Salty

 We meet one last time

reluctantly, like castaways

not quite resigned to a diet of bugs

and scrawny seabirds.

I take an astrolabe out of my bag

and you dangle a sextant from your hand

as if it were the neck of a dodo.

We ignore our plates and order no drinks

though the room pitches and yaws in the gale.

I lift my peg leg right up onto the table.

It's made from a piece of my mast

that fell before your showy cannonade.

The yellow parrot I have engaged

is out to take you for all you're worth.

he argues elegantly in curse words and patois

while doing an inventory of every rolling doubloon.

"You Shanghaied me!" we accuse in unison,

pointing fingers like surgeons probing a wound.

Nice try, but I brought an extra eye patch just in case.

So here we are, sitting at Mike's Deserted Island Cafe,

gaunt, weak, half delirious, brandishing the tableware

and setting fire to our own grass huts, because

we are both angry, and gutshot, and flailing in the water,

shoving each other off the last floating barrel

still redolent of the wine we once shared with a smile.

Nyx

 

Here is the Moon, with its baton,

puppetmaster of waters and women

low gravity dancer in the skies over Anytown.

My head is a bowl whose edges ring.

I have buried the years in flowerboxes

under every window. They bud into regrets.

Here is my marriage to a wildflower grave.

Here is the Moon, with its baton.

I want to run amok like an islander,

and may already have done, bobbing 

in my cradle like an avid nun before Nyx,

puppetmaster of waters and women.

Listen, I need a month in the countryside

to knock these Perspex-eyed monsters

out of my dreams, to lighten me and render me

a low gravity dancer in the skies over Anytown.

Baby, I'm freezing, I can't take delivery

of myself anymore. The Sun has reversed

herself, gone down the well, and my head oh

my head is a bowl whose edges ring

with unbearable Moon-song I don't know how to stop.

_________

for Word Garden Word List--Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Music: Kim Carnes Breakin' Away From Sanity

CQD

 

Membrane Boy's parents have separated,

pending divorce.

They communicate through him, as if shouting

through a sealed porthole.

"Remind Frank to pick you up at six."

"Tell Linda a little junk food won't kill you."

He relays all this as if he were a Marconi operator

working Cape Race.

Membrane Boy arrives home to find

his mother in bed, all vials empty.

He dials 911.

"Man the lifeboats. Stop.

Position 700 nautical miles east of Halifax. Stop."

The 911 operator answers:

"Tell your father not to have his bimbo there."

"Tell your mother to stop playing the martyr."

Stop.

Membrane Boy's mother is a berg,

his father a double hull.

Trapped crew members bang hammers on the side,

A dead stoker smiles at the boy, his eyes blank.

"You have your whole future ahead of you, son," says the dead stoker.

"Full steam ahead," calls the Captain.

The lifeboats are lowered,

their wood between sea and air.

The ship lists, the lifeboats overturn.

Drowning souls cling

to the upturned hulls.

Membrane Boy wants to save them

to push them off

to save them

to watch them die

to be alone

to not be alone

Stop.

The Angry Damned

On a blue sea beneath a pearl sky, 

time's drunken messenger carved a name on the side

of the shell in which he was born.

At the prow, a maw appeared,

and began to tear at and consume the sea-mother

from whose vomit they had risen.

In the stern, various gods

enormous of mouth, globular, gelatinous,

wounded each other avidly.

On a blue sea beneath a pearl sky,

the angry damned carried this obscene craft on their hands,

filmed with pitch and gasoline.

Cretinous sailors with disappearing arms

composed semaphore hymns sung by trapped demons

who drowned tangled in blind flags.

The angry damned

consumed in flame!

Sea on fire!

Blood immolation!

Worlds cracking, erupting,

lava herds of the diseased damned plunging headlong

into further misery.

Miasma of sick flotillas expanding, gaseous, unwholesome

into the scaled palms

of the shrieking, angry damned

leading each other by sharp hooks through the brain

down into hard pressure depths

where transparent monsters wave phosphorescent pennants

and say, through needle teeth,

Behold, I am the sun, the light, come unto me,

and they rush in, like vermin to a corpse.

_________

with thanks to Arthur Rimbaud, Stephen Crane and Allen Ginsberg. This is either an homage or a rip-off, depending on what you think.

for Sunday Muse #167.

