Power Couple, 1970

 She said,

"I shall strike a sewing needle through your heart

for a gyroscope to keep me level.

Spin, wounded dancer,

declare yourself a world."

Spinning and bleeding, he said,

"Primp yourself a pelt

for ornament and testament.

Live your life upon my wall,

to collect and devour each passing eye."

And every bird begins its bower

with a glittering bauble in the early hour.

Wearing him as he wore her, she said,

"Make yourself a mummy,

preserved forever in cement Jello.

I shall bury you with various anchors

I calve from the ice of my womb."

Tearing himself away,

he became a skeleton, dancing, playing a flute.

"I have found a new mask to marry,

made of prescriptions and rococo furnishings.

She is a lovely acid, a suicide waltz."

And every bird in its rotting nest

fades with its bauble low in the west.

______

for The Sunday Muse #175.

My Other Hand

They tell me--I mean the throat clearers in their white coats--
that my extra hand is a blighted twin,
and that its presence on the right side of my back is not threatening.

The fools.
Hungering for love like anyone else, I gave in
to someone's touch. In mid-declaration, he found the hand
and jumped away as if electrocuted when he saw what he'd touched.

In church, wearing my customary black,
I pray, and in my prayer, I lie, giving thanks.
The horrid hand crosses itself at the moment of deceit,
and my skin crawls so badly that I nearly scream right there in the pew.

The worst part is that I can't really see it.
I twist painfully, my back to the mirror, but it curls away 
like some unholy creature avoiding teeth, or fire.
I curse it, sobbing with frustration, the hand mirror smashed.

At night, the hand traces letters against the skin of my back,
but the language makes no sense except to devils and Gypsies.
My mother brought the doctor, then the priest, upon finding me
blood-drenched and wheezing on the floor in the morning.

Who could blame me, for the knife?
Who could forecast that the thing would defend itself,
at cost of three fingers, one of them mine?

The same doctors performed surgery that afternoon,
pronounced the thing removed and benign,
but I know better, and carry the scars to prove it.
______

for my own Fireblossom Friday challenge at Real Toads: "It's Only A Paper Moon."

 

The Broken Glasses

My glasses fell, broke, went blind in one eye.
Not much that I lose (anymore) upsets me very much,
but the world has lost its bones and I feel like a stranger.

Faces become pillows, buildings blobs.
Only my heart retains its hard edge, and I bleed myself dizzy every night.
"Look," say the pillows, gathering around my wheelchair

Like dumb birds for bread. They think I'm blushing
when I'm dying and hang little samplers on the walls of my room.
"She's as rosy as a girl," they say, silly chatterboxes

Without faces, but with mouths as big as the white shadow that doctors know.
______

mini-challenge.

Observations on The Construction of The Human Ear

Every ear is different, as unique as fingerprints,
and that is why the world
can speak in a million voices
and to each in her own particular language.

Same-same, the trick is to listen
to what's coming from every direction and to make 
nonsense into music;
foolishness into poetry.

If you can do that, the world will not seem so mean, so ugly,
but will, instead, whisper in your ear like a dream of the Divine.