Do I need a goal like a road
into town? I keep skidding
off. Why take a trodden
route? I prefer wilderness,
tangles, slippery-leaved
detours. Often I sidestep,
& diverge. I trend
to the complex, get criss-
crossed. In a dream
Teacher reassures, Ditch
the practical path! Feel
laughter like a Sequoia
towering in your veins; loss
like a Humpback breaching full-
sized from your throbbing
pear-shaped heart.
Hanged Man’s Ball
(Bal des pendus – written in 1870)
At the black gibbet, marionettes amiable
Dance, dancing the Paladins,
The devil’s lean hounds the Paladins,
The bouncing skeletons of the Saladins.
They dance, Sir Beelzebub slaps their heads
They grimace and dance by the jerking
Of a little black tie against the sky
And a smack on their foreheads this Christmas!
Then the puppets, shocked, fuse their spindle arms
Like layered organ pipes—black, bound above;
The chests are open. What used to be pressed
To damsels clean, collides in hideous love,
The thrusting of sweaty congress disemboweled!
Lithe women writhe and swing on the hangman’s beam!
Is this love or is this confusion?… pay nothing of a mind—
Beelzebub boiling rasps bow over viola hissing in time!
My heels are hard, not in need of replacing.
My chest and legs have peeled off suits of skin.
I am naked. There’s nothing shocking left to see Maman.
Atop my skull a cap of mountain snow:
Crows make crowns royal, cracked—
The pink, bleeding flesh quivering at their beaks
Caught in twilight’s dawn of nocturnal winds.
At these, knights of putrescent paper armor present.
The breezes blow through the hanged men arranged
Like ferrous organ pipes, a rusty squeezebox,
And wolves go answering from the violet forests,
From a horizon, hellish and red and moaning…
Shake off and unstring these stony captains
Who, make a holy pass, reading rosaries of love!
Their broken fingers number pale vertebrae:
There is no sanctuary, for you, dead forever!
Oh! There in the midst of the dance macabre,
One mad skeleton, untrammeled wild to gallop
Gone, carried by whips, a stallion:
Still feeling the strangling reins around his neck,
His forefingers clutch at his bony thigh,
Giggles squeezed out of the chalk more than moans,
And, like a wanderer entering the walls of the town,
To applause he bounces the ball to the song of the bones.
At the black gibbet, marionettes amiable
Dance, dancing the Paladins,
The devil’s lean hounds the Paladins,
The bouncing skeletons of the Saladins.
Author: Arthur Rimbaud
Translator: Manny Grimaldi
* Watching our disabled female veteran neighbor struggle mowing her grass,
he took over finishing the job.
* Her 13 year old voice pitched with fear, she called us for help. Someone was
breaking into the house as she babysat a 4 year old and 6 year old. She was our
neighbor and mom wasn’t home. He hopped in our car with no weapon but
himself to the rescue. The intruder drove off as he approached.
*. Volunteered to teach kids with disabilities how to cook once a month for 17
years providing all the food with recipes encased in plastic to replicate at home.
*. Taking shifts to care for my mom on hospice in our home so I could work part time
and Grocery shop.
*. Refusing to do a scuba live aboard and leave me home alone, worrying about my health.
*. Taking our 15 year old family dog, Toby, to the vet when it was time, by himself cause i
couldn’t bear to do it. He came home after, took a shot of bourbon and cried his eyes out.
These are just a few from his list. The reason I trusted him with my life..
Last night I dreamt my old gray dog
was chasing a mountain lion.
Across a dark field he ducked and sprinted until his lame leg weakened.
The cat, her breath steady, descended upon him in slow fluid movement.
Then I, a wilder banshee than she
Screamed from over the ridge.
Hair aflame with moonlight, arms waving like snakes, I dream hopped a marathon in minutes over high grasses and broken trees.
The lioness stopped, stared at me with weary yellow eyes,
and slowly
turned
away.
Sing, Speak as the world spins and changes
Falsities shall be shrouded
While truths lay uncovered
Freeze time in your song
Black bird
Wake the dead
Lull the living to sleep
In sleep your mind is as free as the air
Eat the Rowan berries, brightest red
Black Druid
The symbol of health
Emblazoned on each
We forge ourselves
Into finest gold
With that fiery awakening
Mastery of this hardening clay
Requires a depth charge
crushed into cold,
black, watery hearts
The shock to our frailty dispelled
by stoking our spiritual passion
Unearthing our instinct
to weave and craft our nest
You have tasted of gold
And it has marked your mouth
There ain’t nothing in the life of a child
Quite like a mamaw
Nana, granny, meemaw, mimi, grandma;
All words that share one meaning: joy
A mamaw is all the things that your
Mom won’t allow
Staying up late; midnight cookies and
Laughter that doesn’t end
She is life lessons; learning the old ways
Canning and creating
Hands wrinkled and lined with years of
Diligent hardworking traditions
Making a poultice when you’re sick
Wrapped in itchy blankets
A hot toddy, strong and steaming
Loving and tender words
Butterscotch candies at the bottom of a purse
Passed out at church
A Thanksgiving dinner gathered at the old
Scarred up table in the kitchen
There ain’t nothing like a mamaw
In the life of a child
What any of us wouldn’t give
For just one more minute
It did not burn, Alexandria–not in the way
the flame of history is said to have danced. Instead, slowly,
the hierophants stacked the lumber of words, propheysing
a path unto itself, the trodenness of the muddy earth
sloughing off of the toenails of the nobodies. The lemmings followed
one another until all the dilemmas had been written down, drunk
off of the names of people they no longer knew. Identities congealed
on the discarded bones until flesh grew underneath the maggots
of self obsession, crawling towards the cold sun. Some say
it was these muscles that unknowingly twitched their own demise,
while others claim some knowing monad grew tired of the weight
of its own being, disgusted with what it had become. Purposefully,
or not, fractals of destruction eroded slowly, then all at once,
until all that was left was a concept of a memory, red hot
and disintegrating. They could not find the ashes,
the children of the unlucky, and so, simply,
they sang.
