Apopemptic Assignation
A labyrinth of footfalls
He, nimble as thistle in a Sicilian scirocco
Spins down the somber corridor
A handkerchief, tatted with violets, at his cheek
Scented with memoirs of the night before
The prodigal spouse resurrected his etiolated
Enclosures
She, amative fairy sprite, fidgets in wait
In pantry cupboard plated in
Comfort and comforter
He moves, she sighs
As perilous perambulations seem on precipice of licentious reward
An old man stirs
Needing the micturate moment
He stumbles into the tenebrous hall
A brass condor falls off an heirloom chiffonier
Assailing callow inamorato
Then
Seized with a hunger
He proceeds to the feathered pantry
Causing calamitous din
Young Thisbe, stirred awake
Creeps past a three inch glass
To the chagrin of her fat black cat
and the gustatory satiation
of our grizzled
pater familias.
Asturias, tres
… But in the tangle
Of those hours
That evening of the serpent
When my eyes were bleeding
When you covered my bed with
Wheat and silver
I knew
You would come
Naked and scratched
Bearing the stone scar
Proffering irresistible death
Atlanta 101
The only noise was the sound of an axe cracking
In that stale wood
Rotted from within
Under the hoods that commemorated
A
Confederation of
Ghosts
Whispering “Bitch”
Stepping over the red
Hatched frame
Climbing the rickety
pine
ladder
Rung after rung covered in
Drips of whiskey
Mixed blood
Flowing to the trough
Colored the straw
Crimean sunset
topaz spilled
through the spindle fingertips
of fibrous elms
a circle of citrine
blessings
in the snow
a Cyrillic greeting:
mezzotint on
copper rocks
a bulbous
thoughtful woman
in a boucle almond
dress
steps into antique silver
coach
the arms of her Cossack officer
wait
he opens his greycoat
revealing a violet
baroque vest
fawn embroidery
trims
black stars
Impolitic
Riveting in the twilight
air of
bullets
and dust
Rainbow illuminations
still
cover Tehran
As dying soldiers
fighting with filaments
look toward the darkening mask
tinted in fire
I meet them now
In nail parlors
Pushing back my cuticles
Pummeling my back
Applying hot stones
You would not know it to talk to them
But these young women of serene inarticulation
Came from somewhere
Placing her left foot in the pedicure bath
A faux brunette in mustard capris
Takes the time to place the salon copy
Of People magazine ~ the year end issue ~ down
To inquire where the crouched form at her feet
Was from
“Saigon”
She smiles and resumes her study of the sexiest man in America
Oblivious to the dark child running a razor under her heel
Twining
Rolling the hemp
at the exile
of thumb and index finger,
trespassing tightly, two
errant suppliants
of unfathomable majesty.
Fibers embed in
reverent pinches
and punctured reveries.
This braided rope ~
a wild taut breed
by very nature
of gilded weave
repels all day-by-day
attempts
at unraveled
defile.
Assured in star shine
alabaster
white
that this universe
contains another
just
like
me.
And in that
eternal
ethereal
surety
our journeys
of this lifetime
now rests in God’s
purest firmament.
Enshrined
in this
gilded
forever
ever
Entwine.
Bad at Maths
Little boy
murdered
by a hit man
in Bruges.
Dresden doll face
impaired
only by
protean protrusion of skull
where bullet
blew through.
in that terminal moment
before tiny body spat
on cold flat stone of ancient apse
in tin dim abbey,
a note
clutched tightly
to remind him
how he had angered God that week
as only an irredeemable five year old
on cusp of damnation
can do:
"Being moody
Being bad at maths
Being sad"
Taking into account
how brutally,
how unfairly,
how insanely he died,
one would think
he might get a
bit of a buy
into Purgatory
(being far too old
for Limbo).
… Bad at Maths …
No.
He's Bosch-bound
for sure.
Homage
Cobblestones bruise thin soles.
We walk in silence, a seeming meander
Into medieval corridors that beg
For living lovers.
And that is just the point, steeped in
The miasma of moonstrewn ancient aqueduct
This eternal canal
Thick with tourist disregard
And other brown promises
Beholding nothing
In conjoined gaze
Of watered dim.
Such twinned, effulgent empty
Would seize ecstatic squirrels
And stem the coos of fountain mated pigeons.
We, however, are a different breed.
Two meet these streets,
Tomorrow.
