Winter & Wanting

 

You wanted

To break my cold reserve

To be a flame on the frozen stream

I wanted

To protect my stillness

To be snow in the presence of May

Charming one

You remind me of me

When I was hopeful and still believed

I thank you

For the moment's respite

When you touched my sleep with honeyed light.

______

For Dverse MTB "A Lover as Second Nature" hosted by Laura B.

Music: Jai Jagdeesh In Dreams

Greenhouse Afternoon

 

There should be a bible for things like this--

something dependable

something I could grab onto

when I feel bewildered,

   dizzy,

from your smile and your scent

when you stand closer

   than I expect.

Such a bible would have shed its

shall-nots

in favor of

more love-thy-neighbor

   especially

when the sky is full of soft stars

and you remove my glasses

   along with my reserve.

This bible would be full of watercolors

and nested in by drowsy birds.

This bible would be

   lit like a greenhouse afternoon

or suggested in midnight indigo.

Lay hands on my shyness

   and let me lay my burden down--

turn me to the text of oh-gosh-yes

   like a prodigal

whose lips can finally confess.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Bittersweet.

Music: Denise King Say You Say me

Love Poem In Filigree & Hickory

 

I was sitting on a filigree bench

on a balcony

with no building behind it.

Then I was dressed in black

at a funeral for my own loneliness.

The sun was warm

and the priest was a peacock.

My love, my love,

in your thousands of scarves,

you were there, and we slept in the sky--

your arms silver, mine indigo.

I wound rose stems around the filigree

at the balcony's edge,

red blooms seeking the sun, which was a breast.

Then I was wearing this poem

at a wake for my own loneliness.

There were little cakes

with icing as white as a page.

You were there, my love, each of us inside the other.

Then I woke, and wept,

the breath filling my body

like smothering smoke from wet hickory burning.

_______

for What's Going On? "Last Night I Had A Dream"

Music: Emmylou Harris Hickory Wind 

January

 

I said to January,

just born and tilting like an upset vase

between heartbeat and nothingness,

"Borrow my hands

to hold yourself here. Rock yourself

into this motherless place."

Summer is an orange

in sections, skin as thin as a pulse,

her bright dress never meant for us. 

I said to January

with her hair of stars and darkness,

"You were born to grace the river ice."

January said to me,

"There is one kimono, spun of morning silence--

wrap with me inside it, as pleasure does with melancholy."

We slept and were steeped

in both love and loneliness. When she vanished,

I kept both and went on, into what was, and would be.

_______________

Shared with What's Going On?

Poem About a Dream, With Shifting Tense

 

I dreamed you were there again

like a delayed letter in the mailbox

twined with thorns, slick with lipstick.

There you were, at my doorway

on my farm where I have never laid eyes

or set foot, nor sat cross-legged in the wild-grown meadow.

You were with someone new.

I was with someone new.

They were both starting to see how things are. 

Your hair, you know, it's like a pillow on a bed

where I long to be. And me, I have the key that you can't find,

as clunky as a cow's bell, as broken as an old washer. 

The guy you were with had begun to see the 

sunset behind your October eyes; I've known your full dark.

I'm here but obscured from the wildflower partner beside me.

I'm getting a vibe, like pixelated messages from space,

that your man would like to be mine instead, and drop his

heavy bags on my rag rug. I think my partner has checked out silently.

So there we stand, in a now that never was,

in a place we never were, playing out a scene like breezy clouds.

I see blackbirds on the split-rail fence, dipping, calling,

and feel my heart break apart inside my chest like a broken door handle.

___________

for Word Garden Word List--The Jesus Cow

Music: Coldplay The Scientist

Space Shuttle Challenger

 

"You always have to be different." --my mother's bitter complaint.

My tricycle mind,

up to its seat springs in rocket fuel. 

That will make you different

and confused

and terrified. 

'What do you see at night when you close your eyes?" I asked my older brother. 

"Nothing. What do you see?"

Oh, colors, crazy colors, a shifting kaleidoscope

and sometimes 

scary things.

I can't make them stop

and I lay awake to escape the turning, appearing, revolving, staring.

Later, older, I tried dragging and drugging

my heels, alcohol,

but Challenger blew up and sprayed across the sky.

