Challenge: Five Poems in Five Days.

[PandoraGlitters]

z-4 Duct Taping the Ascetic to the Rocket

Do you have your plug
in?
Good. We all like to be comfortable.
Even ascetics
filled that socket with psalm or hum
but they didn't lick
as we do
the linings of clouds
or pick
as we do
the numbers
mega bonused
listening for the click in the tumbler.

Some sockets click but some
hum slow
at the speed of the plunger.
Some growl straight from
the belly or pussy.

My socket slides and clicks.
The blue light goes
on
and a loneliness I can't name
melts at the fringes

because I am here now
in here.

 

[Eluard]

U+1; 3

After the Ceremony




The bride is burnt white like a phosphor flare,
Hissing sleepily over the deep black seas of his entrails.

To the march he goes slowly, slowly, to the wide centre
Where they both are stripped of phenomena, the animal

Fur of light and shadow. Her gallop is slow, a frieze,
The stars sketching space against the closure of sky;

And his eye watches her, a monstrous topology
Spinning on a neutron, something flower-like staring

Through the crack of night. She reaches him at the sea ---
Where the sunset is a failing dish of blood,

A dull-headed and simple Jack, sawing at its own branch of sight ---
And makes her transition to the thin voice of dreams.

He lay awake at night, watching the stars like a tinny radio
Executing her face, his teeth champing on the horizon's

Cyanide bit. He carves a heart between her slender legs.
Whiter than sand they run through each others fingers

Like claws of gas alight under a petrol rain.



----------------

 

[PandoraGlitters]

z-5 Flood Insurance

Warning: might send you into sugar shock. But this is all I got today.


At the steps of the bridge under
which homeless men sleep, a bag
says in luck red ink Have a Nice Day

and the smile is sincere for within
the bag is a meal partitioned
in styrofoam, some recently warm
vittles, square as a sailor's fold.

I step past this offering, thinking
to the person who left it, "You
are our insurance against flood,"

for what God could destroy the city
of a person who places the offering
Have a Nice Day side up?

 

[Eluard]

u+1; 4

Doll

Take by degrees the measure of this enemy
And stoke its death with patience.

How much harm it has done,
Fattened with night grease and rouge,

Sitting in your past,
Awaiting the visits of memory —

All so exotic and yet so black in the absence
Of its charm.

Take the needle, sew a means of dying
Into its blue forehead

And let it fall. Put back the petals:
She loves me not, she loves me . . .

Death is a flower slowly opening
In the flower of the blood.

Take its hand and boil this surprised eye
Deep in the needle of yourself.



---------------

 

[Eluard]

u+1; 5

Change

The star hits that buried wheel in space
and begins to break up, slowly,
dissolving into napalm on children
and tongues of plasma that overtake
the lonely and the dying,
and somewhere, at some time,
the muzzle flash of a bullet
that is fired into a brain.
It is change the boiling lake whispers
And keeps the sword hidden.

The hero is babbling now
and prophesying at the lakeside
of all those who will die
if he, he alone, does not save them —
but the star has sown deafness
in advance of its fall.
This is all that is needed for change
to overcome the world.
The hero loses his way
back to the fire that is right before him.


---------------

 

[Homburg]

"Planerian in a maze"

Faced by prodding brushes
Locked into a conditioned heaxagon
I seek deviation
but conformity is paid in surcease

Right. - No.
Right! - No.
GO RIGHT! - No.
GO RIGHT, DAMN YOUR EYES! - NO.

"This one isn't working"
Discarded
Anomalous
... I know freedom

 

[Homburg]

"Sequel"

The deck is not very solid
Swaying slightly with each step
but so important to stand here
now
small white box in hand
grey powder and bits of white where once was love
affection
and warm fur
now returns to enrich the soil
outside the window
where she watched the birds
and I add my own waters to the
leaves of grass
tasting the beloved cinders

 

[Homburg]

"Slow terrorism in the fishbowl of retail convenience"

Each day behind the counter
Bored looks at those who hate her

Yes, I stole your jobs
Yes, I take your money
Yes, I hate America
This is why I sell you your cigarettes
This is why I sell you junk food

Die coughing and fat.

