Dreams of Shiva

 

There is a thing I wanted so much--

a thing always denied.

The evil and the angelic made a pact

and placed this desire in my heart

like a ticket hidden in a boot

worn by someone desperate in a station.

I tell people this desire is over--

that I visit its grave on holy days

to leave woven weeds,

but there is no grave because it is not dead--

only paralyzed like an aster when there is no wind,

no sun, no moon, no garden.

There is someone coming up the stairs

to hurt my heart, and they are so lit with beauty,

such an ordinary marvel.

The hallway floor is wood, the light there yellow in autumn.

It is morning, but the birds are mute.

My heart stops, the visitor walks past, the world ends,

but no one notices. There is no fool like an old fool,

no desire that cannot exalt or destroy,

over and over, in silence, like Shiva in a recurring dream. 

______

Persephone

Sexy Persephone, not that anyone would know.

Hades keeps the lights off, the room too warm.

Her children howl from nightmares Morpheus leaves low

like suns going down at the base of the spine.

Restless Persephone, gone bitchy in the ashy shadows,

escapes to fenced April, daughter of deities.

She's a woman, she bears worlds purple with jacaranda,

wisteria, yellow-eyed pansies and Queen-of-the-Nights.

Circumscribed Persephone, prisoner of fence and filigree,

no Ubers in the Underworld, though taxis crowd the tarmac

from city to jungle to ice cap, gathering thick ten feet away,

carrying businessmen dry as last month's paper left on a sill.

Persephone, I ride on your skin, behind your lids, 

trapped as you are, wishing myself fecund as you are,

as frayed, as foxy, as fenestrated, a thing unto ourselves,

rising like spring stems garlanding a world denied.

Persephone, we lie in tandem in a dark grave, like butterflies.

___________

for Sunday Muse #160. 

The Hospital For Dreams

I had dreams.
This is what had always differentiated me from the usual types
that fall from the moon and the dark blue sky
like sugarbirds.

I was not one of them,
though I wanted fiercely to be, when I was younger.
The snake of tough shit, babe
squeezed that notion right out of me
and told me I had other purposes to attend to.

But, about my dreams...

This latest one, this humdinger that I had,
turned out to be so much bullshit.
So what? you'll say.
So, dreams have been the guard rails on the killer curve of my life.
Intuition has been my merciful angel,
pulling me out of the soup again and again.

Now I feel like nothing but the bone.

I thought I was going home.
I thought it was gonna be warm cornbread and sweet butter from now on.
What it was, was
sorry, not you.
What it was, was
heft that bale, you dumb crazy bitch.

So I took my dreams--the new ones--
to the Hospital where they sieve out the serpents at the door,
and hand all the girls a gorgeous red apple.
I turned my open haversack upside down at the nurses' station
and said, "Save these.
Save this one in particular."
They said to me, girl, you are some wild kind of boho trash
to think anybody here cares.

Out by the bus stop,
waiting to go home,
I took a big lungful of magical Detroit exhaust,
like the last Pontiac giving up the final air filter.
I held my dreams tight in my arms,
and told them never mind, babies, just never mind.
_________

banshee

I am not here at your summoning.
I do not blush,
and while I am obedient in my own way,
at my own peculiar hour,
you don't know a thing about me
nor command me in any manner at all.

At the edge of the green-gone woods
where the mist, like souls, shall rise,
you will find me washing the bloody husk
of the brave one who slowly, stoically, dies.

I move through the world in hag-face,
appearing ancient, for I am ancient,
but not weak.
That's for you, the young man who called to me,
mistaking who and what I was,
and when I turned my head, said,
"Don't look at me bitch!" and laughed along with your friends.
Did you feel the ice snake curl around your heart?
I had already looked,
and once having looked, I cannot look away.

At the edge of the green-gone woods,
where the peat fires burn unseen and deep,
you will find me bent to cradle the head
of the brave one whose heart slows, sinking to sleep.

This is the age of superfluous racket masquerading as song.
Myself, I do not sing--
my throat is too thick with writhing crows,
my nostrils too full of ash
for me to do anything but keen.
I am Morrigan, and I am a banshee;
when I open my mouth, the razor flock flies,
a black scream for the extinguishing stars.

At the edge of the green-gone woods
where bat and raven at twilight cross,
I am the coarse-cut shriek of death
the voice of grief, the soul of loss.

Young man, you don't want to know what I do
about the bad cast
and the locked door.
Beneath my crone's costume, I carry my beauty in reserve--
it is formidable, and fair,
and kept for the deserving.
Remember this: I will not keen for you.
What comes out of your mouth is yellow dust;
what comes out of mine is a glass-shard hurricane.
Your future holds the thing you know nothing about;
what awaits you just around the next coward's corner you come to,
will be all yours as I walk away--
utter
stillness.
_______

For Kerry's fantastic "Old Gods" challenge at Real Toads. 

Check out the amazingly cool journal that Margaret Bednar gave me, for my poems. I can't say how much I love it. Next to it, is the beautiful Celtic necklace given to me by Lynn, of Good Things Happened. I wear it a lot. Thank you, dear ladies. Your kind gifts mean so much to me.  

Down The Rabbit Hole

This is for my challenge at Real Toads, where I've asked people to imagine that they've gone through a portal in time and into September of 1958.

