Nutshell

 In a nutshell, meat and wings

and infinite other disturbing things

that rise and rule with iron fist

the little nest that crowns your kiss

Curse the summer, curse the tree

that swelled such nutshells patiently

gardener saw, gardener knew

even as those nutshells grew.

______

written for quadrille monday at dverse "crown"

image: syd barrett, a founding member of pink floyd whose life was derailed by mental illness. However, this poem is about whatever you think it's about.

1972

Here is a lily, love.
See that y'never doubt me.

I have things to do this morning--
I can't confess them, and even if I wanted to,
they have burned the churches down in Belfast and in Derry.

Here is a kiss, love.
Do you need a promise, to know that I am true?

Bodies are fragile things,
and that is why I touch yours so tenderly,
as if you might be torn away from me in an instant.

You might, love.
There are still snakes everywhere, no matter the fairy stories.

In her palace sits a queen, and she has everything.
Still, her fingers are never satisfied unless they make a rope
to fit my sweet white throat.

I am a banshee, love,
and so I must scream. For you though, for now, I whisper.

God made everything in seven days--
that's what a good Catholic girl can do.
I have inscribed little crosses on the pipes and in the powder.

Remember me, if I should fail.
I have cut a lock of my red hair where your lips have been,
and nested it in a silver locket for you to keep.

Here is a lily, love.
A sticky for the Easter rising. 

I am not much, love, but I'm yours, no matter what happens today.
I am just red hair and some spit for the Union Jack;
a prayer for Mary and the thing that I must do.

 


 

The Second Garden

In the Second Garden, the poison vine
as thin as a thought, as long as a doubt,
the devil's darling, nocturne saturnine.

The hangman's weaver bird slips in, slips out,
creating lace of loss, brocade of dark,
as thin as a thought, as long as a doubt.

By second moon, burn the bloom, climb the bark;
a slender creeper who kills by embrace,
creating lace of loss, brocade of dark.

Dream by the lily pond, drown in the race;
the high-shown face is mere mask for the root,
a slender climber who kills by embrace.

Here find bloom for the blind, song for the mute;
black-gone fruit is the dark garden's heart.
The high-shown face is mere mask for the root.

The snake's second skin is fine seed to start
in the Second Garden, the poison vine.
Black-gone fruit is the dark garden's heart;
the devil's darling, nocturne saturnine.
______

A Terzanelle for Real Toads form challenge. Curse you, Kerry O'Connor!

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.  

The Swans

I made a sundial out of a wine glass and a Ouija board.
then waited for the light to rise.
It did, like a lion's head--
lazy,
arrogant,
full of a violent promise.

It was too bright, the smile of a lover who lies.
I knew then,
even without looking at the lake,
that the swans were back
and that I
had, somehow,
summoned them.

Swans, your natural collaborators--
one moment serene, and the next, stabbing at things,
as you do with your brushes and cotton balls
when you're angry.
You are the swan-mother,
and they follow you
like cirrus clouds behind a blue sky.

The glass falls from the table,
its bones exploding as if it had the bends.
Then, of course, the Ouija turns,
saying NO
and YES
at random, toying with me
the way the swans do with sunlight.

Finally,
there is the ring without a finger,
spinning gracefully on its golden edge,
making that silly, dull, cardboard-voiced sound
on the Ouija where it says, quite clearly,
GOODBYE.
______

Loving The Ghost

Before loving a ghost,
understand--
it will be a tricky business.

A ghost will not wear the dress you like.
She will ignore
the meal
the Merlot
and the Mozart.

A ghost does not believe in the future that you've planned.
To a ghost,
the future is feathers made of fog
on a bird that flies away before it is born.

A ghost will not wear your ring.
She will not bear your child, or even your touch.
She is an airy
indigo
butterfly
that can hurt you, and will.
_________

for Real Toads word list. I used "indigo" and "butterfly".

Ethereal

Come.
Here, where leaden birds have broken all the windows.
Here, where the wind is a wild thing gotten indoors, thrashing.
Here, where waiting is more like living than anything I did before.
Come to this place, Love.
I promise, your kiss does not shock me into seizing insensibility as it did the first time.

Darling,
I savor it.
I beg for it,
Prideless.
I am sick for it as others are for white powder, sharp edges, or the dark cards.

