Flat

Flat

When everything is flat and you've dropped it all,

even the silver talisman of his name

when the sky ore falls to vapor in a sulphur flame

unable to fetch from a void spanning ever to never

when the partridge turns blue and pulls out every feather

and too-bent trees hang shattered, broken in the godsway

when the faun sits invisible starving by the lost highway

lemur eyes watching time’s pegged sticks tune up his ribs

when every night wish is caught where no one forgives

strangled by day’s amber noose in unbroken fall

when every chair is placed with uncanny care, yet all

stand empty till the restless dead behind begin to crawl

you can only hide in a chicken-legged house of dreams, actualize

stars and dust, flesh and rust, make a snakeskin grimoire of sighs.

November 2011





Posted for   Magpie Tales  #91

Uncredited image provided by Magpie Tales
removed, 2/2012 apologies to artist
Footer image: Baba Yaga's house, by Ivan Bilibin
Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Moonwitch

The Moonwitch

How many years have I played this flute

under the green autumn moon, 

a cry so plangent
so forlorn the stars
birthed the winter wind to

freeze their tears?

How many times have the

paralyzed trees watched my snakes

uncurl, branch of their branches, my

wicked unwinding scarlet spells,

my blistered pentagram of bones?

How often has the black demon 

come to do my bidding and

left it all still undone

tho we both know 

I paid?

Vous doux, 

you, the sweet

the center safe 

between the lines

edges wild and ripped,

Voodoo I can’t put down,

swaying chant, burning blood

sharp sharpest black flint knife at

hope’s white throat

bleeding.

September 2011 


Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

also

Posted for    Magpie Tales #83 



( If you've already read this one, I also have a new one up here. )

Image: The Snake Charmer, by Henri Rousseau, 1907

courtesy Magpie Tales

This work is in the public domain.

Front Man

Front Man

Every power needs a front man

someone blameless, bright and shining,

a stooge who’ll never quite understand

how he’s used  for pocket lining,

the place he fills in the master plan.

It's essential he speak with charm as he preaches

from a  humble soapbox in the village square.

It stuns the crowd if he gives up his riches

or sometimes shaves off all his hair.

While standing up to the scapegoat leeches,

he should radiate upstanding prelate,

woman’s fancy and man’s self-dream.

It helps if sour milk suits his palate

better than  lobster stewed in cream,

his rhetoric smooth as threadbare velvet.

Above all he must seem pure and sincere

strong and innocent, honest in belief,

for that’s what it takes to front the career

of the invisible, guileful, controlling thief

who mints gold from blood and rules through fear.

May 2011

With apologies to St. Francis, for whom I have the highest respect. This photo  just happened to spark a train of thought that has more to do with politics than religion.

Posted for Magpie Tales # 65 

and also for

OneStopPoetry Form, A Look at Rhyme

I've tried to include a variety of different types of rhyme in this poem, with at least one 'perfect rhyme' per stanza and the others a mix of feminine and slant rhyme. Gay please critique this aspect as you see fit.

Uncredited Image provided by Magpie Tales
removed

Meiosis

Meiosis

The whole subsuming

mackerel smelling abyss:

with a few words I can unmake it,

change it to a wine-rich wave’s warm kiss

let the disconjunctive dark forsake it.

But when the neon tide comes rolling in

the bloated bodies float and the gulls scream

and there’s the sharp swift pierce of a bone pin,

heart nail pounded in a dream within a dream

resuming.

Kaleidoscopic lenses bend

the light, red icestones throb beneath the unquiet lid.

Greensick invaders pulse, fluoresce on the march.

Alien guerillas the cortex can’t forbid

blow the bridge and deconstruct the arch.

A turn of the wrist and everything goes black,

the limbs arrest, the sutures come undone.

The hands spin round but the hours can’t fall back

to that which was so ardently begun.

The colors change and change, without an end.

April 2011

Posted for Magpie Tales #63 

Uncredited photo provided by Magpie Tales removed.

comments closed due to bot activity 2/13

Rainy Day Trip

Rainy Day Trip

I’m on a journey in the rain

where destinations are

scarce as kind words in hell, with

too many out of state dreams.

Lovers and others get lost in the dark,

tarry and black as truckstop coffee.

Not far enough

behind me comes a dog, 

a hound of the basketcases,

so I don’t travel at night

any more.

In the day my car is the knife

I take to the buttery sunlight

But it softens and runs

streaky yellow and then liquid away

down the ditch at the side of the road

buttercup yellow with new flowers.

Jewel spots dancing

like glare become

blindspots of grease in the  rain

on my windshield.

