Way(ra)s Of The Past

 

 

 

Way(ra)s Of The Past

 

 I.

 

There is a road, cold

as stark nightmare's mane, weaving

a winding-sheet memory

choke-tight, wringing the eyes

dry, smearing the heart, called the past.

 

II.

 

There is a tollway

never cheated by moonlight

never unwatched by day. Don't

squander your soul walking

down it; the past collects its debts.

 

 

 

 

 

November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Poetry Form: The Wayra

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Footsteps, 2016, © Joshua Philip Hart

Photograph of the Author, 1956, photographer unknown,  Public Domain

Driving With The Incubus

 

 

 

 

Driving With The Incubus

(Incubus VIX) 

 

 

 

When I first saw you, neither man

nor woman, flesh nor fowl,

you'd brought round the car; a wisp

of sulfur fog hung from the grill.

It snaked up your shoe to your 

black and white smile

 

neither corrupt nor immaculate,

misting my face like tomorrow's shadow.

 

You held the sedan door wide;

I might have walked away but I was young,

and you were the best chauffeur

the devil could find, with

that changeling's face, the hellpit's flare,

 

black peacock eyes and velvet hands

for the gears. You put them

 

over my fog-wet lashes;

 through the holes

in your skin I saw pinpoint stars

as you smoothed the rucked sheets

of my cheek to finger 

the bed of skull so soon to be yours.

 

It was a black car without a brake

made to run the asphalt years

when the heart 

was a cindered highway,

each crossroads a Celtic knot

the devil my driver

til we stood at journey's end,

 

neither man nor woman

nor flesh most foul,

 

incorruptible corruption

tipping at the edge of the wailing abyss

where all I can see

are waning stars,

sulfur skin steaming fog, your

sharp teeth scarlet through

a feral smile.

June 2021

Posted for Fireblossom, at

The Sunday Muse 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process Note: I've written many poems for the incubus over the years. He's always changing his face. You can find them by searching the blog or by clicking on the label "incubus" below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: top via the Sunday Muse Fair Use

Bottom Untitled, © Zdislaw Beksinksi  Fair Use

 

 

 

Daisy

Daisy

Awakenings these latter days

seem sullen, straining for

a gone green music, unprepared as

the day that lumbers up,

tripping its way through a

zodiac of sticks like a clumsy thief,

 too old to run but still wanting to steal.

Hours revolve in a maelstrom

of ferns, once fresh for morning

now a parable of crackling

 brown loss drying back to some point

of unknown where its powdering tides will

drain down earth's fissures,

intimately gone; I'm just another

torn membrane losing the lie,

spinning down the dark drown.

Still I pull all the architecture

of my ruins--the folly, the narrows,

the knot garden, the rockery of

a thousand dead alpine desires--

forward to find

a station of cleared space

to stand in place for life's moment,

asking eyes shut, seed face

blind and upturned,

 sunflowered on my stem

for one last hot meal

of yellow light;

being a daisy,

being a dream.

April 2020

posted for Kerry's

Skylover Word List for April

Note: April as always is poetry month, and though I will be writing as much as I can, it most likely will not be a poem a day. Nonetheless, I will offer to those who are the Friday 55 each week for their use if so desired. So see you here on Friday if you need a meme.

Images: The Old Tower In The Fields, 1884 by Vincent Van Gogh, Public Domain
Still Life With Four Sunflowers, 1887, by Vincent Van Gogh, Public Domain

Pete and Repete's

 Pete and Repete's

Back when I threw away the North, sick of being

Honeybunch Kaminski, 

and came South to be the sweeter, 

smilin'-for-a-dime grits-totin' Rita,

I wrote some verse,

perverse but not diverse

about your tiger eyes because

the ram was a disguise and

I knew you had the spotted skin

big cats can never change--

and so you showed me.

Down the highway from Nelda's

where I trickled out sweet tea and pepper sauce

(7 different varieties) stiffed

by shriveled 'pokes who found me too remiss

in my amateur bottomless
refills, I heard there was a joint

called Pete and Repete's and wondered if
there the hamburger dills were greener, but ended up
at Girlie's to learn the trick

I wouldn't turn, hustling joe and pancakes

in the dusty starlight night.

I  missed you on the day

you came up plumbing,

found instead my cat-eyed body-man  

deep in the buckwheat thicket

his pulse on mine in temporary candlelight 

he never understood, a repulse of who he was
that couldn't stay. Main squeeze: Tvarscki, cigarillo

and the thousand fifty lies that kept him

shiny as hammered chrome. Those Karo eyes

that still saw only Honey in the wild bunch

gone in the black blizzard,

tho the afterlight remains, pouring a bottomless cup of shadows

repeating down a dead-end red dirt road.

~February 2015

posted for     real toads

Challenge: Get Listed

Grapeling (Michael of it could be that)  provides us with a list of words that reflect each other in spelling but have no meanings in common, and asks us to use at least two of them or invent a few--I have tried to do both, though I have strayed a bit from the pathway in this, my autobiographical indulgence and not very serious cautionary tale of the Lovely Rita, non-Meter Maid.

optional musical acompaniment

Process Notes(and/or Spoilers): I worked at several diners including the ones named(except for the famed "Pete and Repete's Restaurant" in Purcell) when I first came to Oklahoma in the seventies.  From what I can find out on google, they all seem to be defunct. I couldn't stand being constantly hit on under my own name, and stole and wore the name tag Rita, left behind by a less stoic ex-waitress, thus assuming my first pre-Hedgewitchian alias. (And yes, the slogan I wore in a strategic spot on my uniform apron said : 'They're stacked better.'  ) My current husband's company did all the plumbing work for the Girlie chain, but we never met until much later, under very different circumstances. But that's another tale.

'poke is short for 'cowpoke' and for those who haven't known the joys of waiting table, 'stiffed' refers to not receiving a tip.

"Black blizzard" is a 30's term for the worst dust storms of that era.

The character Honeybunch Kaminski, by counterculture cartoonist R. Crumb, was one with whom I strongly identified at the time.

Images: courtesy google image search Cup of Joe source
Girlie's source
No copyright infringement intended--will remove at request of copyright holder.