Ballad of the Lost Shark

 A song for the lost shark

at the bottom of the sea

A song for the notions

that line up perfectly

A song for the children

who once were you and me

A song for the west wind

and the nest high in a tree

Sing, sing, sing, for no reason

just because you can

A song for the lost car

rusting in a field

A song for the card sharp

who says shut up and deal

A song for the baby

who was born and then grew old

A song for the kind ones

who give their hand to hold

Sing, sing, sing for no reason

just because you can

for the shark down in the deep sea

and you there on the sand.

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.

Poet

 

 

What I'm talking about is an ailment of spirit,

an ennui of the heart. 

It is not so much a seeking after angels

as a naming of devils.

Though these devils may sometimes be native,

most are introduced

like curare-tainted crosses slipped under our pillows

to teethe on at night.

We wobble into daylight, bright as fevers,

the lovely stricken

who learn to trick demons lazy for years or hours

or just the next blessed moment.

The well is poisoned, yes, but the hallucinations are rare,

butterflies of the injured mind.

We see loves bringing roses that are really lilies

for us discarded, already dead.

We are the gorgeous idiots, God's blind swans searching

for the blossoming branch,

mistaking the loaded barrel for Gilead's balm and leaving poems there

rolled, with ribbons, like answered prayers.

________

for Word Garden Word List #15 (Millay). 

top image: major arcana tarot "The Fool"

the amazing Toni Childs

Essential Oils For The Damned

 Idiot child of broken clocks, you once again brandish your prop razor

and my pretense skin curls away in shavings of apple peel red.

Glitter-eyed goblin, my adopted doppelganger monster,

here is your furious holiday for inmates.

I wave my frayed pennant and slide soggy sophistry down the coin slot

of the arcade game called Ouroboros Hoola-Hoop Boomerang For Dummies.

I like to think that my heart is not an unsafe toy.

I like to think that my blood is made of milk, my fingertips of cotton swabs.

Idiot child with the air raid stuck in your throat, fire-bug goblin,

do not call me sister, or mother, or twin.

There is an oven filled with cakes and loaves,

another with needles and broken glass.

Why scribble my name in static on the sunspot glass of the door?

Why not go die somewhere,

dissolve into tiny scrubbing bubbles of amnesia,

or while away the empty hours on the locked ward birthing lexicons for lunatics?

Why stand in the sudden mirror like immolated Jaycees

wearing Hello My Name Is Me stickers on your smoldering shoulders?

Why pen me inside an iron zodiac

with my temper and PTSD that rips me rising, screaming from my sleep?

The medical term for all this is Spiritual Infucktion

with features of Recurring Ordinariness,

and Impotent Fury.

Idiot child, horror goblin, my teachers and punishers,

the term I am searching for is

sorrow,

is failure,

is not again not again not again.

The word on the tip of my tongue where it is so badly burned is

HUMAN

and it binds me like a bandage made of water vapor and shrapnel.

________

for Word Garden Word list #11. 

This Train

This is the train that circles the sun,

set on a single direction.

Memory has no beginning on this train,

and though I've made my nest in the straw and dirt of an ancient car,

a home in motion never feels like one.

There is no deer trail here, only deaf rails.

The way behind no longer exists except in my longing.

The way ahead is obscured but always near,

like a huntsman and his hounds and so I run while lying still.

This train is containment and escape, a snake eating its tail.

I began helpless but grew strong,

believing the power in my body drove all motion.

I began foolish but wounds made me wiser,

and though I've been quick as winter light and now slow as March thaw,

the train keeps its pace and me with it.

I have leapt and spun in circles and still I rode the train.

Now I sigh and slowly sink to my straw, 

the passing scene softer but filled with phantoms.

My life has been pursuance of prey and sidestepping of traps,

but always, the familiar yet foreign, perhaps imagined

headlong terror of the train.

________

for Sunday Muse #151.

Incantesimo

In a cage with bars of foxfire,

I kept an apparition who claimed

to have made, from flax and piano wire

your nom de guerre, your midnight name.

"Tell me, moonless one, " I said,

"Sunless, starless nattering ghost,

Is there gravity for the dead?

A superseding circle outermost?"

She moaned and split to sugar and salt

identical in paleness to your kiss,

and offered a platitude neatly got

from a serpent poisoned with nothingness.

I burnt a root and bled a bird,

a canary-colored silent fake

whose solitude was ringed by words

that only my love or the damned could make. 

______

for Skylover's word list.

Contained

"The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration." ~ Frida Kahlo

As a small child,

I caught my mind in a jar.

All day, under the sun in the grass blades,

I was monarch,

dandelion,

daddy longlegs. 

That night,

terror held its regularly scheduled circus.

There were lids on every eyelash,

and glass between me and morning.

The tigers said, "Hide in our mouths."

The great ape said, "Hide in my hand."

In their eyes, jars of murder.

People smile and say,

"I wish I could spend an hour inside your head."

Inside, Bengal and Silverback.

Outside

--even still--

monarch,

dandelion,

daddy longlegs

and my face against the glass.

_____ 

for Susie's goose at Toads. 

Image: "Ophelia" by Antoine Auguste Ernest Hebert