A Man

 

A man of some note,

wearing the planets on a chain

said,

'I can't swing a cat without hitting

a faggot or a 

whore

or a

sinner of some variety."

The birds inside my throat stayed silent

but I could feel

their wings

flutter.

I turned my shoulders to July noon

as a favor

to such small, light riders. 

A man of great learning,

with entire

alphabets lined up on the 

tip of his tongue,

kept them all like pets

and taught

each one

to balance prettily on a circus ball

while he went at them hammer and tongs

to no purpose.

Three times that season,

my eyes

became eggs

and fell to my 

throat/

nest.

Finally, flocks flew filigree patterns

all around 

my head

and a man said, "Harlot! Sapphist!"

and a man said, "Anarchist! Libertine!"

but I was an 

aviary/

melody

beyond such puny mewlings.

Incantesimo

In a cage with bars of foxfire,

I kept an apparition who claimed

to have made, from flax and piano wire

your nom de guerre, your midnight name.

"Tell me, moonless one, " I said,

"Sunless, starless nattering ghost,

Is there gravity for the dead?

A superseding circle outermost?"

She moaned and split to sugar and salt

identical in paleness to your kiss,

and offered a platitude neatly got

from a serpent poisoned with nothingness.

I burnt a root and bled a bird,

a canary-colored silent fake

whose solitude was ringed by words

that only my love or the damned could make. 

______

for Skylover's word list.

From My Mouth

From my mouth, an egg.
From the egg, a monster, 
wearing a wet, sticky veil.

Above: the sun, stupid, cancerous.
Below: everything.
Below: my monster, full of a ravenous emptiness.

Let there be summer, never-endingly.
Let there be my monster,
consuming one, and one, and one.

Let there be lawyers and elected officials.
Let there be a rot-bog of stench and glory.
Let my monster be Lord of it.

Let the language of my monster's groans ascend,
come deluge, come Judgement.
Let my monster's instant of joy be cemented.

From my mouth, a new history.
From this history, another monster,
dwarfing the first one, and less merciful.
_______

Another Of My Kind

I ran with another of my kind
until the earth split,
the chasm dividing us like a riven bone.

Below, the damned, more numerous than lunatics in April.
Above, angels with hooked talons, singing for a drunken god in the stunned hour.

Sister! I called.
She answered, but faintly,
our common language already corrupted, scattering.
_______

for G Man's Friday 55 and for Fireblossom Friday at Real Toads.