Author: SB Joy
-
Quill
In the ceiling’s quiet apex a small flock of black birds circle above my head. Each dropping letters into my ears. One by one, until the fluttering turns into a word or two. Hermes at work in my little brainy echo chamber. Which explains the black morning quills stuck in my ears.
-
Man’s Tales of Woe
All the unconscious worlds are dancing shadows and lights between every shade of gray. The dragon man, fairy mother, Hermes speaking between the realms of the living and dead. The pan drying in the dish rack with a few resting plates. The only sign She had been here for dinner. Dropping guises, littering this world with clues. We dream of other worlds to see our own inner workings. Nothing is clear. Fragments, figures. Shadow’s openings. Closing doors made of sand. Crumble under a well placed pinky finger’s push. That frees, what? Beetles, mice, rabbits? My mind that falls down the rabid hole? Instead of sitting quietly in the hour glass bleeding sand from one bladder to the next.
-
Wisp
I imagined pulling thin air out of thin air
and to my surprise I was pulling on
the wispiest of wisp of hairs. -
Pandora’s Box
Pandora’s box was the first tilling of the soil. Opening Mother Earth’s mouth spilling every manner of everything into the open sky. Washing the earth with desire’s hope to have everything now.
The wild world is an open prairie. Swaying grasses. Sage rolling over hills. Mountains, arroyos and canyons. Untamed forests. Stubborn. Silver ribbons. Wide open mouths. Hungry for everything that moves. Not a fenced in sight. No corral. No light switches to light up the world. Instead of the sun.
I’ve given up the wild world for the convenience of anything delivered to my door.
-
Bosom
Oh mythical Jesus, the one with ten wings and forty eyes, turning everything into poetry so that nothing is poetry. Turning the bee in the tulip’s luscious white cup into nothing more than a bee gathering pollen. Instead of the hero returning from war to be nestled in the Mystical Mother’s bosom.
-
Blue Daffodil
She loved me until she found Glück, Oliver, Olds and Collins.
-
Fates
A heart fractured, before birth. A fate of the fates to battle for each day.
Broken, a theme in poem after poem. I am a donkey in my corral lead round and round chasing a singular lie dressed a thousand costumes.
Some days trample me to though the ancestral mud. Muddled hauntings meant to break a man, to send my ancestors back to history’s forgotten wardrobe.
Without Grace’s grace and mercies there would have been no candles that ushered me through darkened den after den. Musty with ancestral blood, the dank stench of ignorance and arrogance.
A destiny laid at my feet that climbed through my spine into my brain. I dread each tread with a broken heart. Haunted by the historical sorrows echoing down a hollowed out dying oak tree called, my family.
Sumer's Words from the Woods 