Sea Shanty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sea Shanty

 

 

Once I thought I had pain for my oceanliner, but

it was a clipper ship, a visitor skimming

the shallows of easy tears, creaking

in every board its promise of moonlight drowning

the dark-kissing sea in silver flakes,

of fools' journey's-end a Crusoe'd sort of shipwreck

where everything needed is salvageable,

of undiscovered places to find but never know.

But that of course was not pain.

Pain is an ocean

without any ship, flowerless and vast,

no islands of palms and coconuts

no brown eyes dancing

from the landward side of the reef

to blunt

the sharp-split wreckage of spars and bones,

no Man Friday

to carry my white man's burden for me,

to feed me 

on conch meat and keep me alive

with all the driftwood exotica of empire.

 

There is only

the cold that pierces too deep

before it numbs, the struggling silence

 

that floats the water

that slides through my hands

and the

 

constant 

unbearable fear

of breathing it in.

December 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List at

Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sea Spray, 1908, pen & ink watercolor, ©Harold Sohlberg   Fair Use

Untitled, ©Zdzislaw Beksinki      Fair Use

 

The Nag

 

 

 

 

The Nag

I try to smile at the morning,

even tho it shambles in

unsure of what to do with itself and 

wants advice. "You're all

the same, " I mutter.

Then you come the way you do,

pulling my hair.

"Look at me, look at me,"you say,

even tho you never see a thing 

except what isn't there.

"Do this, do that!" I pry

your centipede legs

off my neck, hundreds of them, each

one shoe'ed 

with crawling demand.

Talk to me," you insist,

adjusting 

your face in the mirror,

deaf as a blue-eyed white cat.

Explosions and tremors

 

make your bed. Rage

and misunderstanding

call you mother.

Peace will

never know you.

 

 

"I am the goat," I say

"who walks alone,"

and turn to ask

the morning

what I can do.

April 2022

posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

Images: The Smiling Spider, 1891, © Odilon Redon   Public Domain

‘Soulmate’ © Księżycolica, via internet  Fair Use

Abyssinia

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abyssinia

 

 

She wanted out

before they came with

the Chicago overcoat,

but her luck was never aces,

like a filly four men own a leg of;

still her eyes. She had lamps like

two shots of fizz, a nightcap in themselves

and the bob she got to peeve her mother

she thought fit her like a laurel glove

when she left the farm behind her

when life began to wind her

like a two dollar watch.

She climbed the satin stairway 

to a sky of empty sockets just west

of Hooverville and the L.A.summer moon.

She bumped gums with the butter and egg man, 

the man who stepped on stars, another flicker

for his candle on the purple velvet couch. He cast 

her sixth behind Lugosi, the girl who screams

her heart out in a movie off the cob. He gave her eyes

a number in a book with a hundred others

who ran away from their mothers

to an apple filled with worms.

After Fatty took the Rappe,

before the Dahlia bloomed her ink smudge,

she hollered, "Abyssinia," kissed off

 the painted desert, hooked up

with the junior props boy, and threw the watch

away. They moved to North Dakota, and

she told her grandkids nothing

about being sixth behind Lugosi,

about cadillacs and canaries

about L.A. in January,

about the girl too many owned a leg of

or the man who stepped on stars.

November 2021

 

 posted for Fireblossom at

The Sunday Muse, whose theme today is

Illusion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Abysinnia is '30's slang for "I'll be seeing you." A Chicago overcoat likewise for a coffin. To 'own a leg of' a horse is to be part of a syndicate which mutually invests in a racehorse for profit, bumping gums is to talk aimlessly or too much, especially about yourself. You can look up the rest of the slang I've used   here,   the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle/Virginia Rappe scandal which rocked 1920's Hollywood  here,  and the notorious Los Angeles Black Dahlia murder case which sold so many newspapers  here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Mischa Barton posed as early film star Louise Brooks, via Sunday Muse  Fair Use

Still from the 1929 German film Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks and Fritz Kortner  Fair Use

 

Giant's Blood

Giant's Blood

"In my medicine cabinet

the winter fly

Has died of old age" ~Jack Kerouac

Alone

the tired giant sat

looking at America;

no light but Edison's stars,

no song but subways' caterwaul

in the emptiness of time

that made him small.

Bored

he decided America

was constipated. He invented

a purgative of darkness and fireworks, 

administered every night, 

and in his ennui

took most of it himself.

Restless

he rolled, up and down

the endless ribbon that was

 two thirds the mark of the beast,

til the road ran him down

and went on, its

 pockets full.

Dying

he covered the

spliced paper continuum

til  the page flapped out. He saw

the medicine he'd swallowed

was his own black blood,

while America 

was just exactly

what it seemed.

