Challenge: Five Poems in Five Days.

[Eluard]

3-4

. . . .

 

[manipulatrix]

1-3

......

 

[Angeline]

Sunday mornings I come
bearing bagels, not regret
for the old gods who sleep uneasily
or not at all (or they are not at all).
I don't worry over who has risen
on a cracker, who will or won't
be slouching into Bethlehem.
If I look to the West
there are faded cowboy backlots,
dreams dying on a diner stool
and a fat squirrel who sits
back on his haunches and waits
for me to make the first move.
Here Monsiour Squirrel: Take this
piece of the western wall
and bury a chinquapin in the crevice.
Your wish will come true in January
when you are lean and wanting
and I will slice my bagel
so the perfect circle falls in perfect
halves, a host for my mouth.
This is my body, my blood
that means nothing to you, nothing
to the empty sky which is doing
a very good job of holding up
the trees and not much more.

 

[manipulatrix]

1-4

.....

 

[UnderYourSpell]

1

In the burning cities of Silanthea
the starving dogs collect about
the vanquishing armies feet.
Kandor calls out for more fresh
maidens for deflowering, seeding
his conquering spoils of war.
In vain Sturena hides, unguarded now,
in her father's shattered throne room.
Already weakened by months of siege
she grasps her father's mighty sword,
better death than surrendering her
innocence to her sworn enemy.

 

[Eluard]

3-5

. . . .

 

[Angeline]

He asks why whimsy can make me sad.
I explain it belongs to children, who know
nothing can be kept, who hold all things
carelessly in their small hands,
lose them easily as a ball of vanilla
plummets from a cone, metamorphizes
from fairy ice to dirty snow, fit for ants.

We undervalue whimsy for being tiny,
equate size with import. Balloons
unteather from disinterested fingers,
drift blueward and who wonders
for bright circles: Red, Yellow, Blue
that shrink, pass trees and disappear?
Who wonders for blades of grass
trod underfoot? Plums,
those cold purple marvels
are eaten, their pits spat. Do they grow
anew in someone else’s imagination?

Who remembers the fairy tales?
The mermaid on the rock, the nightingale
song at twilight, the steadfast tin soldier
misshapen in the grate? A boy and girl
tumble down hillsides, outwit witches,
with nothing more than breadcrumb maps
or a promise of eyes while fingers
share the rose in a secret garden.
Unmindful of storm, emporer, winter.

In another story a little girl does not
fly to heaven in a grandmother flame,
but lives with her scars for many years.
Her hands shake but still she paints
her beautiful memories and speaks
with the ghosts who attend her. Maybe

she spends too much time on whimsy,
but she watches crows and squirrels.
She feels connected to the trees, knit
somehow against the pines who answer
the wind with impatient rustles.
She understands trees and the life
span of spiders better than herself
and no longer asks whether this
is happily ever after.

 

[manipulatrix]

5-5

.....

 

[UnderYourSpell]

2 ~ 2

Alas all is lost, she is discovered
and the mighty sword falls crashing
from her weakened fingers as she
faints away from hunger and terror.

Kandor licks his lips at the sight
of this tender morsel displayed
upon the bed of furs, helpless
unheeding, as he savours the moment,
knowing full well who lays before him,
nubile, untouched a fathers darling.

 

[sellthecookie]

upload failed

ACT 1


love, if this is
love: acrobatics
on quicksand beds
with floral prints and disaster stripes,
in cheap motels with matchbox
sized soaps that wash away sweat,
if this is how you want it,
recorded, then uploaded
later, in all glorious
pixels, why is there
no resolution? maybe
that is not always the right
question to ask of you.
love, this is love
in the youtube world.
there is just
no resolution.
and meanwhile,
the bellboy is already
knocking on our door.
your time is up,
sir.

