Stormlight

 

 

 

Stormlight

Rain-giver, hail-maker, tornado-farmer,

May's black hammer mesocyclone bouquet

falls into the world; 

a twist and wrench

of chaos-stacked air that knows

only one gamble,

hanging its fate,

its otherworld gate

over wheatfields and wiseacres

it will strip down to skin

in a boiling of sky,

where one will be wrecked

and another spared

by the luck

of the drawing wind.

After the storm,

the crash gasp flash drama,

light is softened,

sky-wrapped in puff-clouds

like a newborn in crochet.

Trees stir and push

to their wild/calm lover.

Birds streak back in sepia

down to a world

neither colored

nor monochrome.

 

We ride these last days

between daggers,

between fear and relief,

between the holy

and the unholy,

the quick and the dead

 

watching domestic

disputes of drunk giants

from a mousehole of hope.

 

 May 2022

posted for earthweal's

Spirits of Place

Mesocyclone: A storm-scale region of rotation, typically around 2-6 miles in diameter and often found in the right rear flank of a supercell (or often on the eastern, or front, flank of a High Pressure storm). The circulation of a mesocyclone covers an area much larger than the tornado that may develop within it. Properly used, mesocyclone is a radar term; it is defined as a rotation signature appearing on Doppler radar that meets specific criteria for magnitude, vertical depth, and duration.~NOAA Weather

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Binger, Oklahoma F4 tornado of 22 May 1981. Courtesy of National Severe Storms Laboratory, NOAA Public Domain via wikimedia commons

Stormlight, May 2, 2022 ©joyannjones

 

Zombie

Zombie

Excerpts from the Journal

 July 2, 1995

...but telegrams from ghosts are unnerving...hard to somehow extract the essence [of the past] without ever wanting it back..

I shed bitter tears for ____ at the funeral Friday, went back to work, came home to crash, woke to screaming nightmares of his corpse pulling me up by the hair ...

mourning for the flame that burned so fitfully but so pure; I go in fear of the black hand that extinguished it….

After I ran away I dreamed

and dreamed of you dead

and now you are
buried in your overalls

laughing brown eyes blanks, rolled up in your head

ivory as  unnumbered dice

the way the whiskey always made them

so dead for you is just another high... 

July 5, 1995

Nearly a year on my new job. Slept too much. Crazy dreams. 

of ______ once again, this time wearing another’s body, but retaining his own insane unfocused brown eyes, ranting at me, holding me by the shirt and shaking me, starting with 

soft words, words that my new lover says to me, 

[‘It will be better, it will all be better soon’]

but always that mad look increasing as I start to know, finally screaming at me;

what, I can’t tell, 

because I too am screaming...denials, guttural cries of child's terror...is it his unforgiving ghost, coming to me in dreams, to finally show what was bleeding and real under the plastic wedding cake cover...

or guilt's last hidden gasp.

...the old dreams from when I left him, that I must fight his corpse--fattened in the otherworld, malignant and mad with unholy life...

now I dream it all again, the headstone so uneasy on the man I knew, careless kind, silly, ineffective, weak and

 [full of the ability to destroy.]

what I feel I deserved to receive / 

or what I actually / behind the masks / received…

 

it’s all too far gone from me now... 

it's always sleeping beside me now

where I'm afraid I'll have to look at it,

don't make me touch it

turning turning in a winding sheet of

strangling nights

blind afraid 

to look and see that those empty eyes 

[there in the dark]

 are staring back and I'm caught again

as of course they always are, and I always am….

Journal entries from 1995, revised and extensively messed with, March 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Poet Stu McPherson is running the show at the pub today, and his prompt is to explore the nightmare edge of our dreams. This is a bit of a departure for me, more prose than poetry, and taken from life ( or more accurately, death.) I've redacted names

July 5 1995

Images © joy ann jones

Stormy Monday

Stormy Monday

Drunkard’s kiss, a used beginning,

a try for that embrace that seems to promise

what no human hand delivers.

We took the long riff into every alley

and found beneath the ground the big abyss.

That life and you are dead and gone,

child of pain, long gone

with the crazy smile, the amber trusting

thousand mile stare.

When I first met you I fell hard

into your painted desert 

whose beauty held no peace,

tumbled laughing down the graffiti'd walls
and hit the hard valley floor,

where the only thing to drink 
in all that stretch of badlands

was a bubbling whiskey river snaking through,

where the only stars that shone in the cold

perpetual night were the flickers and splinters

that came and went

in your liquid red rimmed eyes.

We were never alone, never still

with Johnny Walker and Johnny Winter,

B.B., Muddy Waters and Stevie Ray at the long party.

The eagle flies on Friday, Saturday we play. Sunday

never came and day was night and night day

in our crowded moving house where the music played on
the faces grew pale and formless
and time was spun forever in a whirlwind of denials.

But you were never made to wear the harness.

I remember when we blew two weeks pay on

those cases of pink champagne from France,

sweet under the bed in a room with no heat

and drank them in a week without glasses;

how you always traveled with forty dollars

in your pocket and 16 wine coolers

in the trunk of the Monte Carlo

(for emergencies) even when we
were running on empty.

And after all, you kept every promise.

I was the one who gave out like

a rented mule, a deathbed conversion, 

you who knew where all the kisses went

who kept a golden box of all the hours

who gave your back at the last for me to cross,

a bridge to span the deep abyss

from which you watched me walk.

Some nights I still can see you where I left you

looking up as if you’re seeing

something bigger than a kiss.

April 2011

Enjoy the music if you care to. There never was a day without it in the life of the man I wrote this for, gone on to the last party in 1992.