When You Love a Doomed Thing

 

When you love a doomed thing

you know from the start that the wind will win. 

Friends say, can't you feel

the tremble, can't you see the lean?

but love is a bird that can only do as birds do

until the day it dies.

There is a fire and split inside me now

with no mercy--the ash bird eats my heart as I knew it would.

When you love a doomed thing

you know from the start that the wind will win.

Verse/Us

 

Verse I loved you like window glass loves morning light. Cats envied me my easy silence and singularity of heart. Perverse If I found you dying by the roadside, my eyes would be as blank as china plates and my silence entire. Verse I wrote a bloom of poems for you an origami of your face, your voice, your scent. My love reshaped into rows of you, riots of you, and every shape of you. Perverse Pearls before swine is strange jewelry. A thing is worth what it's worth to the one who receives it, so receive my scorn, my bitter spade, and these branches broken. Verse Look, the moon, your twin and avatar. I blazed for you, and shed light with every loving gesture which you reflected back, quarter-strength, and only in the dark.

Dreams of Shiva

 

There is a thing I wanted so much--

a thing always denied.

The evil and the angelic made a pact

and placed this desire in my heart

like a ticket hidden in a boot

worn by someone desperate in a station.

I tell people this desire is over--

that I visit its grave on holy days

to leave woven weeds,

but there is no grave because it is not dead--

only paralyzed like an aster when there is no wind,

no sun, no moon, no garden.

There is someone coming up the stairs

to hurt my heart, and they are so lit with beauty,

such an ordinary marvel.

The hallway floor is wood, the light there yellow in autumn.

It is morning, but the birds are mute.

My heart stops, the visitor walks past, the world ends,

but no one notices. There is no fool like an old fool,

no desire that cannot exalt or destroy,

over and over, in silence, like Shiva in a recurring dream. 

______

Harvest, 1921

 

Have you ever seen a fat man hanging from a tree?

like a pendant suspended

from the throat of a wrinkled old woman?

Have you ever seen a skinny man hauled up

in front of his burning shop?

the plate glass shattered where he used to look out

at the magnolia blossoms in spring?

It gets hot in June in Tulsa. If you leave a skinny man 

strung up a few days, you get a fat man 

hanging like strange fruit in the devil's grove.

______

for Dverse Poetics: Getting hooked on opening lines. 

Music: Nina Simone Strange Fruit

Equi Feri

 

We came out of the sun like flares

burning out our own memory,

landing like witless baby birds

and handed a brick in the heart before we even knew.

There is the sun, our personal searchlight

calling us not to sell ourselves for nothing. 

We played in traffic, drunk as monkeys,

carrying our Queen Boudica dolls for luck, dodging disaster.

Forever sneaks up, whistling our favorite song,

together with a creepy-crawly to keep us honest.

We have tried to express all of this, bright horses nickering

in the Earthbound Barn but meant for the roses, headlong, guided by the stars.

___________

for Word Garden Word List--Klara and the Sun 

Music: Junior Brown Surf Medley

Ode to a Chrome Cradle

 

The Ford Rotunda burning down, 1962.

It was decided

by women who had lost their sons

that there should be no more Sundays

in Detroit.

It was decided

by girls with broken dishes for bones

that all sewing should be done with dope needles

and veinous thread.

It was traditional

for the underground tunnel to Canada

to be filled with shredded tires and bent hubcaps

from fatalities.

In Detroit, the mediums

predict things that have already happened,

going into trance states instantly upon hearing

old Motown. 

It was decided

that love letters be made mandatory

for bums and debutantes whose heads rot softly

like pumpkins.

It was considered good form

for fat golfers to dole out mulligan freeways

through Black Bottom but never the fresh greensward

of Oakland county.

It was decided

in the end, that all elms be destroyed by fungi

and burned every Christmas at Ford Rotunda, disappearing

in tandem, brightly.