My long hair
Auburn waves
washed
silt shoulders
lithesome tendrils
alit
in caves of nape
yielding only
to Moroccan winds
Casting
henna sun stained
strands
braiding
Fatima
hands.
Mediterranean sea
gulls
cry
for such bending
burnished beauty
in want
of lover’s touch.
Staring into
aqueous infinities
a long lone wisp
bare brushed lips …
… the knowing
of you.
There is No Red in Death
I.
Flesh wounds
bleed
streaming, steamed
vermilion flow.
In this and all
my claret dreams
no terracotta remnants
breathe
Stale flat crumble
denudes the truth
of fluid, vital
river force
this hemorrhage mine
this human course.
II.
Damnation
tastes:
charred scarlet
shrieks
the cohort
rapine beat
of bleating
cankered
noumenon.
Such pulpy legion
Sob
refracts
the missioned
condition
of
terrestrial
ganglion
that animates
Bleeding
need.
“into my soul’s ecstasy,
pours the essence of the eternal”
In the realm of musts and shoulds
I die, the little death
Where the rich velvet drench
Of vaginal tides calls forth
No gilded galleon.
The spearing dolphin dance
Such excruciating thrusts of free
Are unknown to us
And want encrusts a moonbeam bed
Where we need writhe and scream.
We laugh as we cleave to
Our verbal repast
When engorged undertow
Pulls, pulls, pulls
The swollen, pulsating divinity
The life-breath need
The consummated we
That unmet
Seed crush the strawberries
On which we feed.
Tree
Seized and thrashed -
Your viridian mane
crushes meridian glaze;
ruches waves
of aqueous breath.
Tormenting
your
tethering;
Most days,
there is comfort
in permanent
cross-grained
embedded
Firmament.
But now,
(it seems)
Exhausted,
sputtered
rustlings -
vagaries
of
foliated
Bound
…resound.
Meandering eye
now whelms
at throes of agonies
imagined
From mine own
rooted
shackled
Gaol.
A poet’s transient vision
… curates
(pained?)
foliate
flail …
Stroll
A pale gold thread, from a frond
Caresses crevassed arm
A sprig
Of honeysuckle, white
Promises blithe sureties.
Moon-colored ribbons
Illume muddy reveries.
Twilight pebbles,
Ivory, olive, cardamom,
Charcoal, ebon, wishes
Cast in stream of
Cabriole movement.
Blue broken flower face
Obliviously
Waits
Despairingly
Wastes.
Impossible
Droplet joy,
glycine
emulsion
awash in
nacreous
disbelief.
Rivulet baptismal hopes
clearly meant
for other
paler
pinker
cheeks …
I have birthed too many poems
not to know
the sentence that is
my life -
my course
of strewn inconsequence;
this incubated salvage.
So
this is aberrance
or apparition.
Engrafting truth of
one or both
might stave
palpation wild.
This is assured …
… absurdity …
… and yet,
Here I sit -
abused …
… amused …
Beguiled.
And, again…
It returns.
The blackness that desiccates day.
The songbird auger which pulverizes
The indomitable primal to smash refracted self.
The safety of primordial fetal.
If I leave these words, I will seize the
well-wisher’s thorax and empurple.
Dismembered and desecrate the precious
Loved ones skewered on spit of hair-triggered obliques.
The beggar mocked, the child’s open smile unreturned.
This is not supposition.
This is vivisected anamnesis.
It returns, and with it the Bedlam of
Hidden Hellish hemangiomas
The Byakhee is caged.
… she will break free.
Refrain
The runes of winter
Are steeping beneath
Tumultuous greens
Phosphorescent rebirth.
The mandate to frolic
A universal imperative
Carried from majestic lemon monarch
To incandescent hummingbird
Hovering in
Calliope-hued
Nectared whispers.
The warmth of the equinox
Illumes thick, sickened whiteness
Of a long hibernation
even soft, I recoil
So unaccustomed
To bright.
The meadow cries for meandering
It will not remain fallow.
But I am no soloist,
for Vivaldi’s
jubilant exaltations.
Cold marrow deep dankness
Requires incremental
Refrain.
Concessional
Sepia catacombed
In sweet stench of young rot
The maggot is well fed
Bloating, we are new made
In concatenated leprosies
In our mouldy hypocrisies
In the death bed lie.
There are no more causes.
The War is over.
