Mike Pence, Gemini, Visits The Mayo Clinic

We made our own zodiac from prayer books and beating-sticks, 
kept folded in narrow creases,
vermin parables for rot-paper effigies
writ down as paragons in the cheap potboiler of continuous torrent and industry.

Down at the harbor,
salt angels wave goodbye to ships laden
with cream-skinned babies in barrels,
alive in a circumscribed commerce
of palm
and funeral
and coral-colored sunrise.

We peddle our peculiar zodiac at stations
where all trains have evaporated,
the green and violet of bruises rain themselves clean,
and ballads are sung with lark tongues lodged
in mother throats that cannot exist, 
but which sing and sing and sing.

Come, find our graves in the rockery,
lend us new deaths by instant contract.
Arrange us on new stars aloft by decree,
and kill the old deities by stoning via television.
The night horizon will slide us
to the harbor,
to the arms of sirens
who will sing us, exploding, 
through dust-hearts and lie-lips 
to the stuttering surprise
of creatures too perverted and vile 
to carry the note that we plot, on charts, 
like a poem slipped beneath the door of permanent astonishment.
________

for Kerry's word list and Izy's prompt for the last day of April.

The Woman Who Could Not Remember

Winter, pale and fat, presses himself against me,
insistent and stupid, dead oak leaves spilling
from his windy lips.

"Darling," I hear my voice confabulate. My memory
fell through the ice of his pride six years ago and hasn't been seen since.
So I make shit up:

"I missed you," and such fantastic idiocy. I send
weevils into his head to hunt for what went before,
and find my affair with his brother, Fall, and his 
first love turned bitter enemy and destroyer, Spring. 

She and I conspire by telepathy, though I forget afterwards. 

Can he hear the cicadas inside my bones, feel the
mosquito pond of my stilled airless blood?
My benefactor, the Sun, waits for him to subside and die

So that we can be together.

But this time the infuriating fool has the vitality of the nearly-expired,
and as he enters me, the shock of cold sends cracks 
from toes to skull and back again, I am riven
by lost and desperate ice-beaked birds who need me to the point of misery.

Secretly, as he bucks and the wind rises,
I receive the tiny crocus blooms his destroyer sends me
to help me hold on, to fashion together into a time,

Mine, when I will strangle him with rose vines,
sway to my feet as stalks of wheat, heavy as viburnum,
entirely forgetful and ascendant. 

"That's right," I coo, opening myself willingly now,
as a grave does, doing what it was born to do, 
becoming solid and sun-warmed, anticipating lilies.
________

For "take the weather with you" at Toads. Day #5 of Napo Nap Time. Greetings from the (still!) frozen wastes of the north.

 

My Giraffe

My giraffe
s'got the down-nose look,
and those squinty rich-MILF eyes.
What a bitch.

Still, she got a sweet and useful tongue.

When you talk,
all the birds have heart attacks and tumble from the trees in shock. 
Fucking whales have more to say
than you. 

My giraffe
would cut you dead
in public, anytime.
________

for Friday 55 at my BFF's place.

 

Jacks

Noon is when I stopped being pretty--
no one cares and it doesn't matter, 
BUT
I was the spider bride of a textile tycoon and he
took one look and started laughing.

Out of my ears
crawled everything I'd heard and learned--
all Mom's good advice good for nothing, now.
I went straight to the mill
and worked everybody I could lay hands on;
they call me Saint Susan--
Bernard doesn't see those jacks in the palm of my hand.

When a woman loses her looks, anything goes.
Bernard recoils like I'm radioactive,
has a slut mistress tucked away in his office.
Meanwhile, I roam the factory floor like a suicide,
my fingertips solaced by
bolts of cat's claw crimson and
beautiful indigo.

There will be a revolution.
Bernard's gonna look good hanging from a roof girder,
his wrists knotted tight with my pretty scarf.
I'm an uggo but I kiss the blade that cuts the checks;
sugar and sorcery have made the shifts see me
not as I am, but as I could be and have become--
a red ball bouncing and a quick hand to catch it.
______

For "A Poem Of Our Own" with Magaly at Real Toads. I have incorporated the titles of four of my poems from our book "Three-Note Howl: The Wild Hunt" : "Noon", "The Spider Bride", "Advice", and "Beautiful Indigo."

Top image by cellmon, deviantart. Bottom image, creator unknown. 

After hearing it last night, I woke up with my head full of "The Minstrel In The Gallery" by Jethro Tull. I had it in my head all the while I was composing this. Lyrics HERE.

Medea's Lament

Here's the news--
(though you never ask)
a chain grocery has bought Saint Sebastian's,
and the altar still sticky with our vows
will be torn out,

replaced with giant coolers,
jumbo pizzas,
grade A eggs.

Ha! I love irony.
Do you remember when you told me
all that cracked shit about the Golden Fleece?
Did I make fun of you,
there in our bed with your stupid adventure novel 
and our young hopes, sure as homing pigeons?
No.