I watched on tv and saw my inside outside.

I was a baby writer

and once upon a pair of wheels

I wrote crazy stories for friends who asked if I wrote them high.

I wrote them sober,

then got high to stop.

Later still, I set down the drink and slept with the light on for years,

prone to night terrors and ptsd.

I embraced the Church of Regular Meals,

subscribed to the doctrine of Keep Coming Back.

Slowly, my world came into phase

with a job

a spouse

a child

but, tame as a housecat, no more bright crashes to watch at night.

Even later, single again, child grown, lost in my own skin,

I set out to find out if it's really like riding a bike.

"Give me all of your dreams, you dreamer," said Langston Hughes

and I met myself 

in the interstices

between this world and some other.

Totally amazing mind

as my Cranberries fan friend said of me

and helped me learn to ride the rocket

to these lines

and this life

where I dive into the deep end

fearless

A

F.

_____

I'm floating in a most peculiar way/

and the stars look very different today 

for Dverse Poetics: Visionary Poetry, hosted by Ingrid. 

find The Dream Keeper by Langston Hughes HERE. 

Music: the Cranberries "Dreams"

The Landlord of the Moon

 

The landlord of the moon 

likes a little respect with her coffee,

a rose on her pillow 

                                  and all the rest.

She knows she's not loved 

but that's not the point hardly.

She keeps rum on her wrist

                                                and salt on her breast.

It's nothing personal.

No weary argument moves her much,

and it's best to remember

                                             her bird can't sing

except when it's raining

inside suitcases, outside train stations, and such.

Better bow to the east

                                        and kiss the ring.

Still, the landlord of the moon

falters while the factory turns 

and the sun, her master

                                          lounges and leans,

casual and careless

mocking her with jazz hands and money to burn

til she lays, each noon

                                        her heart at his feet.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List #7 (Langston Hughes)                                       

and your bird can sing ^^

Word Garden Word List #7 (Langston Hughes)

 Hello everyone, it's me with your weekly word list poetry prompt! This time our source is the great American poet Langston Hughes. Known for incorporating informal mid-century black parlance into his poems, Hughes gave us a rich portrait of the reality of life in Harlem, both the joys and the sorrows. 

I have intentionally left out some of the parlance I just mentioned, because our goal here is not to copy Hughes's own style, but to use these list words to create our own original poetry. If we can manage to include an homage to Hughes in the process, so much the better.

What we do here is to include at least three of the twenty listed words in an original poem of any length or style. Please link back to this post, sign the linky so we can read what you've created, and remember to visit others cos we all love knowing that others are reading what we write. And, as always, have fun!

argument

blood

clocks

coffee

dreams

faces

factory

heart

jazz

landlord

moon

parade

personal

raining

remember

rose

salt

sandwich

taste

weary

Whistling Past The Graveyard

 I had hired him for an hour in the afternoon

though gigolos aren't my usual thing.

I'm an Egyptian tomb of a woman.

Scarabs whisper to me about daylight.

He was intense, dark, beautiful, 

with a nemes crown and a heqa scetpre.

I turned to dust in his Cyprinum-scented arms,

and wobbled, satisfied, into Duat.

________

for Flash 55 at my BFF's place. 

nemes crown

heqa sceptre

Duat--the Egyptian realm of the dead

Our Bear

Our bear

smells like an old cottage rug;

is partial to sleep

and us

and loaf

and jug.

Our bear

dreams of honey hives;
leaves the shine of
Ursa Major
and Minor
in our eyes.

Our bear
is our bruin castle keep;
we whisper in his ears
one left
 one right
constellated, constant, sweet. 
_______

for my BFF's weekly 55 thang

Upstairs, And The Fine Things Kept There

Don't dream.
Don't sleep.
Not yet.

Did you like dinner?
It was simple,
made from ordinary things.
A little pasta, sauce, and spice.

I brushed garlic on the bread.
I felt your eyes
and the warmth from the oven.

Relax. 
Lace our fingers.
Stay.
_______

for this.

someone once played this song, "Dreams", for me and told me I had a "totally amazing mind." But as another song by another singer has said, I'm just another silly girl.

