Fox In The Kittens

Fox In The Kittens

You're a kite in the crows

a fox in the kittens

the dagger-light thrown

where the poisoned word's written.

I hear your screech by the dolmen

catch your stench in the doorway;

your copper cup's full when

the blood hits the causeway.

Astraea is chained

with a gold liar's lasers

while money's papier-mâché'd

into goblins with tasers;

my gift to you

is a kiss from the razor

to turn your eyes blind

to return all your favors

so the sun rises mild

so dawn saves the child.

~June 2018

I am bitter, furious and heartbroken over the evil being done on our southern border. May all of us stand up for the light, for basic human rights, and stop this vile immoral 'policy' which is nothing more than a cynical political calculus at the expense of helpless boys, girls, parents and infants.  Babies in arms, some, ripped from their mothers and put into cages-- detention centers, internment camps, bureaucratic hells on earth, for the crime of doing as every single one of our own ancestors did, coming here for a better life. There are no words.

Lacunal Dialectic

Lacunal Dialectic

They gave the wide-eyed eccentric

the wild electric

because

there's a  price for every metric,

every loggorheic epic

showing we pull from world-bone

a hole

that goes systemic,  

and fill it,

anthropocentric.

So they made

his dialogue enteric,

scaled to monosyllabic

microbes:


hurt            love           scream          want

                           dead

changed everything he said

and killed his head.

~August 2016

posted for    real toads

Flash 55 Plus

Notes: I often used to add abstruse words to my 55's to tease the G-Man, who would pretend he didn't get it, but of course, we knew better. So this one in particular, despite its rather grim subject matter, made me remember him.

"Ernest Hemingway, American author, committed suicide shortly after ECT at the Mayo Clinic in 1961. He is reported to have said to his biographer, "Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient...." ~wikipedia

Electro-convulsive therapy (electro-shock) is still considered a valid treatment for depression and other mental illness, despite mixed evidence of its effectiveness, and can still be administered without consent in some situations. You can find a list of other famous people who have undergone it HERE.





Top image: Brain, author unknown,  source
Footer: 'A Bergonic chair, a device "for giving general electric treatment for psychological effect, in psycho-neurotic cases", according to original photo description. World War I era.'~ via wikimedia 

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.]

Plague Sonnet

Plague Sonnet

A bite of the flea and the plague is caught;

what he sent away always came home to him.

Tho she begged for a healer, she got what she got.

With fifty snuffed candles the room stayed dim.

From a book of dead suns he read out the shade

and the scream that whimpers before it goes.

She stole new eyes but they soon were greyed

as turquoise fevered in a cold-played flow

of impossible truths, of believable lies.

He put traps in the trees, blood on the stones

with his limp blue gaze where the Kingdom dies;

there could be no bridge in a rainbow of bones,

just the smile of the mouth-pit scarring the lawn,

and one last mistake, to make a girl gone.

~May 2015

 posted for     real toads

Challenge: Bout-Rimés

Bjorn Rudberg (Bjorn Rudberg's Writings) asks us to play a game which evolves a sonnet from given end-rhymes. I have done what I could, though I am not much of a sonneteer. I had no luck with the words, 'glade'  and 'tones' so they have been altered--apologies.

Image: title & author unknown      source
No copyright infringement intended

The Girl In The Purple Sweater

The Girl In The Purple Sweater

The girl 

sat drooping,

dressed purple-pink

 as the wall of a liver 

in the sun, ciphered eyes

 weeping black seeds

 into the frozen.

Each one

grew a pointing finger,

wiggling-white,
worm-curving,

denying
forgiveness
for dark matter
shadowed 

on silver plate,
for snowy eye or yellow bone,

or crab within that crawls

from home to home.

~August, 2014

55 bad seeds from the children of dreams

 for

real toads

where the incomparable Fireblossom (Shay's Word Garden) 

once again hosts the monthly 55-fest

Images:Portrait of Mademoiselle Jeanne Roberte de Domecy, by Odilon Redon

Study of Crabs, by Leonardo DaVinci

Public domain via wikiart.org