And raping evisceration
Inhumanity’s farandole
Has whirled us to slivered
Cockroach delectations.
Pray, scream, or weep
You will only amuse them
Dagger or Hemlock
It matters not how.
My Parasite
You spoon-feed endearments
Like medication
Just enough to keep me
Hanging from the lip
Just enough to stave
The toxicity
Of you
In me.
Like Diana I slay
The suckling wanna be
Takers of me
Laughing at derangements
As their infernos of desire
‘Fire’ phantasmal projections
Not nearly a hollow hologram
Of anything near who I am.
So I fear not
Of breaking hearts
Because they are dribble drunk
On poem-image fantasies.
But you, know
The strengths and the fallows
The beauty and the scars
My deepest beliefs
The abyss of gilded regret
Half-opened sighs
Opaque eyes
Fashioned
By eons of abuse-neglect.
And knowing this
You seize my need
My vulnerability
…and squeeze.
But moments come
When I can raise my head
And behold your glycene emptiness
I now feel this jolt in core
As never before
And though I am skin-peeled
Brazing in your thick sick licks.
I know each day
More and more and more
That soon I shall
Never
take
another
taste…
…and crawl my way to light
Or strew my shreds to Zephyrus’
Flight
To anywhere
But you
Moss
Walking through the glade
Trillium bridal and lyric blue violet
Guide me to the life source, the
Silver light stream
making pebble silt gleam
Washing air in
The tender of time’s contravene
The embrace of deciduous canopy
Strews sun in opalescent splay.
I cannot move.
You have all of me.
And Here
is my ever,
today.
And there in the nurture
Of elm beyond years is my berth
And my lover, who will
Hold me close, make me “hers”.
Back to the sky
Moist softness embeds
And I roll, giving all
To verdant sensual wed.
The communion is as natural,
As love’s quiver, first glance
I shall remain in sanctified
Pleasure dome
Of lushness
and chance …
Peregian Tides
The breeze seizes brine
And steeps
A stinging shanty
Moon draws up the sea
Engulfed
Never more to sing, I
Cry out your name
To pierced
Blaspheming
Oceanic
Night.
Naiad slivered
Deep shivered
Can you hear?
Do you listen?
Am I flotsam fish belly
rank and foul
blight?
The deriding tear tumbles
In torrent to froth
I am now waist deep
And screaming,
but soft
ever soft.
I see face in the swells
Looking something like me
Washed benumbed wastrel
Sees what never
Will be.
Gros Morne
Lavender
Meringue
Sculptured
Sky
Dapple apparitions
in orchid custard.
A pod of
Humpbacks leave
Misted Flirtations
Tracing the intimacies
Of
Bonne Bay
Shoreline.
Passing pastel
Thrift and Harebell
Blossom
Impervious
To the gust that slithers
Through
Fog
Foreboding
Fjorded
Passage.
Sand swallows
Shallow Bay
Maple, Fir, Elm
Leaving silver skeletons
Adrift in
Twilight Dunes.
Wild ponies
Graze and nuzzle
Golden drizzle
Verdancy.
O!
The meadows of
Cow Head.
Like beautiful pottery glazes
Layers of serpentine
Commute
Monotonous Sediment
Into
Brilliantine scarp face…
The trip from Newfoundland
To Halifax is most scenic
And Halifax has many charms.
But I have been where
Hand of Man
Has yet to granulate beauty
To neon dust.
And neither richness
nor impoverishment
escapes.
Intemperate Imaginings
Nude serpent
On the Nubian
flesh
Of Nigerian nymphet
Russet and umber
Billows
Sky-scattered
In autumnal hymn
Of intoxicated toddlers
Grass tuft
Lulls
Blossoming syllables
In raspberry
chanson
White candles
white horses
white whimpers
white night
Turkish
Turquoise
Tiles
Burqa
Breasted
Smiles
Underwater
Unnamed
Rubescent
Sea flower
Seduces
Uccello
Urchin
… To Catullus, Caterwauls, Clare de Lune, Crème de menthe …
… and black Absynthe.
Sudan
The vulture is patient.
Last stage evisceration
The stumble of thirst
of a death intended life.
No "collateral damage".
You are incidental refuse.
A comma in the litany
of carrion
inhumanity.
A rogue profiteer
arcs renegade machete
assuming your status
by the placement of your
rot.
The vulture approaches
his awaited reward.
O
sweet
toddler eyes.
