Aardvark

 

 

 

 Aardvark

 

"..Don't put on any airs when you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue.

They got some hungry women there and they'll really make a mess out of you..."

~Bob Dylan, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

 

 

 

What were you to me back then,

with your tumbled hair and tequila?

Even Dali had his aardvark, led uncomplaining

 

through the dirty streets of Paris,

a glass-globe feast for insatiable eyes.

Impossible to know

what I was to you.

Your face was hinged,

 

a door at times standing open,

cracked to show the arid

 

arabesques of spiders 

smiling in Poe's palace. Others

locked and bolted, bare and flash

 

as clean brass before it's engraved.

All I remember is you held me

like diamonds worked into your arms' ring

there in the tedium of the shelter

among the do-gooders and the riffraff.

 

The cardboard walls flexed with our love

but when I slipped the rhinestone lead

from your sleek throat

 

you ran

and the streets of Paris

emptied.

~August 2024

 

 

 

 

 

Process note: The photo of Dali shown actually is of he and his pet anteater. Poetic license.

 

 

posted for WG Word List at

Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Dali takes his anteater for a stroll in Paris, 1969    Public Domain

The Smiling Spider, 1887, Odillon Redon, Louvre, Paris    Public Domain

Mantis In The Kitchen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mantis In The Kitchen

 

 

"A name is the shortest form of a spell."

~Anonymous

 

 

 

The mantis in the kitchen

knows my name. He

stares with ice eyes glistening,

watches me

watches me

tilts his mild triangular 

faceted face

as if to say, I'm busy,

but later..

 

I'm never alone for 

the things you've possessed

surround me,

watching me

watching me,

mingling our names

in an insect clatter.

 

The ice eyes meet the fate

of all our glaciers. The mantis 

pales and shrinks as

we liquefy in the heat

where even names melt,

leaving a duplicitous aquavit;

the honey of sweet

 

oblivion

or

the vinegar

of change.

 

 

~August 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Open Link

at dVerse Poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Akvavit or aquavit..is a distilled spirit that is principally produced in Scandinavia, where it has been produced since the 15th century. Akvavit is distilled from grain and potatoes, and is flavoured with a variety of herbs. ~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Praying Mantis In Morning Light With Chai ©3D Storyteller All Rights Reserved Fair Use

Cannibalism Of The Praying Mantis Of Lautremont, 1934 © Salvador Dali    Fair Use

 

The Gold Afterburn

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Gold Afterburn

 

 

 

Salvadore, Frida 

and Vincent

go into a bar.

This is America. 

They're promptly 

asked

to leave.

 

The car was as full

of prayer and profanity

as Texas sky is full

of planets and stars

floating in smoke

and blue

bloody tears.

 

Cigarettes, flaming giraffes

and your buzzsaw breath

tipped the lightning jug

over all our

constellations.

The story dissolved

the map; no surprise

everyone got lost.

 

A wheel or two

may have fallen off

in the gold

 afterburn,

and the halos,

 

but all you need to

roll on that road 

is an engine that burns

the laughter
of

the mad.

 

 

October 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Flames, They Call  © Salvadore Dali, 1942   Fair Use

Image via internet, author and title unknown     Fair Use

Camellia

Camellia

"...And a breath of lemon filled the vast moment/as the wind became a flower of gauze..."

~from Nocturnes from the Window, by Federico Garcia Lorca

I am behind the wall now

wearing red and a window.

I will be safe

if you see through me

only white sky, the almond tree

and grass.

I wore the mask til blood

stained through

the sting of a flower; it

told too much with its 

sibilant drip. That 

was not safe.

I am a camellia from

snow country, cut

at the stem, dying in aqua vitae,

a fragrance passing citrus

through your room. I will be safe

when the last petals

cover my cast off mask.

