Repost~Oxygen Vine Dreamscape

Oxygen Vine Dreamscape

 a voice was singing

Oxygen vine

sweet life of mine

o how you twine

oxygen vine

You began to turn me leaflike

browsing me in slack moments,

a subscription of yours, a pastime.

I saw a skewed wall in a lunatic jungle,

undeciphered petroglyphs

scrawled over by flaming flower graffiti

dark hands of roots, celladon vineshadows,

utterly unreadable

a nonsense song

Oxygen vine

trace me a line

o how you twine

oxygen vine

I was deaf from the reverberations

 of collision when you told me

I was a wall against whose

resistance you built your self, but

I was only flesh behind a  wall

etched with the sigils of an unknown cabal,

 its vines and shadows

become my skin

in the deep night

 

Oxygen vine

black columbine

o how you twine

oxygen vine

Love is a cannibal you explained.

His first goal is to kill and eat the other

then make tuneful bells from the bones.

Just so you grew your tensile intoxicant ribbons in me

so hungry and alive, tickling, strangling

composting accommodating flesh till I was friable ooze
  root-fractured, absorbed into your sucking shoots

flensed down to my skull for a drum

sweet notes pulsing

Oxygen vine

razors in wine

o how you twine

oxygen vine

 

I was wined and twined

cut so quickly

I never knew when my smile lost its lips.

You pierced and numbed me

bubbled my blood out with your own

beads of verdant air, an antagonism of life support

careless of  the red drops’ splash

or my cyanic throat

rattling and humming

Oxygen vine

ventilator’s whine

o how you twine

oxygen vine

Autumn brings a bonfire.

 Dry leaves and twigs burn tinder fast

thorns and flowers flaring farewell

in a temperature that crackles,

twining flames fed hotter

by an inrush of escaping air exploding

black under the lids into

smoke blown like seeds on the wind

vanishing

Oxygen vine

darkness define

your ashen design

into silence

March 2011 

 

Posted October, 2011 for   Poetics   at  dVerse Poets Pub

Claudia is in charge of the prompt today, titled Call and Response, and has asked for a poem of two voices speaking. This is one which I wrote to have three separate threads, or voices, going on, the single lines make one poem, the non-italicized 'song' another, and the italicized main body the third. Each can be read individually, and each either answers or supports the other. I've used a little color to make it easier to see for the prompt.

 

Hope this meets the requirements as I had no luck with a new effort today.

(Originally posted for One Shot Wednesday at the inimitable OneStopPoetry)

 

Photo: Trellised Hand, by joy ann jones, march, 2011  

 

 

 

 

Revenant

In honor of the forthcoming holiday, my all time favorite, Halloween, I'm reposting the third post I ever made at Verse Escape. It's one of my old poems, unrevised from 1991, the last year in which I wrote poetry before starting this blog, which turns one year old on the 16th of this month. (This was also the first post I submitted to One Shot Wednesday at the Old One Stop Poetry.)

Revenant

The cool breath of the dead sighs down the hall.

It peels my soul like an old potato,

thick slices of skin and soft woody flesh

dropping in a spiral on the kitchen table of this

tired life.

A speaking shadow stands at the door,

an empty replicant.

A grey curse hangs over him

like the sullenness of unshed rain

blowing past a withering crop.

Huddled in the closed grave of my bed

I compose my bones in paleolithic repose

with dry flowers, an awl of horn,

a broken string of red beads 

       drifted with earth,

waiting for the ending of that next birth.

O I hear you out there,

rapping, knocking, calling

with a mute vibration

begging to come in and have me.

O yes I answered last time and see

See me now.

Roll the rock and stop the door.

Put the holy symbol round my neck.

Only keep

    the shadow

                  out.

March 1991

Illustration: The Vampire, by Philip Burne-Jones  (1861-1926)
Philip Burne-Jones [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
 

Summer Night Dyad

In honor of the last One Shot Wednesday hosted by the team that has brought so much encouragement and growth to so many writers, myself most of all, I'd like to dedicate this entry with the thanks of a full heart to 

Brian Miller, Adam Dustus, Pete Marshall, Chris Galford, Claudia Schoenfeld  

& Gay Cannon.

