Fireman

 

You're right, I was here.

The cats let me in, they are as untrustworthy 

as a broken elevator.

You're right, I had hidden

pieces of myself, like a nightbird's nest

right under your nose.

Sorry about the fire department.

Sorry about my dual nature, always waving my arms

for balance like a drunken signalman.

You know that they burn

saints and witches alike, and me most of all,

but thieves stole the taps

And you just sat there,

like Buddha of the first editions, plastered in poetry,

a wall unto yourself.

You're right, I meant me

but the cats advised me to say you, over and over

begging to be let in

then out

then in

just like them.

The firemen saved them--

the cats, the other tenants, the stairwells and stars.

Me? I died in the fire I had set because I was in pain, 

did not know how to end things,

and you were not there to get that blasé look on your face

and put me out. 

________________

for Sunday Muse #261. 

top image created with Bing A.I.

Handsome Man

 

A very handsome man--

everyone remarked about it. 

Simply leaning back in a chair

with his coat open,

and that devil-may-care casual air--

it made me feel a little drunk, just watching him.

He wasn't gay

as some of us assumed. 

Vi said no, with a canary-cat smile

and she would know, better than us sparrows. 

She told the story

how the war shattered him.

Six weeks in hospital

and the art therapy that brought him back.

Looks and talent, despite a hand tremor that lasted a year.

He was elegant.

You'd feel like the only woman in the room

just because he offered you a cigarette.

With a wave of his hand he dismissed his work as trash

and said better to be

a bricklayer or a dentist.

The thing is, he seemed to mean it

and it felt like watching him vandalize his soul.

He was loved.

One look at Vi told us that.

She said there were nights when he believed he was dying,

and went to doctors in the morning.

They told him, you're fine, really, stop worrying.

He was on the phone one evening with his sister

when Vi said his face changed. 

When she asked him he said he'd mentioned his art 

and the sister had laughed

saying, oh, you're still doing that.

He loved to walk

at night when the air was cold and clear.

He told Vi he was going out for a smoke--

this war veteran,

this handsome, talented, loved man--

and he did.

Then he'd stepped off a bridge into the cold water far below.

At the funeral, Vi slapped the sister, caused a scene.

He wasn't there to smile and smooth it over, for any of us, anymore.

________

for desperatepoets "death by broken shoe laces." 

Music: Billy Joel Goodnight Saigon

Orphans

 

We were made orphans by the war and brought here

fresh as the day's catch, stunned and open-mouthed.

Maps at the front of our classrooms had to be updated daily

as bombardments revolutionized cartography.

We liked to climb things. Nearby hills, the orphanage fences,

bunk bed ladders, walls, and each other when the explosions came too near.

We lost many things. Teddy bears. parents, barrettes, books, brothers and

sisters, homes, friends, cereal bowls, pets, and our sense of fear.

Years have passed, along with everyone we knew except each other.

Our teachers turned dead and brown like ivy from the gas.

We developed immunity and emerge now changed, arriving in towns

across our devastated country, with our steady gaze and detached manner.

We are young, beautiful in our way, outwardly unmarked and shining.

Approach us, kiss us, make plans to repopulate and recover

from the waste, carnage and horror through us, the only hope remaining.

We are as bold as bullets, jacketed, calling you pretty pigeon, townie, lover.

__________

for Sunday Muse #260

and shared with desperatepoets open link  #4. 

Music: Tommorrow from Annie. A favorite of mine.  Yes, I'm a sap at heart.

Beautiful Is A Tired Word

 

Beautiful is a tired word but I found you so

with the intensity of your obsidian hardness, and silver starburst flaws.

A black-leaved water lily with 

blooms of conventional white, like a nun

if the nun were carnal, and clever, 

and forever drowning in her own roots.

How like the Host are your white blooms,

a transubstantiation from habit-black to bland bright,

a false face like a lady's fan

or a death's head

and I just had to touch, take into me, and be wounded by

the carmine-edged cuttings you took from yourself.

Weren't we beautiful, for an hour as the day turned crimson,

making poetry from nothing but dirt and gold?

We wore only our flimsy paper costumes 

printed with deadnames and roses

and a garland of sun-shy violets for a crown. 

Finally, we saw each other for what we were--

one a shadow inside a censer swung by the claw of a talking crow

and the other as dim as a dog and as keen to roll in the foul thing it finds.

Beautiful is a tired word but I hung it around your neck

like a prize won for knocking down milk bottles on the midway.

a feat remembered with both pride and shame for far too long.

