Lilac One

 I saw the devil standing in front of Lilac One

with the dawn across his shoulders

and his shirt cuffs undone

He said, "Why are you waiting, and who waits for you?"

then the dawn turned to diamonds

of peculiar blue.

The devil is lonely though he prowls Lilac Two

and his heart is a magpie

in a mirror that flew

with itself to itself in a blur of time spent

in evening's cold courtyard

by feigned accident.

The devil said, "Nothing can mar Lilac Three

though tomorrow's black roses

are vased there for thee."

Then he shook his hair out like leaving a love

that he's carefully carved--

that's a lot to think of.

________

shared to Dverse OLN. 

Lazy Fireblossom !

 

No Word Garden Word List this week, but it will be back next week! No good reason, I'm just feeling pleasantly lazy this week. :-)

Word Garden Word List: Tom Waits

 

Hello everyone and welcome to another Word Garden Word List where a list of 20 words from a particular source--different each week--is provided and you are to use at least 3 of them in a new poem. That's it! This week our source is singer/songwriter Tom Waits, whose voice will make you want to quit smoking immediately, and whose songs are esoteric, unique, and run the gamut from

tender and tear-jerking

to absolutely crazy.

You might not know that the Eagles' hit "Ol' 55" was written by a young Tom Waits. I've been listening to him since the 70s and he is still coming up with amazing and singular songs. 

And now, your list!

boxing

Burma Shave

cornfield

crestfallen

festival

holy

Martin Eden 

midnight

nobody

overcoat

piano

Romeo

sentimental

sorry

swaying

temptation

trombone

valentines

waltzing

weather

Things She Would Tell You If She Could

 

Romeo, gosh, I'm sorry how things turned out,

and sorry I didn't die after all like you thought.

I'm old now, you wouldn't look twice at me 

but I miss you still, even so, most definitely.

You could find me tonight across from a cornfield

working the St. Lucy's Fall Festival and how would you feel

about that, babe? I wear a lumpy old overcoat

and sell tickets to teenagers so in love they almost float.

I get feeling sentimental and sad about everything

remembering how you said you were the All-Powerful Weather King

and could make the sun come out if I wished it,

or kiss me and kiss me again if I told you I missed it.

My goodness, Romeo, you don't know how often I still think of you,

like when I saw some crestfallen kid with wild hair walking through

the festival like he had something on his mind

and he seemed lonesome, like you, and quiet and kind.

It's almost midnight and the lights are going dim

so I've got to pack up and go home alone again.

I wish so hard that things had turned out different

and I'd say, "Romeo, oh Romeo," and you'd know what I meant.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Tom Waits.

Music: Tom Waits "Blue Valentines"

Jazz Boogie #3

 

I've been getting these transmissions more often lately

as the calendar birds have increased their flock.

Once again I'm twelve, watching

the smoke rise over Detroit, a straight shot down Woodward Avenue,

or watching the pigeons bob around my feet as I walk

with my father to a ballgame.

The ghosts of San Antonio visit me, too,

those hardcore overdose days of foggy stupid wounded highs,

and then the waking from anesthesia

naked, raw and determined to make it stick.

Recovery is a jazz solo, it doesn't go strictly by the note.

You just follow the drummer's beat one by one.

Ah me. I've always felt things so intensely.

It's been a battle to get proximal to some calm center

that goes distal every time I'm about to flag it down.

God sent his little brainiac girl, short on charm,

long on Pinocchio nose, into the saw-toothed world like a cave bat.

I have flown exactly one more time than I have crashed,

and in these veering quicksilver reflections is an oyster eye wondering

whether I have done my dance well

now that the moves have been busted and the tune is winding down.

_______

for Word Garden Word List: CREEM Magazine.

Music: Harry Belafonte "Jump In The Line"

Word Garden Word List: CREEM Magazine

 

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's word list poetry prompt. This time, our source is a little bit different--okay, a lotta bit different! When I was a sprite, CREEM Magazine ("America's Only Rock N Roll Magazine") had its office in my very own home town. In those days, if Rolling Stone was the "underground" press, CREEM was the smartmouth little sib. I loved it.

CREEM was characterized by a bawdy irreverence and a knack for publicizing acts that weren't being covered enough. While Hit Parader had Led Zeppelin on about 5,452 consecutive covers, CREEM was ballyhooing Roxy Music, Talking Heads, Joan Jett, Mott the Hoople, and even Handsome Dick Manitoba, probably just for the name! Their mag was full of cool photos combined with snarky captions. I recall one shot of curly blonde superstar Stevie Nicks being captioned "Sex symbol, or Corgi pup?" 

Now, some 30 years after its lamented demise, CREEM is back, like a rash you just can't get rid of despite oceans of Cortaid. I'm delighted! And so, this week's words are culled from the first issue of the risen CREEM, which just appeared in my mailbox. What we do here is to take at least 3 of the 20 words provided and include them in a new poem. Then link and that's it! Any subject any style, as long as it's poetry. 

And now, your list:

anesthesia

axe

brainiac

brick

charm

Detroit

drummer

ghost

hardcore

intensely

jazz

overdose

pigeons

proximal

ratty

romantic

stages

transmissions

veering

wasteland

Molasses Girl

 

The starlings. They protect my heart.

