Shanty

 

I had a planet,

just a little one

but still.

it had activities--

recreational

illicit

volcanic.

from a promontory above one of its seas,

I pondered what to do with a drunken sailor

early in the morning.

I had to rent out my little planet

due to the commute.

Years passed. 

When I returned and saw

what the renters had done,

I brought the flood in my righteous anger.

Things are better now,

lo these many months gone by.

I have a koi pond with native goldfish.

I sleep in until lazy o'clock

or until the stars wheel above my gingerbread cottage.

The sailor got sober, survived the flood,

and sings, "Weigh-hay and up she rises" 

when I stir

both my happy ass,

and the coffee he has kindly fixed

the way he knows I like it.

I have a planet,

just a little one

but still.

________

for What's Going On? -- "In Uncertain Times"

Music: Johathan Edwards "Shanty"

Elemental

 

I thought that you would be like water

in summer

even if the lake lay

beyond the brambles.

On a road trip, the heat mirage oases

seem nearer

like objects in the mirror

where I first saw you.

In summer,

birds bathe in the dog dish I set out--

they fly without rising

in that finite sky.

Your dark hair seemed to flow and called me

like a siren

whose face is obscured

like her every word.

I still set out that dog dish for the winter birds

in their need.

Mornings I set it steaming

only to find it frozen by afternoon.

There are things that flow, comforting things

already changing.

I remember your reticence and kick the bowl of ice

coming free, ungiving, falling hard and only once.

_________

for What's Going On--"what cold is"

Music: Julian Lennon Ruby Tuesday

Wedding Song

 

Please buy me a rose of bridal white

placed in a vase of anthracite

Wear your suit of wool and flint

and on my tongue a peppermint.

Please buy me a rose of pleasing pink

placed in the pool to turn and sink

Bring the singer who loves the blues

and bury her bones beneath the pews.

Please buy me a rose of funeral black

buy me a dozen, all in a stack

Make the ring from a hangman's rope

Invite the judge, the devil, the Pope.

Please buy me a rose of brilliant red

and remind me you did until I'm dead

Bake the cake with sugar and tar

and preserve my heart in a Mason jar.

________

for Word Harden Word List--Ishmael Reed

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.

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.

My Detective

 

When a detective falls in love, he does not know who to bill for expenses--

everything is up in the air. 

At a mixer for suspects, he invites me to dance via loudspeaker.

Radiant in my white dress, I resemble a snowy owl

even down to my carefully bandaged hand which he takes without hesitation.

I whisper in his ear:

I am Leon Czolgosz. 

Your heart is the President of the United States of America. 

We are dancing in Buffalo, city by the Niagara. 

My detective, of course, falls hard.

The next time we meet, I wait for him in the bullpen at the police station.

They know him there.

They hire cellists. 

He confesses his deepest fantasy to me:

I want to speak words of love to you

via telephone

with our hands naked and separated only by the safety glass.

I want the call recorded

and broadcast to wild lovers around the globe. 

Shortly after, we are married. I wear my favorite bearskin robe.

My small black cubs frolick nearby, 

climbing the pews and then tumbling gaily down again.

My detective is resplendent in his tuxedo. 

The hired band plays Funiculi Funicula.

I snarl when my detective gets too close to the cubs, and this inflames him.

At last, we lie in bed together, like busy machines come to rest.

I am wearing nothing but the revolver-shaped earrings he has given me.

My detective wears a felt fedora

and a look of smug adoration like a daredevil over the falls in a barrel. 

I am The Queen of the Mist,

suspected in various thieveries, check kiting, and jaywalking.

Our love is an aviary

where birds wheel above the thundering water like intelligent confetti. 

Look in your mailbox, I tell my detective.

I have left you a valentine and an Easter egg. 

He asks if, after all, I am his mystery client.

I am innocent. 

Love is a marvelous thing, a joyful thing. My love is happy now, laughing.

_______

For Word Garden Word List--Zachary Schomburg.

Music: Angelo De Pippa Funiculi Funicula

The Swan

 

I dreamed of the swan who made the night long

by dying on the shore of the hours

where you and I walked on storm-bent stalks

who mistook the gale for a shower

of sweet memories

that turned into these

orphans who talk and talk

of some lost song they learned from the dawn

that was filled with falling flocks.

I dreamed of the swan who kept your heart

beneath its wing for a year

until it left on the golden breath

of your conscripted volunteer

who saved you from

the things you'd done

that turned your fingers sharp

on the mandolin you used to win 

those you loved to death from the start.

________

for The Sunday Muse #249. 

Space Shuttle Challenger

 

"You always have to be different." --my mother's bitter complaint.

My tricycle mind,

up to its seat springs in rocket fuel. 

That will make you different

and confused

and terrified. 

'What do you see at night when you close your eyes?" I asked my older brother. 

"Nothing. What do you see?"

