A Taste of Honey

 

I'd like to say I understand

and forgive as in the carpenter's command.

The once-lovely loaf has gone green in my hand;

the crows will have it now.

It's such a feeling to be living at the dawn

with new love in some contented Avalon,

but these things cannot go on and on.

They shy and die away. 

Around your arm, a snake arrives

and I see your face reflected in its eyes.

It speaks one word--the word is "compromise."

It turns your heart to smoke.

I'd like to say it's all all right

and I can't remember anything I dream at night

but my bedside vase holds blooms gone dead and white.

They wave like conquered kings.

And so I'll say--no word at all.

Both the dawning and the dimming hold a sudden fall.

The gods we placed our faith in don't return our call.

"A taste of honey" is their lazy joke. 

____________________

for Desperate Poets "Lonelytown"

 

Cicada

A cicada is a simple thing.
Given the power of speech, it would say,
"I am respectable;
I have worked years for this."

The tree upon whose branch the cicada clings
has stood on the same ground for decades,
but is not unchanging.
"As with me," the cicada would opine.
"I am a miracle of industry,
creativity
and purpose."

On the August breeze, birds float like daydreams,
their songs summer scarves folded on a table by a vase of cut flowers.

A cicada has shed its empty brown skin.
It would tell us, "I have left myself behind on a journey to myself.
Admire me,
collect the lessons I give,
strong, solid and marvelous."

On the August breeze, birds float like daydreams,
their songs summer scarves in myriad tones of impossible variety.

Then, the cicada,
droning its unmusical single note,
proud,
stupid,
insistent that its noise and buzz is all there is
because that is all it hears or can imagine.
______

for Wednesday Muse "Cicadas!"

Proof For The Postulation Of An Old Poet

"There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.  Like, telling someone you love them. Or giving your money away, all of it."  - Mary Oliver - Moments

The generosity of madmen
--whether born or made so--
is like a pitcher overturned, 
sweetness wasted in the sharing.

I'm not about to mistake straitjackets for haute couture;
I am as hard and closed as a policeman's nightstick.

Still, you can lay naked in the spring grass,
holding a hymnal and a caramel.
Pretend yourself a parrot, all colors.
I will still be the crow from whom the night borrows its darkness.

When you have gone, I will play ancient games
with dying cicadas.
The years will fold themselves into pastries
the crumbs of which I horde and never drop.

Go, parrot. And this time
do not leave open my coat of poems
with sleeves like shaded roads, and wool like forgotten noons.
But if you do, I will have been right in my manic certainty

that you would make me cry in the end.
------------

22 lines for Real Toads.

60

I live at Number 60 and have, through industry and dispensation,
made it onto the day roster at the rock factory
where we build birds to which we attach small personal compositions
which can be read after they come through your window on arced trajectory.

I was born in a nest in a mailbox, lo these many years ago,
delivered by a newsboy who pedaled his bicycle out of Hell to help me.
Mother only bled a tiny drop of Freon, but complained that he smoked;
she could smell it on his rags and anyway, he wasn't a DuPont, now was he?

Carrying around an hourglass, I fell in love with one man and a dozen women,
tilting my head up, offering them chickens, Cokes, anything,
as I ran alongside the bus on tip-toes, wearing a prom dress, stoned and winning,
until it was discovered that I was just loud and starving, like any fledgling.

Let's skip to the chase, shall we? I love you. You're the last.
Give me your disease, I'll spit stones and build a house all hammer and tongs,
where we'll live when I quit the factory and you quit on life, wearing a white dress
as beautiful as any bird in the sky, every bit pitched and gorgeous as my songs.
_______