The Room Wanted to Be Left Alone

The room is not good company.

It sits ill within itself,
wearing a thin veil of ash-brown particles
disturbed only by years of sleep walking.

All that nakedness,
all our footprints
washed away in tides of dust.

The room has no windows, and no souls to want them.
The years have stripped us down to core,
A boat of bones,
a wooden floor,
gangly planks on a beach deserted,
a heart bleached of blood.

Online Hide & Seek

The above's the 1st round in my collage journal; it got edited down to the poem below:

Digital comes forth
to organize your life
into facebook - traces
of journeys, neon blurs
smeared on your path.

A forgettable past,
and the way it was
lost and found.

Sneak Attack

(Trying this whole Instagram thing out since my vibrant, hip niece and nephew hooked me up with an account.)

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.

Wee Things: Dueling Poem and Wuthering Heights Mini-Book

“Intellect vs. Art: The Duel”

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” -Charles Bukowski

Does each have a sword, then?
The eye of the mind, the claws
of the heart?

Sometimes, the brain is a shield,
only (.) fiery hearts assault.

(jotted down today and passed along to Real Toads' Tuesday Platform)




Wee Wuthering

“I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.” -Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

I have been obsessed with miniature things for a long time. As a kid, I'd pass the time making paper Polly Pocket-like structures with characters from my favorite books. Fairy (or dollhouse, I suppose) sized books particularly captured my imagination and still do. I've been watching a ton of them, especially from this shop on etsy. Since I really, really wanted to buy some but have no job and thus am pretty much broke, I decided to make one, purely for myself, with no intent to sell.

I found a few different tutorials, but this one was my favorite. (Just like with recipes, I draw inspiration but never follow directions. Good thing, cuz that tutorial's in Russian.) After glancing at 'em, I shrugged and surveyed my art corner. I had cardstock and glue and a printer... everything I needed. Then I searched Online for Wuthering Heights covers, picking a Fritz Eichenberg cover. I used some of my favorite quotes. I also found various images Online that were fitting, including some Kate Bush stuff and some The Gaslight Anthem lyrics that capture Wuthering Heights so well. All images in my book come from others; none are mine. If I were to make any mini-books to share in full with the blogosphere or to sell, I would use only my own images.

Here's the start of the project:


Anywho, after cutting the pieces to size, I added details like gold leafing the pages and adding textured lines to the spine:


Here she is!




I'm happy enough with the results that I'm contemplating making a few mini-books out of my own art and poems as table decorations for my wedding... What do you think?

flowers by the chapel by the sea

Thanks to Rock Rose - this image was taken by her, and captures what I imagine the landscape of my poem looks like. Check out her blog and her "Small Plants for the Sunken Garden" post.


My mind is a chapel
carved from rock meeting
tongue of the sea, licking
away the centuries.

The beach is sonorous dips
of prayers sung without words,
gut-uttered, offered to the wind,
the waves, the simple tides of
time. There are worlds within worlds.

From the belltower, I can see
three flowers. Each sings. Each
shines with the seams of Fate’s fickle
threads woven to Transpire.

Emerge the first flower. See?
Hugging the cliff, there to the left,
just beyond the sea spray, the wire fence
to fend off sheep. Look through the lace of
the reeds, there. Yes, focus on the purple head,
poking from beyond the fence, the single flower
in the mist of weeds. She is lovely, is she not?
She is the sharpest, melodramatic saccharine,
as such, she stings. Her name is If
Only. Pluck her, and bleed.

Back to our safe stone, hewn from the cliff, the peace
full place of worship crafted for the sake of sanctity,
sanity. From here, look to the sand path, worn, its border:
skeletal shells, wily bracken, and the pale white flower,
petals like pointed rays of moonlit beams, whispering their
secrets like stars to the far corners of the universe.
Whispers because they haven’t found their voice.
The blossom must look deep, but it is proud and frightened.
Try to pluck, it will recede. Oh, and mind the bees.
Guardians of all that Is.

But there is one other flower this old chapel
sees, one other flower that calls to me. This one is
yellow and big as a bowl, follows the sun, swallows me
whole. She is so bright that she almost blinds, hers is the
flower that captures my dreams. She holds in her petals
the paint of delight, the plan for the future, the Want
to Be, the seductive howl of a new-moon night.

Together, they set my chapel
humming, fan my skin aquiver,
a breeze skimming the smoothest
pool of my neck, my flesh
set aflame even as it freezes,
the pleasure and the pain, weathered
in the crumbling call of the chapel bell.

The world I know
I will only know
the way a child knows a beach:
bucket by bucket, she builds a sandcastle,
then mourns when the wave clears the slate clean.
Propelled by unknown forces, she plucks and leaves
a flower in her wake.



Inspired by and written for Real Toads' Play It Again, Toads #18. I glimpsed at Writing the Inside, Out, but mostly used the pictures of the three flowers for this one. Thanks for the fun prompt!