While I drive I wonder

things, like

“would coffee taste as good without a smell?”

and 

“is this hard wind a politician,

pushing air for a job?”

or

“does time fly because it's a lost balloon,

or a deer before the wolfpack?”

The answers are

scarce as jokes from an undertaker,

ruffles

on a machine gun.

April 2011

Posted for Magpie Tales # 60


Uncredited photo provided by Magpie Tales removed

That Smile

That Smile

Her father sent her off to wed

the husky son of a hundred counts.

He took her in his arms, she bled

her credentials out upon his bed.

He smiled.

Six strapping sons, three dead at birth

four daughters later, the silence mounts

a siege before what’s left of worth;

the sea, the sky, the endless earth

still smile.

Somewhere beneath the castle floor

the masons are bricking the crypt of counts.

The catacombs are quiet once more;

just the faintest echo behind a door.

She smiles.

March 2011

Posted for  Magpie Tales~#59

Image: La Gioconda, by Leonardo da Vinci, c 1503-1519, Oil on poplar
Leonardo da Vinci [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Vertigo

Vertigo

The heart is

blind but spinning, like a jewel

transparent in darkness.

If there were light,

igniting colors…

but even in the blind black

colors wait for a chance to break

out of the holding stone

Their sleeping presence spins and

turns inside each facet,

seeds within a pod rusting in the wind,

germ within the seed that soon will know

quickness in the green;

only give light

to what already exists.

Only give the meaning to the form.

But I don’t think

this is a thing that you can do.

You don’t know which the gem, which the jeweler

which the instrument, or

what of me is determined by your incessant tapping

and what by the temper of the stone.

You think I’m soft metal, an abradable plate

blank before you etch it with the acid of your desire,

scratched by the stylus that swings between your legs

to give back in my life the imprint of your will.

But I am diamond hard,

and it’s hard to shape what spins in darkness,

and hard to see what’s carved

in the fretwork of scars upon the holding stone;

wind in the dead leaves dancing

a horn of honey poured into the sea

a network of veins full flushed with color

that waits for light to be given

to what already exists.

September 1987, revised February 2011

Posted for Magpie Tales # 53

Uncredited photo of a salt cellar provided by Magpie Tales removed

Snow Go

Snow Go

Snow sparrows shy from the black

unnatural rubber of the car on iced asphalt.

Winter throws softballs against the glass,

trees seem to bend away in the distance

wishing the snow that blankets the road

could hide it, block it

and let their secret world continue

without my car, my fumes, my noise, my uselessness.

January 2011

Also posted for Friday Flash 55 fiction at the G-man's

Posted for Magpie Tales #50

Uncredited photo provided by magpie tales removed

Grey Geese

Grey Geese

The long forgotten party

spilled out on the snow

away from the day's work, 

away from the houses,

and every winter journey

started there, where three women walked.

The first day was for cooking,

and the cleaning up after cooking.

The second day was for eating,

and the cleaning up after eating,

but the third belonged to the women

and they chose the frozen pond.

Just the three of them, leaving

behind the children tired but playing, 

the menfolk fed full and playing

with whiskey and cards in the back room.

They came to skate

but they meant to fly.

One was practical; she would always work

hard on the ice, skirts heavy, soon damp,

using her legs, pulling herself along

brow furrowed and bent to the purpose,

to make herself fly like the geese

who migrate because they have to.

The second woman was preening.

She piled her hair high, picked her fancy hat 

and her striped coat to twirl for the watchers.

Full of smiles for the performance,

she skated with show but precision, like

the geese form up in line.

The third woman was caged. She

came to skate out of her world.

She knew the ice was perfect, she knew her circles

and figure eights were the meaning

and pattern in things, like the geese know

how the sky leads away from winter.

The long forgotten party;

three women grey in the distance,

united in a vee    far out on the ice

         smiling and flying

away from the work, away from the houses.

Every winter journey started there.

January 2011

Posted for Magpie Tales #49

Photograph by Tess Kincaid, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

Two Shadormas on Gloves

Two Shadormas on Gloves

I.

You left your

gloves behind the day  
you left me.
I put them

on, wond'ring if this was the

best way to hold hands.

 II.

Nature pairs

hands, gloves, wings, mates, eyes

to function.

Unpaired things
oppose--night, day, death, life--or

fall to randomness.

December 2010

 

The shadorma is a syllabic poem form, probably from Spain. It has six lines with a syllable pattern of 3/5/3/3/7/5 .

