My Gibbet

My gibbet is a fine and private place

where a lady may tarry of a summer afternoon

elevated and untouchable--

an ideal love just out of reach

like fruit for Tantalus, all pointless sweetness.

Allen Ginsberg appears from out of the crowd,

pink as a schoolmarm, fat as a Christmas goose

carrying his harmonium

singing about plutonium,

barefoot as any angel, toking on the Golden Blunt.

He looks up, mistaking me for a caught kite

dangling above the street in my gibbet

making other women's children

point and cry

demanding candy or weather reports.

Someone climbs up and ties tin cans

to the bottom of my gibbet

in an atmosphere of giddy holiday.

I die and begin to stink

pieces falling away like confetti.

Here I sway to this very day, high above 

the Emily Dickinson Parkway

a paragon of virtue and demure reserve,

dead as hell

black as a bowling ball

ring still on my finger, an ingenue of the afterlife, 

until gentrification when they'll take me down

because gibbets are out, they're upsetting,

like poetry, 

like dead dodos

like buskers in the subway, beautiful, buried, irrelevant.

_______

for Word Garden Word List.

Letter To My Indifferent Love

 I loved you. Forgive the triteness of my tongue,

I'm not the husky-voiced Delilah that I was when I was young.

Poor gentlemen, when we harpies hand 'em

our hearts like letters stuck in tandem

by a bit of glue from horses rotten

sidesaddle ridden and wrongly gotten

Like you, dear sir,

when life was kind 

leaving apple blossom 

scent behind

When red curls fell,

escaped their pins,

while apple cores

curled brown in bins

I loved you. Please pardon my hand laid on your sleeve

as delicate as a caught disease.

Poor object of my heart's desire,

though altered, I'm yet yours entire,

no stepping back and calling for Jesus

I don't think one so holy can see us.

I loved you. As red-handkerchieved consumptives do

the dry air of their coffins, too.

________

for The Sunday Muse #182, where I am hosting.

Ravenous

"Hold you in his arms, yeah, you can feel his disease" --The Beatles

Here is your ideal lover,
restless beside you in bed,
skin alive with a traveling infestation.
Reach out.
Go ahead.
Embrace the one who writhes as he sleeps.

Here is your constant one,
with words as sweet as rot
leaking from cracked teeth that teem with larvae.
Kiss him.
Suck his infected tongue with your lips
Because he cannot harm you.

Here is your adored one's treasured heart
housing sickening vermin.
Never mind the pitch and yaw
Of whatever fills his discolored chest.
He can explain all that, like so many times before;
Bring in a team to identify exactly what he is.

Touch him.
Kiss him.
Sit beside him and listen to him break wetly apart,
and, out of kindness, try not to vomit too obviously.
He is not what you thought he was.
He is legion,
and it is himself he devours, not you. 
_________

For Skyflower Friday. Monsters.

Magpie

I was born in this tree,
and the sun and stars circle 'round it
endlessly.

When I marry, I shall be wearing
a berry train braided by bridesmaids
tirelessly.

To me has been given
this tree, these fruits, this scorn for you,
intruder who dares

approach my bower.
God has given you all the empty air
below--stay there.
_______

Teas

"Here are my teas," you said,
fingers light on the smooth white 
inside of the cupboard door.

Tucking red hair behind your ear,
you recited them:
"Darjeeling," (drawing out the "ing")
"Mood Mender," (stressing the "M"s)
and "China Black...?"

You carefully fold back the little flaps
of one lucky box.
"Mmmm, smell that," you almost whisper.

Then, the kettle whistling,
the pretty, empty teacups on the table,
and you, with a cat's cool,
serving tease.
_______

Exactly 75 words for Margaret Bednar's "Play It Again, Toads #15. The photograph at top is hers.  I selected Mama Zen's Words Count from last December 10th, asking for the use of homophones. (Are they some kind of specialty cell phone? I've got to get my hands on one!)