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

Earthbound Fish

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Earthbound Fish

 

 

It wants to fly

it does

or at least swim

but melancholy never made 

a path to waves or sky

any more than 

Escher's tessellations made

a living

school of fish. They only made

wallpaper

or a fish-dance of replicated cells

that might be somehow the

mute components

of a self-eating brain.

 

It needs wings

that want to be brushes,

that will refresh the distempered

canvas from black

to floating clouds.

Feathers are only clouds, after all,

air things clipped and pressed

into Icarus-wax, 

so why not?

But the paint is caked and dry,

feather-breaking,

and the staggered beating

 like an old heart

that stumbles itself into silence.

Meanwhile ten thousand starlings

live in their moving mosaic, 

a matrix of cloud,

a canvas

of pure flight

from earthdark to light;

 

it wants it wants

 so much

to fly.

September 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Fish wallpaper by M.C. Escher, courtesy of  Etoffe

Starling murmuration over Scotland, no attribution given. Via internet  Fair Use 

Dancing With Crabs

 

Dancing with Crabs

Little crabling bastard

what makes you think
you matter

 

a million like you

hatched a day

for the chef to batter.

You chase what you can’t have;

you get what you won’t own,

a tin can for a hat

 

a scuttle down the sand

sideways slow alone

to lose what you never had.

 Little crabling baby

you know that you’re
half crazy

to want what women have

to love what makes you mad;

to dance, a hermit crab

 

in a white parade of swans.

Little baby crabling

ballet's not for crustaceans.

So borrow from the oyster

loneliness the pearl

that adorns any station.

Last Day of November 

2011, revised August 2023

posted for Lonely Town

at desperate poets

Header Photo: Black Eyed Hermit Crab by Dan Hershman on flick'r

Footer Photo:  Swan Lake by Bella Lago on flick'r

Both shared under Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

On The Bright Turning Page

 

 

 

 

 

On The Bright Turning Page

 (A sonnet)

 

On the bright turning page of spring's uproar

when the ferry sailed from day to dreadful night

with one upon the deck, one left on shore,

an annotation jotted down in stricken twilight,

I heard the winter laugh like truculent swans,

as white lilies bobbed their lovely idiot heads;

I saw a volume could be made of broken bonds,

the long ballad of peace sent hungry to its bed.

 

The bear brings ash upon its ailing breath

when fire flies from frightened children's hands.

When two forces clash in a quarrel to the death

no stone, no garden wall or house can stand;

 

but awash in azure sky, flowers of the sun

grow wild beneath the smell of smoke and guns.

 

 

 

 

 March, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted  in solidarity with Ukraine

for Shay's Word List #15:

Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: many of Millay's poems are sonnets, and she often used the first line as her title. I've borrowed that stylistic aspect here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Lilies, © Constantin Artachino     Fair Use

Sunflower, 1965 © Georgia O'Keefe           Fair Use

The Invisible Man

 

 

 

 

 

The Invisible Man

 

 

To know you is

to never know you, closed

in your dead moth coat,

last century's hat

and shades, mummy's face

empty when unwrapped as yesterday' cup,

all feeling spilled on ground that sucks it dry.

To know you is

to live life in the dark

to look but never

find, feeling forward,

reaching, slipping, hands

fumbling out to nothing as if I'm blind;

to know you is to know the mirror's lie.

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Poetics

at dVerse Poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This poem is written in the duodora form. See above link for description.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Claude Raines as The Invisible Man, 1933    Public Domain

 

 

Surrender

 

Surrender

"...this is the way the world ends/not with a bang but a whimper." ~T.S.Elliot

 

 

You've come a long way

to see me slip my skin

across the star-burrowed sky

past Cassiopeia's iron chair

past the spear of Orion

to the killing floor.

 

You've come for the show

that must always go on

to see my hair burning trees

on my lips the black hole

night for my breath

dripping acid rain.

 

A big bang for your buck

now the requisite whimper

that comes in the dark

with the last surrender.

I wanted to stay just

a little bit longer

 

but everything wavers

when fate breaks her lamp.

October 2020

posted for 

The Sunday Muse

Images: California Wildfires From Space © NASA Scott Kelly Fair Use

Title unknown © Mathew Brohder via Internet Fair Use

Friday Flash 55 For July 2020

Welcome once again to the 55, all. It has been an eventful month, and also a month mired in chaos and distemper. This weekend we get together to add our words to the ongoing pile of all our laments and celebrations, in the form of 55 words, no more, no less. We also do it to remember Galen Hayes, the originator of this meme, as we continue to miss his ever-humorous and supportive presence, as we do all the kickass weekends that seem so long ago. 

The rules are unchanged--set down your thoughts in a poem, piece of flash fiction or prose poetry on any subject, in exactly 55 words. 

Post the url of the result in the comments below and I will be by to read the result.For those to whom words are coming with difficulty, your absence is forgiven from the heart.

The 55 begins at  Thursday midnight and will last til Sunday at 4:00 PM CST.

~*~

Here is my own effort

July in America

The tune that plays tonight

I cannot carry.

 Voice

cracks while sirens

 robot-howl it

clearer, louder:

the ape-rebooted's song

of darkness

coming.

July's made 

of screams 

and broken light, of

cloudy poison rising, eyes

shucked oysters

poached in acid tides.

Stars fall dim,

 rimmed

with bleeding innocence;

 this copper-salt rain 

will never wash 

us clean.

July 2020

Images: Tear Gas in Portland, Oregon  Getty Images  Fair Use

Untitled , © Zdzisław Beksiński   Fair Use