Two New Poems

 THE MERMAID'S CALLING CARD

The winter blinks its eyes coquettish

then faints as all dreams do at last--

I've saved you flower, fin, and fetish--

all you had to do was ask.

_______

PHINEAS, BACK FROM THE WAR

Phineas comes back from the war

carrying a blood-rain cloud in a folded handkerchief. 

The only things he will eat anymore

are fresh-caught birds and escargot--

one slows his speech,

the other is anesthetic. 

Phineas wears glasses with smoked lenses

and declares it dusk at all times of day.

I bring him his infant child--

he shakes its hand and turns away.

Later, his medals appear

in the crib, like ribboned toys.

AP Stray Cat Yawp

 

Think of a time when you embarrassed yourself

and the cold wet sand of your heart 

dropped in clumps down 

through your stomach.

Start there.

Fetch up a memory of raw-throated sobbing,

when you beat the sofa arm or the floor

as if it were responsible for the

wasp's nest in your heart. 

Open up, little glass, fill with it.

Leave pretty sunsets for painters or postcard publishers.

What we're after here is waking inside a coffin,

falling from height, the whole empty belly

lonesome lack of it all.

Don't shake your head like you don't know. 

The thing you cannot even think is the thing you have to tell.

Will they consider you crazy, the only one

who ever did/felt/wanted/made love to

that?

Behold the mute tongueless many saying you spoke for them.

The poet is the person who threads out their own veins,

stews their every experience, fears nothing,

stands on one leg on a high wire,

all because they can't not.

Otherwise, they would just be cross-eyed babies

waving bright toy telephones to nobody,

and calling it art.

_______

for Desperate Voicings

Music: DJ Dero The Horn 

First Snow

 

November's first snow

is soft as warm Pandesal.

Such a sight makes the thorns sleep

as if they had died.

The neighbor's young dog

wears a pink coat and throws her toy

in the flake-filled air. She is a saint

sent to remind me of rivers.

I was in love once, many times.

Seasons arrive with suitcases

holding one beautiful thing and eleven goodbyes.

I am a vase, falling. The earth receives it all. 

Dear November

 

Dear November,

It's mad easy to become lost.

You are so cold and distant, part of me is begging,

the rest of me a raised fist, cocked.

 

Everything inside me is in rivulets down a window

and it's moving,

dear November,

like a scared hare in the stalky brown fields. 

Dear November,

I think I married you once, had your child,

or came to your funeral every year wearing heartbroken black.

I was your dove, dear November,

and your crow.

Dear November,

I need to know that you remember me beautiful,

even if I turned dry as a page,

stale as a bowl of potpourri in a haunted house.

I am crying now, dear November

and December's smile mocks us both,

Cher Novembre,

mon triste bien-aime.*

________

*Dear November, my sad beloved

for Dverse Poetics for the love of letters. 

City of Crows

 

In the city of crows

in the time of autumn,

over the rainy streets the trees

bend and hover like dying grandmothers.

I have been down these streets

on evenings when I did not want to keep living,

and they gave me their susurrations as a balm. 

In the city of crows,

a small village where

everyone in the world lives,

I met a woman who was two shadows,

one behind the other but it was a third who spoke.

I saw only one shadow, heard only the words I already knew.

Now there is no woman, and I know less than when I began.

In the city of crows,

by the canal where the

coins turn to fish of white, gold, and black,

my blood turned to cold water, stopping my heart.

An old acquaintance brought a loaf of bread to my side,

still warm from my own oven or so they said. They hit my heart

with the fist that had held the loaf, and I lived again but in their debt.

In the city of crows,

there is no newspaper, 

and the devices there die

each year when dusk paints the days.

If you want to see me, listen for weeping

in the forest of shadows, where night and leaves fall alike.

I am there, reciting this poem in a second language made of regret,

shame, love, hope, and death. My body is a wick, time the wax,

and the crows the scattering sly-eyed ash.

______

for Desperate Poets. 

The Realtor (repost)

Just a little sprucing up
is all this place needs.
Just some spray cleaner and big black bible to wave around,
and everything here could be restored to its original middling banality.

Come in, come stagger down the staircase clutching your left arm.
We'll throw a party, 
invite the mayor,
the cognoscenti,
and EMS.

Feel free to collapse on the piano bench.
Just blow that dust right off the keys and play!
I've always liked Percy Grainger's Country Gardens,
but if you don't know it, just bang away at the keys with your elbows
and we'll manage a dance.