I have waited all night.
I waver, I do not eat anymore.
I wear your clothes, surrounding myself with their emptiness,
Willing them to consume me.

Come.
Here, where reason has slipped away.
Kiss me.
Pull me down into your root-home.
I do not mind your throat with its silenced pulse;
But my own, quick and ceaseless,
Drives me without mercy to insanity's bitterest edge.
_____

for A Word With Laurie at Real Toads. ("ethereal")

My Happy Place

The New Year arrives at My Happy Place late in the afternoon
By postal motorboat.
We pick it from the splinters and debris in the churning surf,
And carry it up to the house;
"Welcome to My Happy Place," we tell it,
But it only stares fixedly, as if dead.

We put The New Year to bed in one of the guest rooms,
After taking away its shoe laces and belt.
At My Happy Place, we are always at the ready for visitors--
We keep soft restraints in a drawer,
And kindly old Doctor Bubo looks in, though we are never sure that he really understands
Us,
Our guests,
Or My Happy Place at all.

At twelve, The New Year steps out into the night
Near the cupola.
It uses its torn bed sheets to communicate by semaphore
With various monsters and suicides
Out in the deep.
We want to release a flock of doves from the lawn of My Happy Place,
But all that we have is a dead pigeon;
We toss it up into the gale, and it seems to fly for a moment
--noble creature!--
Before thumping listlessly against the bricks and then the ground.

Welcome, New Year, to My Happy Place!
Be mindful of our pitched and slippery roof;
Hold that rose firmly between your teeth,
While stretching out your arms like an aeroplane.
They say that
Birth and Death are less different than the same,
And that all the doors at My Happy Place
Open as easily outward
As in.
____


Happy New Year's, my second least favorite holiday after Independence Day.

The Insatiable Sin Eater

There is not enough Ecstasy,
crack,
crank,
horse,
smack,
booze,

Not enough cutting,
starving,
bingeing,
purging,
burning,

Not enough cleaning,
cooking,
dusting,
decorating,
hostessing,

Not enough sleeping,
avoiding,
forgetting,
denying,

Not enough cars,
houses,
jobs,
promotions,

Not enough failure
not enough
failure
not
enough
failure,

Not enough men,
women,
fetishes,
perversions,
degradrations,
ten year old whores in Bangkok brothels,

Not enough fake smiles,
not enough
bullshit 
bullshit 
bullshit,

Not enough self-hatred,
self-loathing,
self-abnegation,
self-obliteration,

Not enough honors,
kudos,
compliments,
conquests,

Not enough shame
not enough
shame
not
enough
shame,

Not enough killing,
soul-twisting,
mindfucking
unholiness

to do what a little human warmth could have done
when we were wide-eyed and open
and asking for it.
_____


for A Word With Laurie at Real Toads

Snake Mama

Snake Mama gave me the gift of a thousand knives.
"They are beautiful!" she preened, alight.
Over rusty, infecting edges, she crooned,
"They are perfect, pretty, and mine."

Striped with red, I dared to scream.
"So over-sensitive! What are you thinking of?"
Each invasion deeper, further obscene.
"Come, child, be constricted in my love."

Snake Mama can't be wrong,
And brooks no blame, she's smooth--
No harbor, no boundary, no private place
From the trenches undersea to the mountains of the moon.

Cut off one head, seven more will grow,
Each one of them speaking the same;
Snake Mama poisons her babies' bones,
Hard done by to find they're insane.
_______


Find information for daughters of narcissistic mothers HERE.

_______

Dark Roses

The dark roses that crowded, tangled, 
On the latticework, spoke to me
As I knelt in the deep black dirt, adoring them.

They said, behold the spitting clouds.
You cannot stitch them, you cannot
Make a wedding dress or a shroud from them,
They are beyond that.

There are things dark roses do,
Practices they keep, that leave
A girl such as me bitter.
This is what I told them.

The dark roses that crowded, tangled,
Around my body, within my mind,
Choking off all rivals, all future,
All breath,

Laughed at me, and were still beautiful
Even down to their hateful thorns.
I offered, to the leaden sky's face,
To become a bird just to vex them,

But my dark roses only relented enough
To tell me that I am pale, paper-skinned
And bloodless, as doomed as happiness,
Not even worth tears.

Here is the truth I learnt and then poisoned myself with:
My dark roses are flawlessly formed,
Vicious and unforgettable,
As soft and compassionless as worms.

