Neon Run

Neon Run

Turquoise tourmaline tangerine sky,

neon run through the alley

run for some sanctuary. No matter,

what’s behind will run faster.

Snow blown drifts, tinted air brush of filth

white fade to black, dogs add yellow, green vomits

from drunks. No thing falls unspoiled

and rises clean here. Don’t fall.

Noise shatters glass broken noise endless,

clamor yelling curses machinery screams.

Even the air makes red pulsing howling

wind growls in summer, draws blood in the snow.

Out on the lake's the sweet safety of empty,

tossing vaults of cold cobalt vast as that country

where you’ll never go. Watch whisperwhite foam

washtease a promise that dwindles away.

Shrink the self smaller, mouse small, or a pea.

Hide avoid run and the blows sometimes miss,

but words are barbed arrows handfletched for maiming

that always fly true so fly faster fly through

concrete mud and brick sharp falling down rubble

rot kicked to the curb, trash blown down the street.

The bums beg for change from a child

who has nothing, under the bloodshot

tourmaline tangerine sky.

August 2011

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Claudia hosts this week's challenge, and her prompt today is Going Urban: to write a poem about a city real or imaginary. Mine is about the city where I was raised, Chicago, Illinois

Heart's Light

Heart’s Light

Down in my dreams a man walks in the dark.
He has new skins for old souls in the dark.

Take my face in two hands, my eyes with yours.

What deepens your thirst quenches mine, wine dark.

Split the smooth noose, spit out the serpent gag.

Pull your heart up from the spindle of dark.

Feather your wings for this blue starry night.

We'll have the secrets of flight hatched in dark.

Who stamps feet, impatient with dawn and still

incomplete? Who do I meet in the dark?

Feed me with hunger, sharp, heavy and strong.

It's filling is sweet as song in the dark.

Light of my heart, the hot day’s long and bright.

Why is it joy is found best in blue dark?

August, 2011

Posted for    Form for All    at dVerse Poets Pub

This is my attempt at a ghazal.

Gay Cannon has invited John Alwyine-Mosley(@bookdreamer) to host this week's Form For All at dVerse, a look at the ghazal form. Here's an explanatory quote from his article:  

"..Stresses can fall wherever the quantitative pattern used suggests. Hence, in English you can write the couplet based on the number of syllables per line or in iambic pentameter keeping roughly the same pattern per line set from the beginning. It’s roughly, because what matters is the sounds and cadence when read aloud! Or even sang as Ghazals are important classical musical forms  throughout the middle east...

Traditional Ghazal rules of form are very clear. The opening couplet is called a matla, which sets up the rhyme scheme (qaifa) and refrain (radif) by having it occur in both lines. Then this scheme occurs only in the second line of each succeeding couplet for at least five additional couplets and in practice as many as needed. To end the ghazal, the poet has a signature couplet, the (makhta) in which they mention their name or refer to themselves..."

Image: Starry Night over the Rhone, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888, oil on canvas
Vincent van Gogh [Public domain]via wikimedia commons 

Apples and Thorns

Apples and Thorns

A Pantoum

Love’s not an apple, plucked and discarded,

uneaten, Kallisti, some greed gloating prize.

Love’s a thorned angel, not a triumph awarded,

escaping from every trap that's devised.     

Uneaten, a  judgment, discord, greed's prize;

love is worth nothing, unless something tender

is running from every trap we devise

seeking that second of promised surrender.

Love is worth nothing without something tender.     

She knows that she comes to you only to go

seeking her moment of phantom surrender.

My love’s a burned angel colder than snow.

Knowing she comes to you only to go,

attainment’s a ballad for lunatic sailors

serenading burned angels lost in the snow

in pied tattered garments, since Harlequin tailors

attainments in ballads for lunatic sailors.

A song's not an apple, a swing and a miss

by fools in pied garments from harlequin tailors.              

Love’s a thorned angel with ghosts in her kiss.

A song not an apple, her swing and my miss,

for love’s a thorned angel not a triumph awarded.

Love smiles, my burned angel, a ghost in her kiss,

and I 'm the green apple that's plucked and discarded.

August, 2011

Posted for     OpenLinkNight   at  dVerse Poets Pub

Joe Hesch of A Thing for Words has donned the pubkeeper's apron tonight 

to host our fourth Open Link Night. Thanks to all the poets whose participation has made this event so successful and so much fun, and look forward to seeing you there tonight. Doors open at 3:00 PM EST

Process Notes: Kallisti means 'for the most beautiful one." It was inscribed on the Apple of Discord that forced the 'judgement of Paris' between three goddesses, and began the Trojan War.

Harlequin is the comic servant from the Italian Commedia del Arte,  lustful and florid, agile but foolish, dressed always in a motley patchwork of rags. Uncapitalized the word refers to anything dramatically varied in color, or a comic or jester.

 ***

This is my first pantoum and I'm sure I haven't done the form justice, but I enjoyed working in it very much.The  pantoum comes to us from Malaysia via France, where Baudelaire and Victor Hugo first popularized it. It's been adapted quite a bit from the original Malay version, and I've found varying rulesets for it. It can be unrhymed, or rhymed abab, or abba, but it's always written in quatrains, and the line repetition is characteristic, with the second and fourth lines of each stanza  repeated as the first and third lines of the next. This pattern continues for any number of stanzas, except for the final stanza,which reuses the third line of  the first stanza as it's second line and the beginning line as the last line of the poem.

Image: Green Apple, by Image editor, on flick'r 

Image Editor's photostream  

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

Rainsong

Rainsong

I sit and sing, daft diener admiring

the perfect anatomy of this storm.

