February Light

 

Two months from the lamplit darkness that was December,

wrapped in a delicious affair with books, and poetry,

when I lamented the stubborn snow's refusal, once again, to visit,

February has arrived, changing the game, wanting everything its way.

This month has been as cold and severe as the lover who leaves

in the morning, after a thousand others, transfigured behind a screen

of secrets and silence. New snow is peaceful, people say, but no one

volunteers to go out and live in it, lie down in it, die in it.

Sometimes one wakes up confused, as if animated from inside

a capsule, with no history, no map, no landmarks. What then?

Maybe clarity comes with the next breath--or, everything remains

foreign, multiplying itself obscenely, crowded to bursting with horrors.

Sun on snow has the brightness of surgical lights to a person tied

down and drugged. The sun is the optometrist's penlight aimed

at an infected eye hardly able to bear it. It is February and the new way,

a cold intensity that can't be stopped, ravenous, stronger every day.

___________________

for What's Going On? --Light.

Music: Tears For Fears Pale Shelter

As I Said

As I said

in confidence

as i said 

from a holy book

as i said

at the emegence

as I said 

but could not look

These are the days of the Autumn's fall

These are the days of lead.

As i said

when we heard the trumpet sound

as i said

as i held your hand

as i said

as we knelt to kiss the ground

of this long-abandoned land

These are the days of the flying bird

These are the days of gold.

As i said

in bent and rusty words

as i said

with fingers crossed

as i said

to saints and conjurers

as i said

when  all was lost

These are the days of the swollen bud

and the bloom of scarlet red. 

_______

I dreamed this poem last night, or the main part of it anyway. 

Shared with The Sunday Muse #242. 

Hail! Assassin

Hail! Assassin in your golden robe,

you are farewell incarnate, cold as a stone tablet.

Your masters dole out a new Fahrenheit, warming nothing

while whispering to the Ferryman that there are no coins, only handshakes.

You are farewell incarnate, cold as a stone tablet,

a corporeal machinery producing fine dust

while whispering to the Ferryman that there are no coins, only handshakes.

You palm medicine from your keepers to those already dead.

A corporeal machinery producing fine dust

is your rubber stamp of onionskin love, a doublespeak of no return.

You palm medicine from your keepers to those already dead

as your masters cry, "Hail! Assassin, in your golden robe!"

_______

A pantoum for Skylover's word list.

Remains

The first thing they noticed was an earthquake; then the shape that the earthquake revealed.

A once-living thing,
like a bank president or jilted lover,
it had turned to stone and worn the same expression for lo these many millenia.

An expert from the university was dispatched,
along with a few dozen anonymous local sherpas who would be doing all the work.

The expert knelt, pupils dilating, and forgot to breathe.
"Is he going to propose to it?" wondered the sherpas.

Once, the thing's gut was filled with enough sweet summer grasses
to fill all the holes left by the earthquake, and then some.
Its tremendous scat was as big as the expert.
It knew a tropical sun and carried bizarre shrieking birds on its back.

Sometimes, when you are just trying to run a business,
or staying in bed willing yourself to die,
some know-it-all bastard comes along and tells you that you have to evolve, 

or pull yourself together for the children.
This is when aftershocks come in handy,
and rubble suits become these officious fucks,

who, in a thousand or a million more years will find your visage unchanged
and earthquakes as impotent as priests or Pollyannas. 
_________

for Day 16. 

NOT the "official video" btw. But still.

This Poem Is the War Bird, the Cat, and Ashes

This poem is the war bird, tethered.
This poem is the cat, crouched, waiting.
This poem is ashes, flame's dark warmthless daughters.

Once-soft Goddesses wearing gauntlets
hurry new dawns into a red sky unready;
The bones of songbirds make trinket jewelry
for these light-drunk chippies, unsteady.
It is not the war bird who is tethered to these dime store deities--
they desperately tether their silly selves to him,
his talons,
his keen eye,
asking him in a rush, blathering,
to tell them of rising, of honest blood, of sky.

Quiet becomes rare currency
in a plaza sick with ambrosia barkers.
Weaving between pillars and the busts of noble dead,
comes a common cat, traversing the markers.
It is not the feline who lives at the edges and margins,
but the noisome voided screechers calling themselves master--
vomiting,
wearing bibs,
insensible to the common cat, crouching,
stalking the dull bird under their ribs.