Oh, colors, crazy colors, a shifting kaleidoscope

and sometimes 

scary things.

I can't make them stop

and I lay awake to escape the turning, appearing, revolving, staring.

Later, older, I tried dragging and drugging

my heels, alcohol,

but Challenger blew up and sprayed across the sky.

I watched on tv and saw my inside outside.

I was a baby writer

and once upon a pair of wheels

I wrote crazy stories for friends who asked if I wrote them high.

I wrote them sober,

then got high to stop.

Later still, I set down the drink and slept with the light on for years,

prone to night terrors and ptsd.

I embraced the Church of Regular Meals,

subscribed to the doctrine of Keep Coming Back.

Slowly, my world came into phase

with a job

a spouse

a child

but, tame as a housecat, no more bright crashes to watch at night.

Even later, single again, child grown, lost in my own skin,

I set out to find out if it's really like riding a bike.

"Give me all of your dreams, you dreamer," said Langston Hughes

and I met myself 

in the interstices

between this world and some other.

Totally amazing mind

as my Cranberries fan friend said of me

and helped me learn to ride the rocket

to these lines

and this life

where I dive into the deep end

fearless

A

F.

_____

I'm floating in a most peculiar way/

and the stars look very different today 

for Dverse Poetics: Visionary Poetry, hosted by Ingrid. 

find The Dream Keeper by Langston Hughes HERE. 

Music: the Cranberries "Dreams"

Leaving

 

We have been

leaving

for a long

time. First,

we

left the

fragrant grass of

lawns

and the 

copper smell of

pennies.

Later, we left

fine 

kisses

as if they were

old 

soda cans

first loves in 

aluminum bodies

10 cent refund in MI and IA.

Jobs, apartments,

houses, 

appliances and

various gods 

bob 

in our wake 

as we

age.

Now we can't 

get the damn toaster to work

let alone

move our bowels

or anyone's

world.

The finale

should be 

a snap.

After all,

we have been leaving

for a long

time.

____

for The Sunday Muse #234.

The Goblin Girl (A Child's Fairy Story)

 

image by Gustaf Teggren

The Goblin Girl is cursed and wanders

over stubbled fields and passes under

the riven bridge that ice has split

and counts herself the cause of it.

Should the Goblin Girl admire the arc

of a lofty bird it misses its mark--

falters and falls like an iron omen

to fall at her feet in evening gloaming.

On thorny brambles she lays her head

with moon for pillow and stone for bed

to dream of peacocks and peahens crying

for the bride whose lily is cut and dying.

Who laid the wicked curse upon her?

Perhaps some coward behind a mask?

Or was it the smug and well-dressed hunter

who cradles his gun and ready flask?

Who burned her image and let the milk curdle

as done to them by an earlier other?

Why, the very one who rocked the cradle--

the Goblin Girl's Janus-faced mother.

________

for Word Garden Word List--Christina Rossetti. The poem is, in style, an homage.

For more about the two-faced god Janus, look HERE. 

Music: Sarah McLachlan "In The Arms Of An Angel"

Lesson In Entomology

 

Red ladybugs, often made of wood or plastic, are the cheery ones. The dull brown ladybugs are the ones that bite. Born yesterday, uncelebrated and infused with the bright mindlessness of relentless summer, their hate is genuine; they wait on a pretty stalk for your bare arm. Your pain is their nectar. 

October is the time of show-off leaves. Red ladybugs burn their own houses down. Ask one. She is her own child in the blaze, and to her, death is quite romantic. She loves you, without the slightest notion what that really means. They are as vacuous as lawn ornaments. 

When waiting winter compels a choice, your heart will say, choose the brown ladybug, she knows your soul, even as she destroys it. Your sense says, choose the red, she'll make you happy. But no. You have decided and offer your arm.

______

Today at Dverse Prosery, Bjorn wants us to use a line from Bob Dylan's classic song "Desolation Row', a piece I have long admired, both for its lyrics and also for whoever that was playing the guitar counterpoint to each line. Bjorn instructs that we must use the line "To her, death is quite romantic" from this song. I will comply, (143 words)

Hurt Bird

 

There it was, a hurt bird

panting and skittering in circles

on the grass by the berm.

Feeling badly for it, I reached out,

tried to pick it up and help it if I could,

to cradle it and quiet its thrashing about

but it buried its beak in my palm,

a short sharp angry stab

that brought blood spreading across my hand.

I threw it down, said god damn bird!

but immediately felt my heart shrink in horror

and I bent over it, sick over its hurt.

The bird, on its side gasping,

its upward eye a mix of panic and hate,

beheld my gaping face as the last thing

it would ever see, its every

agony saying damn your help and damn your pity,

wishing only to die there by the berm without this hovering intermediary.

_______

for Sunday Muse #223. 

Music: "Something" by Julien Baker

The Boathouse In Winter

 Fishing poles lean against the wall like sailors

bewitched by sirens

or made lazy by plum wine and local taxis.

