Song On the Election Of The 45th President

Ode to the Electoral College

on electing the 45th president

It's a killer concept

whose time has come:

 the dollar can talk

without any tongue;

dead pennies for eyes,

 an orange cherry nose,

soft phony fur and invisible toes.

Beat the boys down with your money stick,

today's the day

the billionaires have their picnic.

Out in the dark

without their mums,

they count their money

don't need any thumbs

to shine the machines

while the silly slaves bleed,

to steal all they can

from the hometown of greed.

Throw out the old, the starving and sick.

Today's the day

the billionaires have their picnic.

Forget Karl Marx.

Forget Langston Hughes.

Dance the Titanic

in your Gucci shoes.

Frack all the oil

at the point of a gun.

Step on the bodies

that pay for your fun.

Beat the world down with your money stick;

today's the day

the billionaires have their picnic.

~December 2016

Teddy Bear meme fair use via the internet

Wasp's Nest

Wasp's Nest

A heart hangs now

in the center of winter

a vacant nest

built of poison and paper

empty celled

where each lover lingered

in change, a drone to the flame

till ending's escape.

A collection

of spaces, 

exit wounds, dead places 

to make recollection's ruinous progression,

 first conceiving to last leaving,

a Fibonacci hanging swaying;

a summer home buzzing connection

now shelled and blown

on the white breath of the North

while the ambitious maker,

light as that empty cold

quickly curling her legs, 

lays down her husk on the crackled grass

~December 2016

posted for real toads 

21 lines for Kerry's   Final Twilight 

and some rather surreal musical comic relief:

Image: author unknown, fair use via the internet

The Beach

The Beach

Here in the dry constellations,

Orion winters in the blue west, the

Drinking Gourd spills silver on the void, and

the Seven Sisters crowd together, 

quilting the smothering night.

I miss the beach.

I miss the salt, I miss the sweet

curled wave that rolled the wind

in a gestured wand

of air and water,

joining two lurching things

ungainly in their solitary progress,

shelled and crabbed in solitude

into one smooth moving beast

hip to hip, stride for stride

tandemed untarnished

because you chose to throw

your arm around my neck

and let us spin

in the eddy, as the tide

ran out, till we were dizzy

and all the slipping stars

cleared the boards and moved

their heavy banquet

to our eyes.

~December 2016

Images: The Enchanted Beach with Three Fluid Graces, 1950 Salvidor Dali, Detail. Fair use

Elenita At The Beach, Asturia, 1903, by Joaquin Sorolla Public domain

The Winter Cabin

by Jenny Leslie

The Winter Cabin

Ghosts on the floor,

crumpled at the fortieth failure,

tousled and tossed down to

decorate dead December.

They're waiting unread

in the winter cabin

where the plague has been

and gone;

only goodbye

left of all their words;

only a snow-flaked feather

remembers the bluebirds

too small to save the world.

~December 2016

posted for  real toads

A Snow Birthed Tale in 13 lines

for my friend Magaly

Thanks to Jenny Leslie for the kind use of her image.

Last Act

Last Act

A pared face, a false peel, a sliver

above silver seamed stars;

who will call the waters

now that we've broken the moon?

In the windowed night,

 love's widow
walks her hushed graveyard,
where the white skirts of memory

 rustle around the turn.

Who can say

what time it is; only that time

never stops.

 ~November 2016

posted for real toads

Flash 55 Plus

Note: I cheated here and used the first 55 words of a longer poem, hoping it stands alright alone--anyway, only for those interested, here is the rest of the piece:

 Last Act

...

Who can say

what time it is; only that time

never stops.

 

Answer

the midnight door--perhaps a dead king 

disinters to go dancing,
or the palest child, cold,
is offering in the dark

a chance to finally pay your debt;

hear a script with no speaker,

a performance careless of audience,
a whole cosmos
that gestures and moves

as the void declaims before it,
tapping its teeth in the final soliloquy.

All we are is cut from this paper,
cellophane over the footlights.

Who is that 

singing by starlight

now that the players have gone?

~November 2016

Images: Night, 1905, by Mikalojus Ciurlionis Public domain 
via wikiart.org 

A Graveyard in the Tyrol, 1914, by John Singer Sargent  Public domain 
via wikiart.org

Both images slightly manipulated.

White Bird In Snow

White Bird In Snow

This unsleeping night

remembers winter for me

as it remembers the January hour

I was born, seeing past the still

green curl of April's exhausted leaf

the chill glassful of north wind,

so delicately sipped now

before the drowning.

It knows my name, it calls me

winter girl, drifted witch, 

snow-woman globed from rolled

frozen fog, compressed cloud wrack,
sentinel-eyed and carrot-beaked,
ice fingers melted then
rigid again around

a hollow pen;

bent wrist, bent back, ages

old, so old not even an ash-furred coal

glows from the parsed fire in my pale

flattened face.

The sleepless night

rustles with husks and remains;

a coyote stutters his hunger 

to the planked stars

and here where all things pass,

long sleep comes down the grass
where I wait

invisible and surprised

as a white bird

in October snow.

~October/November 2016

for Brendan at real toads 

from a still, white place

 






Images: House in Snow, 1890-94, by John Henry Twatcham
White Birds in Snow, by Ohara Koson
Public domain.