Two Sharks

 

I have two sharks inside me

swimming in tandem and holding my heart

between them like a little family 

walking in the dark.

I send them gulps of air from outside

as if I were some sort of oxygenated charity

with a face and feet, operating in the world

on their behalf like a proxy or prosthetic.

Oh fishies, confined and angry in the bowl of my ribs,

here come those old blues again.

Why does life go on so long, demand so much,

slowly dribbling out the cracked glass of years?

I have had ideas all along, fine ideas

to open a ministry in a dumpster,

a ballroom in an attic, a cemetery 

on a space station with the whole Earth for Ouija board.

I'm scared, fishies. Will the moon call you

and will you answer her tidal madrigal?

Will she require three voices, you and my heart?

Will you rise in glory, leaving me hollow, in salt and sorrow?

_________________

for Word Garden Word List--How To Sell a Haunted House

Slough O' Despond

 

Welcome to the Slough O' Despond Shopper!

Oh, the warmhearted clerk you liked won't be back--

we chained her to a stove and dumped the stove down the 

roiling 

          oilspill

                     of our ravenous bellies.

Don't be bitter, we still offer a wide selection

of watery logic and dubious ingredients.

Our highly satisfactory laundry products get everything

whiter than white like a terrified horse's eyes

when we ride him into our slaughterdreams

which are

                 members-only

                                           and fully automatic. 

Check out today's special! BOGO on genders

of which there are two but only one matters.

Recite with us our shopper's guarantee! We

pledge allegiance to our public, but only

those who happened to be born in our parking lot. 

Come on,

                 crawl in, 

                                leap in, but don't look 

at the price tags cleverly hidden in plain sight and doubled every day.

_________________

for Word Garden Word List and WGO? open link. 

"Slough O' Despond Shopper" taken from a line in Grover Lewis's poem You Know Where. 

I am in a state of utter despair today about my country and the apparently innumerable people in it who just voted in a doddering Christo-fascist dictator.

Music: Celine Dion Think Twice. It's a break-up song. It reminds me of my country.

Crow & Astrolabe

 

Crow, obscured by wing and leaf,

there we were

under the stars.

Who knew then that we would bond

over common language

and common loneliness. 

You came when you would, and not that often,

like others of your kind

I had known before.

I thought, if I can crack the seed your heart will open

starved as you were

starved as I was. 

Crow so black against indigo sky, I lacked

Rosetta Stone

or Tarot deck.

So, I wrote you poems upon an astrolabe

looking for heaven

Deus ex machina.

Crow with your song in ghost-ship semaphore,

you sang to me

beautifully

Yet crows are crows, and stars are reclusive.

Astrolabe and downdraft

broke both our hearts.

I have learned wariness of crows, and they the same

both poorer but safer

for such sad education.

Still, I have my astrolabe, an antique affectation

like the love I once had

for an obscure bird.

_________

Jennifer over at Poet Laundry--no doubt prodded to do so by a thousand devils--challenged me to write a poem about or including an astrolabe. This is that poem. I encourage you to go visit her there; she is a genuine peach of a poet. 

Music: Alana Davis Can't Find My Way Home

Anna

 

We had this woman at Dalldorf, claiming to be

the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia

plucked Deus ex machina from the bullets and blood of some cellar smack dab in the snowy far reaches of Nothing Good. 

We did  hydrotherapy there, but she'd gotten a head start,

either jumping or about to jump off of some bridge into the Landwehrkanal

as if she were Girl Rasputin, Queen of the Waves. 

She did this in springtime, holding a pink tulip and a volume of Pushkin.

Mornings, I'd bring her a bowl of oatmeal and my scorn,

setting it down hard on the tray, sounding like the crack of a rifle.

Anna Anderson, do try to eat some (I'd say), like the nonsense you spoon out

as ammunition for the Great Cannon of Bullshit for the credulous.

Dalldorf Asylum is gone now, and my job with it, dragging incontinents

to the toilet and fakers to the street outside when the administrators were 

otherwise occupied filing reports or fucking the mute up on seven. 

At night I used to tell her my suspicions about Anna, and cures, and treatments.

Now I am old, and Anna Anderson is gone, proven by modern techniques

to have simply been a loon and a manipulator. I go to her grave and

plunge a Russian Orthodox cross into the earth right where her heart should be,

but never was. Madness and murder were everywhere then. Anna used

crayons to draw those poor dead Romanovs, while there she sat, well fed,

celebrated, alive in the sun room, like a cat or a cockroach, immortal.

_________

for What's Going On? -- Character(s) In Action. 

Don't forget that this week's Word List is still "live" through Sunday. 

Music: Cafe Accordion Orchestra Ochi Chyornya

Handsome Man

 

A very handsome man--

everyone remarked about it. 

Simply leaning back in a chair

with his coat open,

and that devil-may-care casual air--

it made me feel a little drunk, just watching him.

He wasn't gay

as some of us assumed. 

Vi said no, with a canary-cat smile

and she would know, better than us sparrows. 

She told the story

how the war shattered him.

Six weeks in hospital

and the art therapy that brought him back.

Looks and talent, despite a hand tremor that lasted a year.

He was elegant.

You'd feel like the only woman in the room

just because he offered you a cigarette.

With a wave of his hand he dismissed his work as trash

and said better to be

a bricklayer or a dentist.

The thing is, he seemed to mean it

and it felt like watching him vandalize his soul.

He was loved.

One look at Vi told us that.

She said there were nights when he believed he was dying,

and went to doctors in the morning.

They told him, you're fine, really, stop worrying.

He was on the phone one evening with his sister

when Vi said his face changed. 

When she asked him he said he'd mentioned his art 

and the sister had laughed

saying, oh, you're still doing that.

He loved to walk

at night when the air was cold and clear.

He told Vi he was going out for a smoke--

this war veteran,

this handsome, talented, loved man--

and he did.

Then he'd stepped off a bridge into the cold water far below.

At the funeral, Vi slapped the sister, caused a scene.

He wasn't there to smile and smooth it over, for any of us, anymore.

________

for desperatepoets "death by broken shoe laces." 

Music: Billy Joel Goodnight Saigon