You will be missed.

Summer Night Dyad

I.

The Night, The Moon and The Lovers

Up and above in the swinging night,

far from red walls and flying knives,

the kestrel flies with a mouse in her mouth.

The scorpion wags her tail in the south.

The firedrake sleeps in his sulphurous cave

spooned in the high cliff above the wave.

A flickering lantern orange and brief

still fights the moon in her silver sheath;

two lovers sail in a boat of breath

and love till they have nothing left.

When the heart is spent and hollowed like clay,

it becomes a lamp to light the way

Skybluepink lips of deepest night

cup the moon in an overbite;

she’s a melting scoop of vanilla ice cream

 tipped in a cone of clouded dream.

The flame persists though the wind is sharp;

The faeries come out to dance to the harp.

II.

Shooting Star

The beating heart of night rocks

the star cradle on her breast gently gently

in the warm southern wind,

but still every so often a star falls out

bright and sudden, a streak thin as a broom straw

scratched off against purple floor,

a white chip on black china

a match that lights

and is blown out.

Oh to be in that cradle rocking, lulled

with the whistling of constellations,

the voice of a mother, vast and mild

caring as much as she can

for her brood of legion,

at the edge of

the ear

humming

lullabies;

to rock

and sleep

then

to fall,

a

brief

light

in the

dark

to 

wish 

on.

July 2011

Posted for   OneLastShotWednesday   at  OneStopPoetry

Process Note: Sky blue pink is a color my grandparents used to tease me with as a child. If I complained about wearing something, they would always say, "What do you want, a sky blue pink dress?"

Photo: Blue Moon with Skybluepink Clouds, by joy ann jones, july 2011

Witch's Candle

Witch’s Candle

I sent my heart, a candle in a paper boat,

sailing out on a white-rimed onyx sea

by the witchlight of a failing auburn moon.

At morning’s crackling burn she returned to me,

finding nowhere any berth or port of rest,

and this is all the tale that she confessed:

“I sailed at first quite blind," her low voice murmured,

“Nothing moved on the silent water’s face

except for my own shadow cast before me.

Then towards midnight, waves began to race.

The paper boat leaned to the blackened sea

as if the circling atoms sang beneath me.

"A  basilisk blue, a serpentine ocean's child

brought its face upturned to split the waters,

slicked with scales of turquoise demi-moons,

natron flame for eyes, black doves for daughters.

It seemed to want to eat me, piping tunes

on an easy azure tongue that danced the dawn,

but it tired of my taste, and I sailed on.

“Then,” said my heart, “ I came to a speck of land.

The paper boat shook out its weary folds,

for what’s so white and thin’s not meant to last,

not nearly last as long as what it holds,

and I was growing heavier with the tides,

but lava lapped the land's membranous sides.

“My own flame paled, lightning of a blinking insect

beside the heat that island caused to flood.

Red rock ran incandescent from the puncture,

a  hissing mouth that spit the worldcore’s blood

and brought its floating lips to my boat’s height,

kissing its creases crisp in the fire’s bite.

“The eagle of four corners stooped above me,

and pierced me on his running ruby claws.

He carried me for twenty leagues untiring.

I watched the obsidian sea and learned its laws.

I saw a million such as I, chained frozen, alone,

or sailing still but dead as a fossil's bone.

“I begged the bird to teach me how to fly.

Instead, he dipped his wing on a downward turn.

He loosed his grip; I dropped, my flame blown out.

So three times turned away, here I return.”

There bottomed in the bright aurora of dawn,

I took her back, so broken and so sore,

called her my one candle, light and life,

and swore to send her sailing out no more.

July 2011

Posted for    OneShotWednesday   at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Image: The Repentant Magdelen, by Georges de la Tour, ca 1628-45, oil on canvas

posted on flickr by mpt1607

Epistemology: Demons

Epistemology:Demons

What do we know 

about demons? Angels may

float the sky in a white penumbra 

of  cloud, but you know 

where you are with a demon.

We know demons are god’s

black ops, sent to

do his wetwork, to keep

the wings of the angels

always clean.

