

I'm just the torn wrapping

from a pre-packaged rainbow,

a rider in the sky's pocket,

mischance given breath.

I'm the flare of a spark

struck between strangers

burning alone

in the slums of the storm--

a pinwheel, a Catherine wheel,

a somersault of fires

not safe to play with,

not warm and not yours.

~April 2016

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Challenge: Words Count

Image: Lichtkreise (Kosmischer Regenbogen) (Cosmic Rainbow), 1922, Otto Freundlich

Public domain via wikiart.org

 

 

The Dark House

The Dark House

"Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, 

deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do;..."

As you like it

so it will be.

So we said in cadence each to each,

dark and deep our eyes' forsaken night,

smoky our sighed, incited, worn insights,

and yet nothing was; indeed

nothing could be,

for we were whips alone, and well

deserving of the darkest home.

Now the sixth age flips

its skeletal slippery pantomime,

the mirror's jest, the frankly fumbled lines;

never jealous enough

in honor or enough bold,

sans heart, sans mind, 

sans everything but role.

(Do you not know 

I was a woman?)

So I speak to myself in this room of the voided cheek,

as false as the vows made in wine I used to seek.

 “Men have died from time to time, 

and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” 

 ~April 2016

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Challenge: Hat Tip To The Bard

Both quotes from As You Like It, by William Shakespeare, as well as several other lines extrapolated here, including the ones concerning the sixth age, the woman remark, and of course, the last lines.


Image: So Long As You Like It,  ©  Liz Huston via internet. No copyright infringement intended

Thunder In Mourning

Thunder In Mourning

Thunder mumbled all night,

thunder subdued, a cello played

by a sobbing storm,

or the beat of a drum: an elephant's steps

on the following walk, trunk to tail through

the wrong end of the kaleidoscope

up the curved wall and

down down again toward the moving end.

As the stained-glass lights blind,
she shows me the way

to balance my bulk

up on a ball, on one oak-like foot,

small eyes sunk and kind

too old for my mind.

She's a thing born for trust

despite what we've seen

from killers and users,

pale abusers who'll never hold
the blowing rose that drops away

as they push close.
She knows

all our possum secrets,

our summer fades,

how we murder our minutes

to buy our day.
She sways, a grey

forest that grows wild and wide;

she blocks the dead light

that increases night.

She'll let my feet slide

down the dodger's paradigm

towards the planet that struggles

to be a star, to the music

womb-warm but

played from so far. She bends
down her great head

to let me ride, for going there

might take a fall, and all

that's left of our lives, drums in the rain,

footsteps patient--cello gone soft

thunder subdued,

thunder in mourning.

~April 2016

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Challenge: Elephants

Images: Top: Warrior Mounted on  an Elephant Overpowering a Cello, 1983, Salvador Dali
Fair use via wikiart.org
Bottom: author and source unknown No copyright infringement intended.

A Turn At The Asylum

A Turn At The Asylum

I was looking for the

miracle office when I

walked through the unlocked door to see

no trace of a sign, just

Monica at the front desk offering a full

line of cosmetics, lipsticks in drawers

red pink and black,

each shade sheathed, chicly

discontinued.

From the walls gazed the founders

benevolent and plump, framed

in pince nez and patents,

spats and Van Dykes. No strait jackets here,

just the soft pavane smoothing

the sensitive system of Dr Tarr

and professional stars

and a ceiling of doctoral feathers.

And there I found you,

the last thing I expected,

thick and hot and immediately tangled

between my legs when the warder

walked in, unaware of course for his secret

success was a modest mind, 

and kind.

While the cashier was distracted, 

divvying up the day's

proceeds,(bales of hay and clockwork bears

and a chiaroscuro Tintoretto) we slipped like smoke

out to the veranda, covered safe 

in the polka dot patter of

St John Stockworth Sinclair, whose plans

were about to quite soon

reach surprisingly lush fruition.

