Some of my more progressed, less progressing, works-in-progress. As you can hopefully
tell, I enjoy both odd metrical relationships and not-quite-here-yet lexical items.
Lost Creature
If, then, God calls again, just as he called the rain
When Noah had procured His smelly zoo,
Let unicorn and griffin die in pain,
The last bright nymph to gargle in the slew;
A stud among the ungulates may look to you
Upon your shrinking promontory, chew his cud,
Grumble to his companion of the scene outside,
Who, also chosen to survive the flood,
May seed old stories of wild magic in your blood
Who only came to magic when, for spite, you died.
Lullabo
Where continents swell,
should you and I dwell
with the common idea,
without longing or fear,
that the fading frontier
and the faulting Pangaea
are illusory, we
could abide by the sea,
and would never be sure
that the shifting of sands
in the drifting of lands
made them worse than they were.
Morning Decree
At six a.m. everything tastes like bile.
The sun belies a soul's nocturnal grace
like a witch on trial.
The sun's on trial, and if my vengeful saints
have found it to have falsely lit our space,
it shall be blotted out tonight with pastel paints.
Ellis
Tonight,
On fragile strands our captive rises,
Stands refracted, binds contract
And eyes expand...
A fling, and singing glass shatters tense,
Stings matter, an actor's battle
Passionate and past, a chatter
Of fragments, his stunned audience.
Flesh to Stone
The mind's eye, so lustful an organ,
against her baser judgement looks
to that contemporary gorgon
which turns men to books.
In this new form of permanence,
the academic's diffidence,
deep within the eyes,
reflects a brief and failed pretense
to shroud those final motions of surprise.
29A (Lilith as City Witch)
Sanoi. The sister looked me in the eyes
And spoke her first word, guarding the fetus.
I didn't know then, how the preverbal
And prenatal could align as bridesmaids,
How ones so young could join an ancient war,
Crushing, with sociobiology,
Poetry, though they'd think they were speaking
Of cute boys, or later, good providers;
I only knew that my breath turned to sand
The moment I saw the pink young mother,
And that this two-year-old knew that I knew.
And I felt the tang of an unripe plum
On my flaccid tongue, as the succubus
Entered, to encoil and squeeze my language.
Andrea's Perspective
After the fade,
I am left with a torrent of jade in your distance,
Your distance, your grace;
At my feet, as a child at a fair
Dancing heedless of audience, or of that tempo
Of which I am far too aware,
Long past long-desired, short-awaited transgress
Of the Scylla-Charybdean altar, more
Smooth in her skin after driving eyes sore
Than in her celebrity, rolls to a stop.
(She rolls to a stop.)
Love, cached in a pip,
Bounds music-drunk across felt
To some random still.