dVerse – This Jolly Beggar

Deathbeds

Lisa is today’s host at dVerse’s Prosery, and says: "Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to incorporate the quote ["I dress in their stories patterned and purple as nigh" –from “When We Sing of Might,” by Kimberly Blaeser] into a piece of prose. This can be either flash fiction, nonfiction, or creative nonfiction, but it must be prose! Not prose poetry, and not a poem. And it must be no longer than 144 words, not including the title. (It does not have to be exactly 144 words, but it can’t exceed 144 words.)

Deathbeds

Their graves are trash bins, medical refuse after each organ is harvested, the doctor careful to preserve the parts but not the whole. There is money to be had. She knew all this. She had worked as one. But the children she had aborted were not real to her.

Until the day she lay dying.

Suddenly they appeared before her eyes, smiling their forgiveness, and she relaxed. They understood! There was a God in heaven after all. Why, she didn’t even have to forgive herself!

She stretched out her hands to them but they stood out of reach midst the children she herself had decided to keep.

Her children saw her eyes widen.

“I dress in their stories patterned and purple as night,” she whispered.

What stories, Mom?

“The ones I took from them. The ones I robbed them of. Oh God! They burn!”

Update: So far this year almost 40 million children have been killed by choice. The leading cause of death is by abortion, far surpassing all other causes. According to data compiled by the Worldometer, a reference website that monitors statistics on health, the global population, the use of resources and deaths in real-time, over 40 million abortions are performed worldwide annually.

A Meteor’s a’Comin’

Canoop! the sound of your loop-tee-do
Enough! the slough of your despondency
Wooditch! the whinge of your panicky
The meteor’s coming ‘ere election day!

Cannip the conniption fit, buddit the funk
Swallow the glut of slubbish bilocracy
Gnash, says the prophet Neal deGrasse
Tyson, we’ll die in a blaze ‘ere election eve!

O Meteor of space! O Deliverer of grace!
You’ll spare us, ‘ere you dare us, with crater
Dustiferous, injurious, deleterious bringer
Of sweltering doom ‘ere we galood election gloom!

Come the third of November, we’ll never remember
Who’s Harris, Who’s Donald, What’s Joe Biden hidin’?
We won’t know a thing when the meteor’s oncomin’
O’er helter-election-welter, combustin’ election eve!

For Peter Frankis's NTB "Let your words ring out" at dVerse. 
Check out Mr. Linky for more poems with "with a focus on sounds"

The Alchemist

I thought I’d write this quadrille (prompt word “magnet”) in anticipation of Halloween with its cornucopia of bat wings and eerie skeletal thrills. Quadrille Monday at dVerse limits each offering to 44 words, so be warned!

She walks in a drysalter’s den
wearing death, her subfusc,
scattering acedia’s magnetic coils,
like iron filings shot hard
against fate’s blind eyes,
their littoral currents crashing
against her noon day commerce
of herbs, bone dust, pharmacopeia,
against concinnity escaping
fruitless desire, skulking caitiff.

Read more quadrilles at Mr. Linky.

Give Me, Sister Silence

It’s “Meeting the Bar” at dVerse, where Bjorn asks us to use the autocomplete function in Google to generate lists that transport us to imaginative poetic heights. Check them out by clicking Mr. Linky and join in!

I began with typing in “Give me” as a search term which led me down rabbit holes ending with typing in “silence” midway, trying to find my way out of the dark wood in which I’d ended. Beware Google.

Give me one reason, sister silence,
give me directions home, oh sister do you hear?
give me the time of day a nightingale sings
Silent bays, skies, silent rage and silent lambs
must sit on silent hills, searching Google in Thrace
Satyr Silenus, do you hear, your drunken nights
by Dionysus's side have all led you to make a king
turn a daughter's flesh to gold, oh, oh, oh!
Give me liberty sits enthroned, untutored,
give me love lyrics for dirty ears, Alexa!
ask tongueless Philomela, oh sister hear!
"inappropriate predictions" don't you think? 
Google, show me the severed head of Itys unmourned
unseen, "I'm feeling lucky," tereu, tereu
Non, silento! Basta! Enough! Give me love
I don't need the win, just directions home
from here to there. Give me Jesus. Please.

Give Me One Reason [Song by Tracy Chapman]

Nightmare Ballad

Today’s prompt on dVerse Poetics, “You Want It Darker,” is courtesy of Lucy who asks us to “write a poem about the transient notion of life to death, or topics germane to the theme. With a twist.” The twist is to write a ballad that “will/can include dark, gothic themes and imagery . . . . It’s October and we’re looking for some dark poetry, publies.”

I’ve taken as inspiration a painting by Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński who once said, “What matters is what appears in your soul, not what your eyes see and what you can name.”

Nightmare Ballad

between October’s mists
my ring on your finger
your fingers in her hair
my heart consumes fire

wonders casual causality
between your white-rowed teeth
her crimson, wet-bladed lips
crimes hallowed like wine

when the moon fell from the sky
on a common day of sepia-tints
the ground bled red
nightmares rode split tree trunks

into a necropolis of fears
where decayed hope
breeds madness
the food of the gods

where desires feign love
where mirrors that were eyes
open silently
bend inward
and scream

till I wake

For more on Zdzisław Beksiński's paintings, click here.
Click Mr. Linky for more poems and join in.

Lady Lavender in Extremis

She came sailing in —
foxgloves in murder digitalis
shape-shifters in book-covered heat
an Austen novel in her head
pharmacopœia of bottled lust
in everyone else’s closet Gothic
unholstered in a room of Macbeths
unshriven, exhumed desire
— sailing in, lighting torches
blanketed fire,
lavender swan.

Merril's Quadrille #113: "Blanket Us" for dVerse
A dVerse quadrille is a poem of exactly 44 words. 
Click on Mr. Linky to read more and join in!

The Moongate Garden

When summer’s twilight warmed the Moongate Garden, soft breezes lit twin fires, feldspar and quartz, in rose granite, and my hand trembled as you entered through the gate of half-moons. Water circled, a calm pool, and the soft blush of the lotus laid bare my heart.

Nothing was yet forbidden. The trees shielded us even to their own gaze, their leafy whispers mingling with ours, their shadows lengthening over ours. Darkness, insatiate, spun round the breathless earth.

came the harvest moon
trapped in the water’s cold eye
ever by your tomb

A haibun written for Dverse's Haibun Monday 9/28/20: to the Moon!
Click on Mr. Linky for more haibun and join us!

Sky-verse To You

I’m skating it, free-wheeling it
Somersaulted skyward by the infinite jest of it
That I could be winging it, barrel-rolling
Like Icarus to the very summit of it
Unburned by it, cascading liberating fall of it
Caught in it, unbound through it, Your love.

For dVerse's Quadrille #112: The Sky’s the Limit (in 44 words)
Click on Mr. Linky for more and join in!

September Hope by Candlelight

Broken shadows across the cracked ground
your grave day lost in flurried words
like September leaves across
yesterday’s hallowed ground
grief yet uninterred:
you six years gone
from my sight
till Day
breaks.