Challenge: Five Poems in Five Days.

[PandoraGlitters]

4-5

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[ElmerGlew]

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[ElmerGlew]

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[vampiredust]

9 - 1

Another Friday, Another Funeral

We watched the undertakers
loitering outside the Armenian
church, guarding their casket
like a pack of overzealous pups
who had just received a new
toy. The attendees came from
different directions, attracted
to the bodies' magnetism. Most
wore the usual uniform - black
tie and suit with a white shirt.
Only an observer - a robin -
dared look out of place with his
russet breast. I thought of him
listening to them weeping, ready
to chirp and guide them out
of the stillness waiting outside.

 

[AChild]

The Devil Beats his Wife

Take my hand
in hopes of wish forfillment
I A.

Jacket off in the rain
jack's wolf whistle teeth
shaped like Pan flutes,
bite
the pressure causes flesh to
raise

Go light
clothes soaked
naked to the elements
the dust of you makes mud
let your smoke raise

Step on shadow
climb the mountain
run like the bird song on
the kabuki trees
lap the wind for revenge

Pierce the clouds, an arrow;
hands back face forward >
breath the air that makes rain

 

[vampiredust]

9 - 2

Certainty

Cleaning out the airing
cupboard reveals life's
eternal struggle: a dead
wasp's chassis and two
moths circling its corpse.
My bones, knowing I will
fall into earth one day,
weep in their sleep.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

5-1 showoff

stretch the body
to its perimeter making it long
a yoga highway
a runway
a stripmall

you can choose which bone
to love
I will show you
all of them if you have time

there are twenty
six more when I point my toe and lift
it angle it to the dying sun
fifty two when I frame
the shining moon

if you find nothing
loveable in my bones
use star knives to open
the present of my tissues

warm in my blood

meat is soluble

 

[Eluard]

I — Christmas Eve

La Notte

A Tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni

Swimming against plaster
. . . Someone mentions the absence of flowers
. . . . . . Which had gone unnoticed until that moment.

All of this is beneath the oceans, it's quipped
. . . And suddenly it all makes sense.
. . . . . . Life forms here but can't be lived

That requires something more than mere geometry
. . . Something richer, though no one can say what.
. . . . . . Til then the desert stays silent and unbloomed.

This was your theme, maestro,
. . . The terrible weight of coming alive inside oneself
. . . . . . And finding an underworld of abstract forms,

A Mondrian city staring up through the ice,
. . . Knowing one can't live there.
. . . . . . Yes, it is your reward, the reward

Of consciousness, if you like,
. . . But only you saw the burden
. . . . . . That always someone will disappear from here

And you will search blindly
. . . Only to realise, in the end,
. . . . . . That they have disappeared into life, ascended

To the forgetting,
. . . Up to the realm of Lotus Ware and Osirian motifs.
. . . . . . The streets of Rome

Would never be so empty again —
. . . Never again would one be able to walk through
. . . . . . Blocks of shadow folded across a tooth-white plaza.

You knew that it was only in such walking
. . . That one lived and was whole — when
. . . . . . All of life visited you at once, crowding you.

And telling stories of what it had done in your absence.
. . . This is the secret: when life wants to speak to you
. . . . . . It makes art.

So on the occasion of your death
. . . Flowers would seem to be the wrong choice
. . . . . . Ironic in a way you never were

(Though the scherzo romp clearly appealed
. . . That will not do here either.)
. . . . . . So all I have for you, in place of the praise

You deserved and never received
. . . Is this wreath of Platonic shapes that I made
. . . . . . Made and coloured in, burnt umber, Chinese

White, red ochre — and, finally, lamp black
. . . For the shadows whose shapes on the walls
. . . . . . Have ceased.

 

[vampiredust]

7- 3

The Terrace

A partially opened
window in the guesthouse
gave me a glimpse
of a hidden terrace

with its orange tree
in one corner producing
fruit to the music
of a Chinese water clock.

Three cast iron chairs
with backs woven
into copper coloured
quavers sung the chorus.

I wanted to take this song
and watch it paint everything
I had with tranquillity,
were it not for an unseen

cloud staring at me straight
in the eye, ready to release
its thunder.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

5-2

There are only three ways to begin:

the statement, the question, and the command.
Each presumes and makes its own demands

to be trusted, to be answered, or obeyed.

When you approach, composing your words
and your walk in sync, the half-gone beer
palmed possessively, will you ask her
to dance with you? If she has ever been
in that class with you? or if she has a twin
sister who lives in New Jersey? In Omaha?
or someplace more glamorous. Paris?

Or will you just compel her? Perhaps you will
calmly say, in a voice made more agreeable
by the undertone of romance, the beer left
back on the table so that your hand
asks the question your mouth doesn't
as you say, "Dance with me."

And if you see that she might, if the amber
in her eye flickers with possibility, add
"Please." Not to ask, but to urge
her hand that much quicker into yours.

 

[Eluard]

2 — Christmas Day

…Along the X-Y Coordinate

The octopus and the shark lay on the floor
uninterested in night. The storm brought them
to this place,

coughed them up with the branches and
bicycle sprockets and tubercular magnolias. (I think
you understand the life in which you cannot move,
always ready to block out the sky with a palm —
but the whirlwind whitewashes everything to sky light
and my son disappears, shouting, into the tube of your life.)

