The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Ronda Eller

WHITE CRIMSON

The inventor, for the invented, gambled
his life on a pen, his heart on a stage
where the dancer danced or pretended and ambled
out, weighing himself on the thread of a page
   that reemed at life for being incomprehensible.

He mused over women, both baroque and refined,
growing awkwardly taller but not thin in nerve;
still determining marriage as a finish line
to romantic endeavours and courting words-
   undeceived by the wrinkles in his aging pen.

The poet, adrift on a platitude, painted
pictures that spiritually twisted about
envisioning a pure infiltration of blatant
inscriptions in quiet volumes--the shout
   of a Harpy impaled on the crimson tide!

Still, the white bird whistled with rose under wing,
one eye jammed tight shut from blowing sand
where his talon had dug up some truth and the thing's
two-handed wisdom could imprint vision's brand
   on the broken-heart ensign of inchoate man.

Inventing wings on which to fly
near an earth-rooted tree that sheltered him
he gambled his death on the ethereal sky
and waited to hear the midnight clock's chime--
   both eyes shut       both eyes open wide.


TOOTH-ON-TOOTH

We've lined our journals with walked-on egg shells
sewn neatly between the lines with needling pens;
their jagged-edged scrapes (like bloodshot eyelids) yell
and tooth-on-tooth, like sardined skeletons,
they scream their own forebodance.

We visit them--these words, these muses, masks
that shift and chatter; tectonic plates of insanity
aroused by dreams and loves that would be past
if we'd not brought them with us for posterity .
to taunt us with some lost pangean essence.

What world was that where we once called our home
and still revolves--slipped into this museum--
convinced we'll keep it safe within these tomes,
defying burial in attic mausoleums?
In reality, we evoked a gestalt monster!

So let the eggs fall, smashing where they lay,
soak yolks with time for yellowing every page,
entomb that glabrous monster though it brays
and use our needling pens in other ways.
If the chicken came first, it no longer matters!


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