Blogger absolutely would NOT let me fix the spacing at the beginning. It is not meant to have the extra spaces there. 

Consummation

I would tell you absolutely anything
if my mouth did not fill with pebbles,
my teeth to a breakwater,
my tongue to a dying whale
each time I try.

See how the sun hangs in the sky, lugubrious as a defective,
lighting our possibilities with its dusty shine?
I would dance for you
except that ravens have collected my shinbones and tarsals
as trinkets for their nest.

Still, joy is possible.
You shove the Universe, I'll pick its pocket
and we'll set up the world's most elaborate lie
to stun ourselves into devotion.
That's when you'll guess my name, Mary of the Maritimes,
and skip yourself over my body like a thrown stone.
_______

A second poem for camera FLASH! at Real Toads. Again, I was inspired by the lighthouse card, already posted on this blog with my first effort.

Guanacos

At St. Catherine's

Master had a bowling ball in his throat.

A heavy fog drifted around our desks,

in our hair,

everywhere.

Ship's horns blew.

Some drowned.

I still can't identify the hypotenuse of a right triangle

or the bodies of the girls who turned to pussy-willows

during the long afternoons.

At night at St. Catherine's

I was in love with a girl who was not in love with me.

She spent her evenings stitching the windows closed,

while I fell in and out of clouds

like a blackbird in a storm in a book in my head.

St. Catherine's became a sea port,

then an art gallery,

then a candle wax manufactory.

It groaned under heavy currents,

the bricks ran in the rain,

then it caught fire and drifted into the harbor.

After St. Catherine's,

the girl who was not in love with me died

when her skirts became sails and sank 

somewhere off South America.

The guanacos  came down to eat her jewelry from her ears and fingers.

Then it rained but never touched the ground.

St Catherine's girls' choir

saved itself under my skin.

In the silent hours when my new love turns like stirred batter in my arms,

I can hear Handel.

Then I am alone except for the guanacos with their sorrowful eyes

who graze on the lichen in my palm, around my heart, and in this poem.

__________________________

Process note, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Some guanacos live in the Atacama Desert, where in some areas it has not rained for over 50 years. A mountainous coastline running parallel to the desert enables them to survive in what are called "fog oases" or lomas. Where the cool water touches the hotter land, the air above the desert is cooled, creating a fog and thus, water vapor. Winds carry the fog across the desert, where cacti catch the water droplets and lichens that cling to the cacti soak it in like a sponge. Guanacos then eat the cacti flowers and the lichens.

And: 
St. Catherine's Taffy is a candy made by girls in Quebec to honour St. Catherine, the patron saint of unmarried women on her feast day, November 25.^[1] St. Catherine's day is sometimes known in Quebec as "taffy day," a day when marriage-age girls would make taffy for eligible boys. Marguerite Bourgeoys, a founder of the Notre-Dame de Montréal and an early teacher at Ville-Marie, the colonial settlement that would later become Montreal is credited with starting the tradition as a way of keeping the attention of her young students.

Orphan Bus In The Underworld

When the Orphan bus in the Underworld stopped
for Unhappy Meals,
the orphans removed the driver's brain and fucked with it.
Out, then, from the dark,
back into mayhem and political doubletalk,
the Occupied Zone their parents died for.

Power comes to the innocent. The Virgin sees to this. 

First, a fish tank for the Premier,
gills and a ceremonial sash trailing in the algae.
Then, a pencil in the eye for every perved-out fat man,
and their scion sons putrefying inside local dance clubs. 

From a book bag--the Sun!
Roiling, blazing, launching sunspot flares!
Snowman parents, gooshy as Christmas;
running in Church allowed.
____________

106 Words for Angie at Toads. Is 106 more than 100? The Orphans say no. 

It's "Orpheus IN the Underworld", not "AND the Underworld." No wonder the stupid boat sank.

Koi Pond Haiku

giant fanged goldfish

schools the flailing zen master

knowledge bubbles up

____

The Kraken

"It pulled me back, it is a monster" --from "A Bright World, Darkened" by Charne Williams

The Kraken in your coffee
doesn't wait for the end of your cool story,
bro.

The Hydra in your headphones
sends nine notes across the three bones
of your ear,
dear.

