Beach With Absence of Yellow

 

 

 

 

 

Beach With Absence Of Yellow

 

 

 

 

Because

you were gone

the sun was a gin-soaked gypsy

in a yellow dress

going inevitably down

down where sticky darkness

wants to go, sliding from

the mouths

 

of ruined sailors

whose pleasures led them to the overflow,

drowned down gold-bright waves, row on row,

to wash up sorry scarecrows

on the shore, back-stabbed and 

broken to the empty land once more.

Because

everything is gone,

the morning sun is sober as a cat,

bored and batting at the palm-leaf's knees.

The sailor's flattened hat is

shredded on an unpersuaded breeze

that only wants to quit

 

and all along the boulevard

cigarette butts still roll,

the mirrors lie,

the telephones ring.

 

 

March 2023

 

 

 

 

posted for

Word Garden Word List: Randy Newman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Venus and the Sailor, 1935 ©Salvador Dali 

Vegetal Puppets, 1938 ©Remedios Varo

 

 

 

 

The Infernal Operator

The Infernal Operator

The incubus is having

another rough night;

a bitter bell keeps ringing

between his horns, foreign, 

off-tempo, pounding like

the gallop of a three-legged horse,

or the arrhythmic crash of cambered granite

tumbling from a fallen cathedral,

and to top it off

there's an angel in the fire,

feathers burning acrid, ashy black,

dialing, dialing the clouds, asking 

the great silence left when the clacking

rotary wheel cogs home: Where is the bird-winged host, 

my alabaster birth brothers, the holy
triune fatherspiritson
to pull me out?

The incubus knows the angel

has landed in the wrong fireplace for this,

yet still he wishes

it would happen, to see at last a miracle 

not born of tormented flesh,  

and also so the noise would stop,

the pale, luminous eyes cease following him

from window to window as

he tries frantically to let out the stink.

Doesn't it care, this minister of grace, that

the incessant ringing, the billowing smoke

of its rendered virtue, distract him 

from his greatest opus?

(50 Shades of Damnation,

to be published next spring.)

Why doesn't its everpresent

compassionate disaster master save it?

Instead it burns and burns

as the phone rings on unanswered,

sweetly smiling, staring at him 

as if the lines weren't down,

as if there was something

he could do.

~October 2015

posted for    real toads

Fireblossom Friday

(For my other poems in the incubus series, just hit the eponymous tag below.)

Images by Salvador Dali, Fair Use via wikart.org

Top:Debris of an Autobile Gives Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone, 1938

Lobster Telephone, 1938