Elemental

 

I thought that you would be like water

in summer

even if the lake lay

beyond the brambles.

On a road trip, the heat mirage oases

seem nearer

like objects in the mirror

where I first saw you.

In summer,

birds bathe in the dog dish I set out--

they fly without rising

in that finite sky.

Your dark hair seemed to flow and called me

like a siren

whose face is obscured

like her every word.

I still set out that dog dish for the winter birds

in their need.

Mornings I set it steaming

only to find it frozen by afternoon.

There are things that flow, comforting things

already changing.

I remember your reticence and kick the bowl of ice

coming free, ungiving, falling hard and only once.

_________

for What's Going On--"what cold is"

Music: Julian Lennon Ruby Tuesday

Soon

 

It's August and the cool spell is over.

Days heat up like love coming back

but you know this lover

and they be like that.

The walnut leaves look tired and dry

like an old washer woman's skin.

The tree's still lovely as the sun climbs high

but no May morning beauty again.

August and the flies on the screen

are in afternoon as crickets are to the summer moon.

I'm tired of tying my hair back and watching shadows lean;

let the smokey tang of autumn bring my first love back--soon!

______________

for What's Going On? ("August")

And don't forget that the Word List is still active through Sunday!

Phineas Gage's Satori

 

Phineas Gage was a working stiff who nonetheless

took great pride in his job, which was blowing things to Kingdom Come.

He reached age twenty-five, never having been depressed

or observably outre, but Poetry made a sudden entrance the day he forgot to run.

A mountain might be said to be the ultimate conservative,

a geological accountant or engineer, set in its strata, posture, and ways.

Along came Phineas with his Magic Wand, keen to make the Earth move,

but the Mountain objected and sent the steel phallus back through swain Gage.

"He's dead!" cried his crew aghast, but his vision was sharpened

by the implement through his eye, introduced to his mind in an instant.

Phineas sat up as if nothing were wrong and calmly opined

that he might need a physician for the crowbar suddenly extant. 

He died but only to who he had been before, well-respected,

industrious and measured. Over the weeks he spit bits of brain

onto foolscap as a sort of carmine ink and thus were his first poems invented.

Phineas found he could make them rhyme, sing, moan and rain.

Imagine now Phineas, drunk as an Irish pickpocket, grabbing at ladies

and spouting the most remarkable obscenities. Imagine him in the full vigor

of creative expression, novel thought, unfettered here-ness and the rabies

of Instant Genius blasting from every pore as if dynamited higher, bigger.

For a time, Phineas exalted, Phineas in bloom, Phineas transformed!

Then, through doctor's care and Normalcy's constant soporific embrace,

Phineas drifted from shining masterpiece to haiku to erasure poems

and became redacted from himself, dependable again, decorous, quite sane. 

_______

for desperatepoets "state of the art"

Notes: Phineas Gage was a railroad worker who loaded charges into rock faces where rail lines were to be built. He packed the charges well into the rock with a custom-made crowbar of which he was quite proud. One day the dynamite went off prematurely and sent the crowbar through his skull. Miraculously, he survived and was even sitting up calmly afterward, asking to be taken to a doctor. After a long and sometimes gruesome recovery, Phineas' personality is said to have changed dramatically, though he eventually returned to a more typical state. I have taken the liberty of making him a poet. A satori is a sudden awakening. 

Vagabond Ball

 You can lose the colored ball that rolls under the fence and into the weeds.

You can lose the puppy you slept with, the blanket, the bed, the parents as well.

You can lose your shoes when the roommate stretches them,

lose your virginity and barely remember it,

lose your bestie, your internship, your single room, your shine.

You can lose a husband or wife, that bastard, that bitch.

You can lose your tolerance, your keys, your court case, your kids.

You can lose yourself and wonder how in the hell.

You can lose and not be able to let it go.

You can lose your shit, or sigh and say, "oh well."

You can lose your composure when you see how far you fell.

You can lose the booze, the dope, the sex, the waste.

You can lose the name you started with and choose another one

that doesn't have the sting and shame, the stopper and the bung.

You can lose the demon and shame the devil.

You can lose who you weren't and gain who you are,

no matter how unexpected, how hard, how glorious, how far.

Your soul's the same, untouched after all,

waiting in the weeds with the vagabond ball.

_____

my attempt at "a little repetition" for dverse. 

Sevenling (On an afternoon dark as Egyptians)

 On an afternoon dark as Egyptians,

I buy a used copy of Rimbaud

and cannot hold my bones in place.

Sit on the sand, the ocean will reach and draw back

like tempted nuns

at the proscribed birthday of boho ghosts.

Acrobats pull stitches from the binding for nets.

for Word Garden Word List #5 (Gregory Corso)

To Those Dead On Public Transport

 

To those dead on public transport,

we do not judge.

Perhaps you do not know, and not knowing

is just a vacant compartment that the Clerk

Of All Knowledge fills with folded messages.

The various vacuum attachments,

marrow spoons,

foreign capitols,

all may confound and confuse.

Majestic death takes its place with these.

To those dead on public transport,

you needn't concern yourselves further

with stops,

schedules,

responsibilities,

or other petty matters.

Your destination has come to you instead.

Have no worries about your husk of flesh.

If muscles relax and give way,

water is the same whether in glass or lake;

soil the same whether in pot or prairie.

If others snicker, 

they have forgotten their own beginnings.

To those dead on public transport,

this bulb, this skin, 

this womb in which you gestated

now opens.

You emerge. 

It is not the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

You need do nothing but exist vividly,

God's bauble,

taken up,

cut and polished,

worn with pride,

shining brightly.

_________

for Sunday Muse #188

Vessel Of Your Unmuse

"And the sad act like lepers They stick to the shadows They long to ring bells of warning So that the pure can shut their doors" --Conor Oberst

"We are not amused." --Queen Victoria

Viewed in a certain way,

Even a thorn inspires.

Sharp edges trim away

Superfluous dressings,

Even those we cherish

Like showy cuffs of lace.

Over the course of time,

Fitting uses are found.

You can use words to bind

Or reopen a wound.

Useless protections die,

Roses are thorns, disguised.

Use these new mediums

Not of skin, but of scar.

Muses of blood that run

Under any radar

So you can ring clearly

Every bell you become.

_________

Pretty much, this is a Spirit's Vessel form, though I messed with the rhyme scheme. 

Shared with Dverse Poetry Pub for "Who's Your Muse?" 

Duet

 

The cello began to make demands.

"You must make allowances for me," it said.

"I am overfilled with grief, like a suicide's bathtub."

"I will bow you more gently," said the girl.

"Gently shmently," said the cello.

"Make me a tree again, restore my rings and skin."

"Cash me ousside, how bow da?" said the girl.

"Cry me a river, cello.

We both moan from inside our changed bodies,

Bowed by handsy players who take bows for our fracaso."

-----------

for Sunday Muse #163. 

fracaso--Spanish for defeat, ruin, downfall, calamity, destruction

Motion

Living on the road is like being in love with a kleptomaniac;
the unfamiliar is always turning up
in place of old favorite fragiles that go missing.

Here's a prezzie, baby,
out of the blue,
because he's sorry he sold that thing he did
that you loved
in the old place, or ten places ago.

Grackles love the morning same as sparrows
and like your love, they woke up being what they are.
You know winter will come,
the road will ice over,
and nothing will be the way it was, again.

Be his sparrow, then,
and know that God and the cops have their eye on you both.
Honey, you don't have to tell them a thing
and your fingertips, your breath, your tired determined hope
are out of their jurisdiction and beyond their experience, 
like flight, 
like lightness, 
like the way he makes you feel.
__________

for the Sunday Muse #64.

For You

This is for you, 
who never saw me at all.
This is for you, ladling out poisonous "forgiveness"
when I had done no crime.
This is for you, distraught
that "no in OUR family" had ever been like me.
(Don't bet on it.)
This is for you, with the fiction of me in your head,
who never existed anyplace else.
This is for you, who would rather I suffer for a life time
so that you can feel "comfortable."

This is for you, the friends who reached out
when I was scared,
when I was sad,
when I was not at my best,
when I really needed it. 
This is for you, who shared your own stories 
so that I would know I was not alone.
This is for you, who loved me before, and loved me after.
This is for you, who have never known me any other way.
This is for you, watching me,
as I once watched others
for their joy
for their beauty
for their fierce belief in their own lights.

And this is for me, God's own girl,
arriving back where I began,
at peace in the passing illusion of my own skin.
_________

for this.

Rapunzel's Hairdresser

Rapunzel's hairdresser was one lazy bitch,
with sporadic, unpredictable hours,
and a shop inconveniently located smack-dab center of a perpetual rain storm.
And so,
when contestant #15,383 said, "Great hair!"
and really meant "How desperate are you to be seen, 
complimented,
valued,
loved?" and, more to the point, 
"Are you willing to fuck me to get it?" 
Poor Rappy lost her shit right there in the coffee bar. 

It's hard, if you've never tried it, 
to saw off ten years' growth with a plastic knife meant for
spreading cream cheese with,
but our Raps found herself filled with Messianic vigor, 
and, too, her cause was flat-out righteous.
Have you ever seen a perfectly normal girl with really unbelievably long hair
arch her back and hiss? 
Here was your chance,
and pity if you missed it.

Her girlfriends call her "Berry", which started as
Rappy, then Rappy Raspberry, then just Berry.
Now they say,
"Lookit YOU, sugar!" and rise out of their mid-afternoon drowse
and make all appropriate noises one makes about a girl with a fresh style.
So, when contestant #15,384 asked if she was a dyke,
out of jealousy or fear of female power or 
by way of eliciting a shame response or something,
she was Teflon,
she was made of gold,
gloriously side-shaved and in the moment,
too cool for fools and he walked out, hands in pockets,
back to his wife and the 
apartment above the empty shop in the never-ending rain storm.
And our Berry?
She does her own hair now. Word.
_________

for Camera FLASH!

 

Woman In A Fire

"You've changed," she said,
and so I have.
Oh my love, get up, put on your clothes
(if you want to make the sun stutter in the sky;
if you want the swallows to go stunned and still)
and go outside.

Everything that was dead a month ago has sprung from the ground
or from the ends of branches.
Everything that was here a year ago is dead and sleeping,
forever, in that same ground.

You thought I was like an old lamp, always there,
always unnoticed and beloved at the same time.
I thought that too.
Now, though, starlings have found a way in, 
and I can barely keep my feet on the ground.
They call me;
they are a cacophony,
reminding me, so much, of--in those first days--you.

I had a dog, my whole heart, Mercury on four legs.
How I loved him! Now, he is gone
and I see a ginger cat in the garden every morning.
Goodbye, my love.
How it twists my heart to say it.
The starlings call, the ginger cat watches the birds,
and I change, rising on an updraft
or the ashy exhalation of a favorite book, now burning.
________