Things Placed In A Velvet Box

It doesn't matter to me, anymore
if your buried name feeds flowers or wasps or nothing at all.
All day there is bread on a board, and a book's pages rolling with the breeze.
There is rain and minutes dying and both the best and least of these...

The things I placed on velvet, in a box
as children or idiots do, with fistfuls of forget-me-nots 
staining fingers blue, as ink will do
when spilled across pulped pages, entre nous...

It doesn't matter whose way 
is the less foolish one
or which moon 
will rise on the ash of a setting sun.

_______

for micro-poetry. 

Mulberry Rain

Rain falls from the leaves 

of the mulberry outside my window--

purple berries drop from its branches 

staining the walk--

my dog tracks them into the kitchen.

I love the rain--

my noisy neighbor stops working on his truck.

The rain, the berries, my dog

all soothe me,

but I am falling, too--

just slowly.

_____ 

A 55 for my excellent BFF.

 

Hologram Family Robinson

The Hologram Family Robinson
lives nowhere because they don't exist. 
"You're projecting," they sneer at each other,
bloodless
boneless
auto-tuned assholes that they are.

They become peevish.
They become representations of reptiles
dying in a dream sequence involving a tar pit or peat bog.
"Discover us," they plead.
"Split our rock with a hammer, release us, love us."
But they are assholes, 
and like love
good advice
or last night's dinner,
everything goes right through them.
"Hail, signalman!" they cry, larynxless
like insects in the rotting ear of a dead man. 
_______

for "Unhappy Refrain" at Toads. I recycled a comment I left at Paper Tiger for this.

Maison D'oiseau

Here is the house with rivers for walls.
Mine is the body with voices for skin.
In your eyes, setting suns and cycling stars.

Mine is the port with a shore made of wind.
Docks are easy, moorings leaden;
morning birds fill every tree. 
______

for quadrille #59--cycle

Testament

I folded a love letter

inside a bible

and left them both

on a table

in the garden

overnight

in the rain.

As expected,

my new lover 

appeared

wearing the sun

and the wind

like epaulets 

on his shoulders.

With a strong open fist

he broke my loneliness.

A dove flies

to cold

lofty

Ararat.

_____

for my BFF's most entirely awesome 55 thang.

 

Orange Peel

The white inside an orange peel

velvet soft as a water dream

bears the stunned blankness of betrayed wives.

Circles and sections,

heart beats, desires, babies, birds,

all in a grain of sand

or the eternal and silent dome of the sky.

The white inside an orange peel

fragrant with what it has already lost

remains beautiful, sensual, for a short time

but is already dying.

Circles and sections,

heart beats, desires, babies, birds,

none of these are meant to endure--

their purpose is goodbye,

their pinnacle sleeps in dust.

The white inside an orange peel

was/was never/ was/ was never one with the fruit it sheltered.

Lover sweet, lover who stings the knife's cut

all the same, and doomed themselves.

Circles and sections,

heart beats, desires, babies, birds,

all born of the branch and gone to the table,

the plate,

the necessary separation and then--

returned to the garden, the turned soil, the green shoots

and the endless rot and rise of everything. 

_______

Geometric Onion Dome Girl

Geometric onion dome girl has a resentment against stars.

Everything must be rooved--taxis, coffins, bus kiosks, and especially churches

because every little light can't be a christ.

Geometric onion dome girl got a paper cut from a phone book

while trying to give blood to the past to revive it.

The operator denounced her, 

just for old time's sake,

and quoted maxims instead of backing up her soul

with a more modern device.

Architects don't care about onion domes anymore,

and geometry is all angles and curves.

Revolutions never happen in the rain.

Tea is weak and poetry no longer burns.

Stars don't even light cigarettes,

and so the savior of circumferences plots a mid-point

between 

ennui 

and

effervescence,

shooting herself into space like old light in transit. 

______

for the Sunday Muse #8