And so you see, I am merciful after all,
at least to the degree of which I am capable. 
A few dragon's teeth make a thousand men,
and a thrown rock scatters them,
just as I had told you,
to save you,
back when I was almost innocent, and in love.

So how is Glauce?
Does she still dye her crispy pale locks with L'Oreal?
Is she old enough to drink yet?
Was she worth it?

Oh dear, I know that black grinding silence;
I've offended you.
I just called to tell you about Saint Sebastian's,
and to tell you the kids can't come this weekend.
Yes, I know it's your turn,
but they're going swimming.
Yes, alone, Jase. I told them they could.
In fact, I insisted.

You always imagine the worst of me.
No, I don't think that's a good idea, and besides,
they can't come to the phone right now.
What do you mean my voice sounds funny?
Happy, you mean? Satisfied? Like you would even know.

One last thing...
that winged goat thing that we had?
I pitched it.
Well Jason, I needed space in the family room
for food trays from the deli at the new supermarket.
Why, for the funerals, of course.
Poor Jason, you sound so at sea,
but don't worry,
I've taken care of everything,
just like I used to when you loved me and I was glad to do it.
________

for Kerry's challenge--"Is Love A Tender Thing?" 

          

The Farm For Critics

At the farm for critics,

the soil is rich,

and the poet sleeps well.

______

for Mag 208. 

"Poet's Sleep" image by Chang Houg Ahn.

Please click on "older post" for the poem I wrote late last night. It wasn't up top for very long. Bless you.

Seeds

At the top of marble stairs,
those hard smooth stairs pressed from prayers that could not be granted,
I will leave twin birds each with half a song.

You will know them by their scent,
and by the midnight-storm sea-water blue of their melancholy.
My kiss will come back to you, folded inside their feathers.

Follow the marble to where it breaks,
take the root-bone broken dirt road that splits the upstairs floor.
I will strew lilies to guide you, as sweetly as an easy death.

Oh, did I mention how restless, how diffuse
is the road I have lured you down? It webs out, becomes thousands,
becomes legion, and down just one of them is my bed and my heart?

I wish you luck.
Place these non-seeds in your hand and let your breath begin them.
Follow them. Splinter as you do, and I'll kindly bury each letter of your lies.

You should have loved me right, when I flowed hard for it.
Now, well now, this is the only way, and I have avalanched everything behind you
with black gems that turn to rot if you touch them.

Just do the best you can, my second chance baby.
Just pretend your feet are magnets and that I am true north.
Just follow the strange-birthed backwards sun that comes up in the west,

so that you, too, can know what it means to be scorched by a blank face.
______

Milkweed orb by Deborah Glessner. Used with permission for Artistic Interpretations With Margaret at Real Toads.

Check out the song. I dare ya to sit still. 

Kitchen Girl

There are stairs,
scarce been used--

the smell of wood,
straight cut and new--

all of it built
quite recently, for you.

Didn't I tell you, baby,
I'd get you before a preacher one day?

Didn't I tell you, Lonesome,
that I'd find the words to make you stay?

I saw it all,
can't prove I lied--

in the case of those
who've lately died.

A ring means an unbroken circle,
a rope means a broken neck--

I knew one day I'd make you fall,
and dance, and turn--
first east, then west.
________

Izy at Real Toads says take her to an exotic location where you'd never want to go. All right. I think a gallows is fairly exotic and I certainly never want to end up there.

The title is taken from a traditional song of the same name. It goes, in part:

I never will believe what one man says
though his eyes be blue or brown--
unless he's swingin' from a scaffold high,
sayin', darlin' I can't come down. 

 

I waited for you

I waited, wearing the pink dress,
which should tell you how young I was,
how soft I was,
when I began.

When you're up to your eyeballs in estrogen,
you'll do things no sane person would ever do--
you wait your turn.
You hold your tongue.
You stand there and cry boohoo,
but your hair stays nice and that's something.

You see, I wanted to look good for you,
should you ever arrive.
I wanted to smell nice, too--
not like the usual napalm and pancakes one finds
in the trailer park
or the bus station.

I waited, patient as a saint.
Thinking me one, little boys beheaded me,
set me on fire,
ran me through,
and denounced me as a sorceress,
but I was just a girl
waiting.

An old woman came and cleaned my dusty eyes with a pungent cleaner
sprayed onto a rag made from the Pharaoh's robes.
After that, I saw how it was--
you were never going to show.
Oh sure, you kept sending pigeons with little messages tied to their legs,
but never anything substantial.
You never picked up the rotary phone in the warden's office
to talk dirty to me.
Not once.

Now, 
I hear from our spies that you've fallen on hard times.
I hear that your lips are turning black and curling off,
for lack of kisses.
Believe me, I know all about heartache and I'll be there
as soon as I see a dinosaur
driving a Deusenberg
and singing "Sonny Boy" in blackface.
Until then,
you can wait for me.
________

art: The Forgotten Expectation by Mark Worrall

for Real Toads mini-challenge.