Detroit

The muscle cars have aged out

of high school hamburger stands

and live in landfills

or junkyards

but some survive.

The codger across the street in the end house

keeps his in pristine condition,

replacing its parts, babying its body

in ways he can't do for himself.

I see him rolling out down the street,

into youth,

joy,

music,

health,

until he rounds the corner

and disappears.

_____

River Under a Stone Bridge

 

The river runs under a stone bridge

down where no one ever goes

a place for old men where the trees bend

and ask, "Pourquoi chercher autre chose?"

Its source is hidden as is its end

this river that barely flows

where the trees bend, a place for old men

who ask, "Pourquoi chercher autre chose?"

Where the stone bridge breaks, it cannot mend

what deep January froze

a place for old men where the trees bend

and ask, "Pourquoi chercher autre chose?"

______________

pourquoi chercher autre chose?  =  why look for anything else?

A ZaniLa Rhyme for What's Going On? "In Your Deepest January"  The instructions require that phrase or "In my deepest January" but there were two problems which I hope that our wonderful host Sherry will let me slide by with. One was, that phrase just doesn't sound like me, to me. The other is that a ZaniLa Rhyme has a syllable requirement of 9-7-9-9 and a rhyme scheme and inverted third line that would have made it almost impossible. The prompt phrase is 8 syllables all by itself, so I almost had to shorten it, and so I did. If Sherry sends the Prompt Police to collect me, I will understand.

Music: Simon & Garfunkel Old Friends

Alician Red

 

There we were, all alike in white

little siren-sailors calling ourselves,

faux black hearts beat Alician red

guided still by the stuffies atop our shelves.

Chittering big-eared receiving stations

gathering gossip in the vegetable patch

to take back to our warrens to sort and parse out

which colors clash and which might match.

We lived on pellets but dreamed of rows

of fat tomatoes to pile in a pram.

We had the side-eyes of those good to eat

and batted our lashes at the young huntsman.

_________

for Bjorn at Dverse--"get to know kennings"

Don't forget that the Word Garden Word List stays active through Sunday1

The Memory Place

 

This is the memory place, the preserve

of hollow wallpaper grandmothers,

stale gingerbread eyes balanced on

straw shoulders, fragile as a dream.

In this place, maple-leaf red and long

as love letters, her hair revives again.

The swing rope rewinds itself and 

her feet are steady on the knot. 

This is the place where what once was

soaks the air like a diary left on a porch rail. 

Everything is musty, throats close, eyes water

until I take my place, brittle, superannuated,

a carousel horse with painted eyes, spinning.

Weight & Lightness

 

In morning, a thousand plans;

afternoon finds me recumbent

Hours become like contraband

and my plans undone but done with.

I feel unchanged, sitting by the window

but tire at the slightest exertion.

I watch as the evening bends low

and wonder at vitality's desertion.

But my mind! Imagination grown brighter!

While a simple chore leaves me breathless.

So I poeticize or read another chapter

and for the moment feel light, lifted, deathless. 

____________

for What's Going On? -- March of Time.

I have been a sad child and a wild addict and a recovering person, a long-time employee, been married and raised a son, been divorced and started over, called myself straight and LGBTQ, and I end as I began, with a love of dogs and poetry. What a long, strange trip it's been, but I am happy where I have landed. 

Don't forget that the Word Garden Word List remains active through Sunday. 

Music: Fleetwood Mac Landslide

Poem For Those Trying To Reach Me About My Car Warranty

 "I found that just surviving was a noble fight" --Billy Joel

If you're bleeding on my block

I'll call an ambulance.

If you're hanging around the kebab truck looking broke

I'll spring for some kofta,

but I can't carry the world's weight--

my own is enough.

It's September and once again I take stock. 

My trees are a little bigger--

I touch them with the flat of my hand as I pass

wishing them prosperity.

Sometimes a limb will fall;

I can see where the woodpeckers have been.

There are two different ones who visit--

are they the same ones as a year ago? Two years ago?

Am I the same as I was then? 

Will someone call an ambulance for me one day?

One night driving home I ran over a skunk.

My dog killed a different one on a different night.

I felt bad, but kept my car, bathed my dog.

He is my seventh dog. This is my only life. 

I've told it all, about the PTSD, the alcohol, the depressions,

and also about recovery, coping, finding joy where I can.

You want to talk about wars and rumors of wars.

Whose side am I on? Aren't I outraged? Don't I care? 

It's September and the sky is that glorious rare blue.

The jays have been by, and the grackles.

