God, In Youth and Age

 

Mistakes were made. Things were done.

There in the void, scattering lava-spitting planets from Hell to next Thursday,

kid must have been stone lonesome.

If He drowned his toys in the bathtub for forty days, hey, it was The Exciting Game Without Any Rules. 

Bitter little bastard, and so would you have been.

Time goes by, tick tock.

Awkward with girls, He just popped one pregnant.

Fast forward, single father with a son.

Awake at night, His fuck-ups from years ago torture Him still,

all the aggression and acting out.

Stone tablets just made it weird for everybody,

but He had to learn on the fly, no teachers, no friends.

What a smoking pile-up.

So there's His only son, chopping chairs and hope chests out of trees in the shed by himself.

"I'm gonna give you twelve friends, let you see the world, set everybody straight, do and have everything I never had!" Big smile, open arms, well? Well???

Jay turns back to planing the edge of a door. 

The flying chips remind Him of His old lava-spitting planets, most of them rocky and dead in the end, and He goes off.

Presto, Jay's in the desert with the devil, for the good of all concerned. 

Oh, He talks to the neighbors about sacrifice and salvation,

But every time He sees the hand-crafted coffee table out in the garage, 

dusty,

forgotten next to the Jarts and the lawn mower,

He dips His old white-haired head,

leans down with His spotty hands on His knees 

and whispers, "I am that I am," to nobody.

_________

for Sunday Muse #164. 

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

Mi Amada

 

The Moon is sleeping

in a pool of rain water

dreaming of tides, solar winds,

and the last words you said last night, mi amada.

The crow wears his feathers

like an old man's overcoat

at a train station

in early December.

He wraps used alphabets

around the Moon in payment 

for memories,

some false, some bittersweet.

The crow will stay

as long as the Moon does.

The Moon will stay

forever, but often hidden.

The rain water

comes alive at a touch, 

receding even as it returns

in spite of itself or anything said last night, mi amada.

_______

For Sunday Muse #162

Arabesque

I am the spine of a book, pages open on either side.

I am steel rails down a valley that two greening hills divide.

I am the corpus callosum, of two minds in every thought.

Am I sleeping or here wakeful, one eye open, one eye not?

I am the nest with two birds calling, both the same but different still,

I disperse myself in potions, both the doctor and the ill.

I am the worm who grew two wings, one of blue and one of gold,

Meeting in the middle when in flight and when in fold.

_______

for Sunday Muse #161. This had three stanzas but I liked it better with just the two.

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. 

Mermaids

Mermaids sing but do not stay

and I have always been partial to them,

perhaps because they do not stay.

I take to sea in a skin of metal and wood

to look for mermaids diving, vanishing.

I throw my heart over like an anchor,

heavy odd thing, inflexible,

not the sort that mermaids love at all.

-----------

written during the Wordcrafters on line meeting.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

My Queendom for a hair clip,

plastic gizmo that I prize

as my hair in the wind whips

in my mouth and face and eyes.

My Queendom for a hair clip,

though I cannot see to search

I think I know right where I left it

so off I weave and feel and lurch.

My Queendom for a hair clip.

Here it is, hey wait what huh??!!?

Hope I don't skid or skate or slip

And smack my forehead, falling, DUH!

---------

for Sunday Muse # 158.