_________

The Detroit riots 1967

For Word Garden Word List--The Prodigy

Music: The Shangri-La's Leader of the Pack

Process notes: I grew up in well-off Oakland county, just a bop down Woodward Avenue from Detroit. I still remember being taken to the Ford Rotunda at Christmas when I was a small child. There were live reindeer, and my brother always got a toy version of a concept car. It burned down in 1962. I was seven years old.

In 1967, the city exploded in a riot after the police raided an after-hours "blind pig" nightclub. After decades of being hassled by Detroit police, the people there had finally had enough and fought back. I stood on the corner of Woodward Avenue up in my safe white suburb and watched the smoke rise over Detroit. I'll never forget it, and things would never be the same again.

AP Stray Cat Yawp

 

Think of a time when you embarrassed yourself

and the cold wet sand of your heart 

dropped in clumps down 

through your stomach.

Start there.

Fetch up a memory of raw-throated sobbing,

when you beat the sofa arm or the floor

as if it were responsible for the

wasp's nest in your heart. 

Open up, little glass, fill with it.

Leave pretty sunsets for painters or postcard publishers.

What we're after here is waking inside a coffin,

falling from height, the whole empty belly

lonesome lack of it all.

Don't shake your head like you don't know. 

The thing you cannot even think is the thing you have to tell.

Will they consider you crazy, the only one

who ever did/felt/wanted/made love to

that?

Behold the mute tongueless many saying you spoke for them.

The poet is the person who threads out their own veins,

stews their every experience, fears nothing,

stands on one leg on a high wire,

all because they can't not.

Otherwise, they would just be cross-eyed babies

waving bright toy telephones to nobody,

and calling it art.

_______

for Desperate Voicings

Music: DJ Dero The Horn 

What I Did Instead

 

Swans came to me 

as they frequently have,

in flocks like nuns

and in nightmares

rising from lilies pressed

in the pages of a bible.

"You must forgive," they said,

"to turn dust to bread."

Wearing a black masquerade

mask, the nearest said,

"You will feel better." So I shot it

and immediately did. 

A crowd cursed me and called

me a devil. They kissed the swans,

held them like bouquets,

offering them to me like scripture.

Now, I carry a thorny rose in my teeth

and wrap the vines around the beaks

of every talking bird I meet. 

I eat my black bread with red jam,

my face a volcano, my heart a ringing forge.

_________

for desperatepoets "wrestling angels". 

image: unknown artist, found on Pinterest. 

Music: The Animals It's My Life

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.

There You Are, Little Sparkler

 

"You are everyone to me,"

said Caligula, and he gave me a scarf

to hide the hickeys--

when you split with a devil

it gets tricky

not to fall apart.

Spending Christmas at Joan of Arc's

with real saints, a faux fire

and presence under the tree--

I can't think exactly which to do

for truth or dare

except to keep my tail clear of the rocking chair.

Joan's guest room smells like

balsam and baguettes

and oh you crusty evergreen--

who's the fairest

of them all?

Who's so full of shyness

that she can't steal on down the hall?

That Frenchy firework, me

mais oui. 

____________

for Word Garden Word List--The Smiths. The middle section has been edited.

Music: The Smiths Ask 

Oriole

 

Lizzie Borden was alive in you,

in a dreary wooden way,

holding her breath for the next thing,

turning blue then gray.

You considered the wooden cradle

and me, of imperfect flesh

deciding you'd hate me not so much

were I made of ash.

Lay the axe at fireside,

move the cradle closer, too.

Your suicidal substitute

me in place of you.

The handle of the axe is made

from that which it destroys

in little bits and other shit

like broken burned-up toys.

But I, so like you in some ways

had asbestos in my soul

and rose away in sparks and smoke

like an orange oriole.

_______

for Sunday Muse #197. 

To An Admirer

 "It's like being mailed into space" --Sylvia Plath

There are children

and a magnifying glass,

an ant

a sidewalk

and the summer sun, 92 million miles away.

The Prometheus ant will shortly know glory

and the eagle.

The children are its doctors

with their laser.

A poem on one's heart

is a volcano in a paper bag.

An old romantic

is an ant in a Hiroshima body.

You'll see me magnified, aflame,

for writing this poem about

happy children

in the summer sun.