Please fill out this questionnaire:

1. Do ordinary objects seem to rear up? Posture? Speak?

2. How long has this been happening? Just today? All week?

3. Do you get the feeling you're in a movie? Playing a part?

4. Does the role involve broken dialogue/ bones/ heart?

Sit down.
Please.
Quit making that noise,
Stop hugging your knees.

Tell me about your earliest memory.
Does it have anything to do with me?
Do you see things that aren't there? Any idea why?
It's all right to make something up. It's all right to lie.

Good luck with the Kraken.
Who knows where it might be hiding!
Good luck, you poor loonbat.
Good luck with your writing.
_______

Find Charne Williams complete poem HERE. This poem written for Kerry's challenge at Real Toads.

 

When Eaten By Sharks

When eaten by sharks, try to stay calm.
If possible, write down the genus and species;
call your old professor if you think she can help.

Don't automatically assume that being eaten by sharks is pure disaster.
Imagine that smug know-it-all relation of yours. 
Imagine his face when you greet his latest pronouncement by leaning out from rows of enormous teeth,
waving at him from between shreds of seal, 
laughing at him from your unassailable new address.

When eaten by sharks, try to remember which shark took what portion.
By doing this, you may be able to reassemble a prototype,
from which a full replacement may be constructed.

Most of all, try to acclimate yourself as soon as possible.
Inside these perpetually swimming creatures, travel is yours.
If limbs remain usable, hit the inside of the shark's belly with an open hand;
the resulting bass beat will astonish nearby boaters.
"Listen," they will say to each other, "that's Morse code."

Send letters, long, short, long, describing being eaten by sharks.
Query editors. Self-publish. Above all, work quickly.
________

 

Pictures of Heartbreak, Poems in the Spokes of a Wheel

Here is how I imagined my heart:
blood compromised, made thin and blue by work schedules,
thoughtless words,
kindnesses forgotten,
mad-making obstacle dreams and stale air
arriving at the right atrium like someone stumbling in out of the snow;

Received like a guest, served coffee and cookies,
surrounded by the biological greenery outside the atrium,
this blood eventually slipping through the delicate leaflets 
of the tricuspid valve into the guest room quiet of the right ventricle.

Shall I go on? Isn't it obvious, the druggy dream of the pulmonary artery,
the bloom of new love in the left atrium,
the free fall through the mitral valve into the left ventricle
with its clocks and chimes, and finally the aorta into the unknown?
This was my concept, my imagining.

Reality was this:
An endless rain, the filth of the floodwaters bringing
boards, bodies, houses, livestock and death on a black surge,
an ink to begin my poetry with.
Within my chest, the wheel, the weird carnival,

All I had ever consumed or breathed gathered in ceremony,
children being born and let go but never let go,
the shout above the wind, the wonderful stupidity of the church tower
or widow's walk in a lightning storm,
the stanzas, the strophes, the angeldust afterbirth of all I needed to say.

Go ahead, tell the one whose love you need the most
that you are dropping out of med school,
that you are bisexual,
that you have knocked over a bank and shot the President;
they may forgive you, or at least pretend to.

Finally, tell them you are a poet and watch them walk away.
Feel the flood, the fever and fire--
then, dear heart, start writing.
_______

for Fireblossom Friday at Real Toads

 

 

The Partridge Family

The Partridge Family, ruined and violent,
take up residence in what's left of the ark,
parked in Noah's cracked, weed-lined driveway
next to his run-down split-level.

David sings, "I Think I Love You" with heavy irony,
as he shovels old giraffe shit into a wheelbarrow.
Danny Bonaduce walks up and pops him one,
shouting, "shut your pie hole, you pinhead motherfucker!"
The police come.
Again.

Susan Dey does Noah for the rent,
her life a mountain of failed wrinkle creams.
She can't believe she made an idiot of herself over David.
She can't believe she sat there shaking a stupid tambourine
when she could have learned to shred on guitar.

Their tv show is an ancient memory.
All their out-of-date clothes rot in resale bin hell.
Susan's hair looks like shit no matter what she does.
It is starting to rain,
and the animals are gone.

Reader, behold the rising waters,
the fallen stars.
Weep,
and start rowing.
_______ 

 

Mystic Krystal's Revelations

Fat Angie has one last mini cupcake and closes the package.