We know they have radiant

faces of fire, red eyes

of ember, a split singing tongue,

tails that thrash like pythons

and a foot divided,

that if they speak

then they are lying, that

they play us like dulcimers,

sucking the music straight

down to hell.

We know they’ve come to

burn down the heart, but first

pull up the flowers on the doorstep

to scent the flames that

cover the smell of blood.

They are not distant

but near beside us, the better to catch

a lungful of loss and smoky grief

from  feelings clean as diamonds

they‘ve turned against us in the blaze.

We know they are as we are,

damned or dancing to the tune

of the universe, which says

some things must die

so that others can live.

Yes, you know

where you are

with a demon.

 

June 2011

Note: This is a companion piece to Epistemology:Angels, found here.

 

 

posted for   OneShotWednesday   at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

This is the one year anniversary for One Stop Poetry. Happy Birthday! and thanks to all the One Stop Team for their fine work and the many hours they spend in visiting and commenting on a huge number of participating sites.

Image: Stone Gargoyle Face, by Digital Wallpaper on flick'r

Digital Wallpaper's photostream

Hedgerider's Lament~Part III

Note: This is the third in what will hopefully be a set of  four sestinas on the pagan holidays which mark the turn of the year, and of the human heart. Hedgerider's Lament, Part I, (Yule) is here, and Part II, (Candlemas), is here.

The Hedgerider's Lament

Part III: Beltane Sestina

It’s been a killing winter here circled deep in the hedgerow’s walls.

I hear the hungry crying, birdsong and brisk bee buzz drowned out.

Wrapped in the scorpion’s tail of drought the new sun builds no fires

and seeds fester as they’re planted in a darkness shorn of green.

Somewhere a heartwound hides itself, seeping dully under the moon

and all are made to feel that pain till the fires outburn the curse.

Things are coming through that shouldn’t, tangled with the curse

It strengthens dark and brings them kicking out at the charmbuilt walls.

The faery lights are spectral blue, dim and distant in bowls of moon.

The tongue cleaves to the mouthpiece and the song will not come out.

The world hangs on the coming of the one who brings the green.

Behind locked doors barbed evils thicken, old flesh no longer fires.

So out we go to find the nine woods needed to build the fires,

twin pyres to burn nine murders and nine times nine despairs, curse

fright that sets the handle slipping stripping deadwood from the green

fuel and future even mixed in the razorsharp hedgerow’s walls.

Babes are counted, a white horse passes vast as the veils thin out;

pale hands grip tight the reins of light that pull the quickening moon.

In the darkness that is absence floating in night’s red eye, the moon

looks down on fractals, throbbing temples, cold heart fires.

The weasel eating her young, the blighted seed that won’t sprout out

grim her pocked sad face and set her calling to lift the curse,

to begin the windsigh song the harpist brings to raise the walls

so all in the hedgerow’s circle know the lover’s kiss of green.

The flower bride she walks in May, all cup in search of filling, green

her gown, breadbrown her hands, face limpid as a slice of moon,

summer’s lord for her arms, green man of the land that knows no walls.

She carries her basket of wishes to make the spark for the high balefires

and all that dances through them comes out sound and free of curse,

for every spite of winterlong will be ashed and trampled out.

No more shelter for the fiddling tongue ravaged by betrayal, thrust out

black bloated at all comers in pours of poison bitter and green.

No more room for winter’s old man’s rage or hag’s hardbitten curse

when the summer lord and the lady come to dance beneath the moon.

There the skin is thin and the maypole thick by the heartwood’s fires:

stop, reverse and turn, as its green ward weaves the hedgerow’s walls.

Re-spin the curse to blessing, crossweave sun with braids of  moon.

Pull up the dead. Sins' tinder flares to burn out on the green.

All seen, all felt is new again. Life fires light, singing up the walls.

June 2011

Posted for    OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Process Notes:

I’ve been working off and on on this for several months and  meant to have it ready for the true date of Beltane, which falls at the beginning of May and marks the midpoint of the sun’s equinox in progress towards today, the summer solstice, but the demands of a poem a day in April shunted it to the back burner.