I did not drink today or wake up screaming. 

I did not consider methods of suicide.

I wish all of this for you, too, but peace

is too precious a thing and I'll only give what I can spare.

________

for What's Going On? --"Finding the Balance"

April Begins In A Graveyard

 

April begins in a graveyard

the stasis of winter broken.

Bold dandelion hold my heart

and everything said and unspoken.

I have done this, and that,

often for the last time.

I go gray as the sun moves over me

arranging my bones in rhyme.

Let the lawn grow long and wild, 

the caretaker drunk on his stool.

The old oaks must scoff at upstart April

and at me, a philosophizing fool.

April begins in a graveyard

with its bees more proud than the dead.

Let me doze on a bench in the half-shade

with my hand on the book still unread.

________

For What's Going On?--"April"

Music: Simon & Garfunkel The Dangling Conversation

Seven Poets

In Hades seven poets

pasting pips on paper crowns

facedown on the sidewalk

holding seven falcons down

woke to find the sugar vein

clogged by golden tusk

and the Genius of the Galaxies

was just shit out of luck.

When seven poets wobble down

the racetrack of the dawn

riding lazy Sensitivity

like bangers of the gong

who spin in gyres like goblins

whose experiments go wrong

when they trade their tongues for bullshit

then say, "Don't you love my song?"

Seven poets claim the globe

of earth and eye and breast

while their dietetic revolution

starves out all the rest

I pray for wolves and pray for beasts

to pry them from their pens

to strip them of their peacock pose

and show them stunted hens.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Michael McClure.

also shared with The Sunday Muse #252. Image by Ruven Afanador

Donne Like Dinner

 

Consider the plight of old food.

The congealed egg gesticulates, spilling her ninth glass of wine, 

claiming she could have been a chicken, soaring majestically over all you dumb motherfuckers.

This is not just lies.

She was hot, desired, asked for, and surrounded with warm companions.

Somehow, though, time skittered by, friends departed,

turning her yolk cold, her edges hard, and her future bleak.

Now there is nothing left but the scrub pad, the spray nozzle and the disposal.

Uneaten bacon sighs, recalling mobility, corn cobs and enticing sows!

Where is yesterday's jolly sun and days spreading out ahead like the world's most magnificent wallow?

The young roll their eyes as bacon's eyes light up,

warming to his subject, reliving the glory!

Like an old actor in a shuttered theater,

bacon has no stage but the walk-in cooler,

no mark but the edge of its cardboard box,

no applause but the hum of the refrigeration unit.

Imagine having an expiry date stamped on your skin!

Imagine that it has already passed!

Consider the plight of old food,

the muffin, the corn flake, the butter pat, scorned and forgotten!

Hash browns have feelings.

If you prick a pancake does it not bleed (syrup)?

Does the orange (juice) fall far from the tree?

Ask not for whom the busboy's bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

_________

for Sunday Muse #205.

Remember the Maine

 

(My) lovers might last longer

I say to the dog, a philosopher of sorts himself,

were they more like Teddy Roosevelt

or even Alice. 

They'd look killing

in stiff collars

of khaki

or Irish lace.

Things are never the same

as they appear in the catolog.

Lovers are never as nice

when they want you to do crazy, perverse, upsetting things

like leaving the house.

That innocent carton

knows its milk will go bad, but won't say so.

It still wants to talk about forever,

especially at 3 a.m.

I always recommend blaming the Spanish

for any little thing that may happen to blow up.

You have such honest eyes,

such lovely hands when you take mine.

"Talk to me," you say,

in a voice as warm as Havana Harbor.

"Remember the Maine!" is what I say as you get up to pack,

but Teddy would have grinned

and Alice would have understood.

---------

Image: "Woman Standing In Doorway" by Albert de Belleroche (1864-1944)

Power Couple, 1970

 She said,

"I shall strike a sewing needle through your heart

for a gyroscope to keep me level.

Spin, wounded dancer,

declare yourself a world."

Spinning and bleeding, he said,

"Primp yourself a pelt

for ornament and testament.

Live your life upon my wall,

to collect and devour each passing eye."

And every bird begins its bower

with a glittering bauble in the early hour.

Wearing him as he wore her, she said,

"Make yourself a mummy,

preserved forever in cement Jello.

I shall bury you with various anchors

I calve from the ice of my womb."

Tearing himself away,

he became a skeleton, dancing, playing a flute.

"I have found a new mask to marry,

made of prescriptions and rococo furnishings.

She is a lovely acid, a suicide waltz."