___________

for desperatepoets LOVE SONGS ON A GHOST JUKEBOX. 

images created with Bing A.I.

Music: The Japanese House Dionne

Rán

 

I can't recall what this place was like

before the renovations.

There were difficulties--

bombings, whatnot,

and the removal to the madhouse of the construction foreman. 

Blueprints are lovely, don't you think?

Smooth and blue as calm seas. 

Birth, though, that's a bloody messy business

of screaming gobsmacked arrival

held up in the hands of the midwife who never cuts her nails.

It's not so much that I love this place as it is that I was presented with it.

I woke in these rooms

with the hammering already in progress. 

I long for waterfalls and love,

but have skin like bricks, and hair like shingles.

People say, make it beautiful, you can do it!

Be your own fetch, a siren of the flooded basemant,

luring yourself with your own song.

Make it your home away from home as drowning sailors do,

find the bright side of blistering paint and warped floors like heavy seas.

All right then. I have tattooed the name Ran

on my arm, see it when I hold you.

We are limited only by burst plumbing, crumbling rebar,

and our own imaginations,

navigating our Rubik's Cube Winchester House of gorgeous possibility.

__________

for Sunday Muse and shared with desperatepoets open link. 

Phineas Gage's Satori

 

Phineas Gage was a working stiff who nonetheless

took great pride in his job, which was blowing things to Kingdom Come.

He reached age twenty-five, never having been depressed

or observably outre, but Poetry made a sudden entrance the day he forgot to run.

A mountain might be said to be the ultimate conservative,

a geological accountant or engineer, set in its strata, posture, and ways.

Along came Phineas with his Magic Wand, keen to make the Earth move,

but the Mountain objected and sent the steel phallus back through swain Gage.

"He's dead!" cried his crew aghast, but his vision was sharpened

by the implement through his eye, introduced to his mind in an instant.

Phineas sat up as if nothing were wrong and calmly opined

that he might need a physician for the crowbar suddenly extant. 

He died but only to who he had been before, well-respected,

industrious and measured. Over the weeks he spit bits of brain

onto foolscap as a sort of carmine ink and thus were his first poems invented.

Phineas found he could make them rhyme, sing, moan and rain.

Imagine now Phineas, drunk as an Irish pickpocket, grabbing at ladies

and spouting the most remarkable obscenities. Imagine him in the full vigor

of creative expression, novel thought, unfettered here-ness and the rabies

of Instant Genius blasting from every pore as if dynamited higher, bigger.

For a time, Phineas exalted, Phineas in bloom, Phineas transformed!

Then, through doctor's care and Normalcy's constant soporific embrace,

Phineas drifted from shining masterpiece to haiku to erasure poems

and became redacted from himself, dependable again, decorous, quite sane. 

_______

for desperatepoets "state of the art"

Notes: Phineas Gage was a railroad worker who loaded charges into rock faces where rail lines were to be built. He packed the charges well into the rock with a custom-made crowbar of which he was quite proud. One day the dynamite went off prematurely and sent the crowbar through his skull. Miraculously, he survived and was even sitting up calmly afterward, asking to be taken to a doctor. After a long and sometimes gruesome recovery, Phineas' personality is said to have changed dramatically, though he eventually returned to a more typical state. I have taken the liberty of making him a poet. A satori is a sudden awakening. 

Vox Humana

 

My voice slipped out as I slept,

taking the path between rows of white narcissus

to the upturned boat, just port side and starboard side,

no deck, no keel, with the world below and beyond.

It had normally slept in the blanket of my throat,

silent, cupped in a chrysalis.

Now it went up and down upon the earth

filterless, making many enemies, there when I awoke.

I hid my voice inside a bell, but it was only louder.

I stuffed it in the pages of a newspaper, but caged birds repeated everything.

I set it in the hands of my lover, and my lover left, cursing.

I hid it in the sound hole of a guitar and it spoke in every language.

I taught it manners and it died of boredom.

I taught it doublespeak and it ran for high office.

I taught it sanctimony and it attracted a congregation.

I taught it flattery and it was beloved. 

Desperate, I taught it poetry and it lay down again in my throat

where my bones fell in love with it.

A doctor diagnosed the shaking as palsy

and prescribed a pilgrimage to Branson or Las Vegas.

_________

for Challenge #1 Desperate Poetry. 

Music: Leonard Cohen A Singer Must Die