 

[Liar]

2-1

Little By Little

Little by little
and by and by and by
means so small
that fidget and fiddle
and ache and make
would make no sound at all,

you skiddle and fiddle and
fidget finger by finger that step
and stop and linger
on anger and hunger and
anything in between
that rather and really
should stay if not untouched
at least unseen.

Little by little you
trip on a tremble
and flutter and blink,
turn coal into carousel scarlet
and brick into butter scoth pink.

Flutter and blink and flicker
and twink and fiddle and skiddle and fun,
you fumble and lips tips stumble
across this tense, and if you mumble
this close something might make sense
just a little by little
leave little fingerprints by and by
to guide down the sun.

It needs to be nothing but little by little,
a fubmle a stumble a fiddle,
to get the job done.

 

[manipulatrix]

2-1

.....

 

[UnderYourSpell]

2 ~ 3

Ex king Porthram, head held low
through exhaustion and shame,
lay on a meagre bed deep below
in the dank dungeons of the castle,
not knowing if his beloved Sturena
was alive or dead or had fallen
victim to the pillaging army.
Silently he prayed to the gods that
she has slipped away to safety
but in his heart knew it could not be.

 

[joric]

Grandfather cried.
I couldn't tell you how many
times or the circumstance
that leads to memory. He cried
like rain that falls soft, no sound
but I see his wet face, tears
tracked past his glasses.
I smell his aftershave,
Old Spice forever mixed with sadness
for me. I've tried to imagine

their faces, bewildered
then horrified, maybe resolute
in between choking for air,
on the way to peaceful. I know
even the most violent Death
can be recomposed
to manufacture serenity,
but it's all imagination,
a blank gap we fill
with supposition. No one
should have to imagine a family,
and maybe that is why he cried.
Tears for the ocean he crossed,
for the river that moves past
empty banks, for the puddle
that reflects only the sky.

I loved this poem.

 

[Liar]

2-2

Logos Bomb

Words, you want them stripped,
rubbed rancid by your acid spit,
a Pollock of nouns splattered
all over the semantic scope
you can't contain, not anymore,
in vain stabbing that lead tip deep
into the chest of stick figures
on a sheet you haven't put any real
syllables on for years.

You want words fucking in the bushes,
swilling too much cheap Bourgogne
and setting the outhouse on fire,
words tearing down traffic signs
and clusterbombing public buses
with gang tags and crayon hearts.

You want words that can stop
a heart beating or crash Mercury
into the sun, words made of
Plutonium and pain, of parlance
and panic, words that vibrate
in your hands, jump from fingertips
and burns themselves into
the nearest wall.

You want words kneeling by your side
heads bowed, the perfect shapes,
beautiful, deadly, ready to kill
or love by your slightest wink.

They're right here, words, letters,
language bloating my tongue, stuck
just above frantic cords,
shutting off lungs, mumbling dissent
into these too weary ears.

So reach in, rip them out, please,
set them free.

You want words?
Take them from me.

 

[manipulatrix]

2-2

.....

 

[sellthecookie]

ACT 2

ctrl + shift + enter



today, a bullet is lodged
on the wall, etched like
lizard tracks, spider
webs, and teardrops from
picture frames of those who
see too much, day
in
and out. For hours, we cried
to wash away the mad
worry about what lies
on the other side when we finally
emerge out this door,
onto the waiting glare of the
motel owner and his vicarious hatred.
You are absentminded
today, letting go of things
like rings, pendants, and other
weightless objects.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

2 ~ 4

Sturena seems to hear from afar
the song of the minstrel bird
singing by the sunlit quiet waters
of Silanthea, where she gathered
wild flowers with her handmaidens.
Her mind unfocused for a moment
feels the soft furs lying beneath
the nakedness of her alabaster skin,
only to waken fully into the shock
of hands spreading her into openness.