 

Succubus

Here is the thing about a Succubus--
she won't schedule a date at a mutually convenient time.
She'll just appear--always at an unsuitable hour.
Don't expect her to ask if you were sleeping. She knows you were.
Don't wait for her to say "sorry." She's not.

Here is the thing about your body--
with the Succubus so close that her breath is as near as your own, 
it won't be answering your calls anymore. 
Your old familiar will be off the leash, off the rails,
off to hell and gone--pardon the figure of speech--
and you may as well put a band-aid on the fault line of an earthquake
as to try and master your flesh, with Her there.

Here is the thing about her purpose--
it has nothing to do with your body. It's become a door, that's all.
Lemme in, lemme in, lemme in, that's why she's rattling your ribs.
She'll fog your brain with her honeyfire ways.
She'll draw every tremble from every lit-up synapse,
and perfect a reflex from all your sweetspots. Then again. Then again.
All just to distract you and make you deliciously stupid.

Here is the thing about your heart--
it's next-of-kin to the thing she really wants.
Try to catch the words she whispers to her Master,
The One you're not supposed to realize is there, but she's lazy about it,
and you know, in a feverish, unreal way, that He's in on this with Her.
It's a metric that measures how fierce her appeal is,
that you know but don't care that she's sharing you all the while.

Here is the thing about it all--
She is after your Soul, and even a sparrow has the instinct to be wary.
Her lips, so soft they could make a god give up,
are the vehicle for every lie under the sun. 
Resist Her--yes, you, barely hanging on in the gale of her attentions.
Resist Her, even as She takes you over the edge.
Hold back just that one particle, that mote She's come for,
and know you're winning when she curls her lip and bites you awake,
shaking, in tears, but still a lit vessel intact despite the storm.
_______

From a dream I had recently.

The Unfortunate Hat (a prose poem)

The milliner suffered from insomnia. When he did sleep, he was subject to dreams involving his lost love, Lucinda.

He would dream that he could see her at the other end of a train station, waving with a folded newspaper held in her gloved hand. However, in the manner of dreams, when he tried to hurry to her, each movement required Herculean effort just to budge an inch. He would never be able to cross the entire station in time.

And so, he would wake up and go down to his basement shop to work on a new hat. As if he were a public fountain of loneliness, his sadness dripped from his mind down through his arms and out his fingers, into the material for the hat, into the ribbons, into the packaging for mailing it to the customer.

Upon receipt, ladies would see the lovely color, feel the softness and delight in the unique design, hand-made only for her by the milliner. Unfortunately, upon wearing the hats, odd things would begin to happen.

Mrs. Arthur Popovich, after wearing her hat to her bridge club, failed to return home. She was found sitting on a bench at the local train station, fanning herself absently with a folded newspaper, with tears streaming down her cheeks. 

"Do you see the platform?" she asked a bewildered Mr. Popovich when he finally found her. "Do you see how it makes no move to hold the trains as they arrive and depart? How cold it is! The rails never meet. Did you ever notice that?" 

"Come home, darling," he said gently, and she did, but she was never the same. Other husbands from Dubuque to Sioux City reported the same baffling behavior, and read about each other in advice columns.

Meanwhile, the milliner saw his Lucinda once again in yet another dream, waving to him with a folded newspaper held in her gloved hand. Inside, were letters from men whose wives had purchased hats. These men sat in telephone booths along the wall, the doors folded back, their overcoats open, not talking, just staring. When the lonely milliner tried to run, to get to Lucinda in time, each of these men picked up their respective receivers and began to dial. The milliner found himself moving so fast that it made him dizzy. In the time it took him to realize it, he was at the departure platform, losing his balance, reeling and falling past Lucinda. She turned his way and blew him a kiss, her lips a perfect red, her gloves as white as electric lights. After that, he did not dream anymore, and there were no more hats, despite dozens of orders scattered across his work table, unfilled.
_____ 

for Bjorn's "Butterfly Effect" challenge at Real Toads.

So Much

So much depends upon
the curve of the horizon

at night

on the other side of the world.

Take it as an act of faith--
believe that your lover is there in the darkness
breathing
like sea birds on an updraft

in some harbor you've never seen.
______

For my own Fireblossom Friday "Red Wheelbarrow" challenge at Real Toads.

