AP Stray Cat Yawp

 

Think of a time when you embarrassed yourself

and the cold wet sand of your heart 

dropped in clumps down 

through your stomach.

Start there.

Fetch up a memory of raw-throated sobbing,

when you beat the sofa arm or the floor

as if it were responsible for the

wasp's nest in your heart. 

Open up, little glass, fill with it.

Leave pretty sunsets for painters or postcard publishers.

What we're after here is waking inside a coffin,

falling from height, the whole empty belly

lonesome lack of it all.

Don't shake your head like you don't know. 

The thing you cannot even think is the thing you have to tell.

Will they consider you crazy, the only one

who ever did/felt/wanted/made love to

that?

Behold the mute tongueless many saying you spoke for them.

The poet is the person who threads out their own veins,

stews their every experience, fears nothing,

stands on one leg on a high wire,

all because they can't not.

Otherwise, they would just be cross-eyed babies

waving bright toy telephones to nobody,

and calling it art.

_______

for Desperate Voicings

Music: DJ Dero The Horn 

The Realtor (repost)

Just a little sprucing up
is all this place needs.
Just some spray cleaner and big black bible to wave around,
and everything here could be restored to its original middling banality.

Come in, come stagger down the staircase clutching your left arm.
We'll throw a party, 
invite the mayor,
the cognoscenti,
and EMS.

Feel free to collapse on the piano bench.
Just blow that dust right off the keys and play!
I've always liked Percy Grainger's Country Gardens,
but if you don't know it, just bang away at the keys with your elbows
and we'll manage a dance.

Peach, I can see by the look on your face
that you think this is wasted effort.
Trust me. Just spit on the sleeve of your dress
and use it to wipe a circle of clarity on one of these lovely old windows.
Let the half-light and fog in,
as you fall to the floor in one of your fits.

I've been at this business for a while,
and I always bring spare keys and smelling salts.
Look at the ad!
"Motivated seller, no reasonable offer refused".
Let me call their agent.
We can be at her office in half an hour--
me at my professional best,
and you giddy and rambling in light restraints.

Then, in a week or two,
after the fire, but before the funeral,
I will breeze in with a housewarming gift especially for the new mistress--
Beelzebub on a chain,
ringing a bicycle bell and
asking, despite his slight speech impediment, which room is to be his.
_________

Self Portrait in Red and White

 

I was just out of the hospital. It was snowing,

and my spirit was leading my body around

like an old dog

on a long leash.

Nurses are funny creatures, kissing the glass

of the locked cabinet as if it held a month in the country

where fountains flow patients

to the bathroom by themselves.

As a child, I lay in the snow sideways to the sky

and believed I would always have a place to go,

full of tomato soup 

and rag rugs for the floors.

That day, though, I was just out of the hospital

and been beaten up besides, for the fun of it

by someone younger

with healthy fists.

Bent like a damaged tree with red leaves,

I fell into a cab and got the stink eye from

a driver concerned 

about his upholstery.

At the hotel, in my sixth floor room, I kissed

the mirror above the sink. It was cold and smooth

with always that little

gap denying contact. 

With my prescription lost, real pain embraced me,

saying, write about the red of the blood and the white

of the weather,

the gray of cement and concussion.

I wrote the red of a fire welcomed by wood, a white bird

on a black branch outside the window from a warm bed

and a day that ended

years ago where I mended, more or less,

I still have that poem, a good one, full of the best of me,

a beautiful thing

still whole and fine

and standing on its own

when all the rest has gone.

_______

for Desperate Beauty at Desperate Poets. 

Baseball Game In The Prison Yard

 There is a ballgame in the prison yard.

A silver dollar stands on its edge on the gallows

and shivers with every hammer stroke.

Hit it and walk free.

An eagle perches on the crossbeam,

worrying at the rope. All the batters are blind

and in terrible slumps. 

In the morning if the rope snaps, you'll see the afternoon.

John Baal, the Babe Ruth of the Big House

swings hard and misses; the earth wobbles

and Krakatoa blows. 