Oars, rejected by the frozen lake,

brood and search the grain of their wood

for bitter poems of chard and cranberry.

Outside, the willow is a mother whose children have gone.

In the ice, willow leaves wear the panic of stopped hearts.

In their minds

a path stretches into and between orange groves.

In their dreams

there is dancing, though with whom and to what music, they cannot say.

In their souls

the grief of the fallen, the motherless, the snow-blind.

Lake, why do you scorn sailors.

poets,

and fools in their clumsy boots on your shore?

Gone is the memory of holding the boat against your body

and the murmur of your voice

like a great heart about to fail

from the thorn

and the hook

and the plum wine sky of evening.

______________

for Word Garden Word List #13 (Gordon Lightfoot). 

The Landlord of the Moon

 

The landlord of the moon 

likes a little respect with her coffee,

a rose on her pillow 

                                  and all the rest.

She knows she's not loved 

but that's not the point hardly.

She keeps rum on her wrist

                                                and salt on her breast.

It's nothing personal.

No weary argument moves her much,

and it's best to remember

                                             her bird can't sing

except when it's raining

inside suitcases, outside train stations, and such.

Better bow to the east

                                        and kiss the ring.

Still, the landlord of the moon

falters while the factory turns 

and the sun, her master

                                          lounges and leans,

casual and careless

mocking her with jazz hands and money to burn

til she lays, each noon

                                        her heart at his feet.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List #7 (Langston Hughes)                                       

and your bird can sing ^^

To Those Dead On Public Transport

 

To those dead on public transport,

we do not judge.

Perhaps you do not know, and not knowing

is just a vacant compartment that the Clerk

Of All Knowledge fills with folded messages.

The various vacuum attachments,

marrow spoons,

foreign capitols,

all may confound and confuse.

Majestic death takes its place with these.

To those dead on public transport,

you needn't concern yourselves further

with stops,

schedules,

responsibilities,

or other petty matters.

Your destination has come to you instead.

Have no worries about your husk of flesh.

If muscles relax and give way,

water is the same whether in glass or lake;

soil the same whether in pot or prairie.

If others snicker, 

they have forgotten their own beginnings.

To those dead on public transport,

this bulb, this skin, 

this womb in which you gestated

now opens.

You emerge. 

It is not the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

You need do nothing but exist vividly,

God's bauble,

taken up,

cut and polished,

worn with pride,

shining brightly.

_________

for Sunday Muse #188

Reanimated Lavender Granola Switchblade Nun Rides Again

 

Halloween is fun but it's over and the 

candy-scamming spooks

are back in class.

Turkeys wearing pilgrim hats are taped

on the windows and the President

pardons some tom

who has no idea what these talky apes are laughing about.

He'd rather be out in the woods,

eating fruits and nuts

and taking a run at your car on a dirt road when you blow by

for cider and a donut.

From what I read, pilgrims

were a pretty constipated bunch.

When I was outed, the family holiday invitations

dried right up. Poof!

After Halloween, the faux dead rest, but when real people die,

sometimes it takes some time.

Some make nice

some get high

some find a new family

some suicide.

Me, I survived, hanging out with the fruits and nuts,

and my blood and kin?  

Dead to me as if they'd fallen on some foreign shore.

_________

for Dverse Poetics: Epiphany In The Time of Holiday

In The Birch Forest

In the birch forest,

my lazy sister poses as a river.

In her hair, rims of ice 

where she runs an orphanage for birch leaves.

The chill black water is God's mustache.

He has crows for barbers

and my sister is His postmistress.

A workman carries in his sack

things said to his wife,

a few hours from a week in July,

and a small statue of St. Joseph.

His train will come soon, smelling of hay fields and lady slippers.

People say to me, is that your sister?

We invite them to stay, but they fade as we forget them.

Papa arrives home in the winter.

He is the Northern Lights, we are belled reindeer.

As Russian Orthodox,

we celebrate Christmas in January and Easter out of doors.

Papa carries my mother's lost babies in his work sack

where they turn into inked letters.

His love is their postage,

my sister their patroness.

Once each year they return, with ice in their hair,

to sit by July and remark how his whiskers look like birches in the breeze 

when he sees them, and smiles.

________

obligatory link back to Dverse OLN. 

Oracle

 I was raised on the page of a magazine,

a pencil rammed down my spine that I might

keep better time.

My mother said, here, marry this potato,

this barbell,

this party hat,

this disease.

In the night they came to me

on the night trapeze.

I collected hallucinations--Laika in a capsule made of experts.

That winter, my husbands built priests in the garage,

confessed to plates of spaghetti

and drove down mine shafts to golf club coffins.

Now, I begin with new bones,

eyes placed on coins like hor d'ouevres 

for the Oracle who breathes deep

and tells my future

even knowing that no one will believe her.