Poets' Bento Box

 I dug our grave with a silver spade

and a paper bell in the coffin shell--

a bento box where our lines were laid.

I dug our grave with a silver spade

but then in a dream, a kiss delayed

like a sweetly sorrowful gift from Hell-- 

I dug our grave with a silver spade

and a paper bell in the coffin shell.

_______________

a triolet for Word Garden Word List--The Return of Ellie Black

TLDR:

Dave Van Ronk, in the song Motherless Children, sings these lines:

Dig my grave with a bloody spade when I'm dead

dig my grave with a bloody spade when I'm dead

dig my grave with a bloody spade

make damn sure that the digger gets paid

He also does a song Old Blue about a beloved dog who dies. He sings:

I dug his grave with a silver spade

lowered him down with a golden chain

I kind of combined the two in my triolet, which is not about motherlessness or dogs, but is about an old relationship. The bento box denotes the compartmentalization of it. 

In the 19th century, there was a great fear of premature burial. A solution was offered in the form of "safety" coffins, which had a bell above ground attached to a string underground and placed in the corpse's hand. In the event of premature burial, the person could ring the bell to summon help.

Finally--and my process notes are now quite a bit longer than my triolet!--I had a dream recently that a person I had put out of my mind came to me and kissed me tenderly on the cheek, bringing back old feelings, if only in that moment. A paper bell, if you will. 

Music: Elton John Funeral for a Friend/ Love Lies Bleeding

Breviary

 

If you won't put wildflowers in my hand

don't leave them on my grave

I'll have the haunted hillside there

with oaks for palisades

around my bones and all my silent

reveries around

my life of soap and wax and flesh

I've left without a sound.

If you can't think me beautiful

like pennies on a sill

that catch the sunrise slanted light

which wakes the whippoorwill

or liken me to harbor water 

at the set of sun

then please don't give me tepid words

you'd say to anyone. 

If you need a holy man

with Latin on his tongue

to spin a mothball rosary

to tell you where I've gone

just leave me here the time of year

when winter's hardening

I'll curl myself in a berry husk

to rise in rainy spring. 

________

for Word Garden Word List--Madeleine's Ghost.

Lilacs And Ashes

 

1. ‘The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.’- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dent Dutton, 1955

I brought you lilacs and ashes

wrapped in paper milled from early mornings and blind starlings.

On the paper were written a million words

that when translated sickened and when spoken disappeared.

I touched you and grew old but was reborn in the lilacs.

You gave me caramels and sickrooms,

wide verandas where ghosts sang madrigals with sisters of the moon.

You gave me the world's most beautiful door but kept the key.

Your skin was sweet on my tongue, but my tongue became a road to nowhere.

In the ditches there were lilacs, on the hillsides, marigolds.

I wrote you a million poems and grew leaner with each stanza.

You said, "Come in! Come in!" from a dark hall that narrowed into nothing. 

Such was our love. Such was the starling with its injuries,

hiding in the lilac ditch. Such was the silent book,

the radiant rose, the bright marigolds on the coffin of time.

The moon makes me remember and I cannot forgive

its ruined face

so pale

so luminous

so sorrowful

like a Japanese lantern at the canceled wedding of joy and misery.

_________

for Dverse Poetics, hosted by Linda Lyberg. 

Violent Gingerbread Assassins Lead Singer Dead At 47.

 

The lead singer for the Violent Gingerbread Assassins reports for his autopsy.

Electric bone saw in hand, the medical examiner for Los Angeles County tips up his protective face shield and speaks:

"Mr. ..."

"Lo Bo To Me," says the rock star. The medical examiner seems confused, so he adds, "I used to be George Binker, but changed it to Lo Bo To Me back in '97. You can call me Lo."

They then spend several minutes discussing the fact that the rock star isn't yet dead, to which he points out that VGA's radio exposure is down to almost nil, and years of various drugs, questionable sexual practices and a love of In-N-Out Burger has him as good as, so why procrastinate?

They begin.

"How did you get this scar just here, on your shoulder?" The medical examiner touches it with his finger as if summoning an elevator from inside the rock star's body.

"A groupie with a hatchet freaked out and thought I was a ghost trying to suck out her soul through a twisty straw. She thought my strawberry shake was the essence of a previous victim, her stupid friend Pamela. So she tried to off me, but only cut me a little. I threw the shake in her face and then she thought she was an ice sculpture. She was catatonic for ten years after that, and when she woke up she screamed 'Where is that bastard?' and then fell over on the floor. A roadie told me all that. I guess he married her or something."

The medical examiner suggests that the autopsy be postponed. George Binker a.k.a. Lo Bo To Me responds with a non sequitur, asking the M.E. if he's ever heard VGA's song "Clogged Synapse Fantasia."  

"It changed my life," he admits sheepishly.

"A fan! I knew it! Hey doc, what's that thing?"

"Why, a twisty straw, of course. I use it in my work."

The singer for the Violent Gingerbread Assassins sings:

Bay-beh do me do you!

Like a reptile crawling inside my heart,

layin' eggs of love that 'splode apart

in crazy fractals like La Jolla ocean blue!

Bay-beh do me do you!"

Later that day, reports of the passing of Lo Bo To Me, lead singer for the Violent Gingerbread Assassins, dubbed "Lo, the Noble Savage" in an old Rolling Stone article, spread across social media. Fans hold candlelight vigils and sales of their songs on digital platforms exceed all previous markers. The medical examiner for Los Angeles County holds a press conference, expressing, between sips of a strawberry milkshake, the exact circumstances of the singer's death. "The main cause was tooth decay, exacerbated by poor posture."

Why would he lie?

______

A (sort of) Edson-ish prose poem for Word List #8 (Russell Edson).