No bass bay of its thunder can be too loud,

no glissando of lightning too bright,

too piercing, no brooding cloud too black.

It snarls and rains fiercer

the louder I laugh,

a madwoman drinking rain

from her wineglass,

wearing rain for a burqa.

The salt sweet falling

that tastes of  you

I drink deepest;

life on the tongue, seablue

in the mouth, gold in the glass,

my storm that wraps me

in wet winding thrash

after dust dead drought.

Behind the clouds’ cowl there is

no mask, only the godpaint

that sweats off, runs a blue scribed

tatoo over white thighs,

inks seeking lips

as fluttering cottonwoods ripple

and quake in the tease of

the sensate air’s caress, 

as I, as I am played

trembling under the harpist's hand

that barely brushes, thrumming

the breaths of the cooling sky.

Misted skin is parchment for

the scripture of the storm.

Flesh renders meaning where rain

has blurred wet words.

The void  never seen is filled

past holding, charged sudden

bolts shot from sky

ground out in bone,

a silver plastique

ignition of white

rainfire, earth made whole

soaked within and without at last,

lifting her dulcet summer perfume

as the grass gives up its dead

in a honey bath of runoff

that choruses the soul

of each blade and shriveled leaf

requited in wet turning, while far

star fish swimming in clouds

leap and splash.

In the morning, the iron air is cleansed

with the autumn smell of grassfires

lit by the sky’s rocket match.

August 2011 

Image: Lightning over Oklahoma City, photo taken from Chopper 4, Kfor.com

August 6, 2011 Copyright © www.kfor.com. All rights reserved.

The Futility of Argument

Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est?("What shall I love if not the enigma?")

~ inscribed by Giorgio de Chirico on his self-portrait in 1911

The Futility of Argument

The light bent

as I drank it

from my

sieved sleeve

shadow draped  

behind the broken stump.

I stared at

the capsuling bananas

until the young owl

became bored.

Why is it

he asked

you see an enigma

where I see

a banana?

Why is it

I asked

I see the green soil

the purple wind

the tall blue shadow

that bisects the forest

day and death 

multiplicity 

singularity

the monkeys' dogfaced

upside down masks

dripping snarls and chatter

where you see

a banana?

I’m not convinced

by anything

a woman with no head

can see said he, 
revolving his small skull

like a turban vent as
he boarded the train

And I likewise

by no argument

advanced by a rationalist
talking owl.

August 2011

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Today's host is Mark Kerstetter, and he is featuring the life and works of pre-Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico

Caveat: I'm always intrigued by and appreciative of surrealism, but I would never say it's anything in my normal style. I do my poor best at it here, however, if nothing else definitely experiencing 'the uncertainty of the poet.'  I've chosen to interpret the small brown figure next to the statue as an owl, though it may be a loaf of bread for all I know.

Image: The Uncertainty of the Poet, by Giorgio de Chirico, 1913, oil on canvas

courtesy Friends of Art

 

Threshold

Threshold

Go with me to

this last doorway

don’t let me fall

because my eyes cloud and fail.

Bring a light

scatter shadows

like seed at a wedding,

preside at the

nuptial of life and death

because we come uncoupled

for this oldest coupling

and surest.

Say my name again

because I need to hear it

because you need to say it

before the end of names.

.

Watch with me

and be my breath

left behind

because desire finally fails.

Tilt your head

so I can see

your face again

in night’s last candle.

In the morning

let the birds

eat the wedding seed

that drops from your hand.

August 2011

This song just seems to want to go with this poem. Best harmony and dobro on this version by Dick Gaughan, EmmyLouHarris, the McGarrigle Sisters and Rufus Wainwright

Friday Flash 55 ~ Pastorale

Pastorale

A large panting old woman
chases a small panting old dog
chasing a large indifferent cow
in punishing heat.

It’s slapstick, but you say
there’s a poem here.
I’m looking for it.

Is it

maybe there,

where two beings

exchange a speaking
shared look of
annoyed patience;

that woman
and someone's dinner?

August 2011

Posted for  Friday Flash 55   at  the G-Man's

Thanks to Brian Miller, of Waystation One  for the inspiration for this one.

Night Burn

Night Burn

As the black-pelted evening prowls in, paw pacing paw,

panther shoulders rippling, remorseless in heat,

I think of you my hellspawned dear, your lustrous

velvet coat, your lace-edged cavalier cuffs

your star torn smile, small sharp teeth,

crimson liar’s tongue.

I remember the wheel where the butterfly screamed

as she was broken, the shrieks from those who fell

before me down the yellow dead well of your eyes,

the claws you hid so functionally accessible 
padded in the black shadows beneath the lace,

rank with yesterday's kill as they raked me blind,

the crouch before me made disarming,

wide-eyed, open-mouthed in delirium’s pant,

always full of the faithless grace that mesmerized

your little birdlings in that practiced boneless sway.

Your plush endearments rang a nonsense language

hot mouthed and simple, grunts of angelic apes

before fur became slick smoothed skin,

so the shock of sudden spasm as you'd 

twitch a lashing tail and snarling pounce,

lapping at the jet of heart's surrender, biting
in the neckbone’s crunch that ends all reason,

was all the more profound.

I feel veloured deep night heavy and smoldering, pierced

with smoky red planetary coals, burning me

hard and small, leopard moon panting, glaring heat-mad;

give my thanks that soon

in the unchanging course of things

dawn will come.

August 2011

Posted for   OpenLinkNight  at dVerse Poets Pub

where I am hosting tonight. Come join us for some of the best poetry and community online. Doors open at 3:00 PM EST.