Halloween at Mercer

All camellias are ladies, finally.
Gothic gowns and blonde...
And the clouds, the oncoming Halloween storms?
Horses and riders and the dust
Kicked up from the waters of yesterday.
She leans onto the branch
Soaked into roan, skirts billowing--
the wind won't pick up beneath the hooves above
It's the dream of stasis and fear
Pounding the humidity into a slick path
For the pursuing storms.
She flings an arm out, slams her heels
Beneath the branch and folds
Toward the path, leaning over me.
I hear the shout...
But not even a chill catches me.

Beside the Road

A carnival parks where the stores have emptied
The elephantine parking lot rolls toward the shadows
Where the names are washing from the flesh
Of the buildings.
Passenger cars wobble in the breeze, a steel circle
Showing a summer sky through the brisk fall breezes
Sweeping hatchlings of flowers and roadside trash,
Orange butterflies, up.
Down a side street a dark billboard entices
Screen upon screen, sun just another burnt electron
Laser-tailored, while the Mona Lisa in the corner
Takes the order.
Flattened magic whispers under the tires
Windows roll up and down, cars slip flashes
Of other sides and people and then, you,
Driving.

Shift of Season

Drains and birds' nests--season comes when you feel
Cold foundation under your bones, groan of a board
Working away from a dissolving nail
Mold and moss furrow into wood
Like children into sand; toes, then ankles
Then legs, then torso...until the sand
Blankets over laughter and sudden
Upshoots
Upstairs, glass is shattering back to silica
And the Norfolk pine that didn't fit
In the backseat on the last trip
Grows where the broken window rainwater
Scatters dust, in the top floor
Where the crows are at last living
Better than they were at the
Supermarket parking lot
Everything in the house comes to the pine
When the sun casts the monastery shadow
Of its uppermost branches,
The Abandoned Cross,
Onto the floor, sunlight kicking
That which came next down
Among those who remain
And then dragging it up the wall
Where the rats and mice live
They can hear the voices
Suddenly--broken silence freezing
Into icicles of old traps and choking boxes
Season comes when the light fades quick
And the life comes back slow
Season comes, even for them.

Sharing with The Sunday Muse for The Muse #27 and with Poets United for Poetry Pantry #426. Thanks to Carrie at The Muse for finding this haunting image and to all the people at Poets United who make Sunday such a great day for reading. Hoping everyone who celebrates has a happy Halloween next week (celebrating here on Wednesday...probably by watching My Babysitter is a Vampire because I prefer laughing to shrieking...and there were plenty of scares this weekend owing to a minor fender bender) and looking forward to a shifting season and cooler weather. 

Best wishes,
Chrissa

Goofing Around

Pop music, loud garage poetry, the kind that echoes
Loud and indistinct, from the people down the block
Reminders of your skin, flickering in the chorus

And the academic kind, in case your soul
Now needs to shake itself in a shower of chords
Built of angels and thirds and old, old music

Search your tongue for the read, the relics
Of yesterday and tomorrow and tense
Where the language melts and reforms and sings

Stop Sign

Stop sign in a dark puddle
Headlights burn magnesium
Cut the day from night
Splash the moon into drops

Drown the planned trip in the water, in the street
Hold it under the tires, down to the road bed, tired

Night rills leak toward the drain while I watch
Dreams drying on my ankles, underfoot
Until it curls around my ankles, velvet black
Old rims and headlights gathered
In the rubber of its collar--who gives a night cat
A thing of junk and rubbish?

Then the lights flare, metal sparks memories
And the night purrs and waits for more of my magic:
My next disappearance, my next galvanized thought
Shocking through my skin
Thinning oil along gears
I can hear clicking through my head
Like nails across the kitchen tile
A circus of spinning dogs cut from memory
Pasted on the shaft driving the center ring
Twirling, dancing--as if we run on Remember (TM)

All our days decompose into tar--maybe it's the tears,
Maybe it's the skin--and are refined
Into high-grade Nostalgia (TM) that burns like alcohol,
Limelight cocktails fire at the edge of the sawdust
In the black that smells restless, like petrol

I'm sure those other lives splayed
In a rainbow across the puddle I shattered
Into night slivers of moon and cat and dress and wand
That cling and watch and tremble

What card did I flip when I turned that corner?

Sharing with Poets United and  The Sunday Muse. Tomorrow there is a rally in the city to which we are a suburb that was sold as if there would be monster trucks and free toys for the kids instead of monster opinions running rampant. This has nothing to do with the poem, per se...it's just that at times it feels as if my perspective darkens and shifts--seeing incipient violence in the innocent cheering for a local team as if every time we're encouraged to support the colors and cheer is a lesson in how to keep the monsters satisfied with bloody roars instead of blood. So...yeah. What exactly do we run on and from and toward in the night?

-- Chrissa

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Hoping everyone is having a good week. We've had our first taste of fall weather and are hoping for more in the coming week (totally greedy for cooler weather) and the Halloween decorations are up. One of this week's posts will likely be pics since I think my brain needs a vacation. :) Sharing this post with Poets United and The Sunday Muse.  

-- Chrissa

Post-Exilic

Yesterday
I walked through a garden
Flat
Against my skin--
Not iron but heat
Bending to become door,
Exit
Through which I left,
Blade-edge of summer
Barring my return.

One day
We will become the fable
The ones who would not see
Whose better angels will be painted
As the crows of the field.
Everything for the use, for gabble;
Sharp eyes in the shade
Beneath the shiny bigness.

A day, then:
Fleet passing
Of the joy in the escape
From us.

That day
Light will run from the snare
In the form of the new hare
Whose eyes are quick
To the shift of the lie.
And whether anyone
Lays their child beneath
A telling
We will never know
However hungry we become.

Sharing with both Poets United for Poetry Pantry #423 and The Sunday Muse for The Muse #24. Hope that you are having a week in which all your rage is energy and the works you encounter ramparts rather than barricades. 

-- Chrissa

Only This and Nothing More

Silence Thick as Concrete

All I can feel is steel vibrating like a bass string in anger. This blog is closed until further notice.

--  Chrissa