Me, Looking At You, Looking Back

 

Here we are -- me,

looking at you

looking back.

You dip your head, do a little shuffle dance.

I get the question but you know the answer 

before my lips so much as flutter.

You are an odd blue-black, luminous by moonlight

but a cipher at noon, or so you pretend--

our story begun at the bitter end.

You lit and left, lit and left the hollow place in me,

inspecting, appraising, always returning.

You gave me baubles and trifles as rent.

I gave you blood where your sharp parts went.

Here is my dead-womb where you rode

and taught me to mark faces that hold no light.

Screaming helps too. I thought it might.

I am the house of glass, you the burnt wick.

You are the mother of every line I write,

your call the ink I use, fragrant and thick.

We are yin and yang at each other's back.

Me, looking at you

looking back.

______

for Desperate Poets "In The Footsteps Of Our Feathers"

Music: Beth Hart "Your Heart Is As Black As Night"

The Hawk

 By a fence line in the damp green of the morning

a hawk by gifted vision caught a wren.

There underneath his claws she learned the sense behind the laws

and she'll never by the fence line sing again.

In the evening by the fence line lay her feathers

which I gathered up to weave a tiny dress.

Stars said, "No, it cannot fit," but I whispered love to it

and by daylight I stood head to toe in yes. 

By the fence line in the damp green of the morning

I made from apple wood a mandolin

to play the hawk a tune, oh aren't you pretty as the moon

and at his touch I felt the answer sinking in. 

______

shared with Desperate Poets Open Link. 

A Taste of Honey

 

I'd like to say I understand

and forgive as in the carpenter's command.

The once-lovely loaf has gone green in my hand;

the crows will have it now.

It's such a feeling to be living at the dawn

with new love in some contented Avalon,

but these things cannot go on and on.

They shy and die away. 

Around your arm, a snake arrives

and I see your face reflected in its eyes.

It speaks one word--the word is "compromise."

It turns your heart to smoke.

I'd like to say it's all all right

and I can't remember anything I dream at night

but my bedside vase holds blooms gone dead and white.

They wave like conquered kings.

And so I'll say--no word at all.

Both the dawning and the dimming hold a sudden fall.

The gods we placed our faith in don't return our call.

"A taste of honey" is their lazy joke. 

____________________

for Desperate Poets "Lonelytown"

 

"Flat Earthers Unite" a masterpiece by Q. Benighted Shamanyan, Flat Earth Society Grand Dragon

 Flat Earthers Unite 'neath the sweet umbrella of idiocy

and raise your voice in the cretin's version of Innisfree.

Pose and posit with simpleton's logic that what you see is all

there is to Heaven and Earth, Horacio you libtard tool.

Keep expanding on fake moon landings where static flags still flutter

and that the shadow IRA killed JFK with microchips in peanut butter.

In the devil's pizza parlor Hillary harbors tykes who are made to swap genders

to offend Jesus Christ who stays in most nights raising the rates on His renters.

The War On Christmas is serious business if the libs cancel Santa outright

and then ever after the horrible factor of a Santa who's black as the night

blown up in the yards of the BLM crowd who combine with the immigrant scaries

who jig hand in hand with the dregs of the land like POC's, atheists and fairies.

Flat Earthers unite to destroy all Bud Lite and the lamestream media too

who lie and tell us conservative fellas that slaves on plantations were blue

and other such whoppers, O Walmart Shoppers led by Commander Kid Rock

who collect Trump cards and various canards while for birthdays the kiddies get Glocks.

_________

for Desperate Poets "desperate satires." 

Honey Locust

 

Delicate, graceful honey locust tree

jeweled in jade as if Orient-made

thorn-pierced I came and wearily

sick of sun and parched for shade.

Faithful, silent honey locust tree

binding the burns that words had done

constantly and steadily

easing the sting of a dream undone.

Summer's darling, the honey locust tree

July and August's waving dancer

when asked to say that you cared for me

dipped in the dark but gave no answer.

Yellowing honey locust tree

not so constant after all

your chill-bared arms revealed to me

the twisting thorns that pierced the fall.

_________

for desperate poets--"woe my spurs; desperate elegies." I have used the spurs above. 

Music: Larkin Poe Day Tripper

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 

English Walnut

 every day

the black squirrels raid Heaven.

I find leaf clusters

like fallen angels

everywhere.

they want

the hard nuts growing high

in the tree I tend

with loving care

these twenty odd years.

each time

they find their desire,

the Icarus clusters fall.

my tree expands, produces,

then incrementally loses 

all summer long.

I learn

from watching all this

a new behavior

a new ache.

will you bury me as well one day, squirrels

or float me old green feathers

in kind aerial gesture?

_____

for Sherry's prompt at desperatepoets. 

image of leaf cluster and walnut my own