Wedding Song

 

Please buy me a rose of bridal white

placed in a vase of anthracite

Wear your suit of wool and flint

and on my tongue a peppermint.

Please buy me a rose of pleasing pink

placed in the pool to turn and sink

Bring the singer who loves the blues

and bury her bones beneath the pews.

Please buy me a rose of funeral black

buy me a dozen, all in a stack

Make the ring from a hangman's rope

Invite the judge, the devil, the Pope.

Please buy me a rose of brilliant red

and remind me you did until I'm dead

Bake the cake with sugar and tar

and preserve my heart in a Mason jar.

________

for Word Harden Word List--Ishmael Reed

A Season In Hell

Summer that year came with black wings

rising over green suburban trees

and found my blood-beat

like a smiling intruder delivering a shiv.

There is a horror of violation,

a new vocabulary of panic spoken

in chambers where

lions and phantoms trespass the flesh.

It gets dusky inside the mind,

The hiss of a projector spinning out a movie 

made of gin and dope,

actors who live in graves offering their gray stars.

The god-surgeon, numb expert bastard

taught his flunkies torture

and gave me a new face.

I crawled through a radio for fifteen years to slash his memory.

When you always feel wrong, the world is a camera

and your crime is breathing.

There is an underworld with bootleg cures, so you go,

a parade of the altered, weird strangers, sudden sisters

Who come out blinking, holding high 

the severed heads of devils, and unafraid of anything.

__________

for Word Garden Word List--Jim Morrison. 

I had major surgery when I was 16.  That summer, "Love Her Madly" and "Riders On The Storm", both by the Doors, were getting heavy play on the radio I had at the hospital. Jim Morrison died right around that time. 

My title is, of course, taken from Rimbaud, a favorite of Morrison's and of mine.