Paint Swatch “Gypsum” [10-01-23]
Tag: poetry
Steaming Kettle (07/27/2020)
I gather pinches of various herbs and flowers from their various jars and packets.
My mood today is out-of-body; distant and detached.
I open the tap, filling the fat hollow of my kettle with the cool water of the well.
My days have been blending together in a slow rush of sunrises and sunsets.
I have cravings that can never be satisfied.
I smell my earthy fragrant mixture, stimulating something deep within me.
Lavender blossom, chamomile, raspberry leaf, rosehip.
Valerian root, orange peel, sage, mint.
Most from my own garden.
I need something: a physical touch. Intimacy.
Violent passion and passionate violence.
I watch the honey drip from my spoon and pool in the bottom of my mug,
Which reads “Pretend this cup is the skull of my enemy.”
Gods, what would it feel like to be a warrior again?
To know the feel of a man again.
To bathe in blood, instead of the crisp waters of a spring.
I use an old shortsword to stoke the embers inside the old wood burner,
As my kettle finally begins to whistle and scream.
The boiling water in my mug creates intense clouds of scented floral vapors,
The taste of which does something to clear the fog of my mind.
Dark Alley (04-18-2018)
It was the kind of place you didn’t go to because that’s where bad things always happened.
But she liked it bad and wanted something to happen to her. Badly.
So that’s where she went.
It was dark and dingy, damp, and dirty.
A place that attracted the devious, the depraved, debauchery, and the Devil himself.
Moonlight didn’t touch there, and it has even more rarely seen sunlight.
The rats and men were nearly indistinguishable.
It was a place where people threw out their trash, which included corpses.
Usually women.
Usually raped or mutilated.
The police call it “Deadman’s Den”
Because you’re a dead man if you set foot there at night.
But she knew the night.
Had been acquainted with Death.
On knowingly familiar terms with bad guys and the Boogyman.
And she liked it bad.
And she wanted bad things to happen.
She sighed with contentment as she stepped into its darkness,
And disappeared.
Winter (Frostbite) (12-23-2019)
The Winter Solstice is upon us, and the year is in its dark half.
Days and sunlight have been steadily waning,
while the moon gains power and the long nights reign supreme.
I am like that tonight heavy darkness inside.
I wish to cut like ice
Burn like the cold
To be filled with anything other than this nothing.
I want to scream like the wind
And fell cities like fallen snow.
Why can’t you understand that sometimes I am Winter?
Still and dark and sleeping and alone,
My blood a frozen river,
My nails clawing like naked branches,
My teeth need to tear flesh like the sound of crunching snow.
I want to bite at you like the frost,
Make your breath pour hot into the air like a dragon,
Get your cheeks red.
But you can’t take the heat of me,
So, I only hibernate.
And it hurts.
Late Night Thoughts 1 (5/19/2011)
“The moon is full,
and so are my dreams.
Silence is deafening,
and madness wakes,
always howling answers.“
Letter in the Mailbox (03/29/10)
Leaving the house, I stopped my truck at the end of the driveway to check the mailbox. I was expecting a book. It had arrived, and I held the package and sorted through the rest of the mail.
I came upon an envelope. I flipped it over and there was no writing or address or return address. Nothing identifiable of any kind. It did not look like it was from a business. I opened it up and caught a glimpse of neat lines of handwriting across blank white paper folded crookedly.
My brain reeled. My stomach lurched. My heart jumped as though struck by lightning and it beat with the force of a war drum in my ears. My voice caught in my throat and my breath stopped in my lungs.
For a moment I was frozen in time, standing by the road, haphazardly holding an armful of mail and staring down at the letter in my hands. My brain processed as my eyes read back and forth across the page. Trying to comprehend, trying to identify the handwriting. For a second to which seemed as though in eternity, I thought it was yours. The familiar lean and curve of your letters across to page in black ink.
Everything came together in my mind at last and I realized that the letter was not from you. It was someone else’s familiar handwriting. For only a moment in eternity I had lived with hope and excitement and exaltation and shock. The years of restless lonely longing and silence suddenly forgotten and at an end.
And in an instant all of the things I had been feeling turned to sadness.
Sleepy Hollow 10/2017
I was visiting Washington Irving’s home Sunnyside in Tarrytown New York for the second time, back in 2017. It was October, and they were having a festival and home tour at his estate. There was a booth set up with various activities, and one of them was creating a poem from scraps of paper. So mine was obviously centered around Irving’s most famous Headless Hessian of Sleepy Hollow.
Bathtub 02/15/2022
Howl (03-24-2011)
And then, in total darkness except for a light pole next to their house; it began.
A solitary howl; slow and deep, and then another voice broke out, and another. Until the howls of the wolves filled up the air and sky around us, filling in all the places between the trees and within my own body.
Their deep booms and high yips and guttering throat calls and chanting, fitting together in perfect time. A choir of ghosts. Wailing cries of wandering souls in the night.
Then, without any sign of a change, they crescendo, all howls becoming one. The voice of a great and ancient god, a sound that makes my very atoms vibrate.
There is not an instrument made by the hands of man that could come close to creating the sound of a wolf crying. A familiar call to my soul.
Poetry Magnets (4-11-2018)
AEL Library & Archives 