April 2020

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

hosted by the inimitable Fireblossom

Process Notes: Kerouac's great novel On The Road was written in one continuous burst. "Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper into long strips, wide enough for a typewriter, and taped them together into a 120-foot-long roll which he then fed into the machine. This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or paragraph breaks...

..On the morning of October 20, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kerouac was working on a book about his father's print shop. He suddenly felt nauseated and ..began to vomit blood. Kerouac was taken to St. Anthony's Hospital, suffering from an esophageal hemorrhage...He..died at the hospital at 5:15 the following morning, at the age of 47. His cause of death was listed as an internal hemorrhage..caused by cirrhosis, the result of longtime alcohol abuse." ~ wikipedia

Images via internet, authors unknown.  Fair Use

Oh Stars

Oh Stars

Faint sunshine

speckles the frosted

piles of slag

like colonnades of crumbling

carbon dust that line

the missing mile.
The great steel drag,

the rusting teeth and feral smile

have carved the lime

we delvers bring

to all our latter works

of cancelled spring.

The bites of life

we take regurgitate

some foolish tinsel'd

fail of poisoned joy

while in the east the

crescent shrinks to silver

sparks, night hangs the

spinning seethe of stars

our blind eyes block;

our smallness and our deathtoys mocked

by a brooding hatch of dark

and limitless shock.

Oh stars--gods'

eyes that laser out 

our fool's disguise;

what an underworld we make to hide our lies.

What curses can you break to turn us wise

when you come laughing 

on the wail of a newborn wind

so the wide green world can fill its graves

and breathe again?

~February 2020 

posted for  A Skylover's Word List by Kerry O'Connor

and for earthweal's 

Renewal

The images above are ©AP/Charlie Riedel, from this article: 

The Oklahoma town that produced most of WWI’s bullets is now a poison graveyard

"The chalky hills were a kind of town gathering point. The people of Picher, Oklahoma regularly picnicked there and rode bikes. Sometimes they carted the dust away and mixed it with cement to fill their driveways. Some parents added it to their children’s sand boxes. When a breeze picked up, it whipped clouds of the fine sediment through the air....For almost a century, town residents had no idea the dust was poison...

Around the turn of the 20th century, miners discovered Picher’s subsurface stores of lead and zinc. As America entered World War I, demand soared for lead to make ammunition, and Picher became one of the biggest hubs in the region’s tri-state mining district, an area between southeast Kansas to southwest Missouri. Roughly 75 percent of the American bullets and bombshells used in the two World Wars were made from this area’s metals; half came from Picher alone. At its height in the 1920s — when the town’s population reached about 19,000—227 mills were processing 10 million pounds of ore per day.

Miners carved into the earth underneath Picher. The lead and zinc ore they hauled out had to be separated from the limestone and dolomite rock that surrounded it. And the remains were piled into chat mountains around town, some 300 feet high. By the time mining ceased in the late 1960s, there were 30 piles totaling 178 million tons. The local school was built in the shadow of the hills, and the high school track team trained on them....
...in 2011, the federal government sold the massively toxic waste region, known as the Tar Creek Superfund site, back to the Quapaw Indian tribe, which had been forcibly removed from their ancestral Arkansas home and relocated to northeast Oklahoma in 1818. In 2017, the EPA granted the Quapaw $4.9 million in cleanup assistance..."

Picher is an uninhabited ghost town today. Millions have been spent to clean it up, but only time and the planet itself may have the power to do that.

Spider Ascendant

Spider Ascendant

The Fat God preens

on his eight stick legs;

no one tells

how he got so fat.

No one cares

who he ate last night.

 

In his ceaseless spin,

his angry twit,

no one observes the

arachnid eye

fixed cold below on his

appetite's end.

Five hundred mirrors

twice turn back light

on his blinded flies

their wings bloody buzzing

through broken glass

their deathwish devotions.

~January 20, 2017

Image: Ghost Spider © Ceecore, deviantart   fair use

Babylon

Babylon

When the way is smooth

we trip on nothing

because we're made
 to kick things down.

When the belly's full

the brain cramps,

sells thought

for adrenaline.

Small griefs swell like seeds;

so the vein sprouts the needle,

the mountain's slick slope 
shakes its entropy, an avalanche

rumbling us down while

the summit recedes.

We forget

when living's too easy,

we make times get hard.

~February 2014.  revised November 2016

an old one revised, for Fireblossom Friday

Top: Aerial View of Capitol Hill, Public Domain  via wikimedia commons

Footer: Ruins of central Amarna, Egypt, the little temple of the Aton(Amarna Bâtiment du centre ville, zone du petit temple d'Aton)by Kurohito

Shared under a Creative Commons License  via wikimedai commons