Category: Ruby Tuesday

MWA 1951-2024

~ qbit ~ 17 Comments

After Lorca – Of the Dark Doves

The night you died
there were two stones 
in the kitchen
One was a wolf
one was a cat
One had its throat in the grave
one was twice as sorry
There are three ceremonies
a chamber where ash is asleep
and a jar of blood
Slicked, I slip on pearls
you rolled like dice
before heaven’s gate
before swine
Your last words to me
two stones fatted for sacrifice
Two calves
with stones in their throats
You were three times prodigal
then you were none
Wine poured slick like blood
cut from a howl
I am a wolf at your grave
without a voice
Two times you died
One was a sorrow
and both were none

For Shay’s Word Garden & Ruby Tuesday

Crumbles

~ qbit ~ 17 Comments 
Baudelaire (why is it always Baudelaire?)
sat near the window to write fortune cookie scripts.
(Even flâneurs and boulevardiers need 
extra absinthe boodle).

He’d done well with his bumper sticker:
“Honk if you love Jesus!”
but inspiration is lightning
that doesn’t strike twice.

Today he struggles:
“The fox covers itself with the scent of lilies,
its soul an ethereal fire, the rhythm of shadows.”
No, no, that will not do.

“Weeds and wildflowers both die
with the language of silent things on their tongues.”
again, no, he scrapes the palimpsest – 
ghost words haunt the page.

How will he release the pieties, the taboos
of General Gau’s chicken? 
The dark wishes 
stirring in a pot of wonton soup?

For Shay’s Word Garden Word List

For Ruby Tuesday prompts

Billy the Mountain

~ qbit ~ 19 Comments

“Billy was a mountain (Billy was a mountain), Ethel was a tree growing off of his shoulder”*

A responsive Reading to Billy Collins Introduction to Poetry

Billy, you’re such a wiener!
I think we used to pants guys like you
in Jr. High.
Fer Christsake –
 
Let’s take poems
and hold a BIC lighter to their words!
See if they burst into Hindenburg flame —
Zeppelins of hydrogen guitar riffs.
 
Take the poems you’ve been handed —
chip at them with hammerstone
and try to make a flint knife or spear,
something useful for survival when the world ends.
 
Or cut eyeholes in the pages
and use them as a mask
in a bank robbery —
then turn their meaning inside out
 
and disguise yourself
as a metaphor for the blinding sun
as you run down the alley,
cash spilling out of your bag.
 
Grease yourself with WD-40 poems, WD-50, WD-Infinity —
so you can slip through the wormhole
from today back to today
and only lose consciousness of a few hours.
 
Hell yes, tie them up!
Beat them with a rubber hose,
interrogate them for meaning,
make them give up the names, the names…
 
If they lie,
if they fail to tell you
the truth, hang them at dawn.
Hang them all.

*Billy the Mountain, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, 1971

For Desperate Poets

For Ruby Tuesday prompts

Ruby Tuesday

~ qbit ~ 10 Comments

(For J&C)

You said “Goodby Ruby Tuesday” to me 
before clicking the lid shut 
on your jewel-box car –

redlining home with your heist
in the passenger seat, her hair 
the theft of every red sky at morning

warnIng you of the storms ahead.
But you had wound and knotted my vision 
to a rocket – gravity harpooned to its soul –

spoutIng fire into water-black sky
in its fury to escape the barbs 
set by iron laws of the land.

My heart caught in the coils –
a Nantucket sleighride dragging me skyward 
away from the river, the estuary, the sea,

the whale-road home –
instead of sanctuary,
you – if you call me Ishmael, I will call you Ahab –

sank us on the graveyard moon
where you filled coffee cans 
with ashes of the dead.

If I fall to my knees next to you and dig,
dig all the way to China,
will I find scrimshaw runes of my mother and father 

written on bones?
Will my lips be caked with dust
from kissing the lunar ground 

where I was tossed ashore
by the Sea of Tranquility
in a  meteor storm?

Will you find your lost limb
when you hobble to the trunk of your car 
In the moonlight?

Back in our story a ruby slipper
was still on her foot
when her leg washed onto the rocks.

Like me, she must have clicked her heels 
three times
and said “there’s no place like home”

so we could sleep with the fishes
and dream of rivers and the sea
where what we’ve lost sinks out of sight

to where there is no light –
where like a blind fish, 
my hair luminous,

waving in the merman dark  –
I ask her name 
and there is no reply.

For Desperate Poets OLN (and Desperate Crossings)

For Ruby Tuesday prompts