_________

A Delicate Thing Considers Her Swain

I am a delicate thing in a delicate hour--
Twelve is the time
And I assure you that I'm
Mulling on your answer, Sir;
I'll meet you in the bower,
Where my crickets most delicately chirr.

Before that, I have so much to do!
Like wiping out the traces
Like the hanging shrunken faces
Of my suitors before you;
I'll be slaving like a servant
Hide the potion
Stash the serpent
And put on a bashful face, a smiling face,
A suitable face to turn so delicately toward you.

I am a delicate thing in a delicate way
And if you knew what was on the way,
I assure you, Sir,
You'd faster stir
Than any of my suitors who came before you;
They linger in the bower
Right under your feet,
With root and rot and eternity sweet
To yearn for a delicate girl,
A wonderful girl,
A girl too good to be true.
________

for Real Toads excellent fairy tale prompt!

Love Poem In Extremis

Go down by the graveyard, darling;
I'll be there,
Carrying my patent leather heels in my hand.

Meet me where the headstones lean.
Wear a veil.
Come out of a cloud of crows, like a black sun.

My feelings for you stun me, always.
I am gripped with heart attack.
I fight for breath.

I wore a hussy's black lace for you,
And lied like a viper about where I was going;
Look around, everyone is dead. There is no one to sniff and deplore.

I am on my back in the decaying leaves,
Beneath a weeping angel made of stone.
Come to me, I beg you.

Under lowering clouds in late-day dusk,
Let's fuck as if our lives depend upon it--
Because they do, sweetheart,
They do.

______

St. Creola

St. Creola keeps canaries
and doesn't care if they crap on the
good
back-snapping
for-show
furniture
that's been rolled in here like coffins at a starting line.

St. Creola keeps cats
and that, dear little pie-eyed pilgrim,
keeps the birds from getting sedentary
or old.
Behold,
another miracle of the beautiful St. Creola.

So,
has rain afflicted your world until
great monsters leap from the guttering?
Does the devil
sleep with your girlfriend,
help herself to your make-up,
your feather bed,
and your little funky vintage Renault?

Tell St. Creola,
like she could care,
like the jelly buttered muffin would stop at her mouth
and she would say, her eyes filling with blessed tears,
oh,
angel...

Pffft,
sweet canary,
land here,
learn.
Today St. Creola has called the moving men,
so muscular that they ripple while standing still.
They will roll the coffins off the cliff at San Creola,
birthplace of Our Lady;
Honey, she will live forever,
as will her parasol,
as will all who love her,
cleansed in the spray of the coffins returning like swallows to the sea.

St. Creola is serene.
She offers her hand--
kiss it!
Tonight you will share her bed, and in the morning
sleep right through services.
Let your softness leave her boneless, beatific, even a little bruised;
certainly in no condition to notice how
when you pray now,
your gaze is always up
where the birds chirp and flutter
like excited virgins.

______

"Nothing is as vulnerable as entrenched success."

Michigan Love Story

You are cold, I said,

But so beautiful that the darkness hovers near you with all of her stars--

Returning always, helpless with desire.



I am a rocky shore, you said.

Receive me, moon-drawn and rhythmic like a pulse--

I will turn your certainties to sand.



If I am a rocky shore, I said,

Then I offer you surrender smooth as an angel's thigh--

Marbled with devotion and hopelessness.



Come, you said, kiss me for the high,

A little less each time--

Until, finally, I close over you and take you into my blue, barely-beating depths

To be un-born,

Forever,

As my lover.

__________

for One Shot Wednesday

Request

I filled a wedding dress with bones--

My bones.

My...



Well all right, so I stole the dress.



I wanted to be a sweet confection,

So that you would want to wrap me in fluted paper

And place me in the perfect box of delicate pale cardboard

As if I had been born into the palm of your hand

To stand there and be

Witheringly beautiful.



But, darling, my whiteness is that of punishing northers, cracked ice and frostbite--

Not sugar frosting...

Not purity...

Unless, naturally, you mean the purity of my disappointment at your revealed ordinariness.



Sir,

I have fleshed myself with everything sharp I could find.

Don't look so pale, as if you'd seen a ghost!

Invite me to dance, and if your hair falls out from the roots, or your heart stops, then it does.

