fragments of memory cling to my skin
like wet cigarette smoke -
rumors of midnight rainstorms
in the flashes of a gaudy neon sign.
mangled wing unfurls like a twisted umbrella
on a desolate highway,
misty landscape of shattered dreams -
foggy-eyed fairness, luminescent pyre, loitering.
phalanges grasping for purchase
on the slick precipice of a ruptured drainpipe,
as the pipe's raucous laughter echoes threw
cypress-lined alleys and deserted highway margins.
blackness of a darkened peep show captious,
a dolphin's perverse smile glint in the darkness,
an afterimage of unadulterated ecstasy,
as it slid its sleek flesh up against the cool glass.
promise of forbidden pleasure,
an octopus's silky tentacles
guiding the dolphin's exploratory tongue,
a slow waltz of surrender.
then snap—!?
punch spine.
floating up before being brought under,
eating its own seed.
you are not simply the inapposite that breaks
you are the plague that destroys the rose
the captious instrument that causes loss
In my family, a convent in Lucerne, Switzerland loomed legend large.
It’s name is “La Madone Noire” (the Black Madonna) and according to my mom, it is a “finishing school” where captious girls, who lied or who wouldn’t
behave, were sent to live with and be schooled by nuns.
It was, from all reports, a terrible and stern place where there was never any
ice cream or bedtime stories and the toys, when there were any, were made of straw.
Most of the time it was my older sister Annick getting the dark Poe-like lectures, but I was there, in my high chair, listening wide-eyed. The very idea that Annick could be snatched up, for some infraction, and sent off to the nuns horrified me to the point that my heartbeat seemed to come through my whole body.
Eventually, as we grew, “Lucerne” became a shorthand for “shape up or else,”
and oddly, it never lost Its potency. Hmm, you know, come to think of it - there
was no equivalent monastery for my brother.
Mystical ghost of