Here is what we did and what we were,
here and here and here. Weep for the beauty of it,
write poems and songs and marble art,
to present to these defectives--our citizens--steeped in shit.
Everything skips a generation, so the wise ones have said,
before we cored them and tore out their tongues,
all the while
pasting on a laurel wreath.
See our favored girls, pampered and scornful,
smiling ice from rot-sweet teeth.

This poem is the war bird, tethered.
This poem is the cat, crouched, waiting.
This poem is ashes, flame's dark warmthless daughters.
_________

for Hannah's mini-challenge, "boomerang metaphors".

 
 

Madness

Beautiful One,
committing rabid bloody murder
out on the wind-howled dust flats
of this dismal place, come back.

I have repaired the roof of the Environment,
and gotten some of the circuits to work again.
The hours here are intolerably empty without you,
like space, indifferent and suffocating.

At the Program, when we still had futures
fragile as the ecosystems on rocks that circle dying stars,
you were the only Scottish-Asian woman there,
or maybe anywhere.

I should have known then
that I had no chance of discovering anything distant,
when the only launch I cared about
was of my fingers through the black tracklessness of your hair.

Each heart is a rider contained
within a human ship of beauty and bone.
How fragile, how vulnerable we are
to a touch we have longed to know without knowing it.

How defenseless we are when the right face appears, 
making us feel everything,
or the virus which can disguise itself and enter
without being felt at all.

Doubt, fear, terror, carnage--
these are the commanders we answer to now.
Madness sprung from alien chemistry--
destroying us golden gods of science as if we were cardboard.

Cruelest of all, each infected madman here believes themselves sane;
it is the others who have clearly become maniacs.
Honey, if you have disemboweled Anderson from C Deck,
you had to do it. It was self-defense.

At the Program, our lives and our passion had possibilities,
lined up, sparkling and precious, like gem stones in a row on proud display.
My collection was always only
your warm skin, your wicked smile, and the seeking of them both, eternally.

I hate to think that we have shared our last moment
of strictly illegal carnal sweetness.
What I mean is, if I can never kiss you again,
then freezing under a too-distant sun is no different to me than living on.

Eckhart, from supply, looked so crestfallen when he saw what I had to do,
yesterday when we met in Pod B.  
I didn't know that it would be so gory, so awful,
or that he would just stand there, waiting for the blow, his mind already gone.

The rest of the crew is either dead or reduced to
quasi-human, semi-ruined caricatures, carrying flamethrowers and bibles,
ever-present and ever set on the complete destruction
of all that is still good, and gentle, and ennobling.

Listen to me ramble, I sound mad myself, don't I sweetheart?
I'm not though. We are the last two, the Anna and Eve of the end of the world,
and I cannot bear it here without you.
Come back. I'll leave the airlock unsecured,

to let you in, and on the monitor I will see your face,
like a picture of home, or of our days at the Program,
when madness was a delicious thing, the high we wanted again and again,
and if there were consequences, well My Heart, what a way to go.
______

For Get Listed with Kenia! I used the entire list, and kept the sci-fi theme of her book from which the list was taken.

Image from the movie Another Earth.

santeria sixpence

One Fury,
One Fate,
One Muse smoking by the garden gate.

Black bird,
love bird,
one on a perch--
other in the sweet ground, buried in the earth.

Do you ever get the urge to boil up a root?
Brown on the surface--
inside, blue.

Do you ever take a mind to shake a purple gourd?
A kiss for the curious,
lies for the Lord.

One card, two cards, three cards, four--
Aunt Annie likes diamonds,
hearts turn whores.

Five cards, six cards, seven cards, eight--
gone bird and baby
by the garden gate.
_________

for grapeling's word list at Real Toads

Sleep Walk

one day, he'll be shot through with cancer,
empty as an old oxygen tank.
she'll forget him before the year is out,
and marry somebody else;
when she's three months along with a baby conceived from make-up sex,
she'll take thalidomide to help her sleep.

bill and larry have dates,
but would really rather be with each other.
larry will solve it with a noose;
bill will become a cop and bust fags with a baton.
ellen is already bipolar, but doesn't realize it yet.
millie will marry a dentist who will beat her brains in,
then he'll sit in front of that same fireplace sucking gas from the clinic.

tonight it's still early, and they're waiting for larry's cool aunt
who will tell their fortunes from the tarot.
on his deathbed, cancer boy will remember how his date's boobs felt in his hands,
but he'll have forgotten his own sons' names--
the ones whose hair will be longer than hers is now.
_______

for magpie 174

 

At the Aviary

There is a woman screaming.
She snaps her compact shut and asks, "How did I get so fucking old?"