Cigarette, prisoner? Blindfold? 

For my last meal, I request all my past mistakes

and they are served on a cracked plate. 

The eagle is fascinated with its shine and my Morse.

I yell "Pull!" and sling the plate through the bars. 

A home run,

the first in years,

hits it and it blows.

See the eagle and the white shattered stars.

See the runner circling like a constellation.

One way or the other, I will leave this prison tomorrow

like a three-run shot.

________

For Desperate Poets "Desperate Oracles." 

I drew one card from my Medicine Cards-- #1, the Eagle. 

I drew another from my Baseball Tarot--major arcana XII the Slump, analogous to the Hanged Man in a normal Tarot deck.

These fit, as I have been experiencing both spiritual power--my sobriety anniversary was Friday--and weakness in the form of a preceding depression. 

Process note: I swiped "John Baal, the Babe Ruth of the Big House" from Philip Roth's "The Great American Novel."

Motto

 

This is the hospital

where the nicked-up blown-up bastards show up.

We give them ice cream 

and a priest.

There is a river

down the middle.  We launch ourselves into the current

and it is unclear

who is drowning, who saving.

It's a system of gradations, and if you don't die in Emergency,

why then, we come into your room with cake and streamers.

Presto! You're ambulatory, then outpatient, then nurse, doctor,

surgeon, administrator, president emeritus, cutting ribbons

instead of flesh.

See one, do one, teach one is the motto. See the staggering

son of a gun falling to the floor with wounds beyond telling.

We lift him as if we were angels.

Yesterday, we were lifted.

Tomorrow, who knows?

Nothing stops the flow of the river or the flow of patients.

We are Boatmen, and Mermaids, reaching, 

saving, being saved. We are heroes of the

Carousel Horse Cavalry, coming over the 

hill, with bugle and blood pressure cuff,

dizzy with purpose, maybe dying, learning as we go. 

________

for Desperate Poets We Can Be (SUPER) Heroes. 

Music: Brass Band of Battle Creek Song of the Volga Boatmen

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"

Promenade In Green & Gray

 

Spring is the season of madness,

as fine and also bitter as any high always is in the end.

Every doomed thing that grows boasts in beauty,

and who wouldn't finger the new green blades?

who wouldn't close their eyes in the warm stranger sun and sigh?

Every heart is a blind radio, and what good is the word or song

without someone to hear it, turn toward it,

and seem to know the meaning?

Summer is a fever we invite, because we long to be feverish.

What fool thinks a bonfire will burn a hundred years? 

Look, legions of fools consumed by the thing that feeds them,

vanishing because we long to vanish, and then crying, lost, surprised.

In autumn, I have felt myself fall in a million pieces, until I stood

naked as any idiot tree. I was beautiful in a million ways,

pick me up, press me in pages, even just one leaf between leaves,

but I end up with all the others, up against some fence, silent, far from home. 

Winter is the season of stillness, and those who have stored up sorrows

find they do not lack for much. Snowy ground makes others much clearer--

where they've come from, where they're headed. There's no need anymore

to build with strips and shreds, we become our own nest and wait,

astonished and patient, a quiet station at rest in the moonlight. 

_______________

for Desperate Poets "Desperately Different". 

Title adapted from the song Green Rocky Road

Music: The Motels Only The Lonely

Me, Looking At You, Looking Back

 

Here we are -- me,

looking at you

looking back.

You dip your head, do a little shuffle dance.

I get the question but you know the answer 

before my lips so much as flutter.

You are an odd blue-black, luminous by moonlight

but a cipher at noon, or so you pretend--

our story begun at the bitter end.

You lit and left, lit and left the hollow place in me,

inspecting, appraising, always returning.

You gave me baubles and trifles as rent.

I gave you blood where your sharp parts went.

Here is my dead-womb where you rode

and taught me to mark faces that hold no light.

Screaming helps too. I thought it might.

I am the house of glass, you the burnt wick.

