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 

Maleficium

 

 

 

 

 Maleficium

 

 

 

 

By dark lantern, by crimson candle, in

an absence floating in wine without bread,

the Necromancer toasts in mandrake hopes

the golden miracles of his dead.

 

His chamber is fumed with dubious pasts, an

offering's smoke where the last choke occurred.

His breath has gone dry as his corpse-woman's eye,

ceremonially opened with a theurgic word.

 

But that eggshell gaze is blind as stone, her

songs of the oriole fluttered away.

The nods of owls and mnemonic howls

work a brittle sequence no cello can play.

 

The final shriek puts grit in the lens, so

it never divines what time's drown erased.

The owl and the oriole dice for his soul;

every spirit that rises wears his own face.

 

In my dream you've left fetches and dust behind.

You stand by the door of a bridge's arc,

the wild blue river in flight from your quiver,

your shades all spent arrows that killed their marks.

 

 

 

 

February 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Necromancy: "..the practice of magic involving communication with the dead by summoning their spirits as apparitions or visions for the purpose of divination.." ~wikipedia

Maleficium: "the practice of malevolent magic, derived from casting lots as a means of divining the future in the ancient Mediterranean world"~wikipedia

Theurgy:".. the ritual practices associated with the invocation or evocation of the presence of one or more deities..."~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Necrophile. 1965, ©Jean Benoit        Public Domain

The Blind Man of Toledo, 1906, ©Joaquin Sorolla       Public Domain

 

 

 

Mahakali's Kiss

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mahakali's Kiss

 

 

I'm told it rained on the day she was born,

a January Sunday on streets of snow

that melted away like the life she wore,

like time's black kiss, like a riot of crows.

She makes each thing with a blind innocence

that starts a smolder in a long-dry field

just to leave an ash that cannot rest

til love itself belongs to the dead.

So fill your mouths with her acid, boys,

that seems to taste as sweet as mead.

Fill your arms with her empty husk

whose midnight touch will make you bleed

and when lips rot and skin weeps red

remember her smile and the charm she said

to reap your heart in her willow bed

where she dies of cold as soon as she's fed.

 

 

 

December 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted for the Word Garden Word List 

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process notes:  Mahakali means 'Great Kali,' and is the honorific title of the Hindu goddess of Time, Death and Liberation, Kali, whose name translates as "she who is black" or "she who is the ruler of time." wikipedia: "Mahakali, in Sanskrit, is etymologically the feminized variant of Mahakala or Great Time (which is interpreted also as Death). Mahakali...serves as the agent who allows the cosmic order to be restored.." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image: Goddess Mahakali, Delhi Museum via wikipedia   Public Domain

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

 

The Infernal Operator

 

 

The Infernal Operator

The incubus is having

another rough night;

a bitter bell keeps ringing

between his horns, foreign, 

off-tempo, pounding like

the gallop of a three-legged horse,

or the arrhythmic crash of cambered granite

tumbling from a fallen cathedral,

and to top it off

there's an angel in the fire,

feathers burning acrid, ashy black,

dialing, dialing the clouds, asking 

the great silence left when the clacking

rotary wheel cogs home: Where is the bird-winged host, 

my alabaster birth brothers, the holy
triune fatherspiritson
to pull me out?

The incubus knows the angel

has landed in the wrong fireplace for this,

yet still he wishes

it would happen, to see at last a miracle 

not born of tormented flesh 

or the familiar's lascivious alembics,

 

and also so the noise would stop,

the pale, luminous eyes round as blue worlds

cease following him

from window to window as

he tries frantically to let out the stink.

Doesn't it care, this minister of grace, that

the incessant ringing, the billowing smoke

of its rendered virtue, distract him 

from his greatest opus?

(50 Shades of Damnation,

to be published next spring.)

Why doesn't its everpresent

compassionate disaster master save it?

Instead it burns and burns

as the phone rings on unanswered,

sweetly smiling, staring at him 

as if the lines weren't down

in a world on fire;

as if there was something

he could do.