Little boxed ribbons scattered
Bed ruffled secret cavern
Daddy’s pretty hatables
Most forbidden “me” games.
I knew they meant something.
But not asking, meant breathing
Meant a night of not skank drunk
Hair-trigger pissing on
neighbor-laundered
disdain.
As only son/only daughter
I pushed hard, damned to trespass
Sharing KFC bucket, playing stud
Tossin’ Pepsis, crushin’ cans
And in time
slowly building new walls
Of balls.
So one night, flat out:
“Tell me Daddy, ‘bout Korea.
All those winters, all the hurtings,
Those scars where the metal bits
still come through.”
He shat on my bravado.
“Sweetie let me tell you about Daddy, why
he won all those medals, why he’s such a hero,
first ass class.”
Then I learned how my father led a man to
two tree halves, then cut twined binding,
‘yellow motherfucka’ raining guts.
Barely mouthing the hate
he never had.
Then, the real fun, the cheap thrill -
“Clean-up detail”
No prisoners, no survivors,
to give next platoon a head high
So you go up, he curdles, and they’re beggin’,
yeah, pleadin’
waving baby-wife kodaks, b&w shards.
But the sobs sharply end.
When the head shot is tight.
Oh and then there’s that real mind-fuck
Pick a man
tell him stroll
in a mine field uncharted
Hold 44 to his temple,
order move
or suck steel.
‘Course every man’s passage made some progress for others.)
You knew where not to step,
in the wake of strewn brothers.
But Sarge alone threatened trigger jacked
‘cause he craved the whole sin.
Like that screaming spilt torso and that begging family man
Daddy wanted all of Hell’s guilt, to fully cremate his soul.
To create one dead walking,
to ensure who was on that express train to damned.
Silver and bronze, four purple hearts, he walked off the plank
With generals trailing, trumpets a’wailing
At that juncture of hypocrisies, corpse blossoming wild.
He would wash windows, refill beer mugs
Stumbled home break o’ day, heaving shit smeared display.
They loved, that’s for sure, but she was a narcissist
and he terminally ill since 1952.
Oh I got lost in all the drama, but my love, beyond heartache
Since maybe four or five, tops
I knew, I knew, I knew.
Still a young man, Reaper found him,
Plugged Camels lungs with The Feeders
Made him waste in the empty of
morphine-drip loathe.
It was at the VA hospice, the idea came
I could look for his battalion
I could tell them: “It’s him.”
I called, hundreds flew
Bringing wives, brimming babes
Full flank of grand kids
And each said “Sarge, not one here living
Would be living if not for you.”
After they left and he stopped weeping
I handed him a wooden box commanded
“Daddy, open it.”
On rich man’s black velvet, a sea of medals
with little boxed ribbons
all shiny and hued.
And for loudest second
Like floundering babe
He knew not what to do.
Trembling and quaking, he reached both arms out.
Took it softly, child-like gaze of “No, not for me?”
Then in ripped style, Sarge boomed out
“Damn, take a picture!”
Just him and that shadowbox.
And a never seen smile.
Living fully in those moments
Robert C. Newnam, a proud man
Looked at flowers long unseen,
with saucered, starved eyes.
On the next day, his soul sped
Straight Heaven high.
And my salt streaks in shred ribbons
Danced a tribute goodbye
As I heard Donne ringing:
“Death, thou shall die.”
Intimations of Mortality
Today
In penumbra of azure
February bright
My mind is strife and
Gutted
With frail twig thoughts
Of my mortality.
I should stand firm
With pride, as
Neruda tells me that
My obligation
Is to open the prison cell wide
And ignite a cataclysmic vibration
That will crack the skies
Shake terra firma
Make oceans rise
Turn horse head nebula
Into gentle steed.
But on this day
I ache
I
Bleed
And pen to pad
Is tremulous scrawl
I am falling
Into abyss of child-like
Fears
The corrosive monster
Within rips and tears
My music
Into pitiful self-lament
I sob
To no God
But am scurrilously bent
To fetal befoulment
That I will leave this earth
Words forgotten, despised
With remnants remnant
And bootless cries.
("Intimations of Mortality" first appeared at Luciole Press)
Clinic
Porcelain fleur-de-lys
Blemish
blue splash archway
of routinized indignity.
Quaking
In
The
Wraith.
