Three Note Howl: The Wild Hunt

 

Buy this book and save a poet from getting a real job.

Available on Amazon.

The Secret Life Of Mother Moon

From your window,
you follow her phases,
and the brights and the blacks
are so clear
that it appears
there's just dead sky between them.

But in that space
you've mistaken for stasis,
you'll find,
if you draw near,
the return of all tides
and the secret life

of Mother Moon.

First Impressions

manet monet matisse my god -

i've lost my glasses.

For Words Count at Real Toads

Grief

Deathbed driving fucks with your head;
I get lost in my own hometown.
Have to turn around and backtrack
like some damn tourist.

At the pharmacy, I learn
that prescriptions from hospice are free
and tagged with little orange stickers.
The clerk jerks back from the dayglo on the bag
and avoids my eyes.

It's all right, I want to tell her.
Don't worry; it's all right.
Grief isn't contagious.
You're born with it.

For Open Link Night at dVerse

Flake

The family flake slicks back her hair
and falls to work like a field hand -
putting buckets beneath the storm sky;
then, bearing them away.

Angels stay their hands from her bags of sand;
they know she's bound by birth to the grains,
and that she cannot see that the flood has come
for fighting against the rain.

For Open Link Monday at Real Toads

Birthdays

Everyday is someone's birthday,
but I don't bake the cakes no more.
All them candles burn the house down;
don't like confetti on my floor.
And, the headlines on my wrapping paper
just make a soul wish they was never born.

For Poetry Pantry

She Wears The World

She wears the world and wears it well;
the blue brings out her eyes.
And her tattooed thighs,
spread east to west,
are America.

The Pacific is her purse
stuffed with shells and shipwrecks.
Detroit is a heathen verse
emblazoned on her sleeve.
Turnpikes travel her trestled ribs.
Rivers roam her fingers.
Mountains melt and mold to make
stilettos for her feet.

She wears the world and wears it well;
her blue burns out your eyes.
And her fault line thighs,
fracked east to west,
are America.

Some flu delirium ramblings for Fireblossom Friday

Confession

Image via Pinterest

Now that I'm found, 

I prefer lost.

For Peggy's prompt at Real Toads

Bolero

I'm a needle dropped
in the groove of a song.

Spinning vinyl circles
to swelling strings.

Spinning cracked, black circles
of an old man's dreams.

The crescendo

screams

skip

screams

skip

screams

skip

screams.

For Open Link Night at dVerse

Under Saner Stars

Under saner stars,
my last breath
would bring blooms from this broken body.
I'd be covered in a casket of daisies,
and there'd be no need to choose a song.

My headboard would be my headstone;
blank, but for the date.
There'd be viewings and visitations,
but I wouldn't participate.

The service would be silent
unless someone felt a need to pray
with hands raised to the heavens;
Pentecostal . . . but not all day.

Under saner stars,
my last breath
would be years from an unbroken body.
I'd have time to gather the daisies.
I'd have time to write the song.

For Open Link Monday at Real Toads

Weight

I fed the weight
of a woman
to the wolves.
They fattened,
then wasted
come spring.
I laid the weight
of a wife
on a wooden girl
and watched her splinter.

The widow
walks
the weave of her web;
we are fireflies
flush with waiting
for the venom
of her wet welcome
to bid us enter.

For Poetry Pantry

Fence

I've got a fence made of baling wire and bubblegum.
I've got a ditch full of snakes.
I've got a switch I've whittled to a killing point,
and I'll do whatever it takes

to save me from the truth of you
so I can keep on loving you
and tell myself that you love me.

55 words for my G-Man!

White Knuckles

There will be murderous rage.
Swallow it.
It's your wafer at this murmurous mass.
Open the door to the blue scald
and call it spirituous.

Your tongue is your last, best offering.
Hollow it;
split it in half.
Wreath it round the yew tree
so the curious

can weigh the wild of your mourning
and find it wanting.

