Loving Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar, leading your flock 
of raven hounds,
could you smell it on me: 
despair and weakness
with a whiff of amontillado?

Do you possess a sixth sense?
Am I the low hanging body 
on your corpse tree?

Would you love me, 
then leave me, bury me,
mourning me with a proper lament?

Brick me in with your own hands,
whisper sweet nevermore in my ear.

Could we role play in a sepulcher?
Let me call you cousin.

Rise and fall for me, Edgar.
Swing your pendulum round and round.

Feel the tell tale beat of my heart,
served just the way you like it:
cold and seasoned with despair.

Find it here.

Kintsugi Illusions

I practiced the art of kintsugi.
I wanted to believe in flawed beauty,
that I could repair my cracks,
upgrade my broken bits
with veins of gold.
The paint never dries.

I wrapped the butchery
with gauze and illusion.
Adhering my mask,
hoping for my pound of  pretense
like so many layers of mummified sludge.

Your fisted flesh inside me
scraped my resolve.
My bandages slipped,
exposing my deception.

You manufactured 
the distance between us,
calculating the cost of repairs
for my faulty engineering,
The right angles wronged.

The paint, blighted and bitter,
Pipes had been cut.

I forgot to read the manual.


Find it here.

I LOVE Halloween - TAW Challenge

Our challenge this week from Take a Word blogspot was Halloween.

I started with a photo that I had taken of Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans.

I made up this piece but the more I looked at it, the more it felt like two separate pieces.

It seemed as if the two halves don't really belong together or that 

the Victorian bat girl is too far from the Halloween tomb.  

She seems so beautifully framed in the middle of the 

walkway so I hated to try to scoot her closer.

So I decided to break the first artwork into two pieces.

I left the bat girl intact in her walkway, ready to fly up and create Halloween havoc.

I added some elements to my Halloween tomb.

I went back and forth with my tomb poem, finally deciding on a quote from 

Samuel Coleridge's Kubla Khan.  It seemed suitably romantic and eerie.