Plastic paneled
Calcified,
Barnacled
Inertia
Mocks the scribbled
Pathos of my pain-soaked
Particulars
as
Drops of spit foam
Fleck the shoreline
Of cheap orange lips
With every quavered
Signature
On ream upon ream
Of aborted humanity.
“He will see you now.”
White walls, white floors
Dilate
Paper coated nudities
Billowing
In gunmetal gusts
of neglect.
Each script, a phial
Of portioned potent
suppliant
insignificance
Yet to come.
("Clinic" first appeared at Calliope Nerve, Kritya and in the Chapbook Tinted Steam (Shadow Archer Press))
Dedicated
Mute and mindless
Hovering for a whiff
Of original anything
A soupcon of image
Meager metaphor crumbs.
Ever prowling, Steam
Of brain
Worthy
The Killing Bite
Basal ganglia from cheek to chin
Wipe your face.
The vomit of your creation
Gifted
Reviled negation
Such pinpricked abomination!
So skilled in the maddening filibuster
Of deprecation inert
In weakness, in death throes
The poet
Leaves words to ghost watchmen
Just splayed and untethered.
un parfait de dessert!
Drool
Gorge
Imbibe
Masticate.
The bell toll approaches.
A lifetime of hours.
I bludgeon
Your guts.
Such
Fine china clumps,
Sweet
Tea-biscuited marrow…
A pause before sip.
…plunging grasp into skull
and with fine scalloped napkin
Reclaiming what’s mine.
("Dedicated" first appeared at The Poetry Warrior)
Welsh-flecked
‘Romance’
In the laughing house
strewn in the plum dappled
peach tricking meadow,
A thicket of blackberried
hummingbirds steal my form.
That I may gaze through the
fawn breast light
at the glimmers of hyacinth hair
and the ripple of your farm hued
body sawing and bailing, in
briny brilliantine hallow.
Till ash evening
falls and I return to the
dragonfly blight in
the onyx ribboned hills
that fill me with the
quarry of your absence
tracing unkissed lips, pale
in the time skewered dusk.
("Welsh-flecked 'Romance'" first appeared at Strangeroads and in the Chapbook Tinted Steam (Shadow Archer Press))
Shave
Stroking
with precision
That makes
Time steam.
With each flick
A fleck of foam
Embeds itself
In bare-shirted
Tufts and whirls
That cry out
For fingers.
And as the silver glazes
Your purposeful deliberations…
…so sensitive to need…
The tautness
Of midriff undulation
A humid dipped frisson
Of languid images
and driftings.
Salacious whisps
Of our perfected
Pas de deux .
The heat rises
In mist swollen
Wordless communion.
Of liquid lips.
My drips easing
Down molten
salted thigh.
Abruptly,
At clock chime
Desecration.
Stumbling, unsteady…
…pouring black, precisely
In infused
Preoccupation.
("Shave" first appeared at The Houston Literary Review and in the Chapbook Sublunary Curse (erbacce-press))
The Omnipresent Aporia
The sun dies each night.
But never the same.
Apricot, rose-petal, claret
Enmeshment, mutates
Into blinding
Miasmas.
A spectacle of god-bestrewing
Immolation.
Most noticed by tourists who have
made a note to stare through
Paper parasol libations
And, on cue,
Gasp!
This crepuscular miracle
Announcing spangled onyx
Caress
Humbles
Most
Blindly impervious
Post modern pundit
Diatribes.
Yes, ‘sunsets are parataxis’
Dismembering expectancies.
Yet
We writhe and flail
That ‘Beauty is dead!’
So
Caught up in our
solipsistic
Near-sightedness.
("Omnipresent Aporia" first appeared at Heavy Bear)
‘love’ dismembered ...
a play in three acts
a play in three acts
act two: lost in …
act one: ‘making’ Love
now
the memory
of your body
cleaves to each curve
filling me.
Your kiss
...is a primal thing
that lifts my soul
sobbing.
in the aftermath
glistening
feeling woman
rise from my loins
infuse
my form
with soft - made
bliss.
then, am I
your Beauty.
(curtain)
(six months later)
Do I say too much?
Do I rend the air with thick images when a
gossamer silence fills ?
Does the torrent of named beauty / formed energy
bruise a hallowed kiss?
Oh then, dear Love, I will be still. I will wait.
I will tremble. I will be led to a bed of white
sheets. Whiter than tundra. Whiter than the
fawn's breast. Whiter than a silted dawn. Whiter
than light itself --
and I will pray ...
for the Hunger.