 

 

 

~October 2015, lightly revised June 2023 

 

 

 

 

  

I couldn't as yet find any angels to wrestle, but I do have the incubus and his quandary here.(To read poems in this series, click the eponymous tag.)

posted for Wrestling Angels at desperate poets

 

 

 

Images by Salvador Dali, Fair Use via wikart.org

Top:Debris of an Autobile Gives Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone, 1938

Lobster Telephone, 1938

August in America 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

August in America 2022

 

 

August is

a box of eyes

closed

pretending there is no

stab of light

a beach of scalded feet

of knees scraped raw on underwater sand

bleeding a string of dead flowers

and too many ants.

May sang once I remember

November wailed but August

holds a hot hand

over summer's mouth stifling sweat-damp

nights of thirst with silent fever 

like a rash

of rumors

 hallucinations of

drowning rain.

No one wants August

to do anything but leave

even if it means red winter

but it stays

only peeling like old paint

spreading like the sour smell

of smoke

in a burned house

backbuilt from blood and sickness

where even the ants

die by fire.

 

 

August 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets Poetics:

Sometimes August isn't Recognized

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Enchanted Beach, 1950 © Salvador Dali   Fair Use

Ants © Dunja Zubak via satchiart.com   All Rights Reserved   Fair Use

Asylum

 

 

 

 

"..Let the doctor and the lawyer do as much as they can.
Let the springtime begin, let the boy become a man.
I have wasted too much time 

just to sing you this sad song..."~James Taylor, 1971 

 

 

 

Asylum

 

 

 

In the madhouse

on beds of daggers

we slept like crickets

chirping to ourselves

while they tried their best

to make us cannibals.

 

The nuns were worse than

lawyers, praying like accordions,

tracking their sins into our soft 

wax skulls, wheezing like roosters

when one of us cried, laying the greasy ribs

of Jesus on our plates.

They kept you behind

door number six. I'd go to you

with a stolen key, when the noon

smelled bright as carnations, 

when the nights were

more purple than the jacarandas.

 

You spoke of your father

dead of snakebite,

a clockwork marvel with

his million-dollar suit of skin,

and your mother

with the viper between her lips.

I remember your kiss

astringent with reason

as bitter lemons, and the way

your hair blew back from

your dog-brown eyes like poisonous

smoke from the oleanders.

I thought these things

as beautiful as angels

whispering in the dahlias

when I was lost in the asylum,

when the doctors did all they could

to see that we ate each other

down to the bone.

April 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Inspired by the words of Federico Garcia Lorca,

and a dream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Madhouse, 1812-1814 © Francisco Goya  Public Domain

Vase with Carnations, 1886, © Vincent Van Gogh    Public Domain 

 

Empty

 

 

 

 

 "Hell is empty and all the Devils are here." ~William Shakespeare

 

Empty

(a 55)

 

The door to

the henhouse is

always unlocked

for inside there are

only wind eggs.

 

The Fall 

is a tryptich:

blackness, dead hearts,

disingenuous calculations. At

the apex

of chaos we have our

decumbiture, 

no thaumaturgy created

cures corrupted

senescence.

Don't

 turn the key

to lock in nothing; 

just open the door

for the foxes.

 

 

 

November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On November 19th, 2021, Kyle Rittenhouse, 18, was acquitted of 5 counts of homicide for the August 25th 2020 murders of two men and the attempted murder of a third. The men were protesting the shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake, by a white police officer in Wisconsin. The jury ruled that Rittenhouse, who crossed state lines with an assault weapon to "protect property" not belonging to him, acted in self-defense.

 

 

 

wind egg: an unimpregnated, yolkless, or imperfect egg ...an egg with a soft noncalcareous shell

decumbiture:1 obsolete : confinement to a sickbed. 2a : the time of taking to one's bed from sickness. b : a horoscope of such a decumbiture.

thaumaturgy:: the performance of miracles

~Merriam Webster

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Photo of Door, title and author unknown, Fair Use via Sunday Muse

The Fox: Fair Game, © Alexander Pope  Public Domain

Snake Smoke

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snake Smoke

 

 

An eye is a window,

a window an eye.

