Nutshell

 In a nutshell, meat and wings

and infinite other disturbing things

that rise and rule with iron fist

the little nest that crowns your kiss

Curse the summer, curse the tree

that swelled such nutshells patiently

gardener saw, gardener knew

even as those nutshells grew.

______

written for quadrille monday at dverse "crown"

image: syd barrett, a founding member of pink floyd whose life was derailed by mental illness. However, this poem is about whatever you think it's about.

To Those Dead On Public Transport

 

To those dead on public transport,

we do not judge.

Perhaps you do not know, and not knowing

is just a vacant compartment that the Clerk

Of All Knowledge fills with folded messages.

The various vacuum attachments,

marrow spoons,

foreign capitols,

all may confound and confuse.

Majestic death takes its place with these.

To those dead on public transport,

you needn't concern yourselves further

with stops,

schedules,

responsibilities,

or other petty matters.

Your destination has come to you instead.

Have no worries about your husk of flesh.

If muscles relax and give way,

water is the same whether in glass or lake;

soil the same whether in pot or prairie.

If others snicker, 

they have forgotten their own beginnings.

To those dead on public transport,

this bulb, this skin, 

this womb in which you gestated

now opens.

You emerge. 

It is not the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

You need do nothing but exist vividly,

God's bauble,

taken up,

cut and polished,

worn with pride,

shining brightly.

_________

for Sunday Muse #188

Emmeline, In November

 

Emmeline, darkling darling of November

wears russet and red and the rain at dawn.

Her summer-gone ways turn miser to spender,

Emmeline, darkling darling of November.

Her cucks in the churchyard rotting, remember

the rose and her wrist that dropped it down.

Emmeline, darkling darling of November

wears russet and red and the rain at dawn.

__________

this is a triolet poem. 

the image is French language singer Mylene Farmer.

I have written about Emmeline before.

"Emmeline By Evening"

and "Emmeline By Wolf Light"

The Drowsing Moon

 

"Take the ribbon from your hair

shake it loose and let it fall"

--Kris Kristofferson

The moon drowses now, in her compartment

made of asters on a train to the sea

and she seeks in her dream the department

of missent lilies, mislaid carelessly.

Her petition is dancing so sweetly

that the gods search their memories for tears

to stitch where her silver crescent appears.

The moon is blemished now, by dawn and time

and the train master calls for her sorrow

to be served as gin with a wedge of lime

and then forwarded on to tomorrow

where what they can't buy, the asters borrow

a mixing of winds as a bandage to bind

her with thread of forgetting, serpentined.

_____

for Tuesday Poetics: Fay Collins

art by Fay Collins

this poem is a rhyme royal

Word Garden Word List Prompt #1 (Fitzgerald)

 

Hello and welcome to a new prompt I am going to host here at Word Garden. Every Monday at midnight for as long as I shall dig it, and excepting major holidays, I will provide a list of words derived from a themed source. 

Please use at least 3 of the 20 words provided to write either a poem of any style or length, or a "flash 55", which is a piece consisting of exactly 55 words not counting the title. Variations of the words are allowed. Simply leave the link for your post in the comment section. Prompt remains "live" thru Friday.

This week's 20 words are all derived from the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here they are:

champagne

cigarettes

dark-haired

delirious

edition

feather

feverish

flabby

hotel

morning

mournful

pocket

precariously

sorry

tremendously

trespasser

unsteadily

Vienna

withering

________

The February of a Heart

 

Here is something from the February of a heart,

cigarette smoke caught in a bell jar,

roses in river ice.

She was dark haired--half onyx, half common crow,

a revised edition of herself,

a slow-fused Chinese firework.

What is there to say now, in too-bright summer?

Her presence made one feverish,

a Vienna of the blood, a powerful champagne.

To be delirious is to be happy, as falling birds are, briefly.

Her smile a trespasser, she owns unsteadily, carelessly, 

one's fine, burning, hotel of the moment.

Here is something from the February of a heart--mine.

One recovers precariously from enchantment,

feather in hand, but sorry the way birds are, when they die.

________

For Word Garden Word List #1. 

art: Gustav Klimt "Golden Tears and Kiss"

Je Ne Regrette Rien

 

Here is the door you did not go through.

You, ghost handed, 

the handle deaf, 

non-days gathered,

a luggage pyramid entombing clouds and afternoons

discovered centuries later 

by fictions wearing anvil boots.

Come, recover here as the iron rails of empires

rise and intertwine, cobras

reciting the Romantics

with voices quilted from collected rhododendrons.

Stay with what is real,

the blistering sun, or the blue ice calving

every next minute 

into each moment's astonished respiration.

I love you.

I don't love you.

I have never met you.

I can't live without you.

What use the playing cards of a ferret scrying in a tumbler?

There is another door,

an infinity of mirrors,

One True Path

and a million sherpas hauling sermons

up Everest for nobody.

Forget this door, Fortunato its drunken ticket taker.

Walk away,

go home, 

slip yourself into a vase bed and bloom wildly

between the cracks of dreams.

Rise, 

regret nothing,

and proceed in any direction

jubilantly,

automatically,

as even the slightest blade of grass will, like a deity.

____________

for The Sunday Muse #187.