Kiss me and you can feel them fluttering.

"Aren't you happy?" you ask.

It is only the starlings rising in black unison

because your desire has disturbed them.

I am a molasses girl. I am what is left

after refinement. My heart is a vat.

Open it and drown

in starlings sugar-drunk and rushing

headlong into whatever will make you go away.

If I talk in my sleep near dawn,

it is just the starlings screaming from every tree.

I will bathe in the oven,

until my body is a cookie you can carry.

My familiars will follow, testing, screeching, objecting.

They are my dark dowry, the price you pay for more.

________

for Dverse "Strange Houses" (of Lee Madgwick) The art at top used with permission.

Music: Jonatha Brooke "Made of Gold"

In Camera

"You've got to remain to bein' yourself... you cannot be

Nobody else, it ain't no use tryin' bein' no whirlwind

An' uh, jumpin' here an' an' playin' checkers with

Your own life, that ain't gonna work, baby..."  --Propher Omega 

The mirror is running a con.

No reflection or meat-suit can tell you who you are.

Yes you, in disguise there. You are

a sparrow flown straight from the hand of God.

You are a bulb that wants its light back,

but you are the light.

It's the bulb that struts in its brittle body

voguing like it thought you up.

We have come through the looking glass, 

in costume, in camera, incognito,

even to ourselves. We wander lanes of traffic like amnesiacs,

dreamers who show up naked and unprepared, in a panic of shame

for a test we have already taken and passed. 

________

for Sunday Muse 227. 

Music: Adrian Belew and Prophet Omega "I Am What I Am"

Word Garden Word List--Amy Lowell

 

Hello everyone and welcome to another Word Garden Word List. Last week's poems were marvelous, I must say! What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new poem on any subject and in any form. 

This time our list comes from the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Amy Lowell! When i was in high school, one day I was snooping around in the poetry section and found a volume of her poems. I loved it instantly. One line has stayed with me all of these years: "Fate lays many springes for those with imagination." Well, I had to look up "springes", which turned out to be traps. I felt as if I were being spoken to directly.

Amy Lowell was an outcast as a schoolgirl, not being conventionally pretty and into the bargain being "outspoken and opinionated." She later wrote that "the stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius."

Amy Lowell did not begin her career as an imagist poet until age 30 and only lived to age 51, so her window of creativity was brief, but intense. She was a New England spinster from a prominent Boston family, but she was no bore. Heywood Broun wrote of her, "Given one more gram of emotion, Amy Lowell would have burst into flame and been consumed to cinders."

Your list is taken from a volume I have entitled "Selected Poems of Amy Lowell" published in 1928, making my book nearly a century old! It is filled with references to nature, romantic longing, and other cultures. Sometimes she wrote in dialect or vernacular, and I have not included words from those poems. I will include, however, some music to further inspire you. I think this piece says in music what Amy Lowell often said in poetry.

And now your list.

absurd

astigmatism

bizarre

ecstasies

expectation

feeble

fingers

fox

gingerbread

islands

letters

lilacs

peonies

rare

shiver

springes

symbol

tickets

tiles

various

Lessons Learned In Childhood

 

My mother called mahjong pieces "Chinese tiles." 

They were a pretty mystery to me.

A symbol can be like a mute with something to say;

its tongue tied by one's own ignorance.

Gingerbread men have commonalities with real ones.

They can be sweet, or fragile,

and (some of them) smell good and draw me in.

Sometimes there is another one after this one; sometimes not.

At thirteen I was prescribed eyeglasses.

Astigmatism made everything unclear but luminous,

sending blurs of light out from their centers.

You are still unclear to me. You still send out light from your center.

A finger's width is the difference between the next stair

and a broken leg. Catch your heel

and life takes on a whole new itinerary.

There are springes everywhere, so my mother said as she laid more for me.

I couldn't trust my mother, and she taught me

not to trust myself either.

I was in love with the neighbor's purple peonies, so brief and lovely.

I am both fox and hen, and don't know how to love you.

You are Chinese tiles. I am mute. I'm sorry, and can't explain why.

________

for Word Garden Word List: Amy Lowell. 

springes = traps

Music: Steve Nicks "Talk To Me"

Night Work

The earth is flat

there, where the lily of the valley grows

beneath my window.

Some wandering cat

or creature made sleepy by the dawn, chose

to rest there on the stems bent low.

It's crop circle night work

left by visitors

that were. 

________

For Dverse quadrille "work", hosted by JadeLi. 

Music; James Taylor "You Can Close Your Eyes"

Imprinted

 

A ten year old girl gave birth to a black swan,

a dead priest resurrected. 

The first living thing the swan saw

was a weasel, and it took up residence in a dusty burrow under the porch, 

    behind the broken latticework.

From there, it flew out at passersby

with a great explosion of feathers and hatred.

It liked to ride on the back of its father,

making declamations about the nature of love

     while depicting the hand of God in bird shit down its father's coat.

The swan was elevated to high position

and saw to it that the girl was punished in accordance

with Old Testament teaching. 

It was really a vulture, its father a demon,

     but it ate well, fathered a numberless flock, and was well-respected

by those who wore its symbol, carried its banner, and aped its empty fury.

__________________

for Sunday Muse # 226. 

Music: Jethro Tull "Song For Jeffrey"