Several of you have asked me how I am. I guess I've been scarcer than usual. My doggy, Skittles, is having some health concerns, and that, along with returning to work and all that goes with delivering mail in Michigan in February have left me little energy for composing very much. Thank you to everyone who asked after me. I'm fine, and I am working to get Skittles that way, too. 

Bill's Railroad

Since taking up model railroading,
William receives a lot of parcels in the mail.
They contain little cars, little engines,
and a little plastic boy carrying a pole and pail.

To his face, the mail lady calls him Bill,
but behind his back she calls him "that old shithead."
She should be kinder; she doesn't know
that when his wife passed, he wished himself dead.

It was the Beverly Hills Express that saved him.

There are trees with lichen leaves,
and a mountain made from papier mache
with a tunnel going through it and
next to that a neatly painted little highway.

Muttering "more crap for this asshole,"
the mail lady arrives with an important addition.
She smiles, he thanks her, and he knows
it is his beautiful plastic lady, arriving in perfect condition.

Bill admires her kick pleat skirt
and her sunny smile which will never fade.
Carefully gluing her feet to the platform,
he offers her his devotion, and a tiny glass of lemonade.

Bless my hobby which has saved my life, he thinks, and bless consistency of scale.

Bill gives his '50s lady a cotton bubble
in which to say anything her heart desires.
What does she say? What do women ever say?
Anyway, they do seem happier talking, and now his town is entire.

She will always stay. Where would she go?
The tracks are circular and end where they began,
so even if she heeds the "all aboard!",
it will always be 1955, in Beverly Hills, and there she'll be again.
________

for mag 282.

dog years

I love you in dog years, seven for one.
I love you in predictive quatrains and in the secret language of twins.

My love is revealed in weather anomalies,
sea changes, and the Rorschach of sunspots.

Here is the reason for my fingertips:
your hair, your skin.

Here is the sure sign of intelligent design:
your dark eyes, the smile at the corner of your lips.

In the madhouse, men think they are God.
Churches become madhouses for doing the same.

I am mad enough--I want to say to you, girl,
fuck my brains out, make me beg to get inside you,

marry me, tie me up, get me pregnant,
make the room reek of us and then write poems about it.

Kiss me in the middle of the mall, hold my hand.
Duplicate my desire in an uncontrolled environment.

Love me in dog years, seven for one.
Viva la revolucion.
______

 

 

green shirt

I like your green shirt.
You wear it out at your hips,
and undone at your throat
to the perfect balance between promise and secrecy.

I like your glasses.
Your dark hair sometimes rests on the place
where the bow meets the frame,
and curves around it in a way that just undoes me.

Though I love them on you,
how I long to remove your shirt,
--gently--
your glasses
--gently--
with fingertips and long kisses.

Tonight my sleep will be slow in coming,
for thinking of you, your name, and these desires.
Then, in the silent hour, I will dream of pine forests
and streams that bend to reflect the stars.
_______

 

in water

I was soaking
~in water~
I must have fallen asleep
to my slowed breathing;
my slowed heartbeat;
I must have started to dream.

There was a field, a clutch of trees.
There was a retrograde moon, pale white in the morning sky.
There were stately grackles,
noisy starlings,
and a single cardinal on a mulberry branch that bobbed slightly 
under his tiny weight.

I was dreaming that I was
~in water~
I must have submerged into the pool of myself,
because then there were your slender fingers,
your hand
wet to the wrist,
stirring me and holding my heart as I spread and rippled.
__________

 

 

Marry the Moon

I'm keen to marry the moon--
she has my heart--
I have my dress--
all the crows in captivity stacked up in the west.

What am I supposed to do
with that golden bitch the sun?
She preen--
she pose--
she think she better than everyone.

I made a deal with the dark.
I said, "bring my baby here,
when she a sliver before she grows.
I'll bootleg you the stars
and nobody needs to know."

I'm keen to marry the moon
with her down-low ways and hyena laugh--
she has my heart--
I have my dress--
now all I need--
her ask, my yes.
__________
 

Connie

Connie's dead
but her dream is still there,
in the air,
and cannot find its way home.

Connie's bed
is crowded with strangers,
and flashes red blue red
from the ambulance dome.

Connie's dead
but her dream is still there,
in the air,
and cannot find its way home.
_______