Tag: dark

weather, writing

Two One

Posted on by littleREDelf

 

Canad-Goose-pair-by-Ian-Barker

February 1st.
55 degrees.
2 geese in perfect duo
fly
over the bridge together
back from winter.
A false Spring,
a lovely start.

A woman’s pair of beige dance shoes
hangs from the powerline
outside the theatre.
She always wanted to be
a tightrope walker.
We often throw ourselves higher,
sooner than we think we’re able to go.

Ostara, in her haste,
drops a white-washed paintbrush
on the robin blue eggshell sky
leaving a smatter of
pulled apart cotton cloud.

The birds still wait to be warmed
into rabbits.
To fly or to burrow?
Cannot take the sky
before I know how
to go to ground.

A strange circular rainbow appears
incomplete
behind a triangular treeline.
Not yet. Still, more rain.

I take a wrong turn into a dead end street
and the Ouroboros symbol appears
on a glassblowers garage studio door
at the end of the alley,
and it’s no longer the wrong way
it’s the right symbol,
confirmation,
reminder.

I turn around again
bite my own tail,
face the sun
waiting, turning from the dark
for two to agree
and become one.

death, dreams, health, language, myth, nature, philosophy, psychology, technology

Exquisite Cognomen or “How to Name Our Pain”

Posted on by littleREDelf

i am not politically inclined to comment.
i am not so easily terrified by ‘terror.’
i avoid most news to maximize joy.

but i have some thoughts on these things,
in grand universal brush strokes . . .

:::   :::   :::   :::

Exquisite Cognomen or “How to Name Our Pain”

In the world, there is forever fever:
We read the signs,
blazing in historic orange.
We straddle our majestic fates,
ride our caution horses up to the edge,
and prepare ourselves to be known,
We drop our weapons in the dust,
and unveil with the other prairie dogs—a global disrobal.

We read too much tar for no pleasure,
while we patch ourselves up with nicotine band-aids.
We let the talking heads scare us into the show,
We become cancerous clowns in the tumor circus.
We cannot duck and cover in the Alcoholocaust.
We cannot stay dry in the headswim of worry
and forward motion.

Compartmentalization leads to:
rubix cubicles,
paralyzed prizes,
spastic plastic,
and Tupperware death,

All the ever meanwhile,
Howling sweet exultations
and consuming quietly our consummations
so that we may die pure
and be saved by our cleverly patented,
widely acknowledged,
billions served,
guaranteed
one-hundred thousand mile drive chain
Luxury Christ.

When we hunker down
And cast our last breath under the elective curtain,
when they unearth our sterile bones,
will they say they truly understood what fine
encyclopedic creatures we were ?
Will we leave bones?
Bones for wolves to make soup,
for women to make breastplates,
and for men to make cages to keep their wolves
and women warriors in.

They may see the hinted drop stitchwork,
the soft, green loop to crochet the new world from,
but will they want such a pattern to follow?
We who all succumbed to communal self-butchery and burnings.
With the burden of our knowledge,
clinging to our near-death faces
though we wake in the night,
suffering insomniacs,
bloated and blue,
—information gorge syndrome—
well coax the current thickening lump and swallow,
and fall back against another chainlink, razorwire
skinless sleep.

Well, for now, caustic dreamers
of blameless, paranoid, age-defying landscapes,
let us multi-task our spiritual trash,
complicate the workable and fertile into fiscal orgasms,
and reduce our grand and beautiful ideas to slogans and acronyms
that suggest other equally unplugged words.

Let us muck around in newfound dark,
continue our acid intercourse,
bring our weary and our winded before our glittering
revolutionary hearth.
But we ask that you ask your loved ones to cover their nettles,
so we cannot trace the frightening highway back to the ocean,
or the forest,
or the desert,
so we do not name the extraneous scar across the trellis of a thousand nations,
so we will not offend our impressionable guests
at dinner date death,
so we cannot recognize our very same,
unrefined pain.

How do we not weep when we know our name is like a dirge,
strangled from threadbare angels.
The earth groans under our weight,
impregnated again and again with a stifling humanity,
eggs rolling off the edge of the earthen table
set by Columbus—
tiny, hopeful, rudiment vessels,
unpacking the cargo of the daunting future
while crushing the orange partitions of the past.

friends, weather, writing

let. me. clear. my. throat.

Posted on by littleREDelf

you know – i am not one to meow meow meow
and my even having to preface it now, you can fully
expect a little hissing, but more, i implore you:

tragic darling dears, get out of your beds,
off your couches, your haunches, your
hands and knees and for fuck’s sake PLEASE
point the camera out the bathroom, the window,
outdoors, out of self-respect, his, hers, mine
the worried cat and dog and yours
take into consideration that we’ve no need
to bear witness to your public bleeding
i have seen every configuration of stocking
stunt-cocking, macro of labial fold
(god DAMN that shit gets OLD . . .)
and your face pulled down into mask of despair
mascara, wings, and blood everywhere
and more tits than i could ever use.

Now, mind you, i like my dark days too,
and these things can be done in 32 flavors
and then some, but it won’t make me come
find you in your self-absorbed hip-o-drome
it’s just more i have to scroll past –
to find actual, breathing, human
photographs.

i believe you – you are real and so are
the rest of the enhanced blanched
oversaturated things you possibly feel
but i’d like to see more of your real life
pooled at your feet, than a pair of your
panties, your bathtub, the Xs & Os the
utter lack of prose and pause and thought
given to the extended forearm-as-tripod
still in the shot and those webcam eyes
so tenderly wrought.

i am not asking you to find/define your depths
i am not trying to damage your emotional
intelligence – i see the dress pattern you
are after, but i’m afraid you’ve dropped a stitch.
i will allow you the feline quality of female
i will ask you, however, to remove your ears
and that silly tail. There is NO pair of
breasts or handcuffs or shoes that will fix
what your expression
and vision
and your camera
will never do
in ultra-uncandid
clicks.

nature

Curioser Still . . . Where Do The Butterflies Go When It Rains?

Posted on by littleREDelf

Rain.

Floridian backlash from the hurricane sent plenty of it this way. Pattering on and off for days. Competing with our conversations and sometimes, believe it or not, our sleep.

Moths clung to the eaves and fluttered like wet leaves against the windows, looking for shelter.

But my most unusual find was a butterfly at nite, flapping weakly at the base of my front door, bedraggled in a spider web, its one antennae twisted, sticky and fused to a front leg until it became one, sending it wheeling in helpless, directionless, flightless circles.

i’ve seen this dark butterfly in the day – first time this season and one i haven’t been able to identify yet. Smoky, scalloped wings with irridescent green-blue powder. When the wings are closed they present bright orange dots.

i took it into the house and it was so tired it sat in my palm as i took a small pair of razor sharp tweezers and separated the leg from the antennae. it sat quite still, opening and closing its wings slowly like a breath, a slow pulse, a heartbeat. Then it waggled its antennae together, angling out as if communicating or tuning in and discovered it could fly.

. . . in my house.

the cats watched it beat towards the bright torchiere lamp in the living room and i quietly dicsouraged their chase. i caught it and went out side where it sat still in my hand for a few minutes and took flight again, resting against a high window until morning. As soon as the sun warmed things – it was off again to meet the day.

i always wondered where such delicate things could hide while the rain and wind tore through the flowers and trees. They hide under things – leaves and awnings with their wings clapped up tightly, waiting it out. Sometimes they are tattered to bits of confetti like all those tiny dances of death i see in the road beating furiously across stretches of two-lane country roads only to be tossed into the updrafts of passing trucks and cars, creased into radiator grills, dashed against hot pavement. You wouldn’t believe how many of them i see. How easily i pick them out from fallen leaves, newspaper, fast food bags, litter.

How many scraps of wings i find and save . . .

Today Zoey and i were driving to take in some lunch and photos in Annapolis. We stopped the car 20 yards out of the driveway and rescued an Eastern Painted turtle crawling directly in the path of the road. i held it gently by the midsection of its shell and began carrying it to a safe field. It quickly struggled and kicked against me as if to swim away, scratching the palms of my hands with meaty claws – cool and strong. But we saved it from the possible cars or the wash of storm quickly approaching.

Funny how the creatures most flitting, fast and delicate and even those lumbering, slow and sturdy in seemingly impenetrable shells – each are fragile in their own way.

There is always something larger than yourself, different and differently abled.

And we all need a safe place to rest out of the storm . . .

writing

spring dreaming

Posted on by littleREDelf

she’s leaving in the dark
but she knows that it’s morning
those earliest quicksilver hours move with
the first chatter of birdsong
the whisper of lawn sprinklers
the soft rumble of bakery trucks.

she peels herself from the length
of his body,
the indentation where she fits
carved in his side
the nite before
last Sunday
a month ago
the day he was born
a life previous.

on the roadway
lit now by the wash
of a dull, pewtered sun
amber-orange street lights fizzle
wink out like paper lanterns
and the black-blue bird
eyes her from the powerline.

she regards her watcher
with a knowing smile
for he is messenger and muse
promising dreams
the return of Spring
the length of a lover
and the indentation
to be reborn from
every morning
a blood-red sunrise
in a milk-white sky

~ Andrea E. Janda