Tartarus

How fragile is this hand
as it gentles the ferocious coils
which abide below the halfway mark
of belly, making discords of dogma,
and soothes the grinning sibilance
as the ravenous maw bites through
this tenuous grip on new realities.

Oh Mercy! The poison is luscious as lotus!
Desire welcomes the monstrous tongue
in the throat beyond question
of what will become of these bones
once the leviathan has picked them clean.



Inspired by the artwork, Thieves Blend by the artist, Eli Evangelidis a.k.a. @eliedwardart

Utopia

How beatific the ghostly face
as it turns from grim reality
of painful flesh beneath taut skin
unaware that heart is caged
and lungs are slaves
while bones remain as shackles
to the absurdity of decomposition.

Oh God! Time strikes like a meteor!
Life always ends too soon
to disregard the searing blaze
and ascend beyond the embers
of immolation until consciousness
becomes one with oblivion.



Written in collaboration with the artist, Cemal Eker a.k.a. @abreathinutopia, inspired by the illustration entitled Ayesha.

Entrances//Deaths ~ Deaths

In the April of Covid 19
Day 30

“And all your deeds and words, each truth, each lie, die in unjudging love.”
Dylan Thomas

Deaths

Words

I have sought to 

convey pass only as shadows,

Beloved, across your sleeping face

in patterns of fern, feather, constellations

of life’s common comorbidities, griefs, graves:

history of these last weeks penned in poetic obituaries

carved on tombstones while angels keep company

with princes of the underworld, salting tears.

The last thing I will say before death 

or dawn claims both our lives:

Mercy is an act of 

Love.

Skylover Wordlist: Deaths

Play It Again Toads: Bang, Whimper, Hiss

Entrances//Deaths ~ Match

In the April of Covid 19
Day 29

“There crouched bare in the shrine of his blazing breast I shall awaken”
Dylan Thomas

Match

This

is almost

the end, we said as

we made love amid the lilacs

and stones: let us own these delicate

injuries, these dark prophecies of ourselves

and sacrifice life upon the pyre of lesser nobilities 

than the passion we ignited in the kiln of cosmic

self-creation: we are owed this bare hour’s

finality of mutual conflagration.

Let us be the ones

to strike the

match.

Skylover Wordlist: Match

Play It Again Toads: This is (Almost) the End

Entrances//Deaths ~ Mockingbird

In the April of Covid 19
Day 28

“… and then (sang) another in which she said her heart was like a bird’s nest ...”
Dylan Thomas

Mockingbird

        Woven bed of milkweed.
Lambswool and lichen. Braids of grass.
        My heart-nest where mockingbird
composed her song of skyloving weather.

        And the bird pecked feathers
from her breastbone. Gave up flight for
       brooding in the hollow chamber.
A voice of numberless notes unseeded.

        Now the nest lies abandoned
in this cage of my ribs. And I search
        the forgotten summertime
of singing trees in hope of wings return.


 
Skylover Wordlist: Numberless
Play It Again Toads: Harper Lee

"Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.”
Harper Lee

Entrances//Deaths ~ Transfiguration

In the April of Covid 19
Day 27

“A she bird sleeping brittle by her lover’s wings that folded tomorrow’s flight”
Dylan Thomas

Transfiguration

We never strove to mingle with saints
        but knew the joyous grief
of submerging our soulless limbs
        in sultry waves of conscious
will to drown in the infusion
       of our sacred selves
as fearless lips imbibed
      the shattered corpses
of those whom we had once been
      before the flood cast us wet
and shaken upon the shore
      awake in this new country
of the blessed damned beatified by
      the transfiguration of our intimacies.


Skylover Wordlist: Intimacies
Play It Again Toads: The Way of Tea by way only of diction.

Entrances//Deaths ~ Zodiac

In the April of Covid 19
Day 26

“For the country of death is the heart’s size and the stars of the lost the shape of eyes.”
Dylan Thomas

Zodiac

I am learning the language of stars
  beyond voice-pointing,
and my signing hands, which grasp
       but fail to thread the song
when the needle is blind that pricks
       the skin of being we call night.

I am reflecting the light of ancients
  myself a point of refraction
with less of a meaning than a means
  to radiate the text of elements
through the flesh they made of me
  my zodiacal bone and sun.

I am trusting the dissolve of darkness
  the depth of preconception
and loosening the lullaby of my tongue
  in mute exchange of eyes
and fingertips, that smooth erasure
  of lines between constellations.



Skylover Wordlist: Zodiac
Play It Again Toads: Reboot, Rewind, Recycle

Entrances//Deaths ~ Asylum

In the April of Covid 19
Day 25

“Silence, silence to do, when earth grew loud, in lairs and asylums”
Dylan Thomas

Asylum

What becomes
of the mad woman
in her garden?
Driven beyond sorrow
of her fallow bed of weeds
and dandelions
to the cloister
of barren rockeries, 
she digs deep
in furrows
of scars for words
that once bloomed
in abundance
now swept away
with autumn leaves and
heaped on the bonfire
of her silent asylum.



Skylover Wordlist: Rockery
Play It Again Toads: Willard Asylum
Flash Friday 55: Hosted by Hedgewitch.

Entrances//Deaths ~ Question

In the April of Covid 19
Day 23

“Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides…”
Inspired by the words of William Shakespeare on the anniversary of his birth//death

The Wild Wood Tarot
Balance
Image Source with Reading

Question

To be or not

to begin if beginning

means to forgive the living

and the dead, the sunfoil moon

and the sun itself for rising,

to beg the bird 

for birdsong and time

when it unfolds

what plaited cunning hides

in its dark inheritances,

to wake or not 

to shatter eyesight with sight

of terror twisting grief

every question unresolved

of this mortal dream?

Skylover Wordlist: Cunning

Play It Again Toads: The Bard

Inspired by The Wild Wood Tarot by Mark Ryan and John Matthews, with art by Will Worthington.

Entrances//Deaths ~ Seed

In the April of Covid 19
Day 22

“Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Foster'd alike by beauty and by fear”
William Wordsworth

The Wild Wood Tarot
The Sun of Life
Image Source with Reading

Seed

When as a child

I discovered 

my little claypot heart

rich with barren soil

I burrowed a finger deep within

and planted a secret seed

left to grow

 through the lonely years

and flower unseen

with an ache

beneath my breastbone

a pain to be buried

as compost

to the rootbound 

trust I had placed in my life

that one day I would

see the sun.

Skylover Wordlist: Seed

Play It Again Toads: Poets of April (William Wordsworth)

Inspired by The Wild Wood Tarot by Mark Ryan and John Matthews, with art by Will Worthington.

Entrances//Deaths ~ Parable

In the April of Covid 19
Day 21

“And the birds of the winged tree flying my name”
Dylan Thomas

The World Tree
The Wild Wood Tarot
Fair Use

Parable

This side of the grave

and endless wandering

I come at last to the place

where I shall lay

my cheek upon the chest

of the one tree press an ear

to the heartbeat

of an unfolding tale

and surrender my name

to the roots

of the world that I may become

the parable of four seasons

leaf fall and bud

rotten and growing beyond

the living maze

and firesong guardian

 soul of the ancestors.

Skylover Wordlist: Parables
Play It Again Toads: Tree Mythology
Inspired by The Wildwood Tarot by Mark Ryan & John Matthews, art by Will Worthington.

Entrances//Deaths ~ Orison

In the April of Covid 19
Day 20

“Friend by enemy I call you out.”
Dylan Thomas 

Orison

The salt
of this curse
coarse and white
upon my tongue
must speak
its truth to heaven
as I chain
the scattered stars
and bind them
in their oblivious acres
to my will.
Friend I call you
by name
that you may feel
blessed to be cursed
by my orison.



Skylover Wordlist: Salt
Play It Again Toads: When good wishes go bad

Entrances//Deaths ~ Pity

In the April of Covid 19
Day 19

“And for the woman in shades saint carved and sensual among the scudding dead and gone”
Dylan Thomas

Pity

The crouching angel
beside my grave
feeds despair
into the empty mouths
of spring
beckons
while frost sharpens
its blades along the throat
of crocus
whose wound bleeds
blue and saffron
down the dark edge
of wistful dawn.
Pity on the living
who forget death comes
with the lightening.




Skylover Wordlist: Beckon
Play It Again Toads: Get Listed in April!

Entrances//Deaths ~ Fourth Station

In the April of Covid 19
Day 18

“Forgotten mornings where he walked with his mother through the parables of sunlight”
Dylan Thomas

Fourth Station

It was my thirty eighth year

After winter when you passed into the swallow 

Hallowed and star pointing dusk

And I knew

No matter how long the journey into night

I would never awaken again to your

Easy laughter, your easy tears

Your hand

I held close with a daughter’s hand.

Here, again, is the sun of April, showery

Swallows spinning 

Woollen clouds of your birthday away

And myself to set

Paint upon the canvas of another year’s turning.  

The fourth station of our paths crossed

Mother and child

Always ends in farewell

After, Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
On the anniversary of my mother's birthday.

