My Rat Friend

 my rat friend

lives in my garage.

i feed him

kibble, neat.

friend owl is hungry as well--

they play cat-and-mouse.

moon is high

owl on the branch waits.

neighbor has

a floodlight.

when it shuts off, rat comes out.

so far so good, bud.

in summer

a hawk eats pigeons

rat is safe.

in winter

i watch owl watch my rat friend

feasting in the dark.

___________

a shadorma for Dverse OLN.

Cirque de Soliel

 

Coins fell from the sun--

I ate one and lived in darkness for a year.

I said to the sun, "I can never trust you again."

A peach appeared in my hand.

I hired a cook who worked in dough and ash.

I fed bread to my dogs and lived on the last.

Magpies fell from the sun--

they mated in my mirror and made eggs out of glass.

My cook killed the birds, my dogs killed the cook

and married me off to an eight-winged ghost.

My house has a thousand turrets and attics.

The sun rises pink and sets red, automatic.

I put a coin inside a peach like a pit.

There's a ghost inside my skull in a nest.

My dogs fuss and tear and bury the rest

in my heart with my hopes and such similar shit.

_______________

for Word Garden Word List--Kindred

Music: Jackson C. Frank My Name Is Carnival 

On the Occasion of my 39th Sobriety Anniversary

 

You ask nothing of me that you do not share in every detail.

In a desert place, on the edge of a precipice, you found me

and took every wound upon yourself.

You bled where I bled, and that is as real as it gets.

You offered your hand but left it to me whether to take it. 

I did, and knew that I would never fall, then or ever,

and here I stand, Never Alone, sober and strong

Not because of any book or pulpit, but because

a workman found me in a desert place and gave me His hand. 

______

My 39th sobriety anniversary was last month. One day at a time. 

Abra Cadabra Alakazam

 

Oh my darling,

my one and only love,

watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat.

There is nothing dirty

about love such as ours.

Get a load of my white gloves. 

When two people join

in matrimonial oneness

or as volunteers from the audience,

Magic takes on its special sheen.

People just want to be seen,

not sawn in half,

And so we make each other more than we were

like an endless knot of scarves

pulled from our sleeves or our hair.

If I should suddenly disappear,

my angel, my dear,

let me let you in on my schtick...

(Though it may make you feel sick)

it's one of love's magic quirks

that that trick

never works!

________

for What's Going On? "Magic"

Don't forget, the Word Garden Word List is still active through Sunday!

A Strange Place To Die

 

The Polo Grounds was a strange place for a man to die. 

Across the way at 515 Edgecombe Avenue,

14-year-old Robert Mario Peebles' enthusiasm

for the 4th of July hit just above Barney Doyle's eye,

killing him instantly as he watched infield practice.

He never got to see the game. 

Thirty years earlier, a fellow everyone considered to be

a mean bastard delivered a fatal pitch submarine-style.

Back on the farm, his daddy had taught Carl Mays never to back down.

Ray Chapman never got up.

No, wait, after being hit with a dirty, hard-to-see ball

with an impact so loud that Mays thought it was a hit,

Ray Chapman got up, fell, rose, and fell again on the baseline.

"Tell Mays I'm all right," were his last words.

Ray Chapman was a man with the world on a string.

Good-looking, friendly Ray, playing out one last season

at the sport he loved, was newly married and set up in a good job.

He even got on well with quarrelsome Ty Cobb

who was said to have killed a man in Detroit.

The world was his oyster.

In a New York hospital, Ray Chapman got better, then worse,

then was gone forever. His widow lived just eight more years herself.

Carl Mays never felt he had done anything wrong

on a dusty diamond July 4th, 1920 in Manhattan, New York City.

The Polo Grounds was a strange place for a man to die. 

_________

for What's Going On? An Historical Moment.  

Music: Jeff Buckley I Know It's Over

Your Heart

Now, after the fact, like a glitterbomb coroner,

I want to have another look at your heart.

My microscope went blind last time--

I squeezed it too hard, like a sponge when I'm angry-cleaning.

I was too fascinated, sappy,

needful as a driver in a wreck.

Bring me an ambulance in the shape of a spyglass.

I want to find my own ghost.

I thought your bones were made from hard cane,

your hair caramelized smoke.

I wore a white coat (as if I knew something),

glasses made from willow switches, and a half moon smile.

Relax, I told you, but it was me in the coma.

Now--please hold still for once. These worms aren't good,

like the plastic model I saw at the vet's. Your heart,

like the plastic kitchen I used to play with,

practicing to be a fly that would bite you one day.