Peach, I can see by the look on your face
that you think this is wasted effort.
Trust me. Just spit on the sleeve of your dress
and use it to wipe a circle of clarity on one of these lovely old windows.
Let the half-light and fog in,
as you fall to the floor in one of your fits.

I've been at this business for a while,
and I always bring spare keys and smelling salts.
Look at the ad!
"Motivated seller, no reasonable offer refused".
Let me call their agent.
We can be at her office in half an hour--
me at my professional best,
and you giddy and rambling in light restraints.

Then, in a week or two,
after the fire, but before the funeral,
I will breeze in with a housewarming gift especially for the new mistress--
Beelzebub on a chain,
ringing a bicycle bell and
asking, despite his slight speech impediment, which room is to be his.
_________

Christening

 

By the lake there's a bakery that's sinking

and the lilies wear wimples all fall

they'll sell you croquettes of your bitter regrets

that can no longer hurt you at all.

When the moon sells its light to a lady

as a gift for her children to break

you'll hear their laughter for all the years after

until it dies down to an ache.

When everything dies in November,

a baby is found in the reeds

with such a fair face that you'll long to embrace

its body of riverbank weeds.

You'll declare yourself poet in a graveyard

emblazoned with roses and jade,

then you'll write a sonnet with the world scratched on it

and die in the bed that you've made. 

_________

 

Self Portrait in Red and White

 

I was just out of the hospital. It was snowing,

and my spirit was leading my body around

like an old dog

on a long leash.

Nurses are funny creatures, kissing the glass

of the locked cabinet as if it held a month in the country

where fountains flow patients

to the bathroom by themselves.

As a child, I lay in the snow sideways to the sky

and believed I would always have a place to go,

full of tomato soup 

and rag rugs for the floors.

That day, though, I was just out of the hospital

and been beaten up besides, for the fun of it

by someone younger

with healthy fists.

Bent like a damaged tree with red leaves,

I fell into a cab and got the stink eye from

a driver concerned 

about his upholstery.

At the hotel, in my sixth floor room, I kissed

the mirror above the sink. It was cold and smooth

with always that little

gap denying contact. 

With my prescription lost, real pain embraced me,

saying, write about the red of the blood and the white

of the weather,

the gray of cement and concussion.

I wrote the red of a fire welcomed by wood, a white bird

on a black branch outside the window from a warm bed

and a day that ended

years ago where I mended, more or less,

I still have that poem, a good one, full of the best of me,

a beautiful thing

still whole and fine

and standing on its own

when all the rest has gone.

_______

for Desperate Beauty at Desperate Poets. 

Baseball Game In The Prison Yard

 There is a ballgame in the prison yard.

A silver dollar stands on its edge on the gallows

and shivers with every hammer stroke.

Hit it and walk free.

An eagle perches on the crossbeam,

worrying at the rope. All the batters are blind

and in terrible slumps. 

In the morning if the rope snaps, you'll see the afternoon.

John Baal, the Babe Ruth of the Big House

swings hard and misses; the earth wobbles

and Krakatoa blows. 

Cigarette, prisoner? Blindfold? 

For my last meal, I request all my past mistakes

and they are served on a cracked plate. 

The eagle is fascinated with its shine and my Morse.

I yell "Pull!" and sling the plate through the bars. 

A home run,

the first in years,

hits it and it blows.

See the eagle and the white shattered stars.

See the runner circling like a constellation.

One way or the other, I will leave this prison tomorrow

like a three-run shot.

________

For Desperate Poets "Desperate Oracles." 

I drew one card from my Medicine Cards-- #1, the Eagle. 

I drew another from my Baseball Tarot--major arcana XII the Slump, analogous to the Hanged Man in a normal Tarot deck.

These fit, as I have been experiencing both spiritual power--my sobriety anniversary was Friday--and weakness in the form of a preceding depression. 

Process note: I swiped "John Baal, the Babe Ruth of the Big House" from Philip Roth's "The Great American Novel."

Final Take

 

Take me in your arms, though they and I both tremble.

Take my ticket, in the shape of a falling fruit tree leaf,

light and red and now yours, after all this time.

Take me to the harvested fields, cleared of crow and ear.

Take me as I am, with my empty emblems in a cherrywood box.

Take time to be silent, and in being so become my healer.

Take all that I have loved or shattered, planted or trampled.

Take me to my wedding, that melody in a dead bedroom.

Take me to my grave, where I will subside at last.

Take a photograph and give it to the waters beneath the bridge.

Take down everything the river rocks say--that is my epitaph.

This is the take to keep at last--it is all there is or should be. 

__________

For What's Going On Take This Poem.

Top image created by Bing A.I.