And every bird in its rotting nest

fades with its bauble low in the west.

______

for The Sunday Muse #175.

The Angry Damned

On a blue sea beneath a pearl sky, 

time's drunken messenger carved a name on the side

of the shell in which he was born.

At the prow, a maw appeared,

and began to tear at and consume the sea-mother

from whose vomit they had risen.

In the stern, various gods

enormous of mouth, globular, gelatinous,

wounded each other avidly.

On a blue sea beneath a pearl sky,

the angry damned carried this obscene craft on their hands,

filmed with pitch and gasoline.

Cretinous sailors with disappearing arms

composed semaphore hymns sung by trapped demons

who drowned tangled in blind flags.

The angry damned

consumed in flame!

Sea on fire!

Blood immolation!

Worlds cracking, erupting,

lava herds of the diseased damned plunging headlong

into further misery.

Miasma of sick flotillas expanding, gaseous, unwholesome

into the scaled palms

of the shrieking, angry damned

leading each other by sharp hooks through the brain

down into hard pressure depths

where transparent monsters wave phosphorescent pennants

and say, through needle teeth,

Behold, I am the sun, the light, come unto me,

and they rush in, like vermin to a corpse.

_________

with thanks to Arthur Rimbaud, Stephen Crane and Allen Ginsberg. This is either an homage or a rip-off, depending on what you think.

for Sunday Muse #167.

Blogger absolutely would NOT let me fix the spacing at the beginning. It is not meant to have the extra spaces there. 

Apes In The Coffee

There are apes in a woman's coffee.

"We warm ourselves against a hostile environment," say the faces upturned in the steam.

"Asian disciplines,

activism,

on-line broadsides,

these failed.

But this warm pool...is become our haven."

The woman's mind and limbs are heavy as asteroids, 

her heart a falling anvil,

her simian teachers ascended, sanguine.

_______

for Flash 55, hosted by the amazing Hedgewitch O' The Wilds, noted connoisseur of cofveve. 

__________

Sir Edmund Hillary

Sir Edmund Hillary would love these steps

(I would think,

watching my black-stockinged knees 

appear in front of me 

as I climbed.)

There should be sherpas

and glory,

admirers to celebrate my sister and I.

I remember my flat palm against the stone,

warm as a bird's breast 

rough as burlap,

hard as any other thing that had always been

and would always be.

Today I can't recall 

any sunrise in particular.

Lovers' names elude me like the love itself,

and months go by as hours did then.

How clear the memory of a hat's woven straw

or the smooth handle of a red umbrella.

How faint the sounds outside my window now.

What day is it? What difference

does it make?

Nothing disturbs me with yearning or surprise.

I recall we had dolls, trolleys,

skates, books,

and a million days ahead of us.

There was a doorbell,

a screen in summer time,

and always (of course!)

someone busy, and ours, inside.

______

for The Sunday Muse.

 

In Age

In age, I dreamt myself a child again--
a blown leaf, my parents the wind.

Alone, I dreamt of family again--
my son a child, I rose and fell from the west.

Adored by a dog, I dreamt of dogs--
alive again, and my heart was calm.

In sleep, I dreamt of youth--
desire and sweetness came down from the hills.

In morning, leaves tap the sill--
dog and I raise our heads to the early breeze.
_______

for Micro Poetry at Toads. "Fill the empty parts."

Clocks In Deep Resentment

Do clocks sit in deep resentment
of time flowing past them, through them, slipping by,
or do they cradle and bless like a riverbed? 

I have asked them, held in my hand
like branched nests whose natural progress is startled
by my rude curiosity.

You--are you a kind of clock?
At times you define me to myself, but in the next moment
one of us has moved on, like pouched time, a hoarded secret.

I wonder--shall I join these resentful clocks,
ticking off quantified complaints ad infinitum?
Or is it better that I dissolve, like the sugar of a moment

In a hot mug that warms my hands, but only in this instant?
_________

for Fireblossom Friday: Ask  Question.

 

Minutes of The Marvell-Herrick Society

Everybody talks about
miasma
buboes
mass death
like it's a bad thing.

Gray skies are gonna clear up--
put on a bird-mask face
with roses 
under your noses--
yeah that's the way.

Everybody talks about
crops
cows
heads with crowns
like that shit really matters.

Kiss me, honey,
Old Time is still a-flying.
It's not love
but it's not bad,
and what's the dif if we're dying?
_______

Gathering rosebuds while I may, for Mama Zen's "Words Count." And yes, I really drew the Death card. You expected I would get the six of cups?