Back-Up Bliss (Blues Lyric)

 

You know I love you baby

you know I crave your kiss

you know I love you baby

you know I crave your kiss

so don't act all broken-hearted

when I say that you're my back-up bliss

Slip out the back door baby

when you hear the front door key

slip on out the back door baby

when you hear the front door key

now don't get sad

dontcha get all mad

cos back-up bliss is what you are to me

Come and rock me baby

smooth and sweet as summer wine

come on and rock me baby

as smooth and sweet as summer wine

main squeeze ain't got nothin'

that could make me give up this

time with you, my cool and crazy back-up bliss

__________

Process notes! I was blasting Robin Trower's Rock Me Baby while putting away groceries. Now there is a coffee creamer I just have to have, called Natural Bliss brown sugar oat creamer. The store doesn't always have it, and it lasts for months if it isn't opened, so when I get about half done with my current jug, I buy a back-up before I get too low because running out just isn't happening, not at my house! So, I was putting away groceries and grabbed the new Natural Bliss and said, "Oh yes, my back-up Bliss!" That's when the light bulb came on over my head. Sounds like a blues rock song! And voila! Here it is, with tongue firmly in cheek!

Music: Robin Trower Rock Me Baby

Black Sylvia

 

Black Sylvia, moon-pale reflector of ten years' light,

I went down in the mines of you with a mule and bible.

Down there in the bloodstone

with my rock hammer and a rose,

thinking your heart was above me on the widows' walk

or below me on the skewer of a devil,

when there was never anything at all except a stupid fairy tale I told myself in a dream.

Black Sylvia, rocking funereal ribbons and indigo jewels,

tatting dry bouquets from empty veins in the phantom quick-strike,

I panned for what I could get.

Down the shaft was no place for a woman like me,

with my gingham and candles,

but I Morse'd  you a ladder of stanzas while you nodded

at the station with a spike in one eye and a deadgift in your arms, petting it.

Black Sylvia, living somewhere bedecked with onyx spangles

carrying a lockbox under her tongue, bought a black parrot

and killed it with a song.

Now it flutters against the bus-station glass of our two hearts.

A red snake like a caduceus 

wraps itself around her anger, first doing harm, then regretting it--

a living wreath of neurotoxins

hung on the mine entrance where everyone died,

                                                though they whisper like lovers in these lines.

________

for Desperate Poets "Desperate Desires."

Music: Delta Cross Band She Moves Me 

Rosey

 I'm not much for babies.

Oh, I dispense a few sweet noises on demand

like a reluctant gumball machine,

but as often as not, the nickel gets jammed and there I am,

stifling a yawn.

My own child was different of course, but he's grown and gone.

I look around, and it feels like my heart is bunged,

So today I'm on the sidewalk in front of a pet supply store,

navigating the cages, looking.

I'm drawn 

to the shy ones,

the small ones,

the hurt ones,

the lonely ones. 

C'mere baby, come to mama,

Come on-a my house, my house-a come on.

I will make you bold.

I will make you safe.

I will make you well.

I will make you loved. 

It's mother-magic, presto! and we'll make a ton of it

out of thin air.

_______

In August

 In August, the clouds are one-winged birds

collected in a shadow box by boastful head-injured dwarf gods.

They skitter, describing ceaseless circles

as the dwarf gods goad them to fly as they long to.

Storms are the tempers of the shadow box birds.

In August, old men dream of young women 

and young women find themselves shriveled and standing on hard clay.

Everyone is given a shovel and a stethoscope

to listen for thalidomide demons in love with the shadow box birds.

Cicadas amplify the grinding of maddened demons.

In August, weather pattern doctors urge 

tarot card mothers to sleep with bellies full of shadow box birds.

demon doulas with asters in their teeth

sicken gravity with odd fevers and the whole world sways.

Crickets are half birds in the ears of gods, still able to sing, ice pick righteous.

________

for Dverse Poetics "August" hosted by Sanaa Rizvi.

Single Parent Adventures

A man gives birth to a pair of pliers.
The first thing that happens is his friends punching him in the arm and calling him "mommy", followed by snorts and guffaws.

Doctors repair his dignity and hand the pliers child to it.
The man's dignity gets its own apartment.
The man's friends deride his singleness, call him "Lonesome."

One night while fending off bro punches, the man's doorbell rings.
His pliers child is at the door, remarking that it never asked to be born.
The man phones his dignity, and is advised to deal with the situation himself--it is his dignity's kickboxing night.

Fleeing his friends, the man carries his pliers offspring out to the garage and hangs it on a pegboard with the other tools.
"Goodnight," he says, and closes the automatic door.

His dignity calls, as if it had eyes all the way across town.
"What kind of father are you?"
"I've tried to be both mother and father to the pliers," he begins,
but his drunken friends start swinging golf clubs inside the house. 
There is arguing, shouting, police involvement.
He hopes the pliers won't wake up, hear, and speak badly of him later to his dignity. 
_____

for "Let Us Labor" at dverse

Wolf Pack

Where is my child?
Out there, in clockthick air, the icy air.
Where is my mind?
Unspooled to find him, find him in the icy air.

Who forgot the door, the open door?
How soon the night thorn, blood scent, pack with golden eyes?
I forgot the door, the night door;
forgot to call my child, my child with golden eyes.

Where is my body, my body like a bell?
Calling mouths of night thorn, offered as a trade.
I ring under the open door,
To bring the pack my way.

Where is my child?
What fog made me forget?
He runs alone, just flesh and bone,
warm-blooded testament.

Here they are, the thorn sharp pack
to watch me fail and fall;
Why don't they strike, why don't they kill?
Why don't they move at all?

Where is my child? His devil sire
assures me he is dead.
But starlings in his tongue take flight
and leave him mute instead. 

Who forgot the door, the open door?
Who sees what clockthick time becomes?
Where is my child? Out there with them--
in icy air he runs.
_______

for Brendan's "A Little Night Music" at Toads.  

Notes: Recently I had a dream that I had left a door open at night which I should have closed. I realized my boy was outside somewhere and that a pack of wolves and wild dogs which had been waiting and watching, would now have their way. I cast my mind out to find him, but couldn't. So I went to try to shut the door but the pack was already inside. I backpedaled and fell, expecting to be torn to shreds, but the pack just watched me. My ex smiled in a mocking way and told me my boy was already dead, but I didn't believe it. And then I knew--far from being dead, he was out there, vibrantly alive and running with the pack.