"Cry me a river," says GorgeousCrazyGirl.
She and the World's Most Brilliant Unemployable Violinist are sitting on some concrete steps at the bird park.

"My fingers hurt," complains the Violinist. She has arthritis in her joints.
"Quit bitching, darling," says her companion, serenely.

A peacock calls.
oh OHHH, oh OHHH.
His spread tail makes the Violinist think of a Japanese fan.

"I played Tokyo once. They loved me. I played them a program of Bach and Vivaldi."
GorgeousCrazyGirl says, "Are they the ones who bind their feet? 
How do they get to their seats? They must be like Weebles."

"You need treatment," says the Violinist, sitting hip to hip with her.
"Treat me, baby!"
They kiss. There is nothing wrong with the Violinist's lips.

The Violinist says, "When I was young, I didn't know there were lesbians."
"There weren't," replies GorgeousCrazyGirl, as calm and smooth as new snow. "There were just dinosaurs, and covered wagons and shit."
The Violinist smacks her on the shoulder, then says, "Ow" and inspects her hand.

It has been a long time since the World's Most Brilliant Unemployable Violinist was able to perform in a professional venue.
It has been almost as long since GorgeousCrazyGirl has been socked away in the bin, or gotten her pretty ass arrested.
They are arcs,
moving in opposite directions,
together. 

GorgeousCrazyGirl is wearing a ginormous cowgirl hat, a white tee shirt with a quote on the front, and cut off jeans. 
Her bare legs could stop an army in its tracks.

The Violinist is wearing dark glasses and a Burberry rain coat. She might be attending a funeral. 
"What do you think happens, when we die?" she asks her friend.
"Don't be morbid, honey, "advises The Girl, untroubled as a blue sky in May.

Once, The World's Most Brilliant Unemployable Violinist was reasonably famous, financially well off, and as lonely as the last Great Auk, if it lived on a precipice surrounded by a shark-infested moat.

Once, GorgeousCrazyGirl got her dinner out of dumpsters, and believed the wacky shit her head told her. She didn't have a nickel, or a clue, or command of her own mind. She knows what terror is.

There is Aleve, and Wellbutrin. 
At the bird park, most of the birds are paired off, making babies like Detroit once made Packards.
"They have wings. There's nothing to stop them flying away. Why don't they?" The Violinist is looking up, into the April sky, as if it were the steps to a stage.

"Maybe they like it here," suggests The Girl, as zen as a zebra in a hay factory. "Maybe they have everything they need."
"You really are awfully beautiful," says the Violinist, playing tenderly with The Girl's long black hair.
"That's the rumor," she says, wearily.
"No," the Violinist continues, "you would be beautiful in the dark. To a blind person. With no hands."

GorgeousCrazyGirl snorts loudly, then laughs, a sort musical braying. "You're crazy."
"So was Mozart." The Violinist looks quite young when she smiles.
Then, they are intertwining their fingers and saying nothing at all, 
and everything;
like rests and notes,
which, together make peacocks and people go oh OHH...
oh OHH.
______

Dedicated to Dana, wherever she is; the first charming crazy girl I fell in love with.

I bear this in common with The Girl: I frequently wear a ginormous old cowgirl hat.

Linked to Real Toads Open Link Monday.

Everything

A nickel isn't enough for a soul--
no way...
No.

and even though you said
everything is negotiable--
with your microscope out on the table
and a lotus in a bowl,

everything cannot be just academic--
so open up a window and
go, man
Go.

You've got instruments for calculating
everything you know,
while I wrap my lonely skin around
cello and bow

in an empty room with curtains like sails.
What am I supposed to do with the least of you
in all the little details?

In your sleep, you hum and whistle
what philosophers opined,
and spoke of so intelligently,
then intelligently died.

A nickel isn't enough for my soul--
no, baby...
No;

so open up a window and
go, baby,
Go.
_____

for Flipside Flotsam 16 !
 

Kimberly & the Atomic Bomb

When Kimberly saw the atomic flash,
she didn't really care;
it just meant no more Gas N Go,
no more washing her hair.

No more filling out college apps,
no more diet fads and
no more having to hear that one sucky song til she pukes.

She thought of the times her mother had told her
how she came before she was due--
so tiny and fragile and blue--
but she said she had known her Kimmy was a fighter and would prove all the doctors wrong by surviving.

When Kimberly saw the atomic flash,
she sat on her bed and looked at the backs
of her hands as if she had never seen them before,

And the moon glowed red over the Gas N Go
like a rose on fire in the night.
_____

for DOLN #65.