“Marlene” (Part Five – Beloved Moonlight) WWP Prompt # 158

Marlene had once dreamed she was Queen of the Moon. Now her beloved moonlight shines in reflected window shatters, which seem to be a cellar face. Shatters that call her to break last embrace.

On this cold, rain-black night she breaks into this cellar, slipping into some unimagined room. There are books, oh so many, and knowing some, she mouths their titles in soft-lipped wonder.

The Bible, Old Goriot, Madame Bovary … had she been here before? – she cannot break her stare from this impure collection, hidden in this ruined city.

Like Genesis, the snake rules in unabsolved power … or Balzac, misery’s soul to devour … or Flaubert, where dishonest love breaks torn hearts … as train whistles deepen the night, at least she stands here warm.

And books full of pictures like Troy’s long-lost temple, in her beloved moonlight, and a flash of lightning here and there, she reads as confusion surrounds unaware.

Like some sad pristine art, Marlene studies the pictures. Like a soft maiden torn between dragon and sand. Like a sheik unbetrothed in some forgotten harem or chastised in virginous disdained despair. Simple measures intact of forgotten fodder, as spirit of yesteryear smears in the dust in cannonade levity measured in solitude, Marlene rises up through the tears and the rust of serene repetition repeated forthright, to seek vigil here in beloved moonlight.

An old balding man on a carpet-like wingback chair pours wine in his glass, smiling, perhaps grinning, looks her up and down, sparkling, approving. “I am Franz,” he says softly.

He lifts his glass in besotted salute as Marlene bends her fingers in taut feathered cry like the hummingbird flits from some garden destroyed, or an acorn in falling begs soft to its god.

As cloud dreams aswirl almost dizzy her hands, nodding gently polite, she sits down by this man.

There’s this cat, in this book, he’s golden and grey, and he feeds in a garden of cried disarray and he meets up with no-one in subtle display as an oaken-leaf shed lest in summer. As he feels no real longing, he seeks not a friend in this garden sublime where he always has lived and mature like an ox-driven girl from Peru, he succumbs only seldom to underworld twirl. He walks down a path in imagined control, he is simple, e’er thus, ’neath the trembling thistle.

Carnival circles bluster the breeze, make-believe doll clothes dress quiet in the night, shrugging conundrums speak soft yet in ease at the merciless vision of sweet Marlene’s sight – as blood-soaked redemption allows true allure to steal childish memory alone in this girl.

We have not got much time, Franz says to the girl. I have means to obtain clothing and articles befitting our task. Comfortable leather, and dark it shall be, as dark as our mission, Marlene. As your father once worshiped, you shall now be the snake …

Marlene had once dreamed she was Queen of the Moon – vanquished now in little girl folly. The cat awakened has no patience for little girl things or quiet complacence.

“Lifting Branches” dVerse #97

On Sunday, peace rests in
rooster’s crow or a cat’s
paw lifting branches, like
a novel holding dog-eared love
at the bedside table.

Words stream fanciful
in vortex, where a child’s dialogue
speaks secrets in flying parrots
on colourful wings.

A song of unaligned magnitude
lives in me; I raise my hand to
meet my fingertips, where
the world waits for sleeping bodies
forming under the shade in
solitary daydream.

“Crushed Red Pepper” The Sunday Whirl #109

In chaotic consortium our conversation
hovers, opaque on an oil painting
nebulous as clouds that arrive
in the afternoon.

Timing’s breath waits for someone,
never stalling on dusty leaves
with no water to wash it away.

My vision resolves unseen,
the sun torches me,
burning, blazing,
leaving cruel conceit
without gentle touch.

Today is crushed red pepper cut
in lost solution’s bleakness,
abiding with hope somewhere,
though I cannot see it here.

“Rarity” Lucinda Williams

You are a rarity
Your eyes say wisdom
Your skin says frailty
Your mouth says listen

Your voice a cello
Your words speak volumes
In and out around flow
Like Leonard Cohen’s

Since you were invented
Since you came along
No one’s even attempted
To come close to the beauty of your song

No hits on the radio
No one knows who you are
No big deal with a video
So you’re never gonna be a star

You won’t be attending
Meetings with presidents
Of companies pretending
To protect their investments

While they suck the gristle
Off the bones of your art
Unfaithful and fickle
Seductive and smart

They’ll say you’re a rarity
And sleep in your bed
And strangle your purity
And leave you for dead

They’ll call you little honey
And write you a check
Seduce you with money
And fuck your respect

For offering a small glimpse
Through your secret door
Of your intellect and brilliance
You deserve so much more

‘Cause you, you’re a rarity
Your eyes say wisdom
Your skin says frailty
Your mouth says listen

Read more: LUCINDA WILLIAMS – RARITY LYRICS

“Marlene” (Part Four – This Ruined City) Prompt 157: Zen and the soul of body maintenance

Marlene had once dreamed she was Queen of the Stars.

