Song of a Tarnished Eidolon

 

I asked the locust leaves if they were lonely.

They replied,

We are restless.

An owl on a branch of the locust tree

wept silently.

I have looked in all directions.

At home, I found my future in a spoon's face,

and my melancholy in the strings of an oud.

I haunt myself.

Indigo is the night sky.

Indigo is the sleepless sea.

Nun-white bird,

I will meet you beneath the locust tree

wearing a veil of Point d'Esprit

and holding a torn carnation.

_____________

Lovin' Baby Girl

 I was a lovin' baby girl

wrapped in the pages of a million old books.

lonesome as the last day of winter,

bright as a penny on the sill in sunlight.

It took me a long time, wandering midnight walks

solitary as Sunday, blue as a pound dog,

to know I was different inside my head

with its all-night jukebox and pocket poets jam.

I was a lovin' baby girl

who thought love was hearts and flowers

hidden in a busker's guitar case

so I ran out barefoot in the strange streets, looking.

I was just a girl, giving it all away,

even the words that fell from my mind.

and I wore away like sea glass

curled on a Great Lakes beach, inside a bottle.

I was a lovin baby girl

who stopped keeping secrets from herself,

once again the child who couldn't shut up,

the one I was, now with a poem behind every bloom. 

I'm still solitary as Sunday, but I haven't been always,

blue as a pound dog, but not as often. 

If I walk the beach, it's in the morning, with a smile

rolling out poems like waves on shoreline, a natural wonder.

______

for What's Going On? -- What is "it" about poetry?  Poetry and music have always been inextricably linked for me. I notice a number of poets today writing about songs they love. Music was and is integral to my life.  This poem is an homage to several songs I loved when I was young and still do. 

The main one I wrote from here is called Second Story Window, sung by Rita Coolidge. Her first solo album was the second LP I ever bought and I still have that same copy. This song was written by Marc Benno; his version: 

The title and repeated line is from Lovin' Baby Girl by Melanie Safka, a song I have referenced in my tags fairly often.

I was just a girl, giving it all away, is an homage to Leo Sayer's Giving It All Away. An anthem of my early adulthood.  

The song is more joyful these days as one thing has built upon the last. And the poetry is something that has only become more satisfying over time. 

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"

There You Are, Little Sparkler

 

"You are everyone to me,"

said Caligula, and he gave me a scarf

to hide the hickeys--

when you split with a devil

it gets tricky

not to fall apart.

Spending Christmas at Joan of Arc's

with real saints, a faux fire

and presence under the tree--

I can't think exactly which to do

for truth or dare

except to keep my tail clear of the rocking chair.

Joan's guest room smells like

balsam and baguettes

and oh you crusty evergreen--

who's the fairest

of them all?

Who's so full of shyness

that she can't steal on down the hall?

That Frenchy firework, me

mais oui. 

____________

for Word Garden Word List--The Smiths. The middle section has been edited.

Music: The Smiths Ask 

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"

Nursery Rhyme

 There were devils

present at my birth

and veiled angels

in smoky violet shirts

with handbells

they'd stolen out of Hell.

Who is the coward

that devils teach to curse

holding Hope out in a teacup

but overturn it first?

A fool's sun

wanes fast, warms none.

See the rose stem

my assassin's throat was vase for

so that every imprecation

that's spoken only makes more

melodies

across my garden's leaves.

Angels kept my heart

in a box with golden hinges

carried by a devil

on its back with burning cinches

in tandem served--

my hidden heart preserved. 

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Stephen Crane

Music: Beth Hart & Joe Bonamassa "I'll Take Care of You"

Essential Oils For The Damned

 Idiot child of broken clocks, you once again brandish your prop razor

and my pretense skin curls away in shavings of apple peel red.

Glitter-eyed goblin, my adopted doppelganger monster,

here is your furious holiday for inmates.

I wave my frayed pennant and slide soggy sophistry down the coin slot

of the arcade game called Ouroboros Hoola-Hoop Boomerang For Dummies.

I like to think that my heart is not an unsafe toy.

I like to think that my blood is made of milk, my fingertips of cotton swabs.

Idiot child with the air raid stuck in your throat, fire-bug goblin,

do not call me sister, or mother, or twin.

There is an oven filled with cakes and loaves,

another with needles and broken glass.

Why scribble my name in static on the sunspot glass of the door?

Why not go die somewhere,

dissolve into tiny scrubbing bubbles of amnesia,

or while away the empty hours on the locked ward birthing lexicons for lunatics?

Why stand in the sudden mirror like immolated Jaycees

wearing Hello My Name Is Me stickers on your smoldering shoulders?

Why pen me inside an iron zodiac

with my temper and PTSD that rips me rising, screaming from my sleep?

The medical term for all this is Spiritual Infucktion

with features of Recurring Ordinariness,

and Impotent Fury.

Idiot child, horror goblin, my teachers and punishers,

the term I am searching for is

sorrow,

is failure,

is not again not again not again.

The word on the tip of my tongue where it is so badly burned is

HUMAN

and it binds me like a bandage made of water vapor and shrapnel.

________

for Word Garden Word list #11. 

Michigan Vacation, 1967

 

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong in the broken places." --Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms

"Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling." --Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River part one.

_______

Michigan Vacation 1967

When I turned twelve, Michigan blessed me

with a love of lake water.

Rain on wood rails. Cold green waves. White sails.

Goodbye in the eyes of my father.

Solitude in a red paddle boat

watching the sea-weed swaying.

White sails. Cold green waves. Rain on wood rails.

A time cut short. We won't be staying.

That summer, Detroit and drift wood burned.

My paperback left behind.

Rain on wood rails. Cold green waves. White sails.