 

[Sabina_Tolchovsky]

he'd tell the same stories
over and over, it wasn't the alzheimeirs
it was just him

he'd smile and his eye's would twinkle
playful & mischievous,

he laughed and swore and drank beer
he logged timber all his life
when there was still real timber to log

taller than a man
at the base
cut down

Atlas holding the world
one marriage
five children, six grandchildren
& five great grandchildren

smell the bar oil and mix from the saw
in the shadowed old wooden garage
part of me lives there, six years old
stealing dixie cups out of the rattleing floor freezer

Grams voice in my head
to not fall in
cause you could die.

He died like he lived,
alive
cheating at solitare
twenty minutes
away from death.

 

[Sabina_Tolchovsky]

it's off the cuff...no editing

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Doesnt need it ... it's perfect

 

[unpredictablebijou]

1-1

Sapphic for Martha

Leonine, she stretches her languid arms to
nearly touch mine across the restaurant table.
Driving in has tightened her shoulder muscles.
She leans to touch me.

How we have approached and avoided each other
through the years, making cool invitations,
touching hands, or letting our gazes flicker
toward one another.

Is it now? Is it time for the actual truth of it,
or will we spend yet another reluctant evening,
dancing in and out of the maddening topic:
who will begin it?

Neither one of us has quite the courage to do it.
I'm convinced I'm too much in love here already.
She'd be shocked at the level of hunger I'd show her
like some crazy stalker.

But if you saw her, you'd understand me completely:
ash-bright hair of a thousand impossible colors,
caught back wild and uncombed in a straining elastic,
coiling like serpents,

and her eyes, it's so stupid to try to describe them.
Blue, yes, blue, but the color is thoroughly pointless
It's just that startling depth, that completeness
that lack of armor

It pins me down to my seat in the restaurant
frozen in the shock of a gaze almost brutal
if it weren't so slick, and so sharp, and so cooling
and full of amusement.

And her voice, the smoky conspiracy of it
low and rough, like Lauren Bacall on a bender,
husky doesn't even begin to cover it.
Trust me, it's maddening.

Jesus Christ, I want her so hard I can't think straight,
never can, whenever I'm looking straight at her.
I'm quite sure that it's not going to happen this evening.
Or ever, most likely.

Let this be enough for another year
this short dosage of her hypnosis and colors
and let me be such a brilliant goddess on paper
that next year, just maybe...

 

[manipulatrix]

2-3

.....

 

[UnderYourSpell]

2 ~ 5

Panic stricken she vainly attempts
to close her legs and brush aside
the fingers prising open her labia,
knowing nothing of the ways of men
Sturena cries out at the intrusion
of a finger into her secret place.
Probing deep inside until finding
her unbroken maidenhead.
Kandor laughs quietly a prize
indeed and his for the taking.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

1-2

Sapphic for Jezebel


Late that night I pretend I am sleeping
when she comes and sits at the side of my mattress.
She apologizes for her terrible temper,
tells me she's sorry.

Back and forth we have gone for ages
in this dance of the mother and daughter;
As she watches, I grow to seductress
tempting her husband.

What she's sorry for doesn't specifically matter
since some part of her knows where the truth lies;
I have grown to become her reluctant rival,
the other woman.

She has read the dynamics of parents,
how a mother relinquishes power to daughters.
In that simple and clean explanation
she rests securely.

That she moves to the safety of concept
protects her from the truth of the matter:
that he comes now at night to my bedroom
silent and angry.

She knows. She must know. But her mind is disabled
all unwilling to see it or stop it.
And these nights when she screams at the jezebel demon
make me believe it.

Demon, surely, something invisibly evil
that must rest in some black hole inside me
calling down this cursed attraction that kills me
making him want me.

I cannot fault her for seeing possession
what else could it conceivably be?
How else, at twelve, would I be able to be her
reluctant rival?

Quiet now, she strokes my thin hand on the bedspread
tells me that she didn't mean what she screamed
but I know the different and terrible truth of it
that name she called me:

Jezebel, queen of the whores and the dogflesh
Jezebel, raped in the night by a monster
Jezebel, demon that flowers inside me
is my real mother.