(curtain)
act three: the leave taking
(one year, four months, and three days later)
Even now
your images
remain
on the stone platform
where I left you.
it is unsafe
…Now…
a whisper, a breath,
a sigh
Pushes you
into arms
Still
unwilling
to let you go.
(curtain)
Exit
("Love Dismembered" first appeared at Unlikely Stories 2.0")
Surviving Relatives: for Sharon Olds
I. I put The Father back on the shelf. Feeling violation in
the bobbing public acknowledgements of the chin
next to me, buried deep in her copy of the plain beige
text.
... sensing the certainty of fresh incineration,
the doubtless torment of your words, I left
the slim bookshop steeped in literati musk.
Safe abed, husband to my right.
I gazed at the closed copy of your earliest words, at balance
in open palm:
Glossy, fire red cover
Black gothic title
Your white Garamond name.
II. The first poem that touched all
the hollows and swells of my emergent I
was culled by Woman, crafted of women
And while I did not yet know the full
meaning of unforgettable abortions, I, too,
had heard "those voices of the wind."
She was flame and she was knife and she was
rocking chair, riding soft, on an August porch.
Black, fierce, woman sobs hurled to the air, to the
Ashes, to those who could pause to listen. She was The
Mother I never had, and the image for my own soul,
still in the making.
III. In the broken house, I began speaking with other poets, often,
all the time. I turned my back to Whitman's
Everyman and the world splayed according to
Eliot. I became intimate with Poe's caress of sound,
and embodiment of beautiful fear. I let Thomas'
Welch-flecked cadenzas spill all over, brim to the very
top of my Bronx teenaged room.
But where, I wondered, were the women? I searched and
I strained. I pushed out of Plath's suffocating Bell-Jar
and pushed against Sexton's awful upward stroking. They
violated my immunity and touched my violations.
Besides, they telegraphed their endings.
A decade further on, I still stayed to the path of
mindless meanderings, in flight from the death-grip
of a murdered childhood.
IV. I found, in time, new voices. The steel tongued
warrior songs of born-again victims.
Black, lesbian, female screams and shouts. Parker, Hooks and
Lorde, who took up the stiletto, giving form and incantation --
Slaying social and self hates in incising tongues and
irrepressible images. I cleaved to them, moving behind, now towards,
ever nearing, even when pale, man-centric, raw pieces
of me, might not all be welcome.
Then we met, though you did not know it.
Now you do. After all, this is your poem.
Kinnell offered you his book, the new one,
the one with iridescent Garamond lettering
on Gallic landscape (by Klimt). A good book,
with soft words, a fine book.
But this is your poem.
V. Satan Says so much. Doesn't He?
Everyday. He Speaks. Your father's heaping,
heavy body, studded with bile and waste, hurled
me back to other places, sites of distant, deliberate,
time, sites of desecrated 'lamb-white,
mustard seed, green and golden' impress.
I tried to dismiss you -- to fight the life grip of your
paged heart. Your brutal exaltations. Your gratuitous vulgarity.
‘a veritable thesaurus of filth, a litany of genitalia.’
But your truth impaled denial Exquisite, anguished
written communion drew me into the vortex of
ravaged souls. Yours and mine, now joined.
And from that union, I wanted out. I closed you quickly and
often. I even tried in quiet time to re-edit you.
But the siren would not be silenced.
VI. So having said all this. Having
shared all this, having partaken in this
ritual, the formalities of introduction.
I have something to say, to share with you.
Just as you are most welcome to embrace and eviscerate
these words, I will tell you frankly, that in That
Year you discovered your name -- as Jew, as survivor,
in that moment of impoverishment and birth, you left
something out, sold us both short. For, as you well
know, when the prison guard, the tormentor is your
God and your guardian. It is much worse
Than the space spanned in that last stanza, in the
space between Auschwitz and armistice, there is,
as Satan knows, as you know, as I know, a hideous
abyss. You cannot rage as collectivity in your
barracked cells, in the dignity of your
emaciation with your disemboweled brethren,
rocking and cradling a dying parent.
You cannot wear your yellow star, your pink triangle, with secret pride,
if Hell and Home and Home and Hell are one.
And your Goebbels is your world -- both Mother and
The Father.