________

for Sunday Muse #183.

The Year Of Broken Birds

 

It was a year that broke open every bird,

killed the sky with loneliness

and choked every throat with the smoke of its own songs, burning.

It was the year my son lived on earthquakes,

the time of blade tongues

and poison drugs, ugly betrayals and back door bullshit.

When divorcing, wear a black wedding dress,

drain love like old gasoline

and kiss stench-breath vultures like you mean it.

The good man grown is still the coffin of the boy I raised.

Who is this, holding my grand daughter?

We tried to save each other, and did, but with new skins.

Starlings nest noisily in dawn chimneys.

Blackbirds wear old angers coolly on their shoulders.

I learn from them,

learn from solitude,

learn from time passing,

and am content enough, having done all I could.

______________

for dverse poetics "from a place of pain"

A Pyromaniacial Glossary

You likely think living in a burning building is a temporary thing. 
No. It's a lifestyle unchosen--a birthright.
Nothing gets old here, that's true--
everyone wears the latest oily rags.

Kiss me, taste my turpentine lip gloss.
True love for ten minutes, 
then a hundred alarms,
a million exits.

Containment? Oh fuck, you're funny.
_______

for Friday 55.

 

Woman In A Fire

"You've changed," she said,
and so I have.
Oh my love, get up, put on your clothes
(if you want to make the sun stutter in the sky;
if you want the swallows to go stunned and still)
and go outside.

Everything that was dead a month ago has sprung from the ground
or from the ends of branches.
Everything that was here a year ago is dead and sleeping,
forever, in that same ground.

You thought I was like an old lamp, always there,
always unnoticed and beloved at the same time.
I thought that too.
Now, though, starlings have found a way in, 
and I can barely keep my feet on the ground.
They call me;
they are a cacophony,
reminding me, so much, of--in those first days--you.

I had a dog, my whole heart, Mercury on four legs.
How I loved him! Now, he is gone
and I see a ginger cat in the garden every morning.
Goodbye, my love.
How it twists my heart to say it.
The starlings call, the ginger cat watches the birds,
and I change, rising on an updraft
or the ashy exhalation of a favorite book, now burning.
________  

 

Astrid

Some come sweet, from woman born,
not cradled by the briar thorn
and grow with sun and time that passes
not bitter like blackstrap molasses--

Astrid from the fire came
veiled and silent, sharp as cane
she makes you want her without trying
cloaked in all that's dank and dying,

Yet seeming skinned with fire's ember
red as rot in late September--
kiss her, call her, blister sweetly;
give yourself to her completely--

Astrid by the stone fence waiting
phosphor-bright and emanating
promise made that only passes--
Astrid gone to ache and ashes.
_______

Incidentally, this is my 2,000th post at Word Garden.

Incandescence

Incandescence
is hard to hold,
but harder
to hold inside.

Mary Pickford tried to destroy all her old films--
the fragile, flammable celluloid
her incandescence lived in.
A new generation found the silents simple and sentimental,
and their "talkies" stars spoke
in a clipped, faux-English way
while portraying canny, glib sophisticates.

Mary didn't want to be made fun of.
Honest emotion had gone out of style,
much as it has today.

Still, everybody wants to be made to feel
that their loves, hopes and desires,
their pain and struggles
mean something noble, something beautifully human.
Everybody would like to be young, beautiful, and in love,
and everybody would like to kick the landlord in the butt.

As the lady said,
silent stars didn't have words, but they had faces.
Florence La Badie can forever lean over a balcony,
gone for 90 years,
smiling for a lover dead for decades,
and she will always be gorgeous, and alive, and we will want to be her.

See the little dog running down the dirt road
after the Gish sisters.
We hope they turn around.
We hope he catches up,
because we all know what it's like to be found
or left behind.

"They're so blessed, so lucky,"
we say of movie stars,
and we wonder why they flicker,
though it isn't such a mystery.
 
Incandescence 
is hard to hold,
but harder
to hold inside.
________

for Kerry's silent movie challenge at Real Toads.