Lost At Sea

Lost At Sea

The moon mocks a sailor

on the surface, bobbing and breeching.

Boiling in darkness

the sweet arch of coral

clings with its bones to the breast of a giant,

crumbling to a legend

in its poison bath.

The antic fishes

with their calico colors

paint fading murals in a

melting palace, then rise grey

in their bloat to bleach clouded tides.

The sun's spear drives home

through a broken shield

splits the skin of the ice

so it roams without purpose,

a white wolf with Fenrir's breath
that moving southward slowly starves.

In this wreckage and wrack that's the prize for destroyers

who sold all their flowers to dance in an oil slick

and all the world had

for the price of

a mess of pottage, is there one soul left

who can make a new day?

~July 2017

 For Brendan's changing earth

Images: Untitled marinescape, by Zdislaw Beksinski   Fair Use

Edward G Robinson watches a film of flowers before death, from the 1973 movie Soylent Green

Public domain

Process note: "A mess of pottage is something immediately attractive but of little value taken foolishly and carelessly in exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely more valuable. The phrase alludes to Esau's sale of his birthright for a meal ("mess") of lentil stew ("pottage") in Genesis 25:29-34 and connotes shortsightedness and misplaced priorities..."~wikipedia

Premonition

Premonition

The swagger-boys

came at nine

to set back time;

forgot the tics.

They shaved my head

with Occam's razor;

forgot the brain

burned down my house

forgot the windows

confiscated bullets

forgot the gun.

At last they showed the knife

and took my legs;

forgot the heartbeat

that let me crawl away

on love alone.

~February 2017

" [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all 'progressive' thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. ..All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them 'I offer you struggle, danger and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."  

 ~George Orwell, from a review of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, New English Weekly (21 March 1940) via wikiquote

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[Plus~ 1984 ]

Image: Premonition of Civil War, 1936 © Salvador Dali

Incognito, Indistinct

Incognito, Indistinct

In the killing fine fabric

of inflorescent flame

we walk, we burn,

dwindling from kindling

to inglorious smut

alone in a dark

our dying lights up.

  

Murderers in red

boil a soup from the dead.

In our hollowed heads

honed hidden things move,

their inhalation our blood,

their exhale the air

where the fire fed.

~May 2016

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Flash 55 Plus

Image: The Return of the Flame, 1943, Rene Magritte

Fair Use via wikiart.org

 

 

The Terrorium

(c) Lora Mitchell

The Terrorium
(transcription of a dream)

Behind dirty glass
the leaves are speckled

as an old man's hand,

yellowing veins, ropy stems.

A broken-backed rock

nailed in pain

at the shadows' end

is a cankered sling
for what crawls out at last

to preen and bask

with its blood-streaked eyes,

its drop-jaw mouth
engineered to split too wide

as it waits for its keeper

to bring the flies,

or sits fat and laps

at brain-colored worms

with a tongue

that's slit but still

 holds fast.

And it asks 

forever

no more than this:
to sit and swell,

to eat its fill
of all that crawls or
swims through filth

but
the box of glass

has grown too small,

the keeper's gone,

the thing's too huge,

the reptant tongue
too bent and long.

It lifts its head.

It jumps and falls
in a slime of jerks as

it scrabble-climbs

with its plague-toed feet
and bellied brine

up and back,
sideways and over,

quick and fell and hungry,

hungrier than ever.

~October 2015

Untitled, Zdislav Beksinksi

Images are the property of the copyright holders. No infringement intended.