Sparrows

 

Love bloomed

like the green buds of the wild weeds

under the overpass.

She lost the thread

when her ears filled with dialogue

written by devils and idiots.

Her love, in wool socks and field jacket,

lost his libido in the war

but phantom desire lives in his memory.

It isn't being coy

to hold back what you cannot save

from the black nest of loss.

Is it dusk or is she going blind?

The robot doctor holds no cures,

just needles with tiny mouths, enthroned.

Under the overpass

there is a constant buzz of insects

who live in old yogurt cups

Singing their serene song

like an engine before the crash

lifting lovers into each other's arms

somewhere beyond the wreck, beyond reason, 

at the edges of sodium lights and night frights--

two sparrows sold for a penny

where crows and cats spend all night calling.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List--The Beautiful Bureaucrat.

Music: The Doors Indian Summer

Kitty (a pantoum)

 

Your cat has killed my singing bird

she sunk her teeth into its throat

and now, its every song deferred

it wears a reddened funeral coat.

She sunk her teeth into its throat

and left its body on the mat

an ornament for Charon's boat

does kitty give a damn for that?

She left its body on the mat

and licks her paws without a care

does kitty give a damn for that

or anybody anywhere?

She licks her paws without a care

her tail she'll switch in plain disdain

for anybody anywhere

she casually causes pain.

Her tail she'll switch in plain disdain

for having killed my singing bird

or casually causing pain

by any bloody song deferred.

____________

The Word Garden Word List is very much active and can be found HERE. 

Soon

 

It's August and the cool spell is over.

Days heat up like love coming back

but you know this lover

and they be like that.

The walnut leaves look tired and dry

like an old washer woman's skin.

The tree's still lovely as the sun climbs high

but no May morning beauty again.

August and the flies on the screen

are in afternoon as crickets are to the summer moon.

I'm tired of tying my hair back and watching shadows lean;

let the smokey tang of autumn bring my first love back--soon!

______________

for What's Going On? ("August")

And don't forget that the Word List is still active through Sunday!

Black Blooms

 

If black flowers gave the earth its bones

and with their roots made purpose for a heart

could they--in profusion--each bloom alone

when innumerable leaves keep petals apart?

I bring you black blooms

which in dreams were red

strewn on a grave

which must do for a bed.

If black flowers' heads nod with heat

as a lover's will when told it's over

will frost only make them more discreet

and scornful of the simple clover?

I bring you black blooms

which October will kill

with inevitable, merciful

pitiless skill.

If black flowers die in a devil's vase

will November lament it's empty sill?

And will I curse your indifferent face

like black blooms preserved in a frozen rill?

Summer

 

Here's a secret:

summer isn't real. 

It's a replica cooked up in an industrial oven somewhere.

Want to know 

how I know

how I know 

want to know?

hmm hmm hmm?

Sugar, I could enlighten you about a few things,

lay out the deets like an Alexa  but with way better hair.

You see, the real summer, 

the one we grew up in like 

wogs in a puddle with our

bikes and Kool-Aid and

sense of endless warm nose-in-the-green-grass days ahead,

she's gone, my dude. 

They have her secured at Gitmo or Bethesda or somewhere,

trying to find out HOW, like HOW, summer? Give it up already!

She's a clam, she tells them to fuck right off, so there she stays.

This new summer, the one we're in now

like koi fish swimming around saying looky,

our orbit is decaying, mayday mayday!

water temp rising, abandon ship!

is

not

real.

This cheap knock-off, this ersatz season, is as fake as an Eligible Bachelor

with a certificate of authenticity laminated and embossed

with a realistic official seal sticking out of his man purse. I mean

gimme a break.

You don't know me and shit, I get that.

I could just be somebody off their meds

or trolling you because because because...

because that's the wonderful thing she does!

So here is 

one

true

sentence,

and it is the truest sentence that I know:

I long for Fall, because Fall knows me, keeps the windows

yellow-lit and has my long sweater ready, laundered

and scented, laid out next to my cute sox and funky newsboy cap;

Fall wants me, lets me know that I am a work of art and a woman

in the right flesh at the right time to carry the right soul  and a mug

of hot mocha straight into an October morning and live there.

Now imma cry and bake in the phony replacement sun

and maybe if you're any kind of friend you'll say shh shh

baby and tell me softly

in my ear

about leaves

and frost

and hope

and all that happy hopscotch,

ok?

Hang a while with me 

and be my balm in Gilead, 

 my Saint Anthony to the lost.

___________

For Word Garden Word List--Whisper Down the Lane. 

I kind of lifted my man Ernest's words for that one part. No wait, it's an homage!

Music: Fontella Bass Rescue Me

Bimbo Season

 

Summer and I cannot really be friends--

she is tiresomely popular

with her garish daylight that extends

heedlessly into my delicious darkness.

She's the hot girl, skin-deep,

boring me to death with her obviousness

too loud, too cheap,

queen of the surfer boy entourage. 

If only there were some ceremony

that I could perform

to summon chilly winter here for me,

my old bestie returned.

I would live in a bus with bed and blankets

and a storm outside,

all the windows hung with trinkets

and--weirdly--streaming tv.

Yes, an all-comforts bare-bones hideaway

out in the distant sticks

up on four wheels on a winter's day

with soup and chocolate!

Sadly, here I am with this bimbo season summer,

my imagined paradise

far away and impossible--bummer!

White it out winter,

Come back with your cool quiet and I'll write you a killer poem 

to knock your woolly socks off. 