Come, risk something.

I'm just a girl,

What could happen?

It's the least you could do for your bride.

_______

for One Shot Wednesday #36

Haunted House

The wind is absolutely howling tonight, freaking me out a bit. I decided to write a tongue-in-cheek haunted house poem, but it went where it would, and in the end only freaked me out even more. Here it is.

The wind was talking smack against the window frames

When the knock came.

She looked like you, could almost be you

The way that smoke could almost be ink.



I showed her to the wide stone staircase lit with torches.

The mastiffs could barely be kept from falling upon her,

Or me,

So like nervous rabbits did we seem.



She looked so like you, turning her back the same way,

That I saw each step as we rose to be a tarot card.

I asked her a question,

But she spared me only the same answer shades give

Albeit draped in dark inflections,

Inviting me further into my own house as she gained strength and I became more lost.



There are places no one should ever go--

The greenhouse at night;

The lawn on Hangman's Tuesday.

I offered her a room and she suffered me to come inside,

Undressing and bathing me as if I had died.

She loved me as moths do,

Lightly and unthinkingly--

Again, she was almost you except without the iced white roses you always carry at your breasts

Or the melody you sing to keep me tethered.



I placed my desire in a velvet pouch and slipped it into her pillow case

As one slips poison into fresh dough.

She rose

In the morning

Like a black sun,

The half-interested new Mistress of the Manor,

Shutting my eyes inside a bone locket at her throat so that I might always see

How happy she had become

Devouring the desire

Intended for another.

_________

House Of Wax

He moved her into a house filled with spirits,

Then brought in that gloomy, ring-eyed excorcist

Before she'd had the chance to sleep with half of them.

No wonder he fell down the basement stairs

Christmas Eve,

His egg nog balanced perfectly unspilled on the second step,

Him at the bottom,

Staring broken-necked at the dryer.



These things happen, said the firemen,

Snapping their gurney open smartly and removing him on it too soon,

Before she'd had the chance to sleep with half of them.

No wonder their alarms keep going off

At exactly midnight in the firehouse

When there is no emergency

And the telephones make that awful off-the-hook whining noise

Inside their heads.



All I'm trying to say,

Is if you come to stay,

Kiss her softly,

Welcome her crossed ankles across your back,

And remember--

There's plenty of time to fill your lungs in the sunrise,

Hours from now,

Haunted and scented like last night's candle,

Rolled out the back door

And into the light.

________

The Undeserving

Because I was not loved, I became clever--

And because I was not touched, I became a spirit.



When I was ten,

I dreamt that it was snowing on the beach.

I was wearing my favorite heavy green coat,

And both the sky and the half-frozen breakers were gray.

I walked straight into the ocean,

And everything that has happened since

Is only what might have been.



I live inside a bolt--

I am the quiet at its center as it searches, always, for the earth.

Are you a woman of the earth?

Are you a lady of the autumn garden, the full table, the fresh loaf and knife?

It doesn't matter.

There is always another storm, and I am sister to the ion, the ozone, the bright strike.



Still, I wish I could deceive you into loving me--

I wish I could curl into cradle wood and feel your hand there rocking this strange sea-child in the midnight.



My wishes are so simple, and so ridiculous.



Shamed, I tell my invented tales to the wind,

Hide in the heart of my bolt,

And stand just beyond the spirit jars in your darkened yard,

A shade,

A thing that is, but never was,

Longing,

Iridescent,

Finally dissolving in the dawn before the hard-practical sunny cruelty

Of what is.

_________

Shape-Shifter

See the pretty bells of the Foxglove

All along the garden path

Where I once reached for you

As if I were

Some stupid but beautiful hummingbird.



Now,

I curl around the stalks of the Foxglove

As if each one were a caduceus.

Darling,

See the Sabi Star, the Daphne, and the Suicide Tree.

See them and come back;

Come back to me.



I have tea--

Yellow Jessamine.

White Snakeroot.

Mountain Laurel.

Don't tell me that it's over.



I wait in the shadows of the Foxglove

Like the garden cat

You picked up, stroked, and stole.

My feelings haven't changed; they continue intense...

No matter what, believe that I'm still your girl.

Have a care, come to me, any time at all.

Your hummingbird waits,

Deep in the blur and beating

Of her impossible breathless wings.

__________

for One Shot Wednesday

__________