Poem: Ripples

 

Ripples

 

escherian skeletons

rib a lake into canters.

so many creases  

complicate its liquid face.

 

ribs 

crosshatch into tigers,

trellis through pregnant angles,

curve on striped stilts

and manage, somehow, to clash yet glide.

 

curvy green-gold-blues,

songful of sway,

strum my eyes, 

graze my spine, my chest.

legerdemain of a protean harp,

their voices tease my senses:

you, too, they sing, a vivid skeleton.

you, too, spreading footsteps about:

scions of impulse and deed,

ripples on a stage.

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8/27/24 ... 

The sort of thing we ought to think on when we hear "liquidity."

Poem: A Hummingbird

 

A Hummingbird

 

a hummingbird zoomed

so close i thought it

was a mirror of my dreams;

but then i saw i was too solid.

more trapped than alert.

 

the emerald gorget sparkled,

while i played the numb ogre,

a construct of  street and steel

in a lawn-and-order colony.

 

the resplendent bird 

birthed incarnations of magic tricks.

it cajoled the well-heeled fellow i was--

that i saw i was--

but only after i blinked  

in a failure of apprehension.

the brilliant wings, though, didn't stop.

they hovered, flashed, prompted, offered 

a vanishing act of so many doors.

but i, too slow, too fixed,

despite heaven and hope,

too preoccupied with my sod,

entertained not even one.

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8/27/24 ... eds

Poem: Stuck

 

Stuck

  

the dresser flaunted caterpillar knobs,

climbing as it was the walls. 

 

the mirror wore always only itself,

a coat of light too threadbare for warmth,

while the giraffe-neck lamp

claimed curious, constant danger.

 

a few too many light sockets

mastered their two-faced masks,

slits and half-circles fine of fettle,

caricatured to both sob and spy.

 

there were bears in the carpet,

wolves under the piles.

the sheep hung in dark niches

from triangular gallows.

 

the creak of a hissy fan

ignored this stuck room,

antsy and yet efficient

in the blur of its guillotines

and yet

 

the plump flowers on the walls 

couldn't escape the oceanic wallpaper,

their phoney petals stuck,

shades of yellow-going-grey

and yet

 

if a forehead hit a bloom,

bashing the false depth, so hard,

surely the knockout 

would hear the shriek.

======================

8/27//24

Poem: Wylder

 

 

Wylder

 

i’m skilled at reading

the swoopfonts of bats.

too sensitive, maybe, 

in a world where tears bleed,

for few can winnow sorrow from blood.

to touch a stump

yields circuitous crowns.

a lilt of pine needles, lazy in breeze,

she is my masseuse, ah, such fingertips!

which lift to strum light swerves

across my naked curvatures.

 

when the drunken moon

scrabbles in torn skies,

(such moody cinema)

my soles stagger and spar  

to lay me on a bed of dawn.

 

a magus in a cocoon, then,

afloat in unstable bliss

as petals unfurl around me,

exposing themselves, down

to the very last calyx of a rose.

 

but the ribs below,

these i will not touch.

those cages of bone, starved for breath,

never again to wake sensitive.

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8/27/24