For Brendan's prompt at Real Toads

Perfect, Margarita

Salt -
a shallow dish
One well-worked lime
Cointreau -
a double splash
Two fingers
Tequila

For Open Link Monday at Real Toads

To Elisabetta

The Night by Elisabetta Trevisan

Tell me about the girl,

tall and fawn as fall.

The one you shawled in silver;

does she exist at all?

Is she method; is she muse?

Is she ladder or the wall?

Tell me about the girl.

Does she exist at all?

For Real Toads and Poetry Pantry

Blueshift

Landscape Orb by Deborah Glessner

I take the stem of the world
between my fingers
and twist:
A, B, C . . .

Letting the letters
follow my fingers,
I twist:
E, F, G . . .

Blueing the mare
between Alpha and Omega,
I twist:
N, O, P . . .

Too fast -
I miss the breaking
of the stem.

When I was a kid, we played a game that involved twisting an apple stem and reciting letters.  Supposedly, the stem would break when you reached the first letter of the first name of the person you would marry.  This is a take on that old game.

A blueshift occurs when objects are moving so fast toward an observer that the blue spectrum of light becomes more visible.

For Margaret's challenge at Real Toads

Allergic To Happy

I was fine by myself.
I might have lived a little spare, here and there,
but I could stretch a caress
across a good forty miles of midnight,
and I was fine.
Just fine.

But now, there's you,
and we're a pair,
and everywhere I turn
I see some looming, scarlet clusterfuck.
A behind the beat word?
A skyward look?
I'm scared half to death and dumbstruck.

Just my luck;
I'm allergic to happy.

For the Sunday Whirl

Your Glittering City

I ran to your glittering city
with my suitcase full of shadows,
decades stuffed in a duffel bag,
and a kiss caught in my hands.
Yes, I ran

as if wolves were behind me.

Understand; your glittering city
seemed a sort of asylum -
a haven for my hiding -
a map with shifting sands
where I could blend in

and escape the wolf beside me.

Damn your glittering city!
Damn its prophets peddling psalms.
Damn its alimony and alms.
Damn its saviors at the roadside stands.
Nothing can

cure this wolf inside me.

For Izzy's prompt at Real Toads

Monstered

Bread baked on a blooded stone
leaves you hungry and hollow.
Milk molested from the breast
cannot silk your sleep.
Red-rimmed eyes testify
the purse is insomnia's pillow.
You're monstered by the mismatch
between your wants and needs.

For Open Link Monday at Real Toads

The Year

I found the cure to my disease
was to starve myself
till I was half past skinny.
I sliced myself in pages
and bound them in a book
for all to read.

I learned the planning of a funeral
rips a ready grave,
but only for the living.
And, a flower that you've tended
with your sweat and time
just goes to governor's weed.

For Poetry Pantry

Look To The Lady

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."

--- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

When summer is such a toothless lie

the even the sunlight shivers,

and dragonflies are caught in flight

by the ice of reaching rivers,

look to the lady you left behind

with less care than you'd give a stranger.

Look to the lady of snow shrouded July;

a witch is quick to anger.

A bit of fantasy for Kerry's challenge at Real Toads

Barefoot Girl

Go out and spin
in your pastel dress.
Don't stay home waiting for some princely man
to bring glass slippers -
they'll just bind up your feet.
Lord, soon enough, a ring will tie your hands.

Dance barefoot, girl,
while you can.
Do all your dancing barefoot, my sweet, little girl,
as long as you can.

55 words for Marian's prompt at Real Toads and THE G-Man!

Socratic Method

Jesus speaks in parables.
Buddha teaches koans.
Socrates asks questions;
I just work the phones.

I Will

I'll wash the stars with my hair
like that whore that came to Jesus.
I'll plant sprigs of words in my eyes
and let them grow mint wild.
I'll study the work of an egg.
I'll taste the pass of the seasons.
And I will write it down, I'll
write it down,


For Kerry's prompt at Real Toads