Equi Feri

 

We came out of the sun like flares

burning out our own memory,

landing like witless baby birds

and handed a brick in the heart before we even knew.

There is the sun, our personal searchlight

calling us not to sell ourselves for nothing. 

We played in traffic, drunk as monkeys,

carrying our Queen Boudica dolls for luck, dodging disaster.

Forever sneaks up, whistling our favorite song,

together with a creepy-crawly to keep us honest.

We have tried to express all of this, bright horses nickering

in the Earthbound Barn but meant for the roses, headlong, guided by the stars.

___________

for Word Garden Word List--Klara and the Sun 

Music: Junior Brown Surf Medley

Handsome Man

 

A very handsome man--

everyone remarked about it. 

Simply leaning back in a chair

with his coat open,

and that devil-may-care casual air--

it made me feel a little drunk, just watching him.

He wasn't gay

as some of us assumed. 

Vi said no, with a canary-cat smile

and she would know, better than us sparrows. 

She told the story

how the war shattered him.

Six weeks in hospital

and the art therapy that brought him back.

Looks and talent, despite a hand tremor that lasted a year.

He was elegant.

You'd feel like the only woman in the room

just because he offered you a cigarette.

With a wave of his hand he dismissed his work as trash

and said better to be

a bricklayer or a dentist.

The thing is, he seemed to mean it

and it felt like watching him vandalize his soul.

He was loved.

One look at Vi told us that.

She said there were nights when he believed he was dying,

and went to doctors in the morning.

They told him, you're fine, really, stop worrying.

He was on the phone one evening with his sister

when Vi said his face changed. 

When she asked him he said he'd mentioned his art 

and the sister had laughed

saying, oh, you're still doing that.

He loved to walk

at night when the air was cold and clear.

He told Vi he was going out for a smoke--

this war veteran,

this handsome, talented, loved man--

and he did.

Then he'd stepped off a bridge into the cold water far below.

At the funeral, Vi slapped the sister, caused a scene.

He wasn't there to smile and smooth it over, for any of us, anymore.

________

for desperatepoets "death by broken shoe laces." 

Music: Billy Joel Goodnight Saigon

Persephone

Sexy Persephone, not that anyone would know.

Hades keeps the lights off, the room too warm.

Her children howl from nightmares Morpheus leaves low

like suns going down at the base of the spine.

Restless Persephone, gone bitchy in the ashy shadows,

escapes to fenced April, daughter of deities.

She's a woman, she bears worlds purple with jacaranda,

wisteria, yellow-eyed pansies and Queen-of-the-Nights.

Circumscribed Persephone, prisoner of fence and filigree,

no Ubers in the Underworld, though taxis crowd the tarmac

from city to jungle to ice cap, gathering thick ten feet away,

carrying businessmen dry as last month's paper left on a sill.

Persephone, I ride on your skin, behind your lids, 

trapped as you are, wishing myself fecund as you are,

as frayed, as foxy, as fenestrated, a thing unto ourselves,

rising like spring stems garlanding a world denied.

Persephone, we lie in tandem in a dark grave, like butterflies.

___________

for Sunday Muse #160. 

Think Fast

 

We come from clouds

and end in dirt.

In the time between,

a reeling dance,

a disappearing interval

where

panic

and 

ecstasy

look very much the same.

_____

for Sunday Muse #121