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 

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

Black Apples

Black Apples

I was a daylight shadow,

a bride of drought

cast over the mounded world like

a prophecy of night,

living on dandelions and dead leaves

until you gave me,

sour and hard on the flat 

of your incubus palms,

a dozen black apples. Keep them,

you said, for a year. I only ask

that you throw the bones

far away from this dry country

from the death dance of wheat

the victory of locusts

the smoke of the Beast.

Disappear us too close

to the rifting abyss

where the wind's sullen heat

turns the Catherine wheel of change,

show me the hiss of

the scythe in the clouds,

the minarets folded in sand
whose pierced towers pour out

the last blood of solitude sung by
the owl. All our ghosts will join hands.

There's the crack of your laugh;

a ragged breath of earth

to bend and break the dead trees;

the witch-year's burnt up. You and the

drought have gone and I

sit tasting unmourned

the twelvefold sweetness of 

black apples of the storm.

March 2020 
This poem has been slightly revised since first posting.

posted for earthweal Open Link

and Shay's prompt at the Sunday Muse

Arkansas Black Apples

Catherine wheel:a firework that revolves on a pin, making a wheel of fire or sparks; pinwheel.

~dictionary.com

Images: Untitled photo, by Horst P Horst for Vogue Magazine, 1930   Public Domain

Arkansas Black Apples, ©sweetsandlife via Atlas Obscura   (see link)   Fair Use

Empires' Sum

Empires' Sum

Chantilly's lace of words

adorned a million men

with war's black bands. After July

she got no letters from the front; even

the green calligraphy of trees was mute

foddering the feast of fire and gun;

just a telegram to say they both would know

how the moon delivers a thousand nights of snow.

~July 2016

posted for         real toads

Flash Fiction 55 Plus

Notes: per wikipedia: The Battle of the Somme ...was a battle of the First World War fought by the armies of the British and French empires against the German Empire. It took place between 1 July and 18 November 1916 ... It was the largest battle of the First World War on the Western Front; more than one million men were wounded or killed, making it one of the bloodiest battles in human history.

The French and British had committed themselves to an offensive on the Somme during Allied discussions at Chantilly, Oise, in December 1915

Images: public domain via wikimedia commons:

Somme, showing field kitchen [from an album of World War One-related photographs of William Okell Holden Dodds. Brigadier General of  the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1914]

An abandoned German trench [in Delville Wood near Longueval, Somme, France during the Battle of the Somme, from the British Imperial War Museum collection, manipulated.]

SHE

SHE

Her tangled tongue tides infinitely, a stuttering sea

pounding the sense of sand to nonsense.

Her hand is a foot, her pale beak-hook

tears liver from a red-cursed god on a rock.

She sneaks her wings off the mariposa

to discuss the death of a crawling worm

all for a bloody flutter and fall, to pound in our ears

her liver-flecked lie as sweet sufferer's sense,

her mirror eye all on the wrong side, broken

but bright, reflecting the shine of her fracture-knives

cutting deep as she can into watching clay

but clay won't bleed and SHE can't see

that no more will we

ever have what SHE needs.

~January 2016

 posted for        real toads

Weekend Challenge

 mariposa: Spanish for butterfly

Sculptures by Pablo Picasso, photos by Karin Gustafson
All rights reserved to whoever owns them.

Humbugged

Humbugged

The bug is humming

humming to itself

and the blood is drumming

in the numb tied hands

and the faces are laughing

pale hands prodding, slapping

the man in the sack who

hangs from the hook

who hasn't slept in a

hundred hours

whose legs have swelled

like sausage balloons

who knows nothing

and tells it all

to the shaved baboons
in Armani suits

while the bug

is humming

an American tune
inside our heads
inside our phones
in the dollar we use
for the death we buy,
in the lie
the bug is humming,
no price is too high.

Barely hidden under the drones,
we tilt the forbidden;
the humming bug, the perfect slave

for this abattoir, this decorated grave
where we kneel in fear of what we've made

of the land of the free

the home of the brave.

~December 2014

posted for    real toads

Out of Standard: Humbug Origins

Izy Gruye (The Nice Cage) asks us to use the word humbug in it's original meaning, that of a sham or hoax, in a poem that has nothing to do with winter or Christmas. I have been wanting to write on this topic--the recently released Senate report on torture of detainees during the Bush administration--but have not been able to until today. This poem is just a shadow attempt at expressing that horror, with my apologies to the Talking Heads, for borrowing their line "I hope you're happy with what you made/from the land of the free and the home of the brave." as used in the song below:

Process notes: The word 'bug' here refers to insect life and electronic surveillance, as well as the challenge meaning.

Image" Cover page of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study of CIA Detention and Interrogation Program, public domain via wikimedia commons

Burned In The Bathtub

Burned In The Bathtub

After his midlife crisis

the incubus has settled down.

He takes a pill now.

He's sold the Lambo 

and grown a beard

grey as gourd rind

mute as dusk. It teases

when he comes up behind

but better of course,

than mere

insincerity of stubble

or truth of the lash;

or so I tell him.

His rage, his acquisitive

lust, his long

hierarchic frustration

with Beelzebub, his angst--

all abated. He's stopped 

going naked except when he's here

though now the light

must be out; the mood

must be clear; the Jacuzzi

has to work, while I burn sage

to make darkness soft lather

on skin cracked and dry

from hellfire and age.

Instead 

of the sweet drip of lies,

instead 

of my fruitful screams,

instead of the  hoof lifted high

to leave a burnt print 

on my spine,

there's only androgynous giggle,

a few sips of  white wine,

a cooling brain,

a voiceless music

the color of ash

falling like misted rain.

~September 2014

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Challenge: Out of Standard

Isadora Gruye (The Nice Cage) asks us to write a poem about a lie that could have been told better. I have wiggled around with the POV some, but there are plenty of poorly told lies to choose from here.

I've written too many poems to count about the incubus; you can find them  HERE

Top Image: Cialis Logo, courtesy google image search.No copyright infringement is intended.

Footer: The Flautist, by Remedios Varo

May be protected by copyright. Posted under fair use guidelines via wikiart.org