Age of Forfeit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Age of Forfeit

 

 

"..I deny the tastes and habits of the age.

 I am its punk debauche..A fierce lampoon

seeking to inherit what is necessary to forfeit.." 

~1959, Gregory Corso

 

 

 

Ten years old in '59

learning how to eat plastic

how to steal the eyes

of sorrow, how to watch the TV box

build the marshmallow engines of dreams;

learning how to flip forward and back,

an acrobat of lies, an appearance nun, bride-to-be of

Christ's money, of necrotic success, of tears

that can only come out at night.

Ten years old in '59

the decade of glorious acquisition,

born from war and set to marinate in flag-juice,

to memorize the ABC's: Avarice, Bombast, Consumption

at all costs. Eat cake on your birthday. Ignore

the bleached bones of beauty floating

in your corn flakes, the ghost-children, your peers,

who howled as they died in the split atom's vomit.

Don't look at

the malice behind the service.

Don't go too far. Don't grow your hair

or wander in the ruins of compassion;

there's no money there. Don't ask why you're 

starving on plenty, little girl, little pawn. Learn

to iron a shirt, feed the baby, please your man, work

in the cafe, at the office, behind the 

dimestore counter selling blood-paste 

for lyrically lying lips

or you'll be the joke,

the reject, the outcast forever

running for your life.

 

 

December 2021

 

 

 

 

posted for

Shay's Word List

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Fifties photographs, courtesy of Soren Larsen, © Frank Larson   Fair Use

 

The Wandering Eye

The Wandering Eye

I made you

from a map, a hawk and a flower.

I thought you

clockwork-canny, full of power,

a road-veined eye for

spying the highway hours;

a bird, a map,

a flower meant to be

a fragrance and a passage 

 seeking sea.

But so far away

you flew there could never be

a coming back

despite the lies, despite the slick pretense,

so to see you now

as a morph'd and piddling glance

on a burning

globe of constant transience

is only another

blink of blight and fear.

You tell me this

is the you who's real and clear;

fine words from one

who's broken every mirror. 

August 2020, 

(with fragments from March 2014)

posted for

The Sunday Muse

Images:Still Life with Spherical Mirror, 1934 © M.C. Escher   Fair Use
footer, artist and title unknown,  Fair Use

Pumpkinhead

Pumpkinhead

How he bled

the pumpkin head

for seeing what he saw

for saying what he said

when he was only
a nerve left on

 to burn down a house

where no one's at home.

But still

they kicked him
down the road,

they laughed
when they made
his shell explode;

O that was bad, but even worse,

that they killed his voice

but not
his curse.

~October 2015

posted for   real toads

Tuesday Platform

Images: Pumpkinhead, 1972, Warm Halloween, 1989, by Jamie Wyeth  fair use via wikiart.org

Violet Crush

Violet Crush

"Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."

~Mark Twain

Your hope's a hoop

swallowing its tail, your

forgiveness a rosewood

casket, shut   

on the smell 

of something gone.

You can't peddle your

punk beacons here

as the peace of light,

buzzing the moon's ears

with one-eyed drones.

Here I build silence

with the end of strength

so there will be time

for the truth.

~June 2015

posted for    real toads

Weekend Challenge: Flash Fiction 55

Kerry's Plus to the 55 factor this time is to use a quote from Brainy Quote's Quote of the Day archive. I have pulled mine from their vast reservoir of the master of quotable quotes, Mark Twain

Image: White Violet, copyright joyannjones 2015

Pretext

Pretext

Liriope played a wind-doll's calliope

under a blackbrowed sky.

A vinca minor chased Ursa Major

where the melting butters fly.

Passiflora stigmata tapped out her sonata

on clouds dusted with ebony flies.

Red amaranthus and blue agapanthus

ate old Agamemnon's dark eyes.

And all of this is truer, love, than

the lie you made goodbye.

~February 2013

55 mixed metaphors for   the g-man

If you'd like to hear the poem read to get the names straight, please click below:


Pretext by Hedgewitch O'theWilds

Process notes: For those who care about minutia, liriope is a common grassy groundcover in the southern US, also called lilyturf or monkey grass. Vinca minor (or periwinkle) is a vining ground cover with small leaves and blue flowers. Ursa Major, or the Great Bear, is a constellation.  The genus Passiflora, though it includes over 500 species, does not actually have one called stigmata. That was just me making things up. Its common name is however Passionflower, because it's many unusual flowering parts are said to tell the story of the passion of Christ, including its 3 prominent stigmas representing the three nails used in the crucifixion.  

Amaranthus is a large old-fashioned annual with pendulous reddish-purple flower bracts, known also as Love Lies Bleeding, and agapanthus is a mostly tropical bulb with blue globe-shaped blooms on long stalks, also called Lily of the Nile. In Greek myth, Agamemnon was a Mycenaean king who, among other things, commanded the Greeks in the Trojan War.

All images from flick'r and shared under a Creative Commons License
~mouse-over for attribution.