Skylover Wordlist: Stations
Play It Again Toads: Encouragement

Reference: The Fourth Station of the Cross is significant at Easter as the moment Jesus of Nazareth met his mother on his path to execution.
I do not practice religion, but my mother was born on Easter Sunday, so I have used this motif.

Entrances//Deaths ~ Safe Harbour

In the April of Covid 19
Day 17

“Listen and look where she sails the goose plucked sea”
Dylan Thomas

Safe Harbour

The white caps, the whale surge,
the gull-pecked clouds, the topgallant masts of joy,
high water mark, the depths of drowning grief,
forgotten coastlines of summers past. I fall

through the open hatch’s wild
splash of blue, through haze of sweet seagrass
and dive into all my yesterday’s forgotten rue.
With open eyes, despite the brine, I swim to you.

My safe harbour, still waters
tempest-shredded sky, crepuscular rays, tide wall,
foam-laced breaker on rain-spotted sand. Beloved.
You are my anchor. I am sailing home to you.



Skylover Wordlist: Harbour



For those who wish to participate in the Skylover Wordlist Challenge, please leave your links in the comment section below

Entrances//Deaths ~ Conversation

In the April of Covid 19
Day 16

“he who taught their lips to sing weeps like the risen sun”
Dylan Thomas

Conversation

               In the remains of conversation
we kneel amid shards.  Our fingertips are pebbles.
Our tongues taste the grit. The toll of centuries. We
fumble in the fragments but only the weeping wind

remembers the words of our song.
Aphrodite’s breasts rise like white loaves from the ashes.
Her shattered face with soulless eyes. Carved lips unsoft,
too late for whispered breath of love to breach the divide.

We petition the cloudless sky
for drops of autumn rain to fall upon our upturned
mouths. To slake our thirst for speech. But only dry
rattle of leaves. Only the bitter tang of truth. Stifled.




Skylover Wordlist: Conversation
Play It Again Toads: Remains

Entrances//Deaths ~ Folly

In the April of Covid 19
Day 15

“And we have come to know all places ways mazes passages quarters graves of the endless fall”
Dylan Thomas

Folly

I own my folly. This construct of heart
and latticework of broken arrows:
bee-brimming honeysuckle athwart
the splintered kisses and thrusting iris

barricade cannot disguise the ruinous
neglect, the rotten staves and fallen arch
of my breastbone, the concave pool of rain’s
cold tears, where grief has grown to ache.

Unluckily, such folly is beyond repair,
this monument to woeful pride,
and hope of Spring cannot empower
the lovelorn roots of my desire.



Skylover Wordlist: Unluckily
Play It Again Toads: Folly

Entrances//Deaths ~ Invisible

In the April of Covid 19
Day 14

“Time and places grip her breast bone, she is breaking with seasons and clouds”
Dylan Thomas

Invisible

I am invisible. A strange pause. A flint
before the strike. I am a fragment of ether
sensual, formed as woman, flesh-flaunt
of binary star nipples, nova, matter other

than thighs and belly, white as milky way.
I am a life held in suspension. A part missing
from your sense of whole. I am the why
of your sleepless night, the message

you seek to decipher in the half-faced moon
at your window. I am hidden. Always here.
Your skin thirsts for my stroke, throat moans,
hands grope in darkness for light of my hair.



Skylover Wordlist: Strike (Stroke)
Play It Again Toads: Invisible



For those who wish to participate in the Skylover Wordlist Challenge, please leave your links in the comment section below

Entrances//Deaths ~ Dreams

In the April of Covid 19
Day 13

“When only the moon rages and the lovers lie abed with all their griefs in their arms”
Dylan Thomas

Dreams

Let me lie here encased
in the amber of your darkest dreams
no corpse but that you should feel the warmth
of my breasts beneath your sleeping palm
and taste again my kiss
unwrapped from ice.

Let us be of one mind, sleeper and dream
and deny death at any price.




Skylover Wordlist: Lie
Play It Again Toads: 13 is Poetry
L'Arora Form



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Entrances//Deaths ~ Ballad

In the April of Covid 19
Day 12

“Love is the last light spoken.”
Dylan Thomas

Ballad

I speak of love as one bereft

of the ocean’s soulful ballad sighing deeply

in the wide embrace of patient arms;

I tell my love
as one who sails past hope

in a whispered word and trust so true

a throb of joy is incantation

sung to the sky all its burning blues.

Skylover Wordlist: Ballad

Play It Again Toads: Love

L'Arora Form

For those who wish to participate in the Skylover Wordlist Challenge, please leave your links in the comment section below