You found us a dry corner

on the freshly hosed concrete

and blew up yellow as a daffodil

our rubber bed of air

and the love we made there

was enormous, a theatre of smiles

and soft screams, for the whole point

of the miracle office is that

everyone gets their own dreams.

 ~April 2016

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Challenge:Turns of the Tale

Images:
The Grounds Of The Asylum, 1889, Vincent Van Gogh

The Madhouse, (Detail) 1814, Francisco Goya

Public domain

Time And The Reap

Time and The Reap

Time may dull away pain

that drives you mad

but time is slow

while madness will grow.

So long ago

in a nightingale's gown

I sang for you;

when I was a wren

I wove.

When I was a reed,

I bent for you

and all the while called it love.

When my breasts were the apples

on Yggdrasil

when my eyes were Lethe's mad run

when my arms and legs were

the loom of the Norns, you found a way

to use each one.

Time remakes me

a bird dying in snow,

a reed gone hollow

missed in the reap;

only my heart

is living yet.

Have you

a use for that 

before we sleep?

~April 2016

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Challenge: Poetry To The Third Power 

Yggdrasil:Scandinavian Mythology: the world tree-- an evergreen ash which the Norns water and where they sit weaving the fates of men.

Images: Freya, Das Rheingold,

The Fates on Brunnhilde's Rock,  by Arthur Rackham 

public domain via wikimedia commons

Seal Of The Second Millenium

"My wish is to see you, O lord of persea trees! 

May your throat take the north wind, that you may give fullness without eating and drunkenness without drinking...Pleasant is the utterance of your name: it is like the taste of life...

"Come back to us, O lord of continuity. You were here before anything had come into being, and you will be here when all is gone. 

As you caused me to see the darkness that is yours to give, make light for me so that I can see you ."

 ~Prayer of Neferneferuaten,

from the tomb of the lay priest Pahweh 

 Seal Of The Second Millennium

Ten windings round

and a blob of clay

pressed

with the shape of the soulbird

to hold it fast,

prayed over by white taper priests,

wicks of their arms slick with greased perfume

flickering in the chant heavy smoke

while behind the last door

the king waits in his shell

for journey's beginning

from below the rock hill

to the high back of Nut and the night's

soft descent, 

a chariot of gold to adorn

the road of her flesh, 

a team of ghost horses

to outrun the stars. Such

a journey once started

knows no end.

But for the seal breaker

the foul breath of Set,

the jackal eye before muzzle's gape,

diseased as the mummy's black bones.

Ten twists of the cord

and a last look through the dark

at the golden light

not meant to be owned. Life eternal;

the king that desired it, the priests

that implored it, the sun that

promised it,

someone else will yet have it.

The Nile kept back her gift

for ten dead years

one for each twist, and so

the new god was killed 

while the old gods laughed.

The doors of my second life

were sealed as a shrine

with the soulbird kissed upon my brow.

No more will my face 

be as the disc of the Aten;

the deep river of the necropolis

brings the last inundation.

~April 2016

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Challenge: In The Remains

Process notes:

The top photo by Harry Burton (source) is of the funerary seal on the fifth shrine of  the tomb of Tutankhamen before it was broken by Howard Carter and his team in 1923, untouched since the pharoah was entombed, three thousand two hundred years previously.

Second photo: "A relief of a royal couple in the Amarna style; figures have variously been attributed as Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Smenkhkare and Meritaten(Neferneferuaten), or Tutankhamen and Ankhesenamun..“ via wikimedia commons

Third photo: The pharaoh Akhenaten and his family adoring the Aten, second from the left is Meritaten who was the daughter of Akhenaten. via wikimedia commons

Nut was the Egyptian goddess of the sky and the cosmos.She was often shown as a woman with her back arched above the earth. Aten was the sun god, especially as worshiped by the pharoah Akhenaten at Amarna.  For a short history of the Amarna period chronology and events loosely incorporated in this poem, see this wikipedia link.