May 2020

posted for The Sunday Muse

I have also used several words from Kerry O'Connor's

Skylover Word List For May

Images: A Distant Future, © Raluca Caragea   Fair Use

Yellow Roses in a Vase, 1882, by Gustave Caillebotte, manipulated    Public Domain

Birthday Moonsong

Birthday Moonsong

Born  in the wolf moon,

at century's half-crack,

before the moving shadow box

before the singing pocket, the talking hand--

disjecta  membra of a war and peace,

nuclear snowflake crystaled in the cold aftermath,

fallout caught and whirled up

by black arms of concrete

into the sweet dance of chemical fog;

all around me

blackbirds falling

from the sky like almanacs

pages open to the gift of silent prophecy

and in the mirror, a white raven

solitary,
a meal, a target, a danger

to the flock, burning the eye like
a scarlet poppy

on a gravemound, or

a working girl unbuttoned

hungover 

in the convent.

* * *

In the house

at the edge of the world,

with the wolf moon low in the west,

its yellow eye on the scattering stars,

its tongue longing

for the fat white hams of Venus,

the north wind sleets the window glass

bitter green, rattling the taste

of old snow and bad design; the wolf moon

the hunger moon,
stops to lap

pooled pink from blood-red Mars,

swells its belly 

with faltering stars, the small and weak
gnawing them out one by one as I hum

dusting the ape statuettes, the

draped clocks, perplexed still

that the empty chair

stays empty another winter,

while the fire throws white shadows,

while ghosts fall with the snow.

~January 2015

A repost for my birthday.

Images:Wolf Dog, 1976 © Jamie Wyrth  Fair Use

The Snow Queen Flies Through The Winter Night, by Edmund Dulac  Fair Use

Friday 55 September 15 2017

Greetings, fellow travelers, and welcome to this Friday journey  which follows gleefully in the footsteps of those who blazed the trail in this unique short form for celebrating words--55 of them, to be exact--and the writers who work with them. Should you choose to join me, you pick the mood, you pick the style--light, dark, free verse, formed poetry, prose fiction or non-fiction, or any combination thereof, so long as the end result is 55 words, no more, no less. Post a link to your 55 in the comments, and I will most gladly visit to see what you have wrought and, of course, provide wishes for a kickass weekend.


As always, comment moderation is on to weed out bots, ego-freaks, dilettantes and trolls.

So, without further ado, my 55 for this week:

The Apple of My Eye

The jade moon canted slant,

fruit flew through the air;

I wore only black

with white-painted lips.

 I danced in your shadow

or on your sharp teeth,

tongued into oblivion;

an unseated eye

in a caramel apple,

wobbled in chaos

by a sticky-fingered brat

back when love played
at Surrealism

and twirled its Dali mustache.

~September 2017

 For background on this meme, and the man who created it, Galen Hayes, go here.

 Note: For me this meme will always be about getting together with friends and having fun, but I want to emphasize that there are no strings, nothing obligatory, no rounds to make except those you feel up for--use your 55 to connect if you so desire, or simply as a vehicle to provide that nudge when you're stuck, the challenge to be concise, a fillip of honed idea to take you into the weekend. There's nothing wrong with reaching out to support others (except when it strangles the desire to participate at all) but many many sites exist for that, so here it is purely optional. 

Image: The Eye, 1945, © Salvador Dali

Talking To The Corner

Talking To The Corner

Up the nowhere ladder only

to slip on the bottom hours,
to push the first reverse

abrupt turn of the key

dangling eternity

from unwinding entropy--

but still

but still

--one has only memory

against the dark, the data
of  dada that
comes dwindling in.

It's a time of closing

a trance time, a folding, a looking away

from an edge inlaid with endings

where the only beginning

is bending the limits

of the bloody art

of letting go.

~December 2015

posted for    real toads

Get Listed

Dada: a nihilistic artistic movement of the early 20th century in W Europe and the US, founded on principles of irrationality, incongruity, and irreverence towards accepted aesthetic criteria

~Collins British Dictionary

Photo: Tristan Tzara, 1921, by Man Ray

Fair use via wikiart.org