I can't tell you any more

so don't ask me.

 

A promise is a lie,

a lie is a promise;

curling smoke from my pipe,

a snake climbing air.

 

Chaos the white bride

for a bridegroom of money,

worst man holds the ring.

Priest eats the flower girl.

 

A promise is a lie,

a lie is a promise;

snake smoke from my pipe,

a garotte made of air.

 

A marriage is a funeral, 

a funeral a marriage.

I can't talk now

I'm late for the wedding.

September 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Yes, it's a cigar, not a pipe. Poetic license.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Wind From The Sea, © Andrew Wyeth, 1947  Fair Use

Photo of Lakeith Stanfield, author unknown via internet Fair Use

 

 

Driving With The Incubus

 

 

 

 

Driving With The Incubus

(Incubus VIX) 

 

 

 

When I first saw you, neither man

nor woman, flesh nor fowl,

you'd brought round the car; a wisp

of sulfur fog hung from the grill.

It snaked up your shoe to your 

black and white smile

 

neither corrupt nor immaculate,

misting my face like tomorrow's shadow.

 

You held the sedan door wide;

I might have walked away but I was young,

and you were the best chauffeur

the devil could find, with

that changeling's face, the hellpit's flare,

 

black peacock eyes and velvet hands

for the gears. You put them

 

over my fog-wet lashes;

 through the holes

in your skin I saw pinpoint stars

as you smoothed the rucked sheets

of my cheek to finger 

the bed of skull so soon to be yours.

 

It was a black car without a brake

made to run the asphalt years

when the heart 

was a cindered highway,

each crossroads a Celtic knot

the devil my driver

til we stood at journey's end,

 

neither man nor woman

nor flesh most foul,

 

incorruptible corruption

tipping at the edge of the wailing abyss

where all I can see

are waning stars,

sulfur skin steaming fog, your

sharp teeth scarlet through

a feral smile.

June 2021

Posted for Fireblossom, at

The Sunday Muse 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process Note: I've written many poems for the incubus over the years. He's always changing his face. You can find them by searching the blog or by clicking on the label "incubus" below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: top via the Sunday Muse Fair Use

Bottom Untitled, © Zdislaw Beksinksi  Fair Use

 

 

 

Golden Currant

Golden Currant ( Ribes aureum )

 

Locked down to an acre

alive with spring's current,

silver-gold greyed green in

the storm's blue sky farewell,

each arch of yellow stars

on the hill petals honey,

drenches the stench

of rats in the brushpile, of death

with vanilla.

Old dog in her grave

sleeps under shadow

as I pass and remember

her breath with my breath.

Circular rites of the riding mower

trance me an order  

on a grass chaos'd dancefloor, dream me

away from the too solid walls 

stale with canned howls, wilted laments

demon-pitchforked in piles

from screens to my skull.

Shadows posture and strut,

sicken and die, cry in

the night under my pillow.

On the hill, golden currant

knows this spring's secrets,

this spring of its hundreds;

just a silver-lined scent

from some hungry sodbuster

now dished in the dustbowl,  

whose catalogue currant

is never in fruit. Dead brothers

all, under the flowers

wind-snapped in March color

that will flood this dark rampage

with a grave-sealing  spice.

March 2020

posted for earthweal's

Open Link

(themed for last week's 'Silver Linings')

 

Note:"Ribes aureum, known by the common names golden currant,  clove currant {etc}...is a small to medium-sized deciduous shrub...The plant blooms in spring with racemes of conspicuous goldenyellow flowers, often with a pronounced, spicy fragrance similar to that of cloves or vanilla... The berries were used for food, and other plant parts for medicine, by various Native American groups across its range in North America" ~wikipedia

Photos  Ribes aureum, March 2020 © joyannjones