adios

October is ending, November's on its way.
Dancing on the precipice is fine for spring and summer,
but it's time to fold the motley and put it on its shelf.

skinwalker's toss

this is a little choppy,
but, hey, Halloween...

Skinwalker's Toss

worn work boots, wing tips, stilettos, Birkenstocks,
flip-flops, moccasins, Doc Marten, Converse, bare
dog trailing a chain, cat, pigeon, owl, rat
no matter the form of the foot it will falter.
ecstasy or peace, the shapeshifter's chance

on one street out of many in any small city,
a building with a doorway in no way remarkable
casts a lure of peace to any who can hear
the screaming dark moon,
like a wild cat in heat
shrieking

throw off your skin and come to your sister
in the one form you belong to: none
unity, unity, fleshless and free
wild in the space between fragmented wholes

but the door whispers sanctuary, sanctuary, home

the future will hang like the last autumn fruit,
out of reach, out of knowledge
one last new skin could be destiny in flesh
or the anguish and formless insanity
who calls the winner when the coin doesn't fall?
every dark of the moon
the same choice returns

poem from a wordle: the Flock

 





the Flock


Before the bitter winter comes,
the purple martins gather.
No extract of coal could be more black
than their glossy iridescent masses.

They trade away winter in hook-neck gourds
and staircase-less apartments
for the southern kiss of warmer days,
and the drooping mass of Spanish moss.

Mosquitoes bred in muddy sloughs
they pluck like cherries on the wing.
Their passing, thick as shadow,
is right and perfect on the sky
as a cat on a porch, blue lines on a page,
or a smile on a porcelain doll.

October wordle

animal poem for WWP

In answer to your question:
Yes.
I can, in fact bwaawk like a hen.

( conversationally ) Bwaaawk, bwaaawk, bwaaawk.

( with excitement ) BWaaaawk!

( self-satisfied, or petulant, oddly the same )Bwawk.

and ( because there are always such moments ) Bwaawk?

It's a skill; it's a talent; it's an art.



For other animal visions, see
WWP Trip to the Zoo

raise 

high
the poop
deck, car
penter;
the wal
rus
wants
to sail.
pluck up
the droop
ing stair
case;
extract
the hook
from alice,
and let her
swim away.
her muddy
gourd's
gone bit
ter and the red
queen's pur
ple in
the face
from glos
sy dolls
and
kiss
es

Libran Workle in Progress

100 words

I begin to doubt that this will work, but even if it doesn't I will have learned something.  When the haibun prompt came up, it reminded me that I had intended to try some American Sentences.  I didn't then.  Now along comes what ought to be the perfect occasion.
Of course, I haven't even read that many, but I have a hunch that mine are, not simply not good, but actually bad.

Still, we lie on our backs and wave at the ceiling before we start to crawl, before we walk, before we run.
About 1/3 of the way through the list:

1. Refrigerator latch broke; pap inside's tepid, and a touch foetid.
2. La primavera: a warm embrace, but her storms have icy kisses.
3. A dust of butterflies wings wafts, delicate, past the trickle of tears.
4. A jet plane over the ocean lives by the beauty of fire and air.
5. A fleck of gold in his green eyes, sparked an alluring frisson of lust.
6. I escaped the lunch with a light heart and a handful of chocolate stars.
7. She snapped back, too warm to be a polite and well-modulated sheep.
8. The clasp at the nape of her neck was sea glass, cool as a sky blue rose
9. Make an I ching trigram called amazing joy out of windstorm thick leaves.
10. To stuff a fig, you must love, not the fruit, but drudgery: or murder.
11. The fuzzy dice on her dash were studded with hot pink diamantes
12. At the roast they served her a baked swan song sauced with hot gin-soaked cherries

 

Quantum Charlie

Quantum Charlie

there was a TV show.
a man's mind bounced around
in past tenses, like a fly in a window,
and settled each week into some
different body's set of troubles,
leaving suddenly just as things began
to clarify, about to go right.

Imagine:
week after week
with nothing but
Bukowski's hangovers.

MONDAY PROMPT / October 4

www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 108

Question And Answer

he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
of all the letters he had received
telling him that
the way he lived and wrote about
that--
it had kept them going when
all seemed
truly
hopeless.

Charles Bukowski

Exercise #1

One thing that came to me along with my husband was a book of essays, Vibration Cooking.   While it does in fact contain recipes, it is in reality a book about  people making joy and home from the ingredients at hand.

The directions were clear enough, but not restrictive.
.........................To question would require an act of imagination, or
.........................the mind of a ten-year-old.
But adaptable.  There was no saying:  I don't have that
and closing the book on the whole enterprise.
And why not be open to interpretation?

This was not neurosurgery,
or baking,
or contract law.

Locking the door behind me,

I stepped out into October,  with the crows cursing the gray cat,
acorns clicking onto the sidewalk, dogs making exuberant remarks
about squirrels and personal property, and juvenile rodents devouring
the red ripe kernels of pomegranate-like magnolias

and began to

Walk At Least 5 Minutes Every Day

Thursday Prompt #22 What’s for Dinner?

HOLDING IN HER HAND AN APPLE...

            I want your money and
your life she said stepping outside
her trite and truly off-the-rack
painted by the numbers linear life.
none of that namby-pamby wishy-
washy, flip-flop, either/or,    either.
I want it all she said, leveraging
with the addition of an air guitar.
beautiful, I'll be the goldfoil angel
wearing diamonds like glass beads,
crashing masked balls bare-faced,
cursing infants for their own good.
and I wonder why didn't I do this
  years ago

____     ____     ____

You can see the genesis of this here.  
And if you're wondering how this poem came about...

I liked the story with Jill’s prompt so much that I decided to steal it.
As a black-hearted highwayman. 
I stole the tree-fort tree and picked an apple from it.
Stuffed her leverage in my pocket, while I was at it.  My childhood was Disney-Grimm, so all the bad fairy curses turn out to have positive outcomes. And because the good fairies are indistinguishable from angels, and Jill seems like such an angellic imp, I just decked her in sequins and gold lame, and stole her off the top of the (now a fir) tree.

But, because I am only pretending, I put everything (and everyone) back the way I found it when I was through playing bandits.

big tent poetry