The City Inside My Head

 

The city inside my head

keeps its Sweet Face down

like a Japanese fan in the hand 

of a dead woman whose ghost

dances in air, 

untethered.

I am an ocean on the edge of a nightmare,

a horse gone headlong,

an unseen hand hanging up the cruisers,

mid-air,

sirens sounding like Stratocasters,

wah-wah pedals at patrolmen's feet. 

In the after-time, when you had gone,

the tall grass afternoons went on and on.

There was a yellow butterfly and a glass of gin,

and a thorn in the soft place where you had been.

The nights were cool, the stars were cold,

and together we turned slowly old

on a blue and green revolving ball

until love was dust, then nothing at all.

The city inside my head

keeps its Sweet Face down

like a Japanese fan in the hand

of a busker's monkey whose chattering forms

these poems, this after-time,

this image of the sun behind closed eyes 

hidden and 

glittering.

________

for Sunday Muse #168. Thanks to Hedge for telling me how to ditch the double spacing. Apologies for the varying type size in this. I can't fix it. 

The Angry Damned

On a blue sea beneath a pearl sky, 

time's drunken messenger carved a name on the side

of the shell in which he was born.

At the prow, a maw appeared,

and began to tear at and consume the sea-mother

from whose vomit they had risen.

In the stern, various gods

enormous of mouth, globular, gelatinous,

wounded each other avidly.

On a blue sea beneath a pearl sky,

the angry damned carried this obscene craft on their hands,

filmed with pitch and gasoline.

Cretinous sailors with disappearing arms

composed semaphore hymns sung by trapped demons

who drowned tangled in blind flags.

The angry damned

consumed in flame!

Sea on fire!

Blood immolation!

Worlds cracking, erupting,

lava herds of the diseased damned plunging headlong

into further misery.

Miasma of sick flotillas expanding, gaseous, unwholesome

into the scaled palms

of the shrieking, angry damned

leading each other by sharp hooks through the brain

down into hard pressure depths

where transparent monsters wave phosphorescent pennants

and say, through needle teeth,

Behold, I am the sun, the light, come unto me,

and they rush in, like vermin to a corpse.

_________

with thanks to Arthur Rimbaud, Stephen Crane and Allen Ginsberg. This is either an homage or a rip-off, depending on what you think.

for Sunday Muse #167.

Blogger absolutely would NOT let me fix the spacing at the beginning. It is not meant to have the extra spaces there. 

Happy Canada Day! (repost)

Oh Canada,

Our home and native land

True patriot's love

At all thy son's command.

With glowing hearts,

We see thee rise,

The True North strong and free.

From far and wide,

Oh, Canada,

We stand on guard for thee.

God keep our land

Glorious and free

Oh, Canada, we stand on guard for thee

Oh, Canada, we stand on guard for thee!

Happy Canada Day from down south in Detroy-it, eh? :-)
_______

El Lobo Herido

 

Injury requires solitude

for the blood to slow.

Cold water soothes the throb

and so he walks the river bed.

His belly is empty as the sky

but turns over sickly,

his body's shock at violation.

Up, through the grasses, silently.

He will stay here, concealed

on his side, panting.

Licking the wound, resting

he will either heal or not--live or not--

the same as any other day he has known.

_________

for Sunday Muse #166.

Michigan Vacation, 1967

 

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong in the broken places." --Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms

"Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling." --Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River part one.

_______

Michigan Vacation 1967

When I turned twelve, Michigan blessed me

with a love of lake water.

Rain on wood rails. Cold green waves. White sails.

Goodbye in the eyes of my father.

Solitude in a red paddle boat

watching the sea-weed swaying.

White sails. Cold green waves. Rain on wood rails.

A time cut short. We won't be staying.

That summer, Detroit and drift wood burned.

My paperback left behind.

Rain on wood rails. Cold green waves. White sails.

Something born or dying. Something fine.

When I turned twelve, Michigan blessed me

with a week that never leaves.

White sails. Cold green waves. Rain on wood rails.

How to love well and then, how to grieve.

________

Process note: My father had a particular fondness for Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. I can't read them without thinking of him.

For Dverse Poetics "One True Sentence." This form is called a ZaniLa Rhyme, invented by Laura Lamarca. 

Bird

 There is a blue and yellow bird.

He can say "pretty bird."

He can take off your finger before you know it.

There is a room with a large cage,

or that is a large cage,

with a sentinel window where only light passes.

Say that this bird is yours.

Say that he lights on your shoulder.

Your skin will envy the window glass, and long for distance.

You can sit quietly in the evening.

The bird can strut and scream on its perch in the afternoon.

When you die, tomorrow or ten years from now,

The bird will tilt its head, fluff its feathers, tap its mirror

tap tap tap

in boredom or in victory, a line of sun across its rope trapeze.

_______

On The Subject of Enduring Love

I have sent my driver, with the map in his head.

He'd be better off blindfold.

Better off dead.

Banter with him as events unfold.

Pretend you've not gone mephitic and old.

Forever is the thing, forever is the word.

Forever the mounted, desiccated bird.

I have sent my car with the soft leather seats.

All the ash trays nailed,

sick with sweets.

I wait for you breathless, gloved and veiled

tubercular, powdered, primped and paled.

Here love's cricket who last night chirred

lies dead in the mouth of that god-damned bird.

____________

for The Sunday Muse #165, where I am hosting.