Eat my attention, it's good for you.

Each worm burrowed there is something I said,

some of which I meant--the rest was practice for a role. 

Let me pull one out like a string, pull it and it speaks this poem,

a pretty wasp with a stinger where the truth pools. 

I am too harsh, I know. I am the laundress who bleaches everything,

a maniac for killing the invisible baddies, a hospital candy striper

performing unauthorized tests that do nothing, or at least,

don't cure or induce any useful fevers.

I have your results. I'll bring them down to the morgue where my

hand awaits its conclusions as if they were a ring or a nail.

Summation:

they weren't worms,

just paper streamers.

I infected you

but it made you better for a while.

the microscope cannot be repaired.

my report needs to be presented in a recognized language.

i'm sorry, truly, if i hurt you

that was never my intention.

this poem is not written in my true voice.

i was never your babe.

that was never your heart.

_______

Music: Igor Paspalj "The Thrill Is Gone"

for Desperate Poets "Illicit Encounters"

Space Shuttle Challenger

 

"You always have to be different." --my mother's bitter complaint.

My tricycle mind,

up to its seat springs in rocket fuel. 

That will make you different

and confused

and terrified. 

'What do you see at night when you close your eyes?" I asked my older brother. 

"Nothing. What do you see?"

Oh, colors, crazy colors, a shifting kaleidoscope

and sometimes 

scary things.

I can't make them stop

and I lay awake to escape the turning, appearing, revolving, staring.

Later, older, I tried dragging and drugging

my heels, alcohol,

but Challenger blew up and sprayed across the sky.

I watched on tv and saw my inside outside.

I was a baby writer

and once upon a pair of wheels

I wrote crazy stories for friends who asked if I wrote them high.

I wrote them sober,

then got high to stop.

Later still, I set down the drink and slept with the light on for years,

prone to night terrors and ptsd.

I embraced the Church of Regular Meals,

subscribed to the doctrine of Keep Coming Back.

Slowly, my world came into phase

with a job

a spouse

a child

but, tame as a housecat, no more bright crashes to watch at night.

Even later, single again, child grown, lost in my own skin,

I set out to find out if it's really like riding a bike.

"Give me all of your dreams, you dreamer," said Langston Hughes

and I met myself 

in the interstices

between this world and some other.

Totally amazing mind

as my Cranberries fan friend said of me

and helped me learn to ride the rocket

to these lines

and this life

where I dive into the deep end

fearless

A

F.

_____

I'm floating in a most peculiar way/

and the stars look very different today 

for Dverse Poetics: Visionary Poetry, hosted by Ingrid. 

find The Dream Keeper by Langston Hughes HERE. 

Music: the Cranberries "Dreams"

Bareback Rider

 

When I was a girl, I often dreamed

that I rode a haunted horse whose head was ether

and its steady breath was my own pulse

sounding through my ear pressed hard upon the pillow.

We rode in slow procession through 

the house gone unfamiliar in weird shadows

pulling a death-carriage behind us

and it seemed that I labored while the horse hovered

With lantern lights for eyes

on each side in concert with the slant moon

dim-blind through silver windows

but watching as the horse's flanks rose and fell.

A bareback rider, I hooked fingers

through streamers of jet mane like widow's weeds in a breeze,

hoping to hang on, to wake up

only to see Thanatos the ostler smiling and standing

At the stable door holding a gleaming dark apple for his charge.

_________

For Sunday Muse #236.

Music: Snakefarm "All The Pretty Little Horses"

A Spilling of Ephemera

 

My life spilled out and spread.

The glass lay on its side like a drunk or a sleeper.

"I await my dream lover," it said, and I called the police. 

One cop turned out to be the Right One and they jumped the nightstick the next day.

"I can't even get arrested in this town," I bitch to my spilled life.

It never says anything back.

I try staring it down but all I see is my reflection and every time it's a draw.

Art for art's sake, just like in the movies. Me in the role of me.

I plunge into my spilled life like a mermaid,

wearing it like a scaly tail. I sing to sailors and to other mermaids

such lovely songs that end in ruin. I am a chest bobbing on the surface,

a promise I can never keep to you or to myself, 

a bright reflection in a dazzled eye, 

a quicksilver tease of things rich with remove, 

a luminous dying and deathless ephemera.

___________

for Sunday Muse #216

In Bohemia

 

In Bohemia, where the Moldau

flows and hollyhocks rise beside the cottages,

I went, as a child, into the dark woods to escape 

the terrors of the monster behind the door of mine.

At night in Bohemia, where the wolves

go and the moon rises over the trees beyond the cottages,

I rose with it in the night to escape nightmares

as the wolves sang to me like imaginary mothers.

In Bohemia there are hands, and cookies shaped like hands

full of sugar and poison. In the mornings the monster

fed me hate because I was a mirror, but the wolves

told me I was a lake and a home for the wandering moon.

In Bohemia, there are little girls carrying wicker baskets

beside the shores of the Moldau, where the rooks rise.

The rooks are born from ice in the blood of monsters

and they say, "we are the rooks, we love you," as they peck.

In Bohemia, by the shores of the Moldau, many children

disappear, into forests, or ovens, where monsters sent them.

The wolves heard of this and began to follow ceaselessly,

so closely that I became them, and they became me.

In Bohemia, where the Moldau 

flows and hollyhocks rise beside the cottages,

a Gypsy girl and her wolves shrank a monster

who starved on its own poison cookies.

So I ask you now, Sir or Madame come down the lane,

to my fairy cottage by a lake beneath a golden moon,

looking for love and loaves and a soft situation,

do you really want to fuck with me and my wolves?

Better you should go, and take your monsters with you.

_________

for The Sunday Muse #189, where I am hosting. 

Psalm For Students Out of Windows Staring

It's yours--that spot of sky obscured.
Dream aviary day and night.
It's yours, that blue by distance blurred.
It's yours--that spot of sky obscured.
Woolgather wing, woolgather bird
with astronaut for acolyte.
It's yours--that spot of sky obscured.
Dream aviary day and night.
_____

for Sunday Muse #66.

Space Invader

I walk in and, once again
the bedding is all in a Close Encounters Of The Third Kind mountain
at the foot of the bed. 

I point at my dog.
"What did you DO?" I don't really mean it, but he
takes me seriously and curls all sorrowful.
"Baby," I say, "Noooo. Mama's not mad."

I sit on the bed I've only had since November
(beds are expensive),
take his little face between my hands and smile.
I am so grateful for a nice place to sleep and for
a sweet dog-friend to muss it.
"I kissa you face," I tell him softly, and then I do, and he wags.
Little mischief maker,
I love you so. 
______ 

for Wordy Thursday. 

Zacky Peanut sleeps with me every night and is quiet as a bug--though he IS a bed hog. Every time I move over a little, he claims the space and eventually has me on the edge with his little self getting all the rest!  But during the day he likes to go in there and do one of two things: either he lays his head adorably on the pillow and has a nice nap, OR he digs at the covers until they are all in a pile at the end of the bed. Why? Who knows.

A Mail Lady's Golden Memories (Episode 54)

Mrs. Geritolle is missing her Blizzardville Inquirer,
expected via post every week from out of town.

Mrs. G to the mail lady: "Maybe it's in your truck somewhere."

"Or sitting at the post office."

"I think you took it home to read yourself." 

Days later, a post card: "Blizzardville Inquirer has ceased publication."

~sigh~

SMH. 
__________

for those not conversant with text short-hand, SMH = "shaking my head." 

A 55 for my BFF.

Red

Nick Gravenites: A woman...

Janis Joplin: yeah?

NG: A woman...

JJ: yeah?

NG: A woman...

JJ: yeah?

NG: Just makes me mad.

JJ: Aw man....sheeit.

--"Ego Rock", from Joplin In Concert

While i was in the hospital
being the world's shittiest caterpillar,
you bought me
JOPLIN IN CONCERT
the double live album i coveted bad.

you were leaves on a high breeze.
i was a silk grenade.
we were young once, weren't we?
in Birmingham
so far down the rabbit hole, the wrong way down the telescope.

nothing from then is still the same.
i kiss the feet of the Goddess who arranged *that*, but
the desire i had to will wings out of my body
and rise is still there,

just like
JOPLIN IN CONCERT
and though i rarely play it,
i see the red cover
and there you are, smiling still, and standing right in front of me.
______

for Bittersweet Melodies at Real Toads.
 

30 Years

For ten years, I drank. A lot. Enough to destroy my tolerance to it, enough to start seeing stuff that wasn't there, enough to turn me into someone I couldn't stand, enough to want to die. 

But part of me didn't want that. At my lowest ebb, and after trying everything I could think of to stop, and failing, I prayed for God to override the overwhelming compulsion to drink, to just get me through to the morning without drinking, because I could not do it myself. 

I stayed sober that night, and as of today, I have been sober for 30 years continuously. If you think miracles don't really happen, I'm standing here to tell you that they do, and I am grateful every day.

