Exit Satan's Men Cento April is the colonnade of rain keeping us warm with dried tubers. Between rosed lips, stillness sinks itself crooked. One black-haired tree slips up like a possessed witch. The moon bulges with no dragon to split from my belly. The 18th Century bawd pukes milk on my dead pantsuit. My violent husband zips up my second mouth; the bonnet of a daffodil Between the boughs, we beat the young poets as often as a stag. Play beside a death-bed, alongside a thousand railroads. My half- brutalised Madonna, in eyes as white as yours, pine and die. Sources: [The Waste Land by T. S Eliot; Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare; The Rose Window, Song of the Dwarf by Rilke; The Starry Night, Her Kind by Anne Sexton; The Final Episode, Sanity by Caroline Bird; Aurora Leigh 1, Aurora Leigh 2 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath.]
The Coup of St. Bartholomew Here I stand in the war of botany. Legs of lavender protest the child who rips them root to tip. Severed by the coltish young, they sway in repose. You in your blue, moony way lecture me on everything you despise. I, in my bug-plagued bed, call for the hangman. We stalked those wiry graves. We looked for someone to blame, But in the end, no-one could scream their name.
Ghazal: What Would Seraphim Do? You rolled your Tamagoyaki with cancer-ridden fingers, trembling with lust and radiation; but what would Seraphim do? Necking sweet Dashi as though you were stranded in a desert with nothing in your gut; what would Seraphim do? Her namesake rendered you sterile, incapable of finding a place for new crust; what would Seraphim do? Whenever I see a pistachio donut, I think of you and all your smut; what would Seraphim do? I want to join you there, but the gates of Valhalla are shut; what would Seraphim do? The stuffed-pillow eggs were our unborn children, never given a chance to deconstruct; what would Seraphim do?
Comments:
- Exit Satan’s Men is a cento poem: a collage of phrases and words from various textual sources.
- The Coup of St. Bartholomew is named after a church near my childhood home. We often held our nativity plays there.
- Ghazal: What Would Seraphim Do? is a unique form of poetry, consisting of five to fifteen couplets. They stand on their own, but will form an abstract theme by the end. In its strictest sense, there are lots of rules to follow, however, you can put a modern spin on it as I have done here
Courtenay's Corner 