_________

for Word Garden Word List--Night Road

Music: Fleetwood Mac Bare Trees

The Duenna

 The light now is a young man

at a long table

with a full plate,

holding forth as jeweled women lean

to catch his words and scent like hungry cats. 

I stay next to the duenna, summer's old widow,

her skin a dead garden under the high neck and long black sleeves.

She used to read him stories

when the silence scared him

and he grew there in the crook of her arm

like a plum added to a grocery sack.

"I wish it would rain," I say to her as I have every day

since summer arrived like a visiting bishop

waving from a sedan chair,

cheered by women wearing head scarves

because others do, and God is watching.

The duenna pats my hand.

I am sick of the brightness of white shirt and linen jacket,

arms gesticulating as children's do when feeding the swans,

and the swans dip their faces in mock modesty.

If only the wind would rise and the sky darken,

this tablecloth would show

how wings are meant to be used,

plates and wine glasses smashing on the stone floor.

"In time," whispers the duenna, as calm as a bread loaf.

These blowy tales will wear themselves out,

the cats and swans will begin to bicker,

and the nights will lengthen beneath our feet like shadows.

Then the duenna will shed her weeds

and wear the moon on her shoulders glittering.

_______

Musci: Bananarama Cruel Summer

Laika

 

There is no one

more unkind than me.

In the evening hour I see

my sandpaper skin.

In every embrace,

a delving to the bone.

I have a peeled orange

beneath my ribs

that swells, overflowing, when it rains.

I cannot go back.

Blackberry vines have overtaken the track.

I cannot strike out.

Fog has dampened the maps. They curl and come back.

Still, I lift my head to every fresh breeze

and interesting face,

mistaking the world in a mural, the sky in a frieze. 

Every creeping weed believes

its home is just inches away.

So do I, and so I hope until each day dies done

and there is no one

more unkind than me.

_______

for The Sunday Muse #225.

Music: Lilliana de los Reyes & Max Quilici "Can't Find My Way Home"

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.

June 21st (Green, Wild Green)

My yard is green, wild green
as generous as a lover two weeks past hello.
All of this profusion, it doesn't need me--
it simply is, bursting with itself because it can
and will
and must.

Not so long ago, these trees and this ground
was bare as an old steamer trunk,
empty as an attic. 
It didn't need me then, either,
even in extremity.
Any words or prayers I may have said were said
to comfort
my own mind. 

Lately, I find myself thinking
(as I sit surrounded by green, wild green)
about clouds that change their motion and mien;
about doors and blooms and lovers
that open and close, arrive and slip away. 
I wandered spring and summer until spring and summer were gone,
and now green,
wild green,
reminds me of what I never understand or hold for long,

leaving me lonely to the bone 
thorned by my own stupid and constant craving
in a garden of green,
wild green.
_______

for the mini-challenge.

Cassandra

With barbs through my swollen lips,
I told huge lies
about an angel.

With a cracked skull, I said every wicked thought I had,
to the wind,
to the wind.

The angel warned every neighbor and cousin about my evil.
She wept,
and swept her reptile tail discreetly out of sight.

I ran, such an ugly girl that the sun turned away,
and the clouds
abandoned white for shroudy gray.

No one believed anything I said--
not the stupid, swaying trees,
not the flimsy hollow-boned birds,
not the thin air I spread my screams into.

No one, until I found her in the crack-glassed mirror,
spit on by Apollo,
disregarded and accurate--

Cassandra.
_____

for Ella 

The Smugness of Sirens

The smugness of sirens
is both heavy and intangible.

Easy in their enormous house,
they sing and sailors fall.

What do they want with me, a woman,
surely a sister of sorts?

The mother of mermaids
is the moon, and though all her tears have settled on them,

She still commands.
They have everything except authority.

The sirens smile
and beckon me down to join them--

It is a casual cruelty when they invite, saying,
"Please sing with us, sister,

Sing like anything, the way you've always longed to;
it won't kill you."

(It is the instinct to breathe again, after,
that will.)
______

For (Non--)Fireblossom Friday with Hedgewitch, at Real Toads.

Image: Moonrise, Beaumarais by Clarice Beckett.

 
 

Summer

What's with the weather, anyway?
If I wanted to live in some sweltering buggy outpost, 
I would wear a pith helmet and talk nonsense about rare beetles;
do you see me doing those things?
Doesn't National Geographic handle all that?

I have caught myself in a few rare moves lately, though, I admit.
I blame it on losing sleep.
I never know anymore whether I will put a sachet in the guest room drawers,
a bag of dog poop,
or one of Muffin's dead mice.

Behold the end of the world, when fey devils employ a single match
to devour, with light, all that is, and then almost delicately, 
throw the bar,
lock the latch.

Signs of The End are everywhere, not just the tv weather.
Have you seen Trudi Beauty Queen lately?
She's about the size of a zeppelin, and isn't even blonde anymore.
All day, she screams at the help in German,
while stuffing eclairs into her mouth like shells into field artillery.

I think, if it would snow, my chi would center and I could be my usual self again.
Instead, I have to wear sunglasses so huge that I look like a Mars probe,
and I can't see a blessed thing, sidewalk from six-lane,
Trudi from a tarantula,
Greek yogurt from green tea facial mask.

Perdition arrives on the arm of Despair, in evening's early gloaming
announced and feted, by Chinese lantern light,
to faces slack,
and ashy white.

I think I'll throw on a caftan, hire some sherpas to carry the tea cakes,
and go visit Bitsy Henderson, to have her administer a test,
running her finger back and forth in front of my eyes.
She'll tell me, if I'm a little off,
and whip out her planner to tell me that summer isn't forever--

only alimony, crow's feet, and naturally, us. 
_______