On the floor of the crater I find a polished piece of
Lapis and take it home to show God that he still exists —
in the dark, a flare rises, and the world is convex once more.


. . .

 

[vampiredust]

9-4

Nobody Knows You're Special


The passenger playing classic
rock loudly on Upminster train
caresses his Starbuck cup's
festive neck like a lover
he had just discovered, choosing
to ignore the outside world
unwrapping itself: a grey sky
boxing skyscrapers and apartment
blocks. Streetlamps poking
their heads through spots of fog.
Look carefully. The pearls plugged
into his ears will soon turn back
into oysters. He will miss this,
listening only to life’s unwanted static.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

5-3 Carolling in America

Pipes play muffled choruses
of water rush, conducted
between the walls and in the cupboards
lining this house, singing the wake

ful showers and filled pots
of Christmas morning.
Mice play in the attic,
celebrating the death of the cat
whose music is missed most

by the matriarch. Drapes rustle, gathered
by her fragile hand to the hook
that pins the coif of the bay window
which faces the world, bravely

and announces the story
of this family's yearly pilgrimage
to the oldest place they have
in this new land.

 

[ElmerGlew]

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[vampiredust]

6 - 5

Response


Thank you for the card and letter,
the editor replied. Unfortunately we
can't publish this. There are fish hooks
still visible on your lower lip.

 

[Eluard]

3 — Boxing Day (New)

The Juggernaut and the Warrior


Fire angel, my words reach you
As a wave reaches the beach —
A child plays there, on the hand
Of my outstretched words
Ignoring the sun, ignoring the wind
That carries torment in its mouth.

It is the stones that judge the world
It is the earth into which the lake of
Dreams soaks and vanishes
That will tell the story of us —
Dreamless.

I wanted to change all this:
To ensure that our dreams
Were added into the sum
Of all we are. I failed
To judge by the ceaseless
Screaming of the Sphinx
In my ear alone.

So tell me the invocation, fire angel?

Behind the veil
Only my words reach you.
Were you also, once, a child
Playing on the beach?
Was suffering the sun your hand
Blocked out for years?

And the side of your hand that
Faced onto suffering —
Is it now deaf and blind as stone?
Do we know this thing as the World?


. . .

 

[PandoraGlitters]

5-4

From the formal dining room of his
five bedroom three bath four car garage
residence, the senator offers a prayer
over the glazed bodies of birds. He prays perfunctory thanks
then petitions the God for victory
over his enemies but he does not see them,
the Iraqis, projected onto the curve of his skull, he sees

tanks, he sees long barrels stemming into blooms
of blood licked fire. He sees boots stomping
in red mud. The movie in his head
is cast with Americans in every role. Though he imagines
the enemy marching in a distant sand basin
the picture he has made of the enemy's face,
beneath sweat and oil,
is his own.

To his left and right, heads bowed over Christmas
dinner, his wife and daughter wait
his low amen to follow with their own.
Their movies are cast internationally
and they can see the bronze eyes flickering
with dying fire. They see 80,000 pairs
of eyes closed by hands of mothers and sisters.

The senator says "Thy will be done"
but thy carries the inclusion of entitlement
as though he and God shared a golf cart.
The chorus of somber amens hang carcinogenic
over the feast, flavoring the fat black and crisp.

 

[Eluard]

4 — Boxing Day (old)

To an Abandoned Fountain

Done with forests that scare easily
Blue cloud tidying away blood,
Done also with the house of air
That cooked nightmares on a stove
And waited for the late sunlight
To enter the room with whorls
And horses and raisins that
Would become night.

Done with it as one is done with
The letter that will explain
To tomorrow’s simulacrum
Of today that everything gets worse
And it is not allowed to mind.
The wood princess breaks up
The bones of the sun and
Hides them all around and
Lying about it is our new religion.

Done with that, and will say it
With silent breath.


. . .

 

[PandoraGlitters]

5-5 How Love Works

still inside
of her vagina, not even
all the way out when he cries

mouth open so wide
feet pushing, frail muscles
straining, legs straight

trying to break
free of his mother's
muscular love
then she is cut

the episiotomy searing
soldering her cry to his
she bares down

her birth canal collapses to a threshhold
and there's a great

gush a flood of hot
fleshy water, grey and pink
her heart pumping against full lungs

her hands reach, fingers splayed
to reclaim part of her
she's lost
she'll reach

for him for fifty eight years

 

[UnderYourSpell]

More more ..... I need the rest of his story .. what happened at fifty eight? Was he gone? Was she?

 

[Eluard]

5.

Postcard

A small raven claps into a tree,
Seeking the lipstick smudge of sunset.

Too bad the desert couldn’t
Wait for death, but went ahead —

Throwing out bathtubs, ink rings,
Rape and cactus flowers.

The bell of sky is rung
By the scorpion’s question

And all around
In the conflagration that results,

In the ruby drizzle of memory,
The pistol smokes

Like a volcano
And is answer enough this time.


. . .

 

[ElmerGlew]

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[ElmerGlew]

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[ElmerGlew]

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[ElmerGlew]

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