Reds are the big bogeymen here.
"Russians, yanno, they got no freedoms, not like we do here."
Pardon my unladylike snort.

I spend most nights at Gracie's.
It's a club, but you have to know where it's at.
There's no neon sign, no Yellow Pages ad.
It's tucked away off the main street
and looks like a warehouse from the outside.
Martha Stewart would take one look and have kittens.

When I walk in, the bartender says, "Hey, sister."
She's wearing a man's white tuxedo and it never looked so good.
Women dance together or sit at tables in the low light and talk, 
while holding hands or wrapped together kissing.
It's a sweet place, where a girl can let her hair down,
or tuck it up under a fedora.

Like I say, it's a sweet place, but every few weeks,
the cops raid, and we get our names printed in the morning paper.
Last week, Elaine lost her job because of it;
she was really tired, I could see it in her face.
There's nothing like a long bath to restore a girl's spirits,
but she took a pack of razor blades in with her,
and we won't be seeing her here anymore.

Nights I don't go to Gracie's, I stay home and read.
I can only find two books--
The Well of Loneliness, that they banned in England, stupid Brits,
and The Price Of Salt by "Claire Morgan."
Claire Morgan is really Patricia Highsmith.
She published Strangers On A Train under her own name.

I want a job doing something more than waitressing,
but it's not easy.
I applied to Disney as a cartoonist, but they sent me a nice letter back
that said they only hire male artists.
Straight movies, straight people, straight world, and a man's world besides;
a girl could lose her mind.

Oh well, sugar, after three more years fly by,
I'll have Laura Petrie in her capri pants to lust after.
My cup runneth over.

One nation
Til then, I'll spend my time at Gracie's
under God
as a sister of the Order
indivisible
a Twilight Girl running under the apple pie radar
with liberty and justice
until John Law raids again to satisfy the national morals
for all
but I can't stop thinking about Elaine,
her life's blood slowly leaving her,
a sacrifice for the lukewarm tap water she couldn't survive in.
________

 
 

Feng Shui For Single Girls

The window is all there is--
the room could be on fire behind me,
all unknown.

I have books, thick as starlings at sunset--
some have tiny bones made from love poems;
that is what I've been told.

I'm so beautiful, and so stupid.
I give coins to babies, formulae to retardates.
I stay by my window like a moondog,
offering the airy currents my kiss.

I wait for you by the window,
pretty and useless, a song in a language no one can sing.
I am sister to the vase, the ring removed, and the window I love,
because we are all open, and empty, like this.
_______

How To Make A Poet (Though Making A Milk Jug Lantern Would Be Better)

I was delivering the mail.
No, the actual mail.
There were steps,
It was icy,
and bullshit bullshit bullshit...

Anyway,
I slipped.
Something deep inside my ears whispered to me:
Whee, whirlybird,
Going down.

I might still have been all right, except--
I landed in the spokes of some kid's bike
Left on the walk;
Then I was dead
Cos I broke my neck just like Mama always said.

Lady come out, lady say,
Omg, call the lawyer.

Then I was floating above my body,
And I thought,
No.
No no no no.
I had almost finished reading a novel, and
I had thawed some hamburger for tonight and
I had a movie that came in the mail,
Set aside,
Like a a potentially distracting
Arranged bride.
So I can't die.

But I died.
I saw souls whipping into the light
Like their hair was on fire.
The love!
(they said.)
The well-being!
(they cried.)

Well, that's not how my experience went...

God looked at my life and then at me and said,
WTF?
And I looked at my life and then at God, and said back,
wtF????
I came back as a cat.

I peed the little potted tree,
I bit the hand that fed me,
I shed and shit and scratched and that was me.
I was angry.

Then I died again, and still,
No love for Shay.
I stood before God in her Radiance,
And was sent back as a geranium this time,
That I might learn patience
And the art of being still.

I was pink, and pretty,
And people said, how nice.
All the time inside I was screaming
GAHHHHH! GAHHHHHHH!
Cos I was angry.
Then some kid, maybe the child of the one with the bike,
Said off with your head, 
And I said
Nothing after that.

I screeched at God, WTF?
And God said back, well, wtf?
I went back as a tropical fish
And an ant
And a dung beetle
And a labrador retriever,
The only one in history that bit.

I died and died and died and died.
And stood before God,
And got the trapdoor in the floor,
And a bon voyage.

It stopped being funny pretty fast.

So, after I was a monkey and a microbe and a
Frozen test tube baby in a basket,
God finally sighed.
One more time, She said, and 
Off I went.

My mama tried to kill me cos
She knew she bore a poet.
But I wouldn't die, not again.
No no no no no,
Not having it.

So I grew,
And scribbled, 
And went GAHHHHHHHHHH!, but
I did it pretty, so pretty.
I didn't love no men, and they didn't love me neither.
I loved some women til it made me cross-eyed,
But they said, we can be friends, such friends.

Then some dweeb at the mall told me God loves me,
And I smack him hard upside the head
With my latest volume.
I beat him
And beat him
And beat him
And beat him,
And that's the most use poetry ever was. 
I beat him, but I did it pretty, so pretty.

I went to jail and they said,
What's your name?
What's your gender?
What's your credit score?
What's your sign?

Then they gave me ten to fifteen years
To contemplate the Divine.
______

picture found on weheartit.com