Watching

Watching

Time for clocks

to come out and play,

to dance while I sleep

cartwheeling on tiny hands,

round faces open, confiding.

In the morning whether

I watched or not

I’m one day 
older.

Ignore the digital display

so professionally alarming. 
It’s a temporary

robot, does nothing artfully

but reorders lifeless circuits

shuffling a shiny LED deck
into green numeric

corpselight by 
the bed.

A good watch dances, has

swisselled movements ever

fluid, cogs clogging, no slippage

on time’s sleet, off its bracelet leash

downstreet as it caracoles

with mechanical ferity

a mime most entertaining

to watch if I could 
watch the watch

watching me

but I’m asleep 
somewhere beyond

the concept of time.

Out boxed in blue forever

precise stars move across

immaculate stage, en pointe
in cyclopean ellipses cog on cog, 

engagements too infinite
for the eye to follow

telling me I'm an hour

which is the sum

of a set of minutes

all dancing.

November 2011




Posted for    OpenLinkNIght   at dVerse Poets Pub

Optional Musical Accompaniment
Take Your Pick

(with Sheryl Crow)

Header Image: Unloved Watch Teardown, image 0239
Footer Image: Work in Progress
posted by Petteri Sulonen on Flick'r  Petteri blogs at Come to Think of It and Unloved Watches

Photos used with the kind permission of my friend Petteri Sulonen, the blog's technical consultant, guardian of the Red Eye, photographer, full time Renaissance Man, and now part time horologist. 
Thank you Petteri, for the photos, and for the inspiration.

The Shade

The Shade

It 

wavers silver,

shadow watching.

It wants to give. I see

the heart of the maker 

shining from its fathomed eyes 

of blue marled gold. Its thinnest of skins

is feverish hot as desert noon 

sand dry stone smooth.

What is it it needs

to give me here 

in this capsule of dream 

so badly 

as it bends me

in the cosmic wind,

past or future life or death

clings to me in a honey'd sheath

cabled tight as a rose's thorn skin.

 Flying lambent in the unseamed empyrean

  swaying harmonics of  musica universalis

propelling the blue airship of dark,

it wants me so dearly holds me 

so closely it's a matter of 

small concern that when 

I wake it will be 

gone and you 

don’t.

November 2011

Image: Danae, by Gustav Klimt, oil on canvas 1907-08

via wikimedia commons

September Storm

September Storm

Lightning’s not like clouds

full of castles and horses

elephants and eagles;

it’s all skinny fishbones

fish hooks and the

skeletons of dragons

lich lightlines walking and 

no pouffe at all.

So with you light of my heart

just a lightning strike against a
shuttered lid,

so with me just a bunch of

dried rosemary

twigging in the wind, so with
love just a rack of bones to pick
of what once was,

a september 
storm
electric sweet still

sighing, sensed, scented 
on memory's nightblue fingers.

September 2011

Words

Words

Write your soul a blanket on the page

with black wrinkled stripes on pure white,

in any tongue on earth. Throw

your zebra quilt over

every shivering   

heart and offer

refuge there,

wrapped in

words.

July 2011

Posted for       Form Monday   at  OneStopPoetry

This poem is in the Nonet form, a nine line single stanza poem where the first line contains nine syllables, and each succeeding line one less, with the last line a single syllable. Thanks to  Corbie Sinclair for this great look at the form, with sincere regrets that this is Gay Cannon's penultimate appearance hosting Form Monday.Thanks for everything, Gay.

 

Mandala Interrupted

Mandala Interrupted

The roundness of life rushes out

with the snap of a fan spread suddenly,

end meeting end in full revolve,

a circle of spines, and death

the vacuum at the heart

of understanding.

In my palm

a star journeys out

from speck to pentacle, to yellow dwarf

pulling all it meets into a glowing

globe, imbuing a map

of ancient

skin

 with all

the colors of light

painting tracings of veins,

a mandala of brooks into rivers,

fan ribs rilling soft hills of cheeks,

weaving the willow weeds of hair

white with wheels of sunsets,

starsets, sunbursts and

the monsters that be here

into a heliosphere

devouring

worlds.

We

illuminated husks,

shrivelled buds, dark

matter in the interstellar cloud

watch the armies, the dead they eat,

ruptures in the planetary floor, bleeding

stigmata of tempests, the dead they provide,

 the oceanblue spiral maelstrom of events

over which we mull without control,

etiolated phototrophs in the dark

dwindling as the sun fades

 redhot and cold now

 beyond 

the

heliopause

still

watching a brilliant molecular ballet shuffled

 in a child’s makeshift slippers, starsilk

on the solar wind that blows the bubble,

a  whirling jig through a corona
haloing an orbiting ball

circling a matrix;

a roundness of life

where the vacuum

sits

 at 

the core

doubting an end,
a beginning, an age,

even a void before the round became.

March 2011

I've been working on this poem for many months, inspired by the photograph above, taken by my friend Petteri Sulonen in Sydney, Australia last December. Recent events have altered its original intent, yet I felt the mandala image still does, perhaps always, remain pertinent.

Posted for OneShotWednesday at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Thanks, Petteri, for your gracious permission to use this image.

Petteri Sulonen's Photostream on  Flick'r