Blue Moon

the blue moon from my house last night

It’s the beginning:

a blue moon, blazing.
bright arms striking out
Black. Light, inverted
smoke wafting down
to my skin like ash. Alone,
waiting for the clock to strike
her witching hour.
Is she ready? Flushed, husky,
lust-filled for magic? This
primal drive invades my iris
rings. Binding, finding myself facing
the Dark from within. She sings.

Once, in a blue moon,
this is how it ends.

“Philologia: Such is this gift, that bites as it gives”

Each word, a name. A gift
to bind together and draw apart,
granted from a settled throne
crafted of collected expressions,
Sovereign.

The queen’s a veil of incense between slate
and stars, whispering her dreams. Sometimes,
she howls, sometimes, she sings.

I cannot see the king, but his decrees
dictate this castle of universe, the etiquette of
interaction, court.

There is
comfort in them woven,
absence in their wake:
my king, the symbols,
my queen, their meanings,
together sweep us through (systemic
spells of aid and debt.)

Royal favors, words, and royal angers, too:
waves of welcome, banishment
twined atop the Omniscient
Word-King’s Scepter,
one dip weighing us all
like a scale with a feather.
One flick cremates, the other embalms,
both stuff our casings with meaning.

What tax must we pay for such privilege?

Beware their lexi-cons, precarious declarations
possessing us all. We drown, word filled or
word less. We drown and we find
our names are carved on the dotted lines
along the bottom of the settled throne.



-for Real Toads’ Get Listed – July, you have to use 3 of the following words: taxman, heat, prison, fear, mail, inevitable, premise, sovereign, system, advice, beware, & kept.

I think I used 2-and-2-halves of these words: sovereign, beware, system(ic), & tax (which is half of “taxman”).

This poem actually started as a reflection on several Real Toads’ Tuesday Challenge poems (Susie Clevenger's "Crumpled Scent" and Crayfish's "Over Tea - TB"), combined with a quote from Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings: “To name a thing is to acknowledge its existence as separate from everything else that has a name; to confer upon it the dignity of autonomy while at the same time affirming its belonging with the rest of the namable world; to transform its strangeness into familiarity, which is the root of empathy. To name is to pay attention; to name is to love.”

The painting is one of my earlier abstracts. I think it looks a little like an imploring dolphin, surrounded by an overwhelming world. Fittingly, it's drowned under layers and layers of other paint, becoming a (hidden) palimpsest.

Rose Window, Notre Dame de Paris

images via wikimedia - click for wikimedia page

Paris.
I was there.
The rain-sleeked
streets never dried,
staining the city steel.

(When the rain silvered more,
you could have taken it for
Granite. Glinting in the street lamps,
glittering through the fogged
net where cigarette smoke
settles to socialize and sense
the dull sharpening of the world.)

I loved steel.
I loved the streets,
small dog shits and all.
I loved fumbling through
Desolees and Parlez-vous Anglais?
I really loved the way the
lined, lean men gobbled me up
with famished eyes. Nobody owned me;
I braced, I softened.
Brazened.

The rose window of Notre Dame
watched me come and go. Watched the men,
the dogs, the rain, the streets, blanketing us
with shards of appraisal. Rainbows.
They gave me the creeps. Guilt, or something.
I hid from her, sliding round the curves
of the beetle-green Metra pole,
down into the absinthe hole,
I hid from her, my Rose. I hid from her in Paris,
from her glances there, from all shades of them.
Green.

Later, I would find salvation jaune at
Notre Dame de la Garde. But that is an
otro conversation, altogether, one for
the sun-burnt squeaky café tables
tucked round the docks in Marseilles,
between the abandon of Paris and the peacocks of Barcelona.

Stick to the story – C’est la vie.



Inspired by Phoenix Rising Poetry Guild's prompt and my own trip(s) to Paris.