Original Omen: Familiar Estuary

There is a Nowhere,
the meeting of the wet trickle of the rainbow line
of our stream and the north fork of
Massie’s Creek, the beat of the water rushing
against itself. Nothing escapes the Scylla
of self entrapment, backwatered estuary.

While not the sea, Massie’s Creek is
bigger, faster, fuller, less slicked
with neon-hued oils from the roots of
clicking gangly reeds. The stream,
though, is less touched by Man. Clear, cold.
From the fields past the Creek, the pipes
poke up, spew currents of planting and reaping.
The Creek is deer-scat
colored sludge, the stream
is the mist of a waking dream.

In the dips where they dare
to meet, watch how they
change… without changing at all.
Welcome to Nowhere,
original omen,
the crash before
the desperate fall.



-for Real Toads' Tuesday Platform

The Flasher and the Fissure

October was a month like me,
a month smoked with wild dreams
welded shut with loss of leaves.
A blazing month that dropped its cloak.
Naked,
thus filled with gaping holes.

(How time flies! It hardly seems right to welcome November without bidding October adieu. October was a tough month. It brought death. It held lots of stress. But it also knew joy. And now I greet November the only way I can: one breath at a time, with a commitment to appreciate my blessings.)

November cuts into the ground,
cold and sharp and deeper down.
Therein lies the treasure here: cold claws
remove the gold, oil, smoldering belly of fire.
Rise, repeat; hurry! The snaggle-toothed Snow King is coming.
We must draw up what he will covet. Pull it up! Higher! Higher!

From When Our Moon Became a Sun

Can you feel the fire inside you?
Forget it for tonight. Mask it with
the world around, feed it with your
flight. Lanterns swerve like fairy lights,
dodging sober shadows; matches strike.

sparklers sing. cigarettes light.

Somebodies stroll arm in arm, gaze at stars,
cry or laugh, walk alone, sip the past, we all
sink dark into our minds. We crave, we itch,
anticipate: sharpest flints that conflagrate.

Our signals smoke, swarm through
city loops. Round the concrete
paths and blocks, boxes
glass and moving
trucks, round the trees
pruned in their beds,
round the sky to
red smog wed.

Zaps run through
our beating blood,
flooding veins and bursting walls,
building lacks of barriers,

seeking: freedom, found
away. out of body, faint
indeed, branded still, scorches fade
into wild. woods. The edge-of-the-city fox
knows all, knows fall, its saffron leaves,
the pubs of candied corn and trail of acorn orbs.
The fox knows when the moon will rise,
it can place the smell of the harkening skies -
though time makes no scent. *Sniff.*

The fox smells the city air and finds
scents that make no sense. The moon within
the smoke, within the dreams, within
the humans, lies asleep. The Equinox
reduced to itchy patches, ancient,
embered chambers in their raw meaty hearts, balanced by
the choking blood, the steady beat, the broken glowing
from the ill-flamed furnace fanning
the forgotten memory:

the first fire lit by human hands, the
howl of triumph, ravenous flash of the flames
of knowledge leaping up. The world shifts drunk
under the gaze of this smoke-glazed moon, the selfsame
moon that reigned the night, the god of dark binding
humans blind. The selfsame humans with their restless hands,
blistered, fumbling in the dark, throwing out the rope,
lassoing the moon in the name of itchy, aching hope.

lassoed, tamed, and fought against:
the night, a brave new dawn.

(This poem was inspired by Pink.Girl.Ink.'s "Warning the Stars" prompt. The prompt's pretty sweet. Word? Word! Well, word-le. Wordle: it's a thing. Find out what at Pink.Girl.Ink!

Anywho, the prompt resonated with my muse. Images of electric light, magical illuminated moments contrasted to the mystique of night not clothed in manufactured light. A recent camping trip inspired me to contemplate darkness, grateful both for the opportunity to witness a wild night and for the ability to blot it out. There was some ensuing guilt and awe for what humankind has accomplished, and fear and hope for what's to come.)

"Out of the Fire"

Delighted my poem "Out of the Fire" (based on footage of a construction worker surviving a massive Texas fire) was featured on Poetry24! Cheers!

Here it is:


"Out of the Fire"

The edge of our seats frizzle,
the screams stick to smoke in our throats.

We watch the man on the ledge
with electric-flames exploding
the doorframe behind him.

The heat on the backs of our necks-
there is no alternative; he jumps.
five stories midair, the world
a movie stunt – he lands.

But four stories stand
between death and life
and the ladder just
doesn’t reach.
He must let go again.

And when he does,
so do the flames.
Fireballs burst through steel, walls,
windows of hell shattering.

We squint through the haze, wordless
prayers reflected and answered.

After the wave, we see that
he made it, clutching to the
ladder’s strength which
by nature will never match his own.

We gather glasses of water
and thank god the TV is only
partially sensory.

He lives.

