Reanimated Lavender Granola Switchblade Nun rides again.

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Black Jaye

He said, "Black Jaye, when you strike a match
you so quickly shake it out
as if each time you find you're with,
you long to be without."

I can't spare love for the Promenade
where searchlights cut the sky.
I paint my dreams in a bed of wheat
growing golden four feet high.

"Black Jaye," he said, "so small and slight
with your scarves of indigo,
why do you sing in Quebecois
telling no one where you go?"

Down by the shore, down by the sea
I loose my hair and call
to bones of birds all crossed and cursed
to stop me if I fall. 

________________

Saturday, December 19, 2020

Greening The Jade


There are wheels on cobblestones
outside the windows of her words.
There is a sailor's parrot on a velvet swing
and strands of colored beads in the doorway to her room.

There is never any summer, no noon to white the wall
and so she'll understand if what you told her wasn't real.
A Persian's ears are there to warm her hands
indifferent to the wheeling way she feels.

San Francisco gray as gulls' wings in the morning
or Barcelona in the lazy afternoon
are in the jeweled clip that holds her careless hair back
to ease her eyes to catch the moon.

Don't say you're sorry, don't sing softly in her stairwell
where the echoes' angels fade.
She always knew that open windows let the rain in
to blue her dreams and green the jade. 
________






Saturday, December 12, 2020

A Tale of Ravening Beasts


She wandered into the forest.

Summer rolled lazily into leaf-blown fall.

In winter, her hair turned white, as camouflage from ravening beasts. 

She crawled into a cave

and lay down with a ravening beast.

Spring arrived.

"Well now," spoke the ravening beast, and she didn't care for his speculative demeanor. 


She returned home.

"Well now," said her mother, her brothers, her cousins,

who fell upon her as ravening beasts

disguised as petticoats.

"Now she's an albino."


The year turned.

The girl swam to an uninhabited island

and set up a badminton net as metaphor.

There, she began writing her book of poems,

entitled "Ravening Beasts."

Her hair fell out and she wove a boat from the strands.


"Hey cue ball," came the welcome in the seaside town.

"Hey head case."

Her great spiked crimson heart rolled inside her ribs,

and she breathed fire.

"Crazy fucking bitch," they said,

but no longer to her face.

She was wings and tail and ten feet tall,

a ravening beast come among them.

-----------

for Sunday Muse.



Sunday, December 6, 2020

Interview


It is not new

this interviewing of myself.

In a dark or dull hour

ghosts rent my tongue,

black flocks rend my mind's sky.


I called a nightmare by name

to break its back.

Making a paste from fury and innocence,

I conjured a papier mache landlord,

all purpose, no heart.


The renters scattered.

The birds flew into a vortex, blind and damned.

Moving into my own skin,

I learned new oxygen

with my keys held tight between my fingers

just in case.

______


for Sunday Muse.