There are too many legends, myths and archetypes associated with Beltane and the coming of summer to list, but I’ll just touch on a few I’ve incorporated here. Balefires are bonfires of purification that symbolically burn away the winter and its ills, marking the goddess of fertility’s arrival and celebrating her wedding with the sun god, when birth and growth of crops and livestock replace the death grip of winter. As always, I've taken a lot of liberty with historical detail and only loosely follow the pagan canon.

You can find a bit more general info here at wikipedia

Image: Summer Solstice Sunrise over Stonehenge, 
Photograph by Andrew Dunn, 21 June 2005 courtesy wikimedia commons

Caryatid

Caryatid

Voodoo can’t protect the lonely

shrunken head, swinging from

the rearview,

dangling  in my memory.

The downward nightened face

the stitched up eye,

the way your cheeks and lips

have lost your tongue

so you can

no longer equivocate.

Still, back then, you couldn’t speak

without singing; it was just

how to bear the song,

how to take the words,

then take your worst.

It was in the oldtime, schooltime,

walking handfast in the dark by 
the Temple of  Bahá'í; what you called,

Episcopalian dry,

god’s giant Juicer in the sky,

when you told me looking up,

Lilith-lashes over chartreuse eye,

that I was a caryatid.

Then you had to explain

to the beggar’s child,

towering her bones Viking brash
above your fretted
Celtic knots,

exactly what that was.

I wasn’t flattered.

But still, you couldn’t sing

without speaking. You read me

Stevens' rage for order, went to heaven 
in a splitpea shell, sang with blue guitar

in your voice of coffeehouse smoke

to the serpent’s hiss of espresso machines.
Till I woke up with burning eyes  
and began, forever outside,

to balance the tilting building

on my head.

June 2011

 

Posted for   OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry 



Possibly pertinent references, feel free to skip:

Bahai Temple, Wilmette, Illinois

“…For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
that we should ask this often as she sang…

...Oh! Blessed rage for order...
The maker's rage to order words of sea
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”

from The Idea of Order at Key West, Wallace Stevens

"I've got a secret/ that none can tell.

I'm goin to heaven/ in a splitpea shell.

O lordy me, didn't we/ shake Sugaree?

Everything I had/done and gone..."

~Elizabeth Cotton

Images: Right Caryatid Chimney of the Chimney-Piece at Dorchester House, 
by Alfred Stevens,circa 1908, and  
The caryatids of the Erechtheum near dusk; Acropolis, Athens, Greece
by Takeaway both courtesy wikimedia commons.
footer image:

Bahá'í  Temple, Wilmette, Illinois, by lalunablanca on flick'r

lalunablaca's photostream

Forensics

Forensics

Shall we do an autopsy

on the thing that’s dead between us? 

Shall we look at the floor and say,

“The directionality of the blood splatter

is consistent with arterial spray?”

Which of us will play the coroner 

in this cold case reconstruction?

I say I have determined

the cause of death to be asphyxia.

The victim was burked, killed the way a lion 
sometimes smothers a buffalo, 

by clamping its jaws over the muzzle,

replacing breath for breath. I can tell

by the swollen heart, the eyes and lungs,

where the petechial hemorrhaging shows

all the hypoxic arguments ended in

our fingers breaking the hyoid bone, closing

the muzzle, crushing the words.You say 

it's plain by the rosy pink of the lividity

that the body has been subjected to

prolonged, intense cold. Decomp's begun;

the tissues begin to fail, the cornea dulls

so that looking at each other, no ectoplasmic

bridge springs up, nothing of affinity in eyes 

dead red, sightless wide. We've come
to the limit of forensics. No chromatography,

no strike of a DNA match

can light up this black puzzle.

June 2011

Posted for OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

“...The term "burking" comes from the method William Burke and William Hare used to kill their victims during the West Port murders. They killed the usually-intoxicated victims by sitting on their chests and suffocating them by putting a hand over their nose and mouth, while using the other hand to push the victim's jaw up. The corpses had no visible injuries, and were supplied to medical schools for money.”

~ enotes.com/forensic-science/

Image courtesy google image search, no credits available, originating site 

House on the Hill

Revelation fields, Eric Johannson

House on the Hill

I’ve built a  fine house on top of my head, grey

dormer windows and tall stories, preaching chimneys,

heavy boards of years across the door. 