 

[Homburg]

I sit there against
the concrete looking cocky
self-assured
in control
I am as fucking GQ
as I will ever look
in my life

I'm am surrounded
by friends
Guys who would
pull me out of a bad situation
or sit in jail with
me joking afterwards

and I look good

The secret
is to be terrified and
wanting
nothing more
than to retch

Looking GQ
is all about the vomit

 

[Homburg]

Apollo spurned
Cassandra's curse
lies on me. I see
but am not believed.

What, sun god,
did I do to spurn you
so? Why must
I be aggrieved?

Forgive this heart
for unknown crimes
and, oh
my cries hold dear.

For I am bare
of life and hope
Salted earth
Once dreams laid here



(This is a train wreck, and I can't make it work. I just need it off my chest and out my hands. My apologies y'all.)

 

[Homburg]

Another 5

I hear the hammer
drive the nails
the sound of wood grain
tearfully parting
to let through
steel, sharp as spiteful words

I hear the sound
of her little girl
voice singing through
the pain, eyes leaking
truth down her face

I hear the tolling
of the bell, droning
like mortality
and the end of dreams

I hearing the rustle
of breath sighing
through the grass

It is the sunset of belief
and I cannot see

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Y-1

At the end of each life
--last echo rushing
self from the corpse--that black box

of our respective wreckages--
how slim is the silver sum?

What matter mat or pew
on which the cooling body begged for life?
Each mean span
grumbles its lack in spools or pleads its need
for more chances at the toss. But some rare
wings spread, caping shoulders eloquent

with sacrifice. What name
matters more than the one whispered
from dying lips?

 

[Eluard]

Z-i

(posted this half an hour ago but it didn't stick — strange.)

Je voudrais vous revoir

As once we were —
Since as the Italians say
‘The living always meet again’. We are living still, aren’t we?
You see, I no longer feel you in the world
As I used to.
Packets of rain come down from the mountain
With no name, as once they would have had yours.
But that was all so long ago someone will say
Splitting a truth into two lies

And whereas there was a time I would have kept the truth
Now I have only the lies.

. . .

 

[unpredictablebijou]

notes for the tangible girl

drop by drop a swelling flood
speaks in tongues below the surface
pressed tight and beating, her
rough water shifts in the light
stretching open. she contains
sudden valleys, and in the dark
the river emerges like pearls

rounded stones, a crest
the leaping crescent of the fish.
My finger carries dreams
into deep curves
your bright beads wake over rocks
this liquid echo rushes in
over the lip and sharp-lit ripples work deep

 

[Angeline]

I'll walk with you Bij

I have secrets in my hands and heart.
Pieces I still hold. Stories speak

from graves, from corners
of a toybox. They roll in and out

with tides. I plant lilacs, a dogwood
blooms. I light yarzheit candles, pray

if only in an inner life. Summer sings
there in splashy heat and calliope music,

If You Knew Susie, God Bless America,
ice cream, wheels and waves. The metal clink

of winter on the Delaware, skates on river
days that slipped and fell but still knew how

to laugh. How can my hands close? I carry
stones here, no more substantial than wind.

 

[Homburg]

"sketchy"

distal point converges
plain white plane
sundered through
sintered grey
lubricates
mediates
bellies meaning
birthed of need
elusive
illusive
right but doomed
pixellate
alleviate
shared
and stared
regret as expression

 

[Angeline]

Halfway across the universe an aging star
exploded in a previously unknown galaxy.
I wonder was it Liz? Timothy Leary is

_________________already exploded.

Remember when your naked eyes
knew stars were bright enough? She was
bright enough, her eyes wide wish purple.

_________________Technicolor.

Oh Elizabeth, once of lush skin unblemished
by the whim of time, was the universe half
its present age when I could still see you

_________________without a telescope?

 

[unpredictablebijou]

W-2 well you asked for it.

I try not to do this but I hated this piece, or at least parts of it, so I've actually taken it down and dragged it off behind the barn to be killed.