Something born or dying. Something fine.

When I turned twelve, Michigan blessed me

with a week that never leaves.

White sails. Cold green waves. Rain on wood rails.

How to love well and then, how to grieve.

________

Process note: My father had a particular fondness for Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. I can't read them without thinking of him.

For Dverse Poetics "One True Sentence." This form is called a ZaniLa Rhyme, invented by Laura Lamarca. 

Following the Fathers

 Fathers' throats fill with wind.

Stars bay like lost dogs

defending the edge of the world

from the shriek of memory.

Take my hand.

It is made of Egypt and empty windows.

I build monuments

to sparrows with royal souls.

I am dead, blown to the borders

of everything I am and was.

This little hill of baubles

is yours now to sell or sew into the sleeves of poems.

Mothers, strangers, mute myths of shadow,

leave me in peace at last. 

I follow the fathers with their wind-throats

a girl again, sung to, willing to be fooled for a kiss.

_____

a second poem for Sunday Muse #121.

Spraying For Aphids

A fondness for tomatoes is just more lies.

The leaves are ugly,

the stems weak, sagging like a tubercular outcast waiting for her next beating.

And "love apples"? 

Poets are dreamy defectives who should be drowned like cats at the earliest convenience. 

No.

I kill aphids because they are so smug.

They crawl around on their stupid stalks,

fat with sap,

experts on everything except what is that big brick thing with the patio,

what are seasons?

and what garden, what planet?

Aphids have never felt any ache and rush

at the sight of you, undressing.

They do not run into traffic like some inevitable idiot,

talking nonsense to the gorgeous grille that will kill them.

They do not bury their dogs or their children.

No aphid feels unable to contain the moment's misery,

and they don't--wise vermin--hope next time will be different.

And so, stupidly unwilling to bring myself to burn

these poems, 

these pretties, 

these pictures from a shoebox kept like guilty dope in a drawer,

I spray for aphids instead.

I watch them fall, from the noxious cloud,

never having felt or thought about anything at all.

The same heart-drop that wrecked me

at certain suitcases and closing doors overtakes me now as the aphids die.

I realize I haven't changed them,

just stopped their motion.

There will be so many mocking Beefsteaks and Early Girls to give away,

almost begging,

as if they held all my mistakes and desires in their dumb meaty red hearts.

I will clutch the arms of near strangers, piping

"Take one! Take them all!" 

A pathetic madwoman for whom "no" has become an expectation, a way of life, a savagery,

like the gardening so many of us take up.

_________

for Sunday Muse where Chrissa presides, faithful dog at her side.

Sir Edmund Hillary

Sir Edmund Hillary would love these steps

(I would think,

watching my black-stockinged knees 

appear in front of me 

as I climbed.)

There should be sherpas

and glory,

admirers to celebrate my sister and I.

I remember my flat palm against the stone,

warm as a bird's breast 

rough as burlap,

hard as any other thing that had always been

and would always be.

Today I can't recall 

any sunrise in particular.

Lovers' names elude me like the love itself,

and months go by as hours did then.

How clear the memory of a hat's woven straw

or the smooth handle of a red umbrella.

How faint the sounds outside my window now.

What day is it? What difference

does it make?

Nothing disturbs me with yearning or surprise.

I recall we had dolls, trolleys,

skates, books,

and a million days ahead of us.

There was a doorbell,

a screen in summer time,

and always (of course!)

someone busy, and ours, inside.

______

for The Sunday Muse.

 

Autobiography In Miniature

It was in Oregon at the sliding icing end of the 70's.
A bus had brought me there,
barfing me up a block from a cafe where my boots dried out and so did I, more or less.

"Danny's" it was called. The goth chick looking out-of-it in the back corner claimed to be a succubus.
Whatever, honey.
We all suck at something.
It might as well be souls.

I scammed a tampon off of her and swore
that if I were still here by Wednesday I'd be a different woman,
open a kissing booth at the county fair or
marry a soccer star from Brazil and crank out kids.
I was certain it could be easily done, here on Highway 61.

So, how did I ever get from there to here, you ask,
spinning at my keyboard loom, all these poems and whatnot?
It was when I winged a napkin holder at my imaginary friend
there in Danny's Coffee Shop, Anytown, USA,
bruising her imaginary eye and changing the look of myself,
that I found The Way.

Blurring the edges is all I've done,
but the gray in my hair elicits assumptions
that I'm basically good,
can bake,
and have fifteen cats at home destroying the sofa.

You know what, Bo Peep? Two of those things are true--
Three guesses which.
______

From a word list kindly provided by *. I used most of them and gave the rest to The American Haiku Foundation.

Oregon

61

kissing booth

sapphire 

foursome 

keyboard 

cafe 

blurring the edges 

tampons 

bruising her eye 

candles in the rain 

soccer shirt 

Orphan Bus In The Underworld

When the Orphan bus in the Underworld stopped
for Unhappy Meals,
the orphans removed the driver's brain and fucked with it.
Out, then, from the dark,
back into mayhem and political doubletalk,
the Occupied Zone their parents died for.

Power comes to the innocent. The Virgin sees to this. 

First, a fish tank for the Premier,
gills and a ceremonial sash trailing in the algae.
Then, a pencil in the eye for every perved-out fat man,
and their scion sons putrefying inside local dance clubs. 

From a book bag--the Sun!
Roiling, blazing, launching sunspot flares!
Snowman parents, gooshy as Christmas;
running in Church allowed.
____________

106 Words for Angie at Toads. Is 106 more than 100? The Orphans say no. 

It's "Orpheus IN the Underworld", not "AND the Underworld." No wonder the stupid boat sank.