Incubus VIII

Untitled, by Zdzisław Beksiński

Incubus VIII
(Bloody Hell)

Hell is lonely without my demon--

my personal one, I mean, because

there's no shortage here of devils.

Basting on the liquid lava's lips,
I'm alone in brimstone sunscreen,

no ruby pitchfork's flip

when one side gets too burnt,

no serpent sapient tail to scale me,

just the brisk popping of my cookery.

I thought my demon knew there's no

vaccine for the maenad's bite, that

nothing says forever like damnation.

I was killing more than willing

to lie griddled on bloodred coals

and call it love; but I missed his

listening kiss in the hissing steam.

Hell is lonely, bloody
empty without my demon.

I thought this blistered blaze might hold
his blade-heart's forge, and a hammer pain to

twin us bright as living never did

yet after the first in-twisting, after

first blood spilled

he disappeared

and that is Hell for you.

~June 2013

posted for       dVerse Poets

Karin Gustafson (Manicddaily) challenges us today to deal with the great splitting gemini within us all, to write of twins, twining, combining or uncombining. Though I thought I'd finished with him, as I've written many little scribbles about my twin the Incubus, still he seems to linger somewhere at the back of Hell's waiting room.

  If you'd like to read the others in this series, you can find them  here.

Image: Untitled, by the great Polish surrealist Zdzisław Beksiński may be under copyright. All copyright belongs to the copyright holders.

Gemini

IMAGE USED TO ILLUSTRATE THIS POEM REMOVED DUE TO EXCESSIVE SEARCH ENGINE(BOT)ACTIVITY. HUMANS WISHING TO SEE IT FOLLOW LINK BELOW.

Gemini

Antidote to evil is the peace in sleep

that comes when all hope of it is gone.

That resolution of night into light,

the bawdy eye of a grackle

in its ungainly dull body 

glittering

perpetuation.

Surrender to destruction

makes impermanence eternal.

Life many formed and changeful

mounts a fluid resistance,

saying the yes now that will later be no.

You like a burning under the moon,

freezing the sun,

a bonfire burned down

to banked coals of life,

translucent in the fitful frost of death.

Servant tool or instrument of neither,

only the twinned image of a dual contradiction.

September 1988,  
Revised  2010~2012

posted for   real toads

OpenLinkMonday

Had another repost up, but after seeing the Gemini theme at real toads, decided to go with this one in honor of all my Gemini cohorts there. 

Image: (c)  Dean Bertoncelj 

 All Rights Reserved

His Commercial Site

A Love Song for Troubled Girls

Got Them Cosmic Silver Blues Again, Mama

Coal Black and Silver Blue
went walking after midnight
Coal say,' Blue, baby,
Things they just ain't right.
We should be Queens
We should have limosines
We should own the machines
Why for all these clownshoes
be fuckin with dynamite?
We could blow this town open
our powder's so dry
but we can't get a light
never mind a piece of the pie.'
Blue say, 'Girl I so hear what you say.'
an she picked up her dobro and began to play:

Silver Blue's Love Song for Troubled Girls

Baby don' go
Don' go again please.
It makes me cry, and it makes me wheeze,
Makes me sing the blues when
I'm really mad as hell.
Baby please don' go, and I'll never tell.

Baby come back
Baby come back please.
I'll buy you a new hat and a dipped Tastee Freeze.
I'll dress you in red and
undress you in black.
I'll sing you that tune if you'll only come back

Baby go 'way,
Go away from me please.
Don't want your true lies, don't want your disease.
Your engine blew out,
you took my last dime
Baby go way and stay gone this time.

November 2011

With apologies to the immortal Coal Black 

Header image: courtesy of The Steel Guitar Forum

Footer image: courtesy google image search

Caryatid

Caryatid

Voodoo can’t protect the lonely

shrunken head, swinging from

the rearview,

dangling  in my memory.

The downward nightened face

the stitched up eye,

the way your cheeks and lips

have lost your tongue

so you can

no longer equivocate.

Still, back then, you couldn’t speak

without singing; it was just

how to bear the song,

how to take the words,

then take your worst.

It was in the oldtime, schooltime,

walking handfast in the dark by 
the Temple of  Bahá'í; what you called,

Episcopalian dry,

god’s giant Juicer in the sky,

when you told me looking up,

Lilith-lashes over chartreuse eye,

that I was a caryatid.

Then you had to explain

to the beggar’s child,

towering her bones Viking brash
above your fretted
Celtic knots,

exactly what that was.

I wasn’t flattered.

But still, you couldn’t sing

without speaking. You read me

Stevens' rage for order, went to heaven 
in a splitpea shell, sang with blue guitar

in your voice of coffeehouse smoke

to the serpent’s hiss of espresso machines.
Till I woke up with burning eyes  
and began, forever outside,

to balance the tilting building

on my head.

June 2011

 

Posted for   OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry 



Possibly pertinent references, feel free to skip:

Bahai Temple, Wilmette, Illinois

“…For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
that we should ask this often as she sang…

...Oh! Blessed rage for order...
The maker's rage to order words of sea
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”

from The Idea of Order at Key West, Wallace Stevens

"I've got a secret/ that none can tell.

I'm goin to heaven/ in a splitpea shell.

O lordy me, didn't we/ shake Sugaree?

Everything I had/done and gone..."

~Elizabeth Cotton

Images: Right Caryatid Chimney of the Chimney-Piece at Dorchester House, 
by Alfred Stevens,circa 1908, and  
The caryatids of the Erechtheum near dusk; Acropolis, Athens, Greece
by Takeaway both courtesy wikimedia commons.
footer image:

Bahá'í  Temple, Wilmette, Illinois, by lalunablanca on flick'r

lalunablaca's photostream

Gemini

Gemini

Antidote to evil

is the peace in sleep that comes

when all hope of it is gone.

That resolution of night into light,

the bawdy eye of a grackle

in its ungainly dull body glittering

perpetuation.

The acquiescence to destruction

that makes impermanence eternal.

Life many formed and changeful

commands resistance, liquid and elemental,

saying the yes now that will later be no.

You like a burning under the moon,

freezing the sun,

a bonfire burned down

to the banked coals of life,

glowing with the fitful cool of death.

Servant tool or instrument of neither.

Only the twinned image of a dual contradiction.

September 1988, Revised November 2010

Posted for One Shot Wednesday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry

Image by Dean Bertoncelj 

 All Rights Reserved

His Commercial Site