It won't go to waste. We're cooking it for dinner tonight. It's tough but will make a good stew.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Y-2 k? Nomad

Grains of sand abandon her for the collective
upon which sandals press; knees up squat.

She shields the small struggle of a fire from the call
of the forest wind, restrains her lungs--it has to look easy

not panting for it. Carefully, she welcomes its orange tip
with warm air kiss until the fire grows strong and licks
its roaring teeth.

She holds her womb from the flame, convinced
it would be unnatural, suffocated on smoke:
both fire and ember.

Waking, she pokes coals and packs mud hoping she can teach
it to love. Her fingers flick wood chip poems
into its mouth for breakfast.

 

[Eluard]

Z-ii

Wire Eclogue

This city has its own orbit in the nerves
and, trawling the succulent grid of lights,
language is its dull weather, grainy epiphenomena
under which people walk like circus cats
under the whip.

And when the city slides sideways into the eye
like a somber troupe of clowns
See! It is stabbing at a cloth doll of itself
with a rain that is always less than rain
and more like the words for rain.

Now that this room is so far from you
these myths begin to afflict me
as though the revenant city were pissing
into its own shadows and deserted rooms,
murmuring and beyond control.

Are you able to recognize the shadows
of these words?
I have felled them across your future.
No sanctuary that you can find
will make you immune to what I have wished
from this room.

The wind bends like barbed wire
Feel! You are losing density to the light.

 

[Homburg]

She remembers
Dance lessons
A promise made
Before pulling back
Reminders unneeded
Advice unheeded
Better to walk away
Than dance alone


(Dammit, thought I'd posted it yesterday.)

 

[Homburg]

(As the previous piece was slotted for yesterday, here is today's offering.)



Carolina bluegrass
sleeps under a
blanket of woolen mist

The still is cracked open
as pipes skirl and
wail and reel o'er the hills

Inexplicably clad
in kilt and sword
Carolina hills fade

 

[Angeline]

2-3 Ode to a Peach

Spring's urgent rain yields
to the insatiable tumult of summer
when you spill from straw baskets,
tussle for position in rough, soft

contradiction with delicate fuzz,
that minute down the tint of elegant blush
as if twilight painted fingers of bright orange
and yellow to hush the day, drift it slowly
into the shadow of slumber here

on this orb, Sun seeped to your flesh
and imbued you with simplicity
rarely remembered in the profusion of choice
that bedevils our modern days.

Do not forget this quiet essence
once poised on a thin whip of branch
making no announcement
but perfuming its small space
with a promise of innocence
and sweet complexity of nectar
beyond the surface.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

W-3

Trying to write about my day like Frank O'Hara does

But see it's like that all the time for me
the death in the middle of the mundane.
Here in the bar, while the talk
turns to bands, or breakfast
I'm suddenly understanding
how this one Dakini
figured out the mandala of Chinnamasta
and the connection it has
to Carole Lombard's character
in My Man Godfrey.
I can't tell anyone;
no one cares. This is why
I carry my notebook
and why I get so sad
when normal people try to pick me up in bars.

Today I got a call from
Pete the Bucket Salesman from New Jersey.
It had been three years since he had met me
at the bar, traveling through to a convention.
Still divorced, he says.
He tells me "You gave me a green stone.
I still have it in my car. You told me
about, like, worshiping women like goddesses
when you have sex. I read some
on the Internet about what you
Witches do. I'm still
in New Jersey, but
I can call you next time I come
that way. Do you still have
two husbands, or whatever?"

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Y-3

When you say love I feel tender as a black eye.
I let my bangs fall down. I hide under headphones in here
plugged in and rocking, fingers throbbing. I'm always ready
to throw up my arms, run, yell Fuck You and toss
the grenade, but miraculously, I can fall asleep
in the crook of your arm, nose pressed against your bicep
steady as a calm night.

Yes, I accept your insignia, wear it like a prefix.
As we walk past a man shouts your name
but he doesn't mean you. I've become your ambassador.
I prepare lists of your virtues in case there are reporters.
But only the drizzle asks and disbelieves.