It’s easier now, not going in and out,

and I needed a way to keep out the dead.

The time it's taken you'd never guess, to 

trim my ears into topiary frogs, meticulous sentinels here

by the door, crouched comical, listening and green

on the hair I’ve mowed smooth as a fog. Totems

well placed can help keep out the dead.

Of course, my eyes still stay outside, blind ovals in

the wild blow of storm, hit by each unseen coldslap surprise,

while inside my house, white incense smoke takes 

the sweetened song of a bird in a cage from attic

to hall, to ward the doors that keep out the dead.

There's the child in her room, lining her treasures up.

See her bone beads of grace in a plastic cup gleam

rich red in an eyeglow turned in, flicker 

and spark giving light where there can be

neither fire nor candle to keep out the dead.

She wears my mist necklace of disappearing jewels

clothes of umber leaves, shoes from old squirrel tracks

left on the lawn, paints my face with the scent 

of rosemary rubbed on the dark skin of dawn,

come climbing up over the living and dead.

And the view is good from the slanting roof,

laid on the summit of my growth, looking out

where my own eyes ever go, beyond my topiary ear

to the walled horizon of clouds and fear

the dead must cross to get to here.

May 2011

This poem was inspired by the photographic-manipulation work of Erik Johansson; in particular, Revelation fields, as shown above. Thanks to Fireblossom for sending me the original link. 

Take some time to check out his portfolio of amazing images here:

Eric Johansson's website

Posted for  OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry 

Weeds

Weeds

Out 

of its quirky carapace

comes the green shoot

comes its partner root

questing for place.

Out

of the fumbling cotyledon,

with its rudimentary

green spurs the opening fist,

come the true leaves

born for the light.

Down 

through the sharp sand

the hardpan clay

the barrier stone

uncaring which

tendrils dance and turn

with the malleable earth,

in elemental shapeshift

 ever ductile ever smooth

powered by an infinite fuel.

Above 

and below

unity of purpose

one mind of being

all choices made

before the push begins.

Then

in a haphazard ordering,

the casual digits

of the giants

pluck them out

again.

May 2011

will be

Posted for  OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Image: Sprout, by myriorama on flickr

myriorama's photostream

NOTE: We  had severe storms and two powerful tornadoes come very close to us last night, but we are all okay and no damage done here. We  did have a power outage so my computer was off, causing withdrawal pangs, but otherwise all is well.
~hw 5/25/11

Blue Feather

Blue Feather

As the sun blows away from the east,

in the stripped tree by the far fence

the eagle breaks through,

too big, too bright

too blue, come carrying all

the questions of white weather, 

cold electric blue in all his parts.

He moves on the bare branch reflexively, restlessly,

a ruffling knife wind at his back full of every

promise of change and threat of frost,

pulling an azure flight feather

through his solitary note of yellow,

stiletto beak a drooping mask

in harlequin opposition.

Improbable of color and shorn of motion, he sits

in a stillness that is not repose,

a being of want and promise, his eye on

an oblivious thing, small and fat

hunkering at my feet, that one

of all my charges I've loved

but not too much.

The eagle watches from the border

of the breathing lands, as I stand my

half-hearted guard, his bright head cocked

to one side like a ragdoll’s flops,

his mouth unlatched, impatient,

his indigo eye kindling like a flare, burning

blue warning in the impending night.

His great wings draw up in clouds, 

shadows spread dark on the sky

crackling loud in the apricot sunset,

bent legs folding flowers under the storm.

His hoarse cry springs the feather, spinning

sudden and singular it hangs between us

centering the worlds.

Then he’s read me, all I am.

He jumps the wind, a flying bolt of blue gone

forever far from where the bars of arms draw in

and sleet falls on the sacrifice heartcovered

in my breast, safe 

from that one stray moment’s wish

to give it up to make the eagle stay.

May 2011

Posted for  OneShotWednesday   at the inimitable  OneStopPoetry 

Image: Electric Blue Feather, by tallmonkee on flickr

tallmonkee's photostream