Music: J P Jones Prophet In His Prime

Motto

 

This is the hospital

where the nicked-up blown-up bastards show up.

We give them ice cream 

and a priest.

There is a river

down the middle.  We launch ourselves into the current

and it is unclear

who is drowning, who saving.

It's a system of gradations, and if you don't die in Emergency,

why then, we come into your room with cake and streamers.

Presto! You're ambulatory, then outpatient, then nurse, doctor,

surgeon, administrator, president emeritus, cutting ribbons

instead of flesh.

See one, do one, teach one is the motto. See the staggering

son of a gun falling to the floor with wounds beyond telling.

We lift him as if we were angels.

Yesterday, we were lifted.

Tomorrow, who knows?

Nothing stops the flow of the river or the flow of patients.

We are Boatmen, and Mermaids, reaching, 

saving, being saved. We are heroes of the

Carousel Horse Cavalry, coming over the 

hill, with bugle and blood pressure cuff,

dizzy with purpose, maybe dying, learning as we go. 

________

for Desperate Poets We Can Be (SUPER) Heroes. 

Music: Brass Band of Battle Creek Song of the Volga Boatmen

Your Heart

Now, after the fact, like a glitterbomb coroner,

I want to have another look at your heart.

My microscope went blind last time--

I squeezed it too hard, like a sponge when I'm angry-cleaning.

I was too fascinated, sappy,

needful as a driver in a wreck.

Bring me an ambulance in the shape of a spyglass.

I want to find my own ghost.

I thought your bones were made from hard cane,

your hair caramelized smoke.

I wore a white coat (as if I knew something),

glasses made from willow switches, and a half moon smile.

Relax, I told you, but it was me in the coma.

Now--please hold still for once. These worms aren't good,

like the plastic model I saw at the vet's. Your heart,

like the plastic kitchen I used to play with,

practicing to be a fly that would bite you one day.

Eat my attention, it's good for you.

Each worm burrowed there is something I said,

some of which I meant--the rest was practice for a role. 

Let me pull one out like a string, pull it and it speaks this poem,

a pretty wasp with a stinger where the truth pools. 

I am too harsh, I know. I am the laundress who bleaches everything,

a maniac for killing the invisible baddies, a hospital candy striper

performing unauthorized tests that do nothing, or at least,

don't cure or induce any useful fevers.

I have your results. I'll bring them down to the morgue where my

hand awaits its conclusions as if they were a ring or a nail.

Summation:

they weren't worms,

just paper streamers.

I infected you

but it made you better for a while.

the microscope cannot be repaired.

my report needs to be presented in a recognized language.

i'm sorry, truly, if i hurt you

that was never my intention.

this poem is not written in my true voice.

i was never your babe.

that was never your heart.

_______

Music: Igor Paspalj "The Thrill Is Gone"

for Desperate Poets "Illicit Encounters"

Promenade In Green & Gray

 

Spring is the season of madness,

as fine and also bitter as any high always is in the end.

Every doomed thing that grows boasts in beauty,

and who wouldn't finger the new green blades?

who wouldn't close their eyes in the warm stranger sun and sigh?

Every heart is a blind radio, and what good is the word or song

without someone to hear it, turn toward it,

and seem to know the meaning?

Summer is a fever we invite, because we long to be feverish.

What fool thinks a bonfire will burn a hundred years? 

Look, legions of fools consumed by the thing that feeds them,

vanishing because we long to vanish, and then crying, lost, surprised.

In autumn, I have felt myself fall in a million pieces, until I stood

naked as any idiot tree. I was beautiful in a million ways,

pick me up, press me in pages, even just one leaf between leaves,

but I end up with all the others, up against some fence, silent, far from home. 

Winter is the season of stillness, and those who have stored up sorrows

find they do not lack for much. Snowy ground makes others much clearer--

where they've come from, where they're headed. There's no need anymore

to build with strips and shreds, we become our own nest and wait,

astonished and patient, a quiet station at rest in the moonlight. 

_______________

for Desperate Poets "Desperately Different". 

Title adapted from the song Green Rocky Road

Music: The Motels Only The Lonely

You

"Maybe tomorrow honey

Some place down the line, I'll wake up older

So much older mama,

I'll wake up older and I'll just stop all my trying." --Jackson C. Frank

You, wearing your father's coat

and a ribbon in your hair,

you're the one I spoke to in a blackbird dream.

You, like a pocket sun,

burning down and rising up in continual blaze

all while reading a book, riding the bus, counting raindrops on the pane.

At home you wear a long shirt

made from calendar pages and paste.

Both are white as summer light, or a fallen blue jay's breast.