 

4th of July

There were fireworks, but it might have been gunfire.
I'll stand here against the wall with an apple on my head,
just to see if anybody splits it.

Downstairs is the Chinese restaurant where silent waitresses
bring us loaded plates and little cups for tea.
You're Greek and I'm Irish, so naturally the Lucky Dragon is our balancing point.

Moving into the open-window flat upstairs was probably overkill,
but we are desperate like that, all we need is a V-8 '32 Ford and two fedoras.
Bonnie didn't really smoke cigars; reality is just a template we can fuck with.

The grifters and junkies have taken over the park down the street;
they pimp out their girlfriends and sit on the edge of the fountain all day
watching for marks. It used to be nice here. Sort of. Better than now.

With my head on your shoulder, I tell you about the war movie I saw
when I lived over there. Everybody cheered when a Jap plane went down.
Street vendors sold the most delicious warm bread, and the buses allowed chickens.

Maybe it wasn't gunfire. Maybe we're really in love.
Maybe you're not lazier than shit and maybe I'm straight after all.
Here, have an apple. Trust me, it's good for you.

I don't know it now, but I will kick this jones.
You I'll never see again after Ohio four years from now,
and the Lucky Dragon? I'll have left my 20s there. If you hock them, save the ticket.
_____

For the Real Toads mini-challenge: Marilyn Chin.

 

The Birder

I fell out of love with myself--
I was cruel, I admit it.
I said things, things I'm not proud of,
and had no mercy, no care for what I did.

All the birds I am made from--
my own distinct darlings and devils--
elude illustration,
cataloging,
and most particularly, shotguns.

This happens, from time to time--
this disenchantment, this anger, this flocking out on the ledge.
Loud noises ruin everything,
and when I am feeling this way,
I am a cacophony.

See how clever you are.
See how my birds come to you, in winter
in summer, in distress and in droves,
saying "She is gone mad again, and we cannot reckon anymore."
See how you shush and shelter them,
my storm orphans.

Here is the curved sky,
the similar earth below;
here is the birdhouse with its precise holes for entry,
and its green shingled roof for keeping out.

You asked me for a bird, tonight, knowing I wouldn't refuse.
You brought no cage, no tether.
How quiet it got, so that all there was to hear was feathers
as I flew back into myself and became this poem,

the one you saved,
the one I wrote in birdsong for you.
______

for Every Day I Write The Book at Real Toads. 

 

The Beauty of God

madmen in masks
suicide bombers
sunday saints
gay bashers
excluders
killers
liars.

my own life out of balance, too.

a spur of the moment stop,
no one else in the sanctuary,
I considered Christ on his cross,
poinsettias in profusion below his wounded feet.

the peace
and beauty
of God came into me
and it felt like love,
like respite,
like hope.

all motherless creatures will understand
why I cried, as a person can sometimes do,
when undone by the touch of silent kindness.
_______ 

 

Devils

Devils stole my face before I drew my first breath,
and so the laughter of devils became my lullaby.

Mothers were scarce, though I searched for them
sang for them; I was a mermaid with a tail of shame.

I had no face, so I stole other faces.
I never realized that they had been left by the devils, for me to find.

My faces were kissed, but the lips weren't mine.
My faces were mocked,
stabbed,
turned to nightmares;

I went to a wedding in a false face, and the wedding was mine.
The devils congratulated us.

I drowned a hundred faces in every spirit I could lay my hands on.
They grinned, vomited, and ate words the devils gave them.

I would have died, you know;
many times, I wanted to die.

In the time before my first breath,
in the time before devils,

I was loved. Someone told me that, and from then on, inside my head,
was a church made of those words.

Mothers were scarce, and so I turned to the Mother of All.
I said, I have no face. She said, use Mine.

Devils are everywhere, on top of skyscrapers,
wrapped around the wheels of city buses,

killing the best of us, killing the spirits of the brightest of us,
whispering in my ear like a flock of empty crows;

but someone told me that I was loved
in the time before my first breath; in the time before devils.

Someone told me that, before the beginning, I was loved,
and in a church made from those words, I kept living.

Here is a poem. Here is a little light from the Mother of All.
I said to her, in tears, I have no face.
She said to me, wandering child, use Mine.
__________

art from wire hangers

I wasn't the kind of girl you wanted;
didn't want a girl at all, I guess.
Still, here I am--
a pretty smart, pretty funny, pretty different, pretty mess.
Gin didn't kill me;
I lived to tell.
Learned from thin air
to care for others and myself.

I'm my own kind of girl.
Your loss. 
_________

a day late for Fireblossom Friday and  G Man's Friday 55