Judas Hand

 

 

 

 

Judas Hand

( a 55)

 

March howls its broken promise

to erase the extra decades in your bones;

 

you're spent in bed still feeling

the burn that made the ash.

 

The ghostwind cuts

your lips with a dead man's kiss.

 

You forget hummingbirds are coming

like children cured by the sea

 

and wish you'd never bet

on that judas hand.

 

 

 

 

March 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for the Word Garden Word List 

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: a poker hand of black aces and eights with a card in the hole is called a dead man's hand, after the hand held by Wild Bill Hickok when he was shot in the back of the head in Deadwood, Dakota Territory 1876. It's also known as the judas hand. Alternatively, a judas hand can be three tens, representing the thirty pieces of silver Judas Iscariot received for betraying Jesus Christ.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Landscape in Stormy Weather 1885 ©Vincent Van Gogh  Public Domain

Display in Deadwood, South Dakota with the dead man's hand (here given as A♠ A♣ 8♠ 8♣ 9♦) Vidor at English Wikipedia.Public Domain

Four Hours

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Four Hours

 

 

Four cold hours

far from dawn

I sit in

manipulated darkness

waiting to see

what will come lie down in

this coffin of a moment,

 

thieving the spray of rosemary from my hand.

 

I've followed

the spark

all my life

seen it birth and kindle

seen it flicker deep

in eyes dark-sweet as berries

when all other light

 

was taken

 

but there is

nothing in this roving 

black behind the blindfold tonight

not a single reflection glancing bright

off the book of stone; only that absence

which is the certainty of death

its witchlight capricious as hope

 

with no thing fair about it.

 

Why have you

brought me here now

to such circular endings, to

this museum of

stolen seeds, false gods, burned

fields, raped children?

Four hours cold

hold too much

 

too many graves

too much

silence.

 

 

 

November 10 2024 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: This includes words from both this word list and the previous one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Black Bowl, 1907  © George Seeley   Public Domain

Curse the Darkness, ©Thomas Dodd  Fair Use

The First Crack

 

 

 

The First Crack

The first crack

always seems easy to mend,

an almost invisible fracture in

 an otherwise perfect thing; so, too,

 the first pock on the face of the moon.

Yet let a few years pass and her skin

is a ballgown of craters.

So I knew when the peacocks

cracked November with their

idiot's scream, when you spit the last

 blackberry from your stained lips, that the

 first bleach of sun on Rhea's hair

would turn your head, 

make you thirsty

for the black cup of ocean, the yellow

manes of lionesses blowing on the sand,

the kelp smell and the wind-draggled lillies,

leaving me alone in this Pharisee's garden

with nothing but a raddled moon

and the smugness of

peacocks.

November 2021

posted for Shay's

Word List

 

 

 

 

Rhea was a Titaness, a goddess, daughter of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Uranus, the consort of Cronos and mother of Zeus, as well as grandmother of Persephone and Dionysus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Lunar Craterr, 2015, ©Æstronomær shared under a Creative Commons License

Peacock Consorts, © Charles Tunnecliffe   Fair Use

 

Will O The Wisp

 

 

 

 

 

 

Will O The Wisp

 

 I walk tonight

and wish to be

the burn in a lantern;

I walk tonight

in the darkness.

In the darkness

with a black moon

on a path you can't see,

in the darkness

following me.

 

Following me: all

 the days and the years

in bright dresses

swallowing Orion,

coming to me.

Coming to me

with the twist of a moon

gone black in the sky,

coming to me with

wishes and bones.

 

Wishes and bones

are all I am,

and lantern's burn.

Wishes and bones and

fire in darkness.

 

 

 

 

 October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: This isn't a form per se, tho it's something like second cousin once removed to a cascade. I just made it up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Deadlight, 2010 ©joyannjones 

Lantern photo via Sunday Muse   Fair Use

 

Haunt's Road

Haunt's Road

You resurrect

on the long road rolling,

with your homeless soul a

prairie schooner full of dull copper

 blood and moonshine, nightmares wild in 

the harness, their snaffled tongues slipping

into dreams with a slow-steeped poison, 

changing sun to eclipse, good to bad, 

alive to dead in a bone-shaking shock,

down along the wheel ruts

 where the wagons 

used to pass.

By 4:00 a.m. 

you're in the house.

The sound of your last rasping

 breaths liquid with suffering still

floating your medicine show, barking

on the mattress-midway the subtle

vibration of your restless shifts,

 a moan and a gasp on the empty

 crater of our bed, hawking

a snake-oil brewed 

for love, or

death.

I put 

your ashes 

out on the hill by

 the dog who loved us

so you may leave

 this haunt's road,

this dead-end.

 Run with 

her 

beloved, 

painless, free,

 green in cloudy  forest,

prairie wind to wrap

you in a place of

 naked stars.

If you 

knew who I am

you'd never
have come.

 August 2020

posted for

The Sunday Muse

*This poem has been edited since publishing

Images via internet, artists unknown     Fair Use

Guillotine Moon

Guillotine Moon

The moon cuts constant

even as her yellow face

sizzles off electric wind to

 spade-black void,

digging

 the dark day's shadows.

No wandering

in mist or star's orison

takes me far from loss.

No color seems to belong

to empty steam.  The last rain

bent my back like a bow,

mocking the horns of

her pale cipher smile; the moon

knows me better than you.

Our  mirror solitude

overflows with light,

her cratered face

the teacher, her absence a gift

of sapphire night, the pill of

her roundness a febrifuge

for folly's cache of nightmare. In

 this moon-blade guillotine

no one sees, I have placed

the eyeless head

of all my desires.

May/August 2020

posted for earthweal's weekly

challenge, Strange Worlds

Images: Moon and Trees, artist unknown     Fair Use

Memory, 1938, © Rene Magritte               Fair Use

Poem For The Last Day In April

Poem For The Last Day In April

April grates her last

most bitter notes

from quickened buds

flashfrozen in their green.

Mute prisoners doze

gone blind in empty rooms

while gilded trains

freight ghosts to plastic ruins.

The mad things 

dance together nights and noons,

cannibals mouthing drool

as stolen jewels.

For they've caught the hunger here

and now's the time

when hearts are meat,

when mothers' blood is wine,

when gold is god

when little deaths are fine,

when human good is bad

and bad divine.

The gentle break

as hate and fear align;

so here we are--

devoured under April's fallen star.

~April 2020

posted for Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads

Bang,Whimper, Hiss 

and Kerry's Skylover Word List for April, 

Deaths

Process note: My state lifts most coronavirus restrictions tomorrow, regardless of the fact that we have not had a drop in cases for 14 days as per CDC guidelines, and little testing and no contact tracing is being done, all so the serfs can go back to work for their corporate overlords. Insert Poe quote from Mask of the Red Death here.

Images: April Freeze, ©joyannjones 2019

The Plague Hospital, 1900 by Francisco Goya    Public Domain