Killer

Killer

Why do you come 

to stand in the dark kitchen, eyes

dull as shrapnel, dangling

your .22 from your hand

like a femur, no silver on you,

charity-thin?

You were the one

who wouldn't quit what killed you.

You were the one

who knew everything first.

Why do you hold

the rifle so tightly? 

I tried to save

all I could of you,

worried at the

pain when it came

with twelve

teeth of morphine, but

you screamed  

yourself away in

that minute I forgot.

I see

you still watch me

like a tilted tombstone,

staring flat-eyed, eternal

as a ghost lion's

hunger. 

Don't

drop the gun to 

hold out your hand.

 

April 2020

a  bit of surreal dream for earthweal's

Open Link

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Images, both Untitled, © Zdzislaw Beksinki    Fair Use

Ghost In Mirrorlight

Ghost In Mirrorlight

The moon poured only ghosts of mirrorlight

but thick and rich as the cream of your summer skin

that blinked pale against the cooling coffee-black night

when the wind was just a comfortable autumn beast,

shaggy with the flurry of falling leaves

and not the winter-bitter glistening back of sleet.

You had no cold love, served without a sauce

nor lukewarm, listening merciless as drought, only

a love that never thinks of loss

to  give to me, and all of it was mine,

the kisses on each inch, the ones that traced

each rise of breath, each shadow in my eye,

from the first that falls upon the cornerstone

to the last

that travels inward to the bone.

My inheritance of teeth, my broken stars

you covered in the heart's deep underground

where I discovered that escape erases scars,

that a lifelong thirst required only tea

made too hot and fragrant for regret,

which you and luck had kindly brought for me

in a tortoiseshell cup

some child had left behind

when love was a shrine.

 March 2020

posted for Kerry's 

March Word List Challenge 

Images: Teatro de Sombras,As Cinco Estações, (Shadow Theater, Five Stages) 1976 ©Lourdes Castro    Fair Use

The Terre-Cuite Tea Set, 1910 ©Childe Hassam   Public Domain

Gravity

Gravity

"when I do fall/I'll be glad to go..."
~Jesse Winchester

Gravity

is not a friend

to planets in shards

to mud-sided hills

or its opposite,

frivolity.

It's a cliff-pusher, 

a  shrinker, a compressor

 able to blow every ruffle out

even as it rucks skin into pleats

 and blind alleys, an old sack under

its shuffled foot.

When hunger 

looks out of your eyes

seriously smiling,

there is always a force
behind the aspect

opposing

that works to make

me faceless,

out of nourishment;

one final bounce
of the deflated ball

landing after its long fall.

~March 2016

posted for        real toads

Challenge: Get Listed 

Photo: Personal Moonscape, © joyannjones 2015

Crow Wind

Crow Wind

On the crow wheel, the war wind

black Valkyries ride

when battle's faltered, when red hands are still.

Full of eyes they become,

to see far and know

just how we rise up in the crop of a crow;

so the lost and blind
will learn to fly

with the bright-eyed on wheels of sky.

~January 2016

posted for    real toads

Flash 55 Plus

Images: Crow at Sunset.  by F. Lionel via National Geographic Photo Contest 2015
Still from Vikings TV series on History channel, season one
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