Posted for Magpie Tales #46
Uncredited photo provided by magpie tales removed

Also posted for Friday Flash Fiction 55 at G-man's  

Mother and Child

Mother and Child


Such gentleness
To have launched a thousand wars
Such love
To have burned so many bundles of flesh
Such folly
To believe beyond compassion
Such hope
That things can be healed

Behind the mother’s mask
A child.
Behind the child’s mask
A flower.
Such ancient frailty
To remain
Evernew.

December 2010

Posted  for Magpie Tales  and also for  Friday Flash 55  at G-Man's place.

December 15, 2010

Uncredited photo provided by Magpie Tales removed

(Poem includes an old informal haiku I wrote earlier this fall.)

Sledding with Cats

Sledding with Cats

Circling in white whirling sand,

old eyes blinded by the summer,

and numb feet in hard shoes

cannot tell it’s snow.

A car drives by on a silent street,

ghost at the wheel

singing a thirty year old song

thinking it’s still

alive.

The house, it’s empty, still.

Against the wall, a sled rusts,

propped by children’s hands

against a snowy day

long gone,

too many calculators and keyboards ago.

Still, in the granite sky

ten clouds make a wall

where the sun guards his back

and holds as best he can that high ground

against an empire of Cold

knowing what he loses one day

on another he'll win.

A child gets out

another sled, and finds another

hill, another child, another winter,

leaning against the door

and cries out loud the news

so even ghosts can hear.

And a dog that knows no better

drags her woman relentlessly

through cold frozen drizzle in

an infinite orgy of

evergreen canine spring.

Inside warm windows

cats are laughing.

Fall and Winter, 2010*

Posted for    MeetingtheBar:Martian Style   at dVerse Poets Pub

Originally posted for Magpie Tales, #44

*For those who may think some of the lines are familiar, this poem is composed in part of recycled and expanded bits and pieces of micropoetry and twitter haiku written over the course of the last few months.

Winter Blue

Winter Blue

Snow

like a cyclone of flour

outside.

Here behind the door,

wherever your arm falls

you hold me,

independent of the course of your thoughts.

I can’t see your face

behind those lidded lights but I know

I’m sitting on some stairs

on some streetcorner of your mind,

a long walk

down dark allies…

But then you look down

homemade light makes windows of your eyes.

Your body pours

like milk into mine.

In the evening

leaving your brown fire,

going into the white world

I melt the snow into smoke with my steps,

and keep the frost off my face

with my tears.

December 1972

Posted for Magpie Tales # 43   

One of my earlier poems that just happened to fit the prompt...

Bard's Tale

Bard's Tale

Your words rang out both elegant and bitter

like sour wine from an antique golden cup,

pouring a ballad rare, medieval, mythic,

with rhymes built neatly to the last refrain,

where all the lovers die.

Your looks were bad, edged, blank and tender,

alternately protective and estranged,

till finally all was sorted, the last line came,

and you were going on without me, neatly folded

like a newspaper forgotten on a train.

Pain well-cooked reduces down to apathy, and

apathy well-cooked becomes a passive steam

inflating a whistling void that’s stretched and wrinkled

like yesterday’s balloons who've lost too soon

their gift of high unshackled random flight.

Rapidly one thought becomes another.

The revulsion of feelings becomes habitual.

Vices are pulled from our hands, each one by one,

till we're left holding our virtues like

roadside advertisements

November 2010,

based on a fragment from 1988

Posted for Magpie Tales #42

Threnody on the Number XI

Threnody on the Number Eleven

Eleven months she missed him and feared eleven years.

Eleven times she called out to catch the ship that sailed.

Eleven times eleven times eleven were her fears.

But once he called and it was she who failed.

Across the moonwarm seas the soulship fumbled

but never stopped its dizzying careers.

Eleven charts were shredded, canvas crumpled.

Eleven months she chased him and feared eleven years.

Across the crepe black void the echoes scatter,

across each face years caracole a tale.

Across all time, all light, across all matter,

eleven times she set out, but sunken ships don’t sail.

Days dropped down wormholes time sees safely landed.

Quick hands of new craft banners from worn fears.

Smiles lace across the light but night’s more candid.

Eleven times eleven times eleven are her tears.

Soft shadow walls stand fast, their faces shimmer,

piled clouds of knife concrete, white ice so paled

by painted rose, soft sigils scarlet glimmer

where dead days shook their fists sunlight prevailed.

But once he called and it was she who failed.

November 2010

This experimental poem in the cascade form is for Magpie #41 
Uncredited photo provided by Magpie Tales removed. 
 
Also posted for the Monday prompt at Big Tent Poetry, which was to write a cascade piece.