Now she sits on her worn wooden barstool, recovering reverie torn asunder from tangled disturbance within. The music is fine but does not soothe her now and she orders another gin. Night is falling like blackening rainfall, the streetlamps shine their empty scene, she knows she can’t just sit here forever, and yet, her mood has fallen serene, so she sits and drinks and orders another to fall into wakening dream disturbed. And in this torment of blackening rainfall, she dreams as she had not so long ago, when once she had been that little girl.

Marlene of the Stars, Marlene of the Moon. Dreams of naïve abandon. On the streets where they’d trudged on a night such as this, hope cast from eyes left in sightless surrender, and the sneers cast their way, she would always remember, and shuddered inside at this darkening memory, and the laughter at those now abandoned. These had once been her friends yet now heartless and cruel, this had once been her city of breathless passion, now yellow-star surrogates, puppets to lend them sublime and superior, to provide rationale for their worship of godless subservient inverted cross. They jeered unaware that their souls were now dark and none felt ashamed of empathy lost.

These rustling memories, shuttered unnoticed by those sitting ’round her tonight in this bar are disturbed by a rustling of linen beside her, a touch on the sleeve, a whisper soft placed, Marlene looks up at her friend’s worried face although forcing a smile, the words flow in haste, they have gone to your house, and taken your mother, your sister has flown and is searching for you. Do not leave this bar, they search for you too, but the room in the back where we once changed our costumes and the small wooden closet where once we had hidden, go there, Marlene and I’ll return quickly, quietly, darling, don’t make a scene.

And in that moment, kissing her cheek, her friend disappears through the smoke and the laughter. So she orders another cup, and slowly, deliberately, smiles all around, makes her way to the back of the bar, to that dressing room where they’d once played. And almost goes into that little closet, but dark revelation stops her just short. Some intrepid warning, primal and mean flashes through the gin. She’ll be taken there, somehow she knows. And she knows now her mother and sister are lost, and she knows it’s payment for murder delivered as she flies from the bar melting silent in shadow.

Train whistles deepen the city tonight. A siren cries warning, uncomfortably near. Yet its normalcy does nought to shatter what passes for life in these streets near-abandoned in fear. Like the vain serenade of a lover’s lament or a grey, weathered wall pocked with holes and some blood, or a turn of a skirt or the way you once looked, fortune abandons all those within to fate unrepentant in lotten sin.

And the brief, fading moment when hummingbirds flitted on succulent flowers within garden walls is replaced with the tremor of oncoming thunder as Marlene walks silently on. To hide just tonight in the blackening rainfall, to see one more dawn wake this ruined city, to dream one more night as she once had so dreamed, of being the Queen of the Stars.

“Cobalt to Steel” Margo Roby: Poetry Tryouts: Metaphor Your Poems

My poems are …

A quarter moon hanging from rafters
amongst shattered stars where a blue
bead strings itself between pearls,
changing cobalt to steel.

(I am of the land.)

They are fish swimming in an unseen ocean
beyond mountain view where words soak
my soul in lost shorelines along a beach
of fishermen.

(I am not a mariner.)

They are silent laughter in a lonely space
where smiles gather to feast on faces
and colours sing pink morning view,
secured cacti thorns cradle blossoms.

(I am my past.)

They are swing clouds in hazy sky,
dust on chairs and tables, a fire
thrusting its fist into the night.

(I dream telescope dreams.)

They are simply words,
nothing more.

“Departure Dance” dVerse Open Link #96

Recalling sun’s warmth
she dances in ash-fallen plume
in streets covered by ancient ruin,
she’s neither evolution nor rebirth,
but starkness catching its breath.

Reciting rain’s echo on roofs,
she dances umbrella-less in muddy
feet, swirling and twirling,
she’s a departure, a lost sanity,
where poison sings chorus inside.

Every night before sleep
she tries to evoke childhood
prayers … and cries for night’s end.

“Marlene” (Part Three – A Pretty Bad Day) WWP Prompt 156: It was a dark and stormy night

Marlene had once dreamed she was Queen of the Stars.