("Surviving Relatives" first appeared at Heavy Bear)
Bed & Breakfast
Victorian bouquets:
Petals of oiseaux, jaquemar,
Eau de nil
Dapple antique eiderdown
In assaultive
mackling
On cockcrow myopia.
Grecian valence frames
Perfectly positioned scenic wonder
awash in London Grey gust
of modernity’s befoulment.
…nary a footnote
in brochured fineprint...
Of Indian Summer
Saturday Getaway.
Varnished and burnished
Undulations of walnut balustrade
Await grandeur frenzied
morning hoard
Inhalations.
Innkeeper’s lacquer and clatter.
Fresh bun salver/lilac doilies
Lalique saucered cups
Brim and steam
Rendering hasty departures
From sunrise
Jacuzzi delectations.
Post matinal satiation
Hedgerow impeccability
invites
Vaporous meanderings
Of routinized reflection.
In the distance…
Beyond the boundaries
Of propriety
An ancient evergreen
Impales manicured
Perfection
Shattering scansion
Of manicured lawn
And architectural immaculata.
Losing myself…
I digress
Trailing
soft earth path
‘Neath the belly
Of ancient
forgotten
Pine.
In approach
The delusion of assembled
Natural happenstance
Shapeshifts into upright slabs
Of fragmented bleached alabaster
Cambered and cruciform stelae
Cracked Cornish crosses
Adrift in weedy integument.
…in memento mori…
Aged bas-relief proclamations
Crying out for notice:
I lived
I was
Duly noted, save
this moment
this day
By industrious puff-tufted
Woodpecker
And ever shadowy
Aeolian kiss.
In a wilderness
Of catacombed questions
effusing from
Tintype/colllodian
phantasmic Swirling
Synaptic trails
To
Imagistic impress…
…Parlor portraiture of customary
Impassiveness.
Seated mother in
Organdy peplum finery
The
Tonsorially flawless chignon
Cradling preoccupied
Baptismal babe
A
Sailor suited shaver
Stolidly at the bulwark
Of kith and kin flank
Dundreary whiskered
Pater Familias…
The thirst of ripened life long quenched.
No more the verdant sommersault of innocent abandon.
No more begging for the baffled coin, the clink of pride.
No more copulations of old, deluded seeking.
No more straying through funereal gravel of the labyrinth.
Just complete silence.
Empurpled drippings of unfulfilled resurrection?
I am deeply moved.
Turbidly
Arising from
Ruminant crouch
Dandelions graze
Solitary wayfarer
Of insanable expanse
Ever receding
By the quickening footfall
Into
Immemorial mist…
Ever more
Striding the shallows
Of mortal coil thought.
Vitalizing
Eternal erasure
Of even faintest lamentation.
In the distance…
Polychrome Queen Anne gables
Pierce
Sudden sunless sky.
As
Whispers of fresh brown bread
And pumpkin soup
Impel needful cantered pace.
The loping affirmation
Of human
Typicality.
("Bed and Breakfast" first appeared at Paraphilia Magazine)
Visible Hand
Chilblain strides
mock the
purposeful promenade
to cubicle abattoirs.
In djembe and kalimba
beat
ancient forgotten
fingertips
twist
Windsor
knot
garrotes
to lay way for
prevaricative
deathbed lamentations.
The tower
of Violated
Promise
Immolated Hope
Annhilated Dream
soars
With every skeletal
Clasp.
Bone on bone
Assurances
of newborn niggard
Joy
assuaged by Dow Jones
sylphic acclivous
arcings
Towards
certainty
of golden
coffer
coffin.
("Visible Hand" first appeared at Kritya)
Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the ‘prehistoric’ epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She was a former editor of South and West, is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven, and is the Review Editor for Calliope Nerve. She has published over 300 poems and three chapbooks in her ‘first manifestation’ as a poet, with another 250 this year. She has just released her first two chaps in 20 years, Tinted Steam (Shadow Archer Press) and Sublunary Curse (Erbacce). A new full length manuscript, Paper Cuts is in final stages for publication. Her most recent work appears or will appear in such 'zines as BlazeVOX, ditch,, ken*again, Pen Himalaya, Rain Over Bouville, Clockwise Cat, Hanging Moss, Neonbeam, and Gloom Cupboard. She was recently “Featured Poet” for the Guild of Outsider Writers and her work is now featured by Counterexample Poetics and forthcoming in The Poetry Warrior. Her website is HERE. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto.
