Labyrinth

 

 

 Labyrinth

 

I played in the field of the minotaur's horn.

The rose trees stretched for twenty miles.

His black eye blinked

my slow heart's beat. I danced all day where

the elephant's hip burned blue in the shade,

where I glimpsed the escape the animals made

before the age had been born.

 

The green grey moor 

was soft as a sponge 

on my cheeks where tears

disappeared in the mist.

I wondered if we'd ever kissed

in the halls behind the labyrinth's door

where the beasts blew their breath on the shadow play.

I saw them come at the end of the day

with all to give and nothing to say. 

Their souls each put in a hazelnut

that sank in ripples of earth's wet heart

covered in time from fire and flood,

from our hands that pull the world apart,

that turn his field from grass to chalk

where roses blow for twenty miles

and the animals at last

have begun to talk.

August 2021

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Minotaur Caressing A Sleeping Woman, 1933, © Pablo Picasso  Fair Use

Swans Reflecting Elephants, 1937 © Salvador Dali  Fair Use

Guillotine Moon

Guillotine Moon

The moon cuts constant

even as her yellow face

sizzles off electric wind to

 spade-black void,

digging

 the dark day's shadows.

No wandering

in mist or star's orison

takes me far from loss.

No color seems to belong

to empty steam.  The last rain

bent my back like a bow,

mocking the horns of

her pale cipher smile; the moon

knows me better than you.

Our  mirror solitude

overflows with light,

her cratered face

the teacher, her absence a gift

of sapphire night, the pill of

her roundness a febrifuge

for folly's cache of nightmare. In

 this moon-blade guillotine

no one sees, I have placed

the eyeless head

of all my desires.

May/August 2020

posted for earthweal's weekly

challenge, Strange Worlds

Images: Moon and Trees, artist unknown     Fair Use

Memory, 1938, © Rene Magritte               Fair Use

Spirit Apocolypse

Spirit Apocalypse

Entropy dreams of its Creator

under the burning blanket

of wild horses slaughtered

of eucalyptus torches slow

roasting marsupials,

of its enemies hogtied helpless

if not as yet quite mastered,

all things of beauty bent

to the wheel of avarice

as the spotted pony runs

as the devil drowns

in sympathy

in sycophants

in syncopated strategies

of the smallest minds now

suddenly somehow successful.

We wait for the tide

to rise, the Earth to speak, 

for the wild appaloosa 

with our handprint

on its flank to find us, 

for the ash

to heave up the white buffalo,

the soul we weep for

to race oblivion

of wave and fire, drought and famine

to bear us

where we may buck and strain

to cut the cords that

crack the bone

of this ravaged

rock on fire

calling to the spirits

for the spotted pony

the white buffalo

the avenging angel

as if we know them,

with only the death's head grin

of the four bleached horsemen in sight.

~November, 2019

Images: War Pony II, by Sarah Lyn Richards. All Rights Reserved to Artist
White Buffalo, by Cuzco. All Rights Reserved to Artist