She is troubled as she looks out of her second floor window--
troubled by the bare-branched silver maple,
surrounded by edges of frost that form a ring around it,
and what bothers her most

are the five hundred red-wing blackbirds squabbling
on the bare branches
of the silver maple
ringed by frost
that frames the scene outside in the cold.

Many have felt like this,
Fat Angie supposes;
many have felt the future and trembled.

She pushes away the plastic package of mini cupcakes,
throws on her favorite maroon and white scarf
(her old school colors),
shrugs into her mail-order knock-off designer winter coat,
and hurries out the door and down the stairs.

One cannot wait,
thinks Fat Angie with a fierce resolve,
for the slings and arrows of cruel fortune to show right up at the door like Jehovah's Witnesses.

Passing beneath the silver maple filled with
fighting
fidgeting
farting
red winged blackbirds,
Fat Angie sets her course as determinedly as Magellan,
if Magellan had been a size 16 unemployed typist living in Eau Claire
like a big blueberry inside a pancake.

She walks east two slushy blocks, then north for one, and through a doorway to a tea room called Mystic Krystal's.
There she is, Krystal the Gypsy herself,
blonde and
babushka'd and
listening to an old Dave Brubeck cd on a portable machine.

She uses a tiny blue remote to turn off the tiny blue player
the minute she gets a look at Fat Angie.
As smoothly competent and focused as any ER nurse,
Mystic Krystal knows
that this will not be the usual whiny plea for lottery numbers.

"Cut the cards three times and ask a question," she says,
and without even removing her heavy coat, Fat Angie is on it like white on rice,
as if they were both sitting in the situation room with the rockets coming in.

"The birds are just a parlor trick,"
says Mystic Krystal as she turns over cards in neat rows.
"They're just a distraction,
dark
and disturbing, but
definitely bogus.

"Your girlfriend is sick. "
It's a statement, not one of those phony baloney shots in the dark
that fake seers use to try to get a clue.
Fat Angie allows as to how this is, sadly, true.

"Lemme ask you a question," says Mystic Krystal,
tilting her head to the side as she looks at the cards.
"Suppose that you,
and she,
and her crazy-ass dog 
were all aboard theTitanic, and there was only room in the crap-ass lifeboat for two of you.
Who goes?"

Fat Angie answers promptly that she would volunteer to suck salt water
so that the other two could bob in the boat upon the ocean blue,
until they got rescued by handsome sailors
speaking Turkish.

Mystic Krystal ponders this.
"Don't you think,
that this girlfriend of yours would stick Fido in her lap,
or shove some salesman overboard
in order to make room for you?"

"She would. She would."

"Everything's gonna be fine.
You got twenty dollars, honey?"
Fat Angie only has eighteen dollars and fifteen cents,
on account of having bought the mini cupcakes
in a fit of emotional eating.
Mystic Krystal says, "Gimme fifteen and we'll call it catnip."
(Mystic Krystal sometimes says odd things like this.)

When Fat Angie gets home, the blackbirds are gone,
and there is a message on her machine from the girlfriend.
"Hey baby. Whatcha doin'?"
Fat Angie is as pretty as a pony in a daisy field when she smiles,
and for the first time all day,
she isn't hungry,
and feels easy with the world, and satisfied.
_________

I shamelessly stole the title from my BFF Hedgewitch, who used it to hilarious effect in fellow Real Toad Kay's post HERE, in the comments.

Relativity

St. Creola is Our Lady of the Shoreline.
Drowning sailors call to her,
but beautifully, like carolers.

St. Creola is unperturbed by them.
They are leaves gently falling
from those trees--their wooden ships.

The beach has so many grains of sand,
changing color with every passing wave;
and the waves arrive ceaselessly, like babies.

St. Creola advises to accept peace where and when you can.
Rushing water makes as poor a floor as roof,
so bless the dry interlude, and the fruit section offered at noon.

The sun has warmed St. Creola,
and when the moon arrives, later,
she will still be here--
a pretty Constant
under the imprimatur of the clouds and stars.
_______

For My Love, At Sea

in the breeze, the beach grass waves--
but can only stay;
in the breeze, the lake waves move--
but can only leave;
and always,
the light.

my dearest heart, i can only love you--
by snow, by summer,
by day, by night;
my devotion and this poem, yours alone--
whether it is wise,
whether it is right;
and always,
the light.

_______

for Real Toads' Friday prompt