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The Cold Moon sets behind the bare-limbed ash. She takes her time. I shake my restless foot.

Sherry Chandler

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Sometimes suicide is slow. A friend tries, fails; tries, fails. But the body holds our secrets and never forgets.

*

One day, years later, the body holds a bright, growing ball and says, “See? Look what I have done for you.”

Elizabeth Westmark

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EU president's haiku

The EU’s new “president”, Herman Van Rompuy posts haiku on his blog. Because Kris asked, I translated and tweeted a few of them. This is the one I liked best:

Ik ruik de vrieslucht,
en stap er dwars doorheen.
Ik adem vrij.

I smell the frosty air
and step right through it.
Breathing freely.

__
Herman Van Rompuy
(translated by aj3d)

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falling leaves haiku

silent

leaves
crushing
rustling
falling
silently

dead

fallen
dead
leaves
dead
leaves
falling
down

aj3d

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Questions

Whose birth is not the enigma
one always hopes for

And isn’t my birth the good friend I go on missing

So, why is my sun limited to moonlight

And why isn’t there a hospital for faces cut from the moon

Why shouldn’t I write mysterious poems if I am not grief

Aren’t there fleet horses running along the top of my trees

Isn’t my true life a furrow through God’s breath

Isn’t life as unforeseen :: as the gift of confusion wise men bring

Why did I have no human thought until light thickened and our course was lost

And why does meditation make an elaborate flame hard to see

Why can’t I touch the part you have in the arc of my sleep

And doesn’t the small dark of the heart seek voices from another world

Is it divorce when I voluntarily die in your sleep

When shall the dreams which give us shape be taken from my mouth

And why do I think the soul is necessary :: and almost nothing else

Why have I kept this secret poem away from its own invention

I’ll put it back in the earth, as soft as dust :: a word too much

When dancing with the dance alone :: my eyes are lit by rain

Grant Hackett
from Falling off the Mountain
Selected and arranged
by Kris

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the sky
a gray cat
curled around
horizon - one pearl
moon eye open

morganabag

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Burial plots for frogs: a micropoetry exchange

Four months ago, over at Identica, Patricia F. Anderson and I traded poems based on recent news stories. I started off, and we alternated thereafter. I believe Patricia kept a list of links to the news stories we drew upon, if anyone’s curious. —Dave

The mayor of Kiev raffles off his kisses & sells burial plots for frogs. He greets protesters with a song, saying: only God sings better.

*

A Renaissance monk scribes the sacred and the sexy, chortles with courtesans, singing “you are all that is left of me.”

*

Imagine how reporters for the Life Morning News felt when they found their distributor had been taking it straight to recycling.

*

Life, death, that’s right - the morning-shift warehouse worker sliced in the cardboard recycling shredder. It’s over. He is.

*

Exiled from mainland Singapore, the seashore bat lily & pink-eyed pong pong tree take refuge on a manmade island of garbage.

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Pollinate the elastic plastic, yeah, trashman, jazzman, your absent music haunting the gyre like twisting in the guts.

*

In Lahore, the Movement for Decency bombs juice shops where couples cuddle. Now illicit whispers hide behind Koranic ringtones.

*

In Chicago they resell the chill graves of urban children. Babyland, Babyland, where is your lullaby? Where are your bones?

*

Japanese scientists studying turtle embryos pinpoint the moment when the body wall folds in, origami-like, to make the shell.

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The embryo folds a tube 2 create the spine. Folds & knots another 2 shape the heart. Some things unfold that are not stories.

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Even those who bought leases below the cancelled storeys wax wroth at the lost value, no longer the tallest tale in the land.

*

Cher Monsieur Butterfly with his devalued pearls, his mythos worth so much more - the bodice rippers, the diva, so delicious.

*

The Colonel bristles at the word “drone.” Real people control it, he says, be it Predator or Reaper. Let’s not dehumanize them.

*

Buzz was second, but no drone, a real person, he says, touching down on another body. No romantic, he pissed first, he says.

*

On the 40th anniversary of “one small step,” astronauts in a space station unit called Destiny repair a toilet pump.

*

Make destiny a bit closer, space a bit smaller. From YouTube ask astronauts questions. They answer like God from the skies.

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The wind has died, its spots have cleared up, and the only thing now marring the sun’s perfect day are these 8 circling gnats.

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The sun naps in the quiet between storms. Jupiter, our bully-proof big brother, wishes we’d learn celestial self-defense.

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The winner of the Ernest Hemingway contest at Key West, sweating in a sweater, says he only writes checks and text messages.

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The moveable feast has become transparent film, memory slicing the century into pats like butter. Never enough, the chef says.

*

A man in a gorilla suit runs out the back door with the hibachi chef’s cleaver buried in his arm.

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Mother of grief cradles her babe in hairy arms, gives suck, turns away from death 2 rub her sturdy flat face against new life.

*

Chernobyl: doves and palm trees on the walls of an abandoned flat. Irradiated wolves chase irradiated deer through the streets.

*

Reject unborn children, damaged children, the damaged thyroid & liver. Reject Pripyat, tanning beds, power plants. Reject.

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Halloween decorations —
removing cobwebs
from the cobwebs

Kurt Brobeck

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"Bright Umber Burning"

1.
The tension of the lamplight
Reflected in the lamplighter’s face
The burnt umbers of a late night’s journey.

2.
High Sienna is my name
And these playful daystreaks astride the horizon
My promise of a long and shimmering day to come.

3.
Golds exhausted by the simmering day
Melt lifeless into browns
To dream of tomorrow’s sweet morningrise
On Dawn’s bright crimson wings.

4.
Burnt sienna
Stains the dusk-soaked oaks
To complete this day’s October pallette.

5.
The tension of the lamplight
The burnt umbers of a late night’s journey.