Pandaemonium

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pandaemonium

 

 

 

Lucifer's a pudgy angel now,

carrying around a clockwork hook.

He glistens like the night-sweat of

a troupe of drunkard clowns.

The hook is busy swinging in one hand,

heavy and sharp, catching this,

piercing that, while he smiles,

extending with ersatz camaraderie

 

the other flat, empty palm. I would

send him a letter, but

he's disappeared all the pens

commandeered the keyboards

burnt down the paper mills,

so it can only be written

on tombstones with a broken crucifix in

my blood, and it's doubtful he will read.

 

I need my blood

for better things, like

watering the apple blossoms

shot pink with spring fire, and

bleeding a banner with a new chorus

 for the mongrel choir

throat singing back to him the

National Anathema. 

 

 

February 2025

 

Posted For Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

Pandæmonium ...is the capital of Hell in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost...The name stems from the Greek pan (παν), meaning 'all' or 'every', and daimónion (δαιμόνιον), a diminutive form meaning 'little spirit', 'little angel', or, as Christians interpreted it, 'little daemon'...Pandæmonium thus roughly translates as "All Demons"—but can also be interpreted as Pandemoneios or 'all-demon-place'..John Milton invented the name in Paradise Lost (1667), as "A solemn Council forthwith to be held at Pandæmonium, the high Capitol, of Satan and his Peers" ~wikipedia

 

Throat singing

Images: Pandemonium, 1841, ©John Martin

The Fall Of The Rebel Angels, 1562 © Pieter Bruegel the Elder 

Sabbat

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sabbat

 

 

 

I saw the moon in the devil's eye

when October rode in on her horse of bone.

The night began to weave the sky

dark and darker, cold and high,

in deep black strands from a witch's comb.

The heart of a bird pierced on a knife

hides a ferric flute and a rusted ladle.

Her blue feathers dropping, her downy white,

leave her butterfly bones to the freeze in the night

while the moon shines bright in the devil's cradle.

Nine shadows come and then three more

to swing five times round the balefire's flare.

The wind robs the roof and opens the door,

puts a wet salt skin on the bedroom floor,

slips on a sorrow too old for despair.

Wash him with blood and dry him with silver.

Float him away on a lye-thick river.

Cross his red forehead with your gnostic brand

but the moon still shines from the devil's hand.

 

 

~October 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List at

Shay's Word Garden 

where she asks us for a bit of rhyme this week

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Walpurgisnacht,© 1923 by Heinrich Kley  Public Domain

Skullshot © joyannjones

 

Where The Mad King Disposes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where The Mad King Disposes

 

 

 

Asleep as far as Night's pen clerks

its long lined lists, where nothing we know is king,

a winter king who never works;

 

still there I see what the mad fool chooses,

veiled and warped with the sharpest taking.

The blue snow seems full of the light it loses

 

forming your face from the flat candle flame,

blowing your form in the billowing drapes,

come back from the dead with a stranger's name.

 

Asleep is a far land laked lucid and deep,

iced out by the ghosts of too many fades.

Where's the sun's blood to break my sleep,

where's the warm substance the shadow makes? 

 

 

 

 

 

~August, 2024

posted for WGWord List

Image from La Chute de la Maison Usher, 1928   Public Domain

 

 

 

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

Age of Forfeit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Age of Forfeit

 

 

"..I deny the tastes and habits of the age.

 I am its punk debauche..A fierce lampoon

seeking to inherit what is necessary to forfeit.." 

~1959, Gregory Corso

 

 

 

Ten years old in '59

learning how to eat plastic

how to steal the eyes

of sorrow, how to watch the TV box

build the marshmallow engines of dreams;

learning how to flip forward and back,

an acrobat of lies, an appearance nun, bride-to-be of

Christ's money, of necrotic success, of tears

that can only come out at night.

Ten years old in '59

the decade of glorious acquisition,

born from war and set to marinate in flag-juice,

to memorize the ABC's: Avarice, Bombast, Consumption

at all costs. Eat cake on your birthday. Ignore

the bleached bones of beauty floating

in your corn flakes, the ghost-children, your peers,

who howled as they died in the split atom's vomit.

Don't look at

the malice behind the service.

Don't go too far. Don't grow your hair

or wander in the ruins of compassion;

there's no money there. Don't ask why you're 

starving on plenty, little girl, little pawn. Learn

to iron a shirt, feed the baby, please your man, work

in the cafe, at the office, behind the 

dimestore counter selling blood-paste 

for lyrically lying lips

or you'll be the joke,

the reject, the outcast forever

running for your life.

 

 

December 2021

 

 

 

 

posted for

Shay's Word List

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Fifties photographs, courtesy of Soren Larsen, © Frank Larson   Fair Use

 

Flash Fiction 55 Special April Edition #3

"Another Friday, another 55 words to chronicle the long march, the wild hunt, the dance of the living and dead. We come to remember a man who had more to give than take from the world of blogging, Galen Hayes, and to explore the meme he brought us as the world turns around us in its ceaseless change.

There are no rules, except to write 55 words of prose or poetry--no more, no less, and link them in the comments below between Friday and Sunday morning for myself and others to read."

I wrote this intro over two years ago but it seems even more apt today, plus I wanted to include Galen, as I always remember him on these days.

Same rules, as above. The prompt will be live from Friday midnight to Sunday at 4:00 PM 

~ * ~

Here is my 55:

 Caviar At Two In The Morning

The moon

fogs the spectacles of night,

fuzzes the stampeding stars;

kinder than morning's hot tongue, who

flicks them inside her like shad-roe.

Tear-soak

wets fever's stiff face,

mines gold from the cold-plated light

gone dead in the eyes of old players

drowned in the wellspring of midnight

who sleep but can only dream nightmares.

April 2020

Images: Moonrise, Beaumarais  © Clarice Becket   Fair Use

Author and title unknown via internet tagged Coven of Ceridwen   Fair Use

 

Killer

Killer

Why do you come 

to stand in the dark kitchen, eyes

dull as shrapnel, dangling

your .22 from your hand

like a femur, no silver on you,

charity-thin?

You were the one

who wouldn't quit what killed you.

You were the one

who knew everything first.

Why do you hold

the rifle so tightly? 

I tried to save

all I could of you,

worried at the

pain when it came

with twelve

teeth of morphine, but

you screamed  

yourself away in

that minute I forgot.

I see

you still watch me

like a tilted tombstone,

staring flat-eyed, eternal

as a ghost lion's

hunger. 

Don't

drop the gun to 

hold out your hand.

 

April 2020

a  bit of surreal dream for earthweal's

Open Link

Just a reminder: On some word press blogs my comments are still disappearing. Please check your spam folder.

Images, both Untitled, © Zdzislaw Beksinki    Fair Use