-

See the following sites for the news story: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/houston-texas-apartment-complex-rescue-from-fire-caught-on-tape/ ; http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Spotlight-on-Houston-apartment-fire-shifts-to-5350686.php

The Cracks in This Fine Social Scene

Darkness hides
Sleep the fluttering wings of
circling bees.
A futile journey, so
you rise and walk
to make water
and boil it.

This, the motherland
the fatherland
the wooden floors
the plaster walls
the stuff that shifts around
like shadows.

There are cracks.
You can feel them as you trudge
from room to room.
But when the light comes up,
they are nowhere.

You smile at me
as we share a cup of coffee,
black, burning
my tongue,
but you drink anyway
and keep
smiling.

The drive to work
is littered
with errs.

Holstering the scales
of justice,
kept cocked in your head,
every step is weighed,
and every breath.

The dark-bowelled verbs
erupt,

Silent.

[Playing with Dylan Thomas’ “dark-vowelled birds,” this phrase popped into my head: “dark-bowelled verbs” and I immediately thought of those things we do that darken the world: conform, hate, and judge. We give ourselves up to the whims of the world unquestioningly. But there’s another layer to my poem: You and I are the same, we are both the judge and the witness, but until we become one in our thoughts, how can we change?
Also, the title of this post is taken from the Zero7 song.]

Collage Poems

Tactility –

the malleability of words
and the mindless
crafting of them, snipped
from pages
and stitched
together
whole
in a brand new way.

“collage poems”

[yes, the title’s last. A braver writer would add, “Fuck off” or “So what?” I simply let the sparkle come into my eye and the words “poetic license” slip through my mind.]

Beneath the Glamour

So, today is a day of shadows and fog, not outside the window, but behind the eyes. No collage. Just a poem. Note the nerdy UU and Who references.



“Beneath the Glamour”

Something comes in the silence,
Something we are not prepared to face.

Our eyes can’t see the thing that
comes in the in-between

hovering.

A ghost?
No, not so
little substance,
I’m afraid.

Somewhere I heard the word
“Oversoul” – like weeping angels,
we bare ourselves open,
rendering a circle
condemned.

There is a cough,
a little laugh,
and then
It pulls back
into the heartbeats,
the tides of our diaphragms.
Shivering wingbeats ripple our flesh
with goosebumps binding the

Whispers, our breath.

Collage Musings: A New Journey

Where did those three years go? They may have gone by without a post, but so much has happened. I've experimented more with artwork and poetry. This is a book of collage musings I made last year - no Photoshop or anything, just my own two hands, scissors, paper, and magazines. Each post for the next few months will be a page or pages from this book, Moonbeam Dreams. The creative force behind them has kept me going through some of the toughest years of my life. Enjoy these works, and give me credit where credit is due if you choose to share. Be safe and warm and just a little bit wildly adventurous.

"Utopia"

an original picture and poem:

Utopia.

Built
axon by axon,
a mirage of pixels
scattered on a
blank screen.

Why in a room not a room
of white plaster walls
stained with insect remains
can’t we enter the worlds
beyond our screams?
Shake the silence?

There are doorways,
Dark and Light,
through which we
wander
saunter
scamper
rustle
fumble.

Speck by speck,
we gather shards of color,
space, scent
and piece them together,
these places
we live.

Under the shadows: two poems from Gillian Clarke

From Gillian Clarke’s “Sabrina”
Before history there was mythology.
Fingerprinted between the strata of story
Is the human sign. We make a guess
At who they were, and where and why it was.
How the daughter of faithless Locrinus drowned
Between an Ice Age and the Age of Stone
To become the river-goddess, a curb in the river.
Today in these fast waters you might glimpse
In the sway of the currents the white limbs
Of a girl caught in a shoal of silvers
Turning and turning in the turbulence
Among migrating salmon, sewin, elvers,
Lampreys, eels taking their ancient water-roads
Under the shadows of thousands of homing birds.

From “The Physicians of Myddfai”
Like a bowl of milk
the mountain cups the lake
where the Ages of Stone,
Bronze and Iron left their bones
under the earth, under the water
with the lake king’s daughter.
Every day he dreams her face
a ferment on the surface
at dawn as the sun casts
its net of light from the east.
With his mother’s bread
he’ll win her to his bed.
The spell is buttermilk and barm,
grains ground between stones,
pummelled and set to warm
by a wood-fire or under the sun.
Such leavening as suddenly she breaks
the waters of the lake.
Three loaves,
three chances for love
to cross the boundaries
of time and history,
of water and stone.
On the third day she is his own.
Three strikes of metal and she’s gone.
The ages drown,
dissolved into the past,
the story of the lake lies lost
in archaeology, the myths and silts
of ancient settlements.

Both of these poems introduce the mythical feel of my novel. They give me shivers, every time I read them.

I got to see Gillian Clarke at the Wales-Smithsonian-Cymru event in D.C. back in '09: