Mistakes

Mistakes

Dark flutters

words melted like butter

burn the tongue, her hand on your shoulder 

on a night from which every dream has been wrung

I looked for your face but it was wrong,

wrong for me to come here

with my snakes

wrapped around

the sad mistakes truth makes.

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Challenge: Micropoetry

Note: This is a triquain, (a seven line poem with syllables of 3-6-9-12-9-6-3) to which I have arbitrarily added a final couplet (3-6.)

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: author and title unknown, fair use via the internet.
No copyright infringement intended.

Chaos Spoon

Chaos Spoon

The figures made the clock work

or were made of clockwork

themselves on a flat plate desert

burnt umber with hunger

where anaplasia is served

with a big chaos spoon.

Fried eggs through the window

shells crushed to dust:

They knew the time

They built the place

where the Handmaid of Fire

and the Blinded Face

kiss with the long drawn

howl of Fate under a black-holed sun

on a scoured afternoon in July.

Those who live by the Lie

will die by the gun, but not before

they make us a bed,

too hard, too long

in  the dreamkiller's cell

feed us rotten red meat

from a toxic pail, pour us

too much dry air from

the poison well. It's a nightmare in time

to lose the door,  but it's better by far

to have a dead fire than to make

the world burn for a dime.

 ~August 2016

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Challenge: Fireblossom Friday
I only wish ALL of this was a dream.

 Optional Musical Accompaniment

anaplasia : n.Reversion of cells to an immature or a less differentiated form, as occurs in most malignant tumors.

~The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary
Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Image:The Meeting of the Illusion and the Arrested Moment - Fried Eggs Presented in a Spoon, 1932, by Salvidor Dali  Fair Use via wikiart-org

The Night Bee

The Night Bee

The night bee flies alone

while the drones doze at home

and few will ever taste

what she brings back to the comb.

Confused by the moon

and the closed rose,

she crawls harlequin walls

where starlight froze

where jasmine twines up

through a sweetness of bones.

The night bee flies alone

while the drones die at home

and few will ever find

what she brings back to the comb

what she keeps in her black throat

stolen from the flower

that closes at dawn.

~August 2016

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 Weekend Challenge

Caveat: Despite the amazing similarity to Magaly Guerrero's poem for her challenge, I honestly came by these words on my own, as I never read anyone's offerings before I write to a prompt (and in fact, 3 days later I am just now reading hers.) Still, it's a crazy coincidence that our two poems should be almost identical in so many ways. I offered to take mine down, but Magaly has graciously said to leave it, so I do, as an illustration of poetic lightning striking twice.

Image: The Tempest:Ariel and the Bee, illus. by Edmond Dulac

(Colors inverted) Fair Use via wikiart.org

The Third City

The Third City

The orange grey sky,

the maple that reels like a punchdrunk boxer

under the fists of the wind,

the metalpunch that's moved in

behind my left eye,
the icemaker home

in the specimen bottle,

floating in a pious pickle, little pig fetuses

taken unborn from my pen;

this is my city of day

but under my bed is a highway
blurring lights, sleeping

up the staircase green hills

blackened by night and a fogfull sky,

from the golden-gated park to

the golden-girled beach looking for your dark eyes,

deeper than the mines, in the City

that needs no name

nightwarm and whispering California,
curled like a child's fingers

round the hand of my heart;

but in the crosshairs of dawn

my feet greyed with sharded dust

from the madman's white temples, I'm here

in the City vanished, the City made flat

as the infinite Horizon of Aten

by the sledge of centuries

remote as the moon

wiped clean of the gods

and all folly of men, home

where the parch-wind and the murderer sun

and endless night and I have come to live forever
in the dead sky, nowhere left to run.

~August 2016 

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Challenge: Get Listed

Notes: The City: A term used around the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California to describe San Francisco.

City Of The Horizon of Aten: "Amarna (Arabic: العمارنة al-‘amārnah‎‎) is an extensive Egyptian archaeological site that represents the remains of the capital city..built by the Pharaoh Akhenaten .. and abandoned shortly after his death (1332 BC). The name for the city employed by the ancient Egyptians is written as Akhetaten  in English transliteration. Akhetaten means "Horizon of the Aten[sun disc] "    ~wikipedia

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Top image: dustbowl sky  © joyannjones 2014

Footer: Small temple of Aten, Amarna, by Einsamer Schütze, via wikimedia commons
manipulated