You, in love with Michigan in the fall, Morrocco in hazel eyes.

In your boot, a trove of travel tickets,

bad paper, and the echo of smoke-gone nights.

You lay your heart in the curve of the sickle moon

and claim to have no desires,

but they leave your skin and howl in the hills all night. 

You, with a sense of home in your chest like a tumor,

wounding and soothing you like the gin you used to love

until you can hardly stand it anymore.

There is a house from 1925, with a Packard in the drive.

Someone is washing it as if it were a memory

there on the tarmac arc beneath the pear tree.

You held your dolls up against the leaded windows

before you were born, after you died, 

before any of this thorned tapestry you're stitched into now.

The leaves are turning red, the nights are cool.

There is no kiss that holds a hospital for souls,

no soft-bound convent that knows the right prayer.

You can just listen to the yarn-ball clock and when you're ready

let it fall, think of nothing, and find yourself home

where we're waiting for you, those whose names you knew, and now recall.

______

shared with Desperate Poets open link. 

Music: Janis Joplin Little Girl Blue

Me, Looking At You, Looking Back

 

Here we are -- me,

looking at you

looking back.

You dip your head, do a little shuffle dance.

I get the question but you know the answer 

before my lips so much as flutter.

You are an odd blue-black, luminous by moonlight

but a cipher at noon, or so you pretend--

our story begun at the bitter end.

You lit and left, lit and left the hollow place in me,

inspecting, appraising, always returning.

You gave me baubles and trifles as rent.

I gave you blood where your sharp parts went.

Here is my dead-womb where you rode

and taught me to mark faces that hold no light.

Screaming helps too. I thought it might.

I am the house of glass, you the burnt wick.

You are the mother of every line I write,

your call the ink I use, fragrant and thick.

We are yin and yang at each other's back.

Me, looking at you

looking back.

______

for Desperate Poets "In The Footsteps Of Our Feathers"

Music: Beth Hart "Your Heart Is As Black As Night"

The Hawk

 By a fence line in the damp green of the morning

a hawk by gifted vision caught a wren.

There underneath his claws she learned the sense behind the laws

and she'll never by the fence line sing again.

In the evening by the fence line lay her feathers

which I gathered up to weave a tiny dress.

Stars said, "No, it cannot fit," but I whispered love to it

and by daylight I stood head to toe in yes. 

By the fence line in the damp green of the morning

I made from apple wood a mandolin

to play the hawk a tune, oh aren't you pretty as the moon

and at his touch I felt the answer sinking in. 

______

shared with Desperate Poets Open Link. 

A Taste of Honey

 

I'd like to say I understand

and forgive as in the carpenter's command.

The once-lovely loaf has gone green in my hand;

the crows will have it now.

It's such a feeling to be living at the dawn

with new love in some contented Avalon,

but these things cannot go on and on.

They shy and die away. 

Around your arm, a snake arrives

and I see your face reflected in its eyes.

It speaks one word--the word is "compromise."

It turns your heart to smoke.

I'd like to say it's all all right

and I can't remember anything I dream at night

but my bedside vase holds blooms gone dead and white.

They wave like conquered kings.

And so I'll say--no word at all.

Both the dawning and the dimming hold a sudden fall.

The gods we placed our faith in don't return our call.

"A taste of honey" is their lazy joke. 

____________________

for Desperate Poets "Lonelytown"

 

"Flat Earthers Unite" a masterpiece by Q. Benighted Shamanyan, Flat Earth Society Grand Dragon

 Flat Earthers Unite 'neath the sweet umbrella of idiocy

and raise your voice in the cretin's version of Innisfree.

Pose and posit with simpleton's logic that what you see is all

there is to Heaven and Earth, Horacio you libtard tool.

Keep expanding on fake moon landings where static flags still flutter

and that the shadow IRA killed JFK with microchips in peanut butter.

In the devil's pizza parlor Hillary harbors tykes who are made to swap genders

to offend Jesus Christ who stays in most nights raising the rates on His renters.

The War On Christmas is serious business if the libs cancel Santa outright

and then ever after the horrible factor of a Santa who's black as the night

blown up in the yards of the BLM crowd who combine with the immigrant scaries

who jig hand in hand with the dregs of the land like POC's, atheists and fairies.

Flat Earthers unite to destroy all Bud Lite and the lamestream media too

who lie and tell us conservative fellas that slaves on plantations were blue

and other such whoppers, O Walmart Shoppers led by Commander Kid Rock

who collect Trump cards and various canards while for birthdays the kiddies get Glocks.

_________

for Desperate Poets "desperate satires."