You are the mother of every line I write,

your call the ink I use, fragrant and thick.

We are yin and yang at each other's back.

Me, looking at you

looking back.

______

for Desperate Poets "In The Footsteps Of Our Feathers"

Music: Beth Hart "Your Heart Is As Black As Night"

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"

 

"Flat Earthers Unite" a masterpiece by Q. Benighted Shamanyan, Flat Earth Society Grand Dragon

 Flat Earthers Unite 'neath the sweet umbrella of idiocy

and raise your voice in the cretin's version of Innisfree.

Pose and posit with simpleton's logic that what you see is all

there is to Heaven and Earth, Horacio you libtard tool.

Keep expanding on fake moon landings where static flags still flutter

and that the shadow IRA killed JFK with microchips in peanut butter.

In the devil's pizza parlor Hillary harbors tykes who are made to swap genders

to offend Jesus Christ who stays in most nights raising the rates on His renters.

The War On Christmas is serious business if the libs cancel Santa outright

and then ever after the horrible factor of a Santa who's black as the night

blown up in the yards of the BLM crowd who combine with the immigrant scaries

who jig hand in hand with the dregs of the land like POC's, atheists and fairies.

Flat Earthers unite to destroy all Bud Lite and the lamestream media too

who lie and tell us conservative fellas that slaves on plantations were blue

and other such whoppers, O Walmart Shoppers led by Commander Kid Rock

who collect Trump cards and various canards while for birthdays the kiddies get Glocks.

_________

for Desperate Poets "desperate satires." 

Honey Locust

 

Delicate, graceful honey locust tree

jeweled in jade as if Orient-made

thorn-pierced I came and wearily

sick of sun and parched for shade.

Faithful, silent honey locust tree

binding the burns that words had done

constantly and steadily

easing the sting of a dream undone.

Summer's darling, the honey locust tree

July and August's waving dancer

when asked to say that you cared for me

dipped in the dark but gave no answer.

Yellowing honey locust tree

not so constant after all

your chill-bared arms revealed to me

the twisting thorns that pierced the fall.

_________

for desperate poets--"woe my spurs; desperate elegies." I have used the spurs above. 

Music: Larkin Poe Day Tripper

Black Sylvia

 

Black Sylvia, moon-pale reflector of ten years' light,

I went down in the mines of you with a mule and bible.

Down there in the bloodstone

with my rock hammer and a rose,

thinking your heart was above me on the widows' walk

or below me on the skewer of a devil,

when there was never anything at all except a stupid fairy tale I told myself in a dream.

Black Sylvia, rocking funereal ribbons and indigo jewels,

tatting dry bouquets from empty veins in the phantom quick-strike,

I panned for what I could get.

Down the shaft was no place for a woman like me,

with my gingham and candles,

but I Morse'd  you a ladder of stanzas while you nodded

at the station with a spike in one eye and a deadgift in your arms, petting it.

Black Sylvia, living somewhere bedecked with onyx spangles

carrying a lockbox under her tongue, bought a black parrot

and killed it with a song.

Now it flutters against the bus-station glass of our two hearts.

A red snake like a caduceus 

wraps itself around her anger, first doing harm, then regretting it--

a living wreath of neurotoxins

hung on the mine entrance where everyone died,

                                                though they whisper like lovers in these lines.

________

for Desperate Poets "Desperate Desires."

Music: Delta Cross Band She Moves Me 

English Walnut

 every day

the black squirrels raid Heaven.

I find leaf clusters

like fallen angels

everywhere.

they want

the hard nuts growing high

in the tree I tend

with loving care

these twenty odd years.

each time

they find their desire,

the Icarus clusters fall.

my tree expands, produces,

then incrementally loses 

all summer long.

I learn

from watching all this

a new behavior

a new ache.

will you bury me as well one day, squirrels

or float me old green feathers

in kind aerial gesture?

_____

for Sherry's prompt at desperatepoets. 

image of leaf cluster and walnut my own

Ink Ribbons

 

This is not happening, does not exist

any more than Bogie on the flat screen smoking Camels

and looking world-weary at the bar.

Bogie's dead, eaten up by cancer,

liver hard and beaten-up as a gymnasium medicine ball.

And yet, here I am, and here is my heart

like a twin engine monoplane on the tarmac at Casablanca.

No smart suit and fashionable hat for me.

I want my father's old fedora and his jacket I used to wear

because I loved him, and we both

drove my mother to razor blades like matching bookends

around a collection of Hem and pulp novels and every page

read to her like THE END THE END THE END.

This is prop whiskey, the gin is Dasani water but the lime is real.

This mood, though, it's the view from a blacked-out liner

at night and I can just make out the lanterns at a cafe on the shore

where they drink the real stuff,

spread lovely lies like butter on bread,

and the solitaries read James Joyce with their works in their pocket.

The off-duty ferryman raises his glass. To me? Not possible.

I am the woman with ink ribbons in her hair, erstatz ether bows

imaginary like the humming presses in a 1940's movie scene.

Edit out the brassy blonde coming through the door,

there's only room for one hard case here

with a PI license and a heart of paper, cotton, leather,

but never even around the corner from silver or gold.

So bottoms up, sobersides, please rush in from the rain I've drummed up

and say something nice. It's always 3 a.m. in these scenes

and I long for morning,

                                       and lanterns lit

                                                                 like my father's smile. 

___________________

for Desperate Poets "I wake up screaming: Desperate Noir." 

Image at top: Bing AI

Music: Billie Holiday Willow Weep For Me

Saw 101010101

 

No one has ever seen Mr. Cobol.

He's like an eclipse, we all use special mirror boxes, but still

he is bright, electrical, and smells of Ozone cologne. 

His disembodied voice materializes out of the intercom.

"Get down from there and report to my office."

Which one of me, I wonder?

No one has ever been to Mr. Cobol's office. 

It's said it's down a long hall, through a tube and up a ladder.

Some say he dances there on the head of a pin.

I select full harlequin costume and megaphone,

trumpeting, "Mr. Cobol, Mr. Cobol. wherefore art thou, Mr. Cobol?"

It's not love, but it's urgent. I need this paycheck.

Mr. Cobol responds--out of the ether!--with mechanical poetry

any simp could compose. I loose my infinite number of monkeys

and hear Mr. Cobol howl jaggedly, bleeding junk data.

Now Mr. Cobol's shadow self emerges, creeping though the ducts

for the air conditioning and all of our eyes. Many go blind.

I play a saw, wahhh wooooaaahh slashing his scores, stee-rike!

Some say that Mr, Cobol is the Ultimate Umpire,

regal, invisible, all-powerful, robed in Rules like Nebuchadnezzar

and the score is always 1-0. I saw lovely Sally in half, now there's 2.

It's said that Mr. Cobol has learned to play the saw, too,

but I know better. My monkeys have him moaning wahhh woooahh

over the intercom, making calculations, spitting out memos.

Me: Two.

MC: One!!!!

Monkeys: five!!!

MC: zeeeerroooooo...

Me: Nine!

MC; zee roooe

Monkeys: Nein! 

Mc: uhhhhhwaahhh oooo

Me: Since I sawwww her standing there!

MC: oeeoowww, oggghh

Monkeys: Not your steppin' stone!

Me: Stoned?

MC: one...zero...liftoff...

Monkeys: happy trails, pardner!

Me: Haw! better skeedaddle!

MC:

MC:

MC: master

MC: master of

MC: Master of Ceremonies

Monkeys: Evacuate!

Me, wearing balloon pants and tapping head: Can't touch this!

Bette Davis: Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride. 

_________

for desperatepoets "Slam At The Singularity Corral. "

Note: In All About Eve, Bette Davis actually said "bumpy night", not "bumpy ride", but the misquote serves my ending better. 

Music: William Mapother plays the saw for Brit Marling in Another Earth.