Villanella - or - Pretty maidens (now profaned) supplicate

Pretty maidens (now profaned) supplicate

Branded tympanies deaf to their cascades,

Night’s mantle, a thief, and the girl of eight.

The sheets and my systole punctuate

This jostled gaze, this fragile hold of flight,

Pretty maidens (now profaned) supplicate.

The unadorned bantam, the sovereign state

Climbing trees, muddy feet, spring faeries,

Night’s mantle, a thief, and the girl of eight.

Gather up the remains, girls; bifurcate

Your infinite sorrows and smiling face,

Pretty maidens (now profaned) supplicate.

Come undone, splayed, we fade and dissipate

Where love might have lived: now the siren’s cell,

Night’s mantle, a thief, and the girl of eight.

But our hearts are not homes we can vacate,

No - our hearts are fallow fields. My sisters,

Pretty maidens (once profaned) supplicate

Night’s mantle - no thief - just the lives we create.

The You, the I

There exists the You, there exists the I;

Shapes losing shape as they blur at the sides.

In parting with fear,

All things.

Helixes, matrices roll wildly by;

Ordered chaos spirals them inside.

Divine form, our very cells

Shift, swell and contract, sigh.

I want to say: You have changed me;

The tongue of our time promises to be

Inadequate - utterly profane.

Yet I am compelled to try: All things

Sacred, the language of our eyes.

In parting with fear,

  in the space left behind,

All things.

The Feeling of Things

I remember my life through the feeling of things; it’s as if my nervous system collected chosen sensory experiences like the BFG collected choice good dreams, and they’ve been lined up in crystal-clear glass jars not only in my brain but also - moreso - along the surface of my skin, the scillia of my nose, my taste buds and the corners of my eyes.

When some body memory is triggered, something outside of myself, it seems, places a tiny finger atop the lid of one jar and, giggling at me through slitted eyes, smashes the jar to the ground of my self: bedlam! my soul sobs; mutiny! my heart cries. And all the while the memory itself dances irreverently on the shards of its shattered prison, leaving a trail of bloody footprints for me to follow.

It is this irreverence toward the past that has, quite unmethodically, cluttered my mind with its ghosts and fairies and angels alike. And the little imp who is to blame, though she seems to exist outside of me, peers at me from within chocolate brown eyes through jet black hair, does the deed with an olive finger and an air of gall I know too well; the little imp looks curiously like pictures of myself around two or three.

Ancient Greece

Sitting in the neo-beast watching stars roll by

  Constellations befuddle my brain

Return me to deep dusty places

     Where I feel like bleu cheese again,

Slightly musty, colored for depression,

     deliciously crumbly

I fall apart more every other day

Can't you make a salad?  and eat me alive…

I've no care for this world as I fall

An ancient pillar, built weaker below

     Those formative years

Are the muddle of mortar that refuses to set

My tears aren't quite sure

       Why they leap from my eyes….

Color saves me from myself around now

  Autumnal oranges and yellow,

  Internally pink, a glowing candle

Except ‘tis the time for a fade to brown and bleak

And I'm not quite sure how I'll fare.