Now she absently turns her greasy gin cup, swirling memories of bar stories lost, she feels sort of lonely, she feels that if she could have done as only God could, as she sits on her barstool, greasy glass beckoning, but the prayers she once prayed aren’t received into Heaven, and she looks ’round for someone with faint recognition, but the flowers inside have died in felled rain, heartlessly tempered by scourge of the faithful. In ruins of the heart lies no sweetness relief.

She remembers her sister, remembers her mother, remembers the stench of her mother’s last lover. He had been such a captain with golden-like ribbons, took her last rumpled chastity ever thus ridden, and the rutting and sweating and pounding he gave her – she thought she had liked it, the roughness, and pale, blonde soft beard against her neck – now she smiled just a lip-turn at fate she had given to this motherless bastard who’d been so secure. To this fatherless rapist she had endured – now she sits with her gin glass as smile creeps upon her, she’s ready for judgement, redemption secure.

Marlene sips her gin, leaving just a swig in the cup bottom, swirling around like a murky reminder of the day that the dust-soaked street whispers had blanked her last vestige of innocence. Those guys in the little kitchen, sitting around mom’s wooden table on the folding chairs, glasses and bottle on the cheap flowered tablecloth, unkempt in their uniforms, bolstered and unshaven, patting their buttoned bellies … and her little sister too.

That had been a bad beginning to a bad day. And she wished she could forget all that. But now as she sits on her worn wooden stool, remembering how she had taken the luger from her mother’s bedside table, and somehow, with some pretty fine aim, blew it all up. And how her mother had just started cleaning the blood and brains off the cheap tablecloth like spilled gravy. And how her little sister had only mouthed “Thanks, Marlene.”

Bodies can be gotten rid of easily enough – the street and the blood and the mud took them in. They were heavy, it was tiring to move them down there, but the neighbors said nothing and the police asked their questions and nobody bothered much more – it was that kind of time in the war.

Marlene looks down to her swirling gin, fingers shaking, perhaps a bit of sweat on her brow, smooths her hair and orders another cup.

Hummingbirds don’t land in every yard, forsaken flowers don’t spring blooms. Where flowers don’t bloom flit no hummingbirds, and life is a saddening, bleakened tomb.

She dreams in soft silver and moonlight reflections … she dreams heretofore of shattered replete as blood-saken memories die at her feet.

Another gin. Same greasy cup. Cheap as it is, she cannot get enough.

They will come for her surely as they once had for the yellow-stars.

Marlene’s hard-fought story is not hard to tell, but the difficult part in her lingering tell is absorbing her feelings and places she walks and the pain she endures and the end that is not how we comfort our children in hope or regret as the noose slowly tightens ’round sweet Marlene’s neck.

“The First Time” The Sunday Whirl #108

Shake the dust from the past,
cast light, life moves along,
never decide to wear the ugly
scar when it’s born circling
a backyard on the docks
where rabbits
make scratching sounds,
celebrating names;
white pillow time
breaks and binds
unreachable beliefs.

Chant in crooked hand,
fist of feathers, darkness’s drone,
vows of virtue, morbid-mouthed,
sad spaced, love loses the sun in sin.

“Marlene” (Part Two – Red Letter Day) We Write Poems Prompt 155 A red-letter day

Marlene had once dreamed she was Queen of the Clouds. Now she sat on a worn wooden stool in a sullen, sad bar, the murky shadows in her greasy gin glass reminding her somehow of whom she’d once been.

Still the music was fine, yet not long ago, it had been a robust and risque cavalcade, like fresh-laden waterfalls free to please all … now cacophonous misery seeped through the walls.

It seemed she had once been a girl in this bar, but in such a short time, fetid dreadsome attention, she felt rapid-aged, in soul’s light to lessen, or so it now seemed to Marlene. She had almost forgotten her dream.

In vague reverie she could almost thus dream as the gin worked its duty in loosening stream; another would benefit thoughts more serene, so she ordered another and surveyed the scene. Where there once, in this bar, had been burgeoning laughter, and ladies all colorful, flirting a’chatter, and boys in starched uniform, mustaches neat, had slipped into lotten charade, their once heady vision betrayed.

Where there once, on these streets, just outside of this bar, trudged the yellow-starred dirty in sickening gloom, marching dead, marching madness yet faithful in hope that some god of somewhere as written in lore would have mercy and charity forevermore.

And their letters once written in vain supplication to loved ones drip red in the gathering loom, slogged and forgotten in yesterday’s illness, this red-letter day, smothered in blood, awaits unfulfilled in the street and the mud.