Wither

 

 

 

 

 

 Wither

 

 

 

I feel an ending

traveling through my bones.

It stops for gas

just short of my liver,

looks for some diversion

 

a roadside attraction

 

as it spreads a cloth

under an infested juniper,

making a picnic of fingernails

and rheum, mumbling,

"Damn the bagworms."

How long time seems

 

in this heat-strangled house

carpentered by a coffinmaker sun,

with no appetite for increasing,

no single cell willing

to grow and not die.

 

We gracelessly surrender

 

to the wither

of merciless azure. Even the land,

with its skin drawn taut

as a snake's winding sheet

drying in August's crinkled moult,

 

knows when to quit.

 

The newborn rain comes,

leaves flush and spin;

when this red shambled summer

finds its cold-spangled grave,

 someone will laugh

up a pumpkin-spiced sleeve

 

under feckless wild stars

 

while the goldenrod blooms and my ending

takes a short vacation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Summer's End

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Gas, 1940 ©Edward Hopper      Fair Use

Native Oklahoma Goldenrod, via okprairie on Pinterest  Fair Use

 

 

 

Cricket Cage

Cricket Cage

When I fell

I came belly to belly

with gravity's captain.

I lay curled, crying

unable to rise, waiting for

your lipless apparition to come for me

to spin me up from the earth,

light on the snow of molting swans

but nothing came.

I was bound in

distorted hours, a prisoner canary

crammed into a cricket's cage,

whose solitude has not improved her song

whose circle of bamboo

bars catches fire

whose moonless screams

won't spread her charring wings.

I wept the rasp

of my beggar's chant;

for release,

for something more,

something without tears

that lives behind the moment

when all the universe was fragrant

with life's confusion, but

nothing came.

Only the root born

of dissolution pierced my spine

with its sharp shoots, as it pierces

each bloody battlefield

where

only the dead

have seen the end of war.

January 2020

Disclaimer: The final couplet is not mine, but a rendering of a quote often attributed to Plato, as in a speech by General Douglas MacArthur in May, 1962, but is actually by George Santayana, from his Soliloquies in England (1924)

posted for Kerry's January word list

Image of cricket cage via internet, author unknown, manipulated. Fair Use

Lacunal Dialectic

Lacunal Dialectic

They gave the wide-eyed eccentric

the wild electric

because

there's a  price for every metric,

every loggorheic epic

showing we pull from world-bone

a hole

that goes systemic,  

and fill it,

anthropocentric.

So they made

his dialogue enteric,

scaled to monosyllabic

microbes:


hurt            love           scream          want

                           dead

changed everything he said

and killed his head.

~August 2016

posted for    real toads

Flash 55 Plus

Notes: I often used to add abstruse words to my 55's to tease the G-Man, who would pretend he didn't get it, but of course, we knew better. So this one in particular, despite its rather grim subject matter, made me remember him.

"Ernest Hemingway, American author, committed suicide shortly after ECT at the Mayo Clinic in 1961. He is reported to have said to his biographer, "Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient...." ~wikipedia

Electro-convulsive therapy (electro-shock) is still considered a valid treatment for depression and other mental illness, despite mixed evidence of its effectiveness, and can still be administered without consent in some situations. You can find a list of other famous people who have undergone it HERE.





Top image: Brain, author unknown,  source
Footer: 'A Bergonic chair, a device "for giving general electric treatment for psychological effect, in psycho-neurotic cases", according to original photo description. World War I era.'~ via wikimedia 

Gravity

Gravity

"when I do fall/I'll be glad to go..."
~Jesse Winchester

Gravity

is not a friend

to planets in shards

to mud-sided hills

or its opposite,

frivolity.

It's a cliff-pusher, 

a  shrinker, a compressor

 able to blow every ruffle out

even as it rucks skin into pleats

 and blind alleys, an old sack under

its shuffled foot.

When hunger 

looks out of your eyes

seriously smiling,

there is always a force
behind the aspect

opposing

that works to make

me faceless,

out of nourishment;

one final bounce
of the deflated ball

landing after its long fall.

~March 2016

posted for        real toads

Challenge: Get Listed 

Photo: Personal Moonscape, © joyannjones 2015

Down On The Coast

Down on the Coast

Three ragged rocks in the bay of the heart

smoothed and seamed by the tailoring spray

now pressed flat as the long wave fades

the water stills, the tide splays

with all its fleery flotsam,

ambergris and driftwood caveats
pulled to deeper decay.

Eleven pouting lemons in a cobalt blue bowl,
secret and sullen as xanthic mollusks,

bitter suns curdling morning to fractions

piercing the tongue with soured satisfactions,

as if to say I told you so

but you just had to 

keep adding sugar.

In the dim gaslight of a half-sincere dream

the medium saw the house burn down, beam

by beam, red walls glow to nothing, saw drawn

in charcoal ectoplasm all the burnt debris--
daguerreotypes of she, of thee

wet framed in blackened ash, 

ruined before time for tea.

Tonight I dream your absinthe aftertaste

gulping loss, coughing up your waste
choking on the acrid gnosis
of each indifferent clumsy phasing

in and out, fractured in either placing,

making and unmaking 

the mask of a sailor's face.

Three rocks in the bay of the heart;

name them as you please or will, so

smoothed and seamed in glinting calm,

blue-ruffled in a bay without a mark;
still mirrors lit by day that in the dark

will founder any cockswain lost at sea

who seeks to come to anchor in that lee.

~May 2012

revised December 2015

Reposted for  real toads

 

Tuesday Platform

Nothing to do with the holidays, just an old wash of words as the pale winter sun enters Capricorn.

Image: I've once again borrowed the work of my friend Petteri Sulonen. Thanks, Petteri, as always for the use of this shot:

Calm Day, by Petteri Sulonen on flick'r

Petteri's photostream

Pyrexia Eclipsed

Pyrexia Eclipsed

Clouds' fists clip the edge

of the china moon; or is it just
his tooth that's chipped, souvenir

of one too many starroom brawls?
Half-cracked, he leers wobbling

down, an over-wise drunk with a secret to tell

to a bored constellation of strangers;

the jukebox night's come unplugged,
and it's stifling as a cave where only

the cold susurrus of blood surfs the ear, or a dream
where the hiss of scratched vinyl

deliriously sputters on.

I sit on my tipped chair by the overturned sky,

in the kitchen of my long disease, kitten-weak, quite ready

to listen to the blasted moon, but even drunk and

crackled, he's not talking. We must have quarreled,

back when I had those spasms. The moon is not
the most patient nurse, especially when
he's had a few, and he knows how to hold
a meteoric grudge. I shouldn't have heaved

all that space debris,  peevish in
my convalescent's rage.

Tertian, quartan, nocturnal,
venal & venereal; they say I'm cured
of all my fevers but the quotidian;

It seems I must be well in this pocked penumbra,

a healthy husk, sucked dry of every juice,
nursing a hypocrite's disapproval
of the winking drunkard moon.

~April 2015

Poem 28 for April

Pyrexia: a technical name for fever

Images, both Untitled, by Zladislav Beksinski
Fair use via wikiart.org