Tag Archives: free verse

schmutzy golem girl

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

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Legend concerns the animation of uniformed matter (which is what the Hebrew word golem means) … [and] the most famous golem is Rabbi Loew’s giant servant made from mud of the [river] Vitava, who was brought to life when the rabbi placed a shem [magical scroll] inside the clay …”
— from, The Rough Guide to Prague, page 101.

In the end, being
nothing more than
river clay, she left
dirty teeth marks
each night across
my neck and
fingers. Clothes
shopping was
a nightmare.
Food bored her.
Often I found
her laying on
her bed, moodily
playing with
her shem.

Her eyes,
the same sludge gray
that they drudged her
up from, held all
the cosmos, twigs,
a drowned squirrel.

Once she said that she
wished to see a heart
break, “Or a bone!”
looking eagerly at my
hand. “Don’t worry, it
can be a small one.”
But it was the warmth
that ran wild in me that
she couldn’t believe.
Tracing a fingernail
across each injury
she’d left fascinated
her. “Purple means
love,” she marveled,
watching all my bruises
change colors the way
the earth changes
with the sky, seasons
and clouds; reflecting
back everything; fading
back into what it once
was; the earth once
again reclaiming all
it had ever created.

summoning

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

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“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs and gleams …” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince.

1st PRAYER:

Wake and watch dawn pour over the desert;
as it does everyday in the city

of Jeddah, in Babylon. She searched for
Lilith among the corpses the raiders

leave for the vultures for she has waited
lifetimes, another dawn, one more sunset,

for this. Out on the Sahara’s low lip
something entered her wrists, thin fingers stirred,

touching, just once, nails kissing each other.
All I tell you is a secret, a need

beyond word, beyond sound, silence, until
the silence releases something like prayer,

like song. She sat in the sand, drew circles
with her curved horn-blade. It is hard not to fall

in love with blades, with rage, with a war like blades.
It was a summoning from the silence,

from Lilith, the First Wife, the First Lover.
She threw down the curved-horn, turned to the south.

A Bedouin widow sat on a dune,
watching the girl watching the vast sand storm

approach, washing over everything; pulsing
with what the ancients called destruction of life.

the color of emergency

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

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“We know that a peaceful world
cannot long exist, one-third rich
and two-thirds hungry.”
— Jimmy Carter (America)

This stupid world —-
skinny mosquitoes, skinny fleas,
skinny children.
—- Issa (Japan)

][][

Heft it by the pound.

Squeeze it and juice

seeps between your fingers.

They don’t say that we’re

made up of juice,

though, but water, but

it is the same thing.

Life in water,

summer water,

warm to the touch.

In Vegas the nights

were so warm it felt

as if you’d been born

three weeks ago.

What sea or river or

pool could rival that?

The joy in heat

is that you can get

out of it. Not

the frog in the pan.

Like food, when

we’re satiated

we stop.

Which makes us

part of the 1%.

Some of us get to eat.

Is pot roast the color

of emergency? No.

The blue-gun metal

shell of artillery.

The silver-white

of the bayonet.

The orange landmine.

The red coal glow

of the end of a cigarette,

peppering human skin.

A body, anybody, hefted

between two staggering

detainees is still 75% water.

But it isn’t water

that runs down

the leg, staining

your hands where you

held her, staining

the ground

with something

that will dry in the heat,

dry and dissolve.