Conspicuous Christians

 

The conspicuous Christians

fill 4 booths and keep the waitress hopping.

12 adults

5 young children needing highchairs in the aisle

17 orders, all different

5 special requests

2 plates sent back

1 spilled coffee

separate checks. please.

After an hour, they leave

dishes, napkins, crayons, sticky syrup spots,

and

1 tract

with

2 crisp 1 dollar bills tucked neatly inside. 

_____

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 

Newton's Cradle

 In evening,

you spoke to me through the wall.

"I love you."

Don't.

It hurts when I laugh.

Tears, like sweat on a glass in summer.

Night, a smothering shadow.

In morning, diminished,

I love you as babies love,

desperate, red-faced, screaming.

_______

for Dverse Quadrille # 158 hosted by Linda Lyberg. Theme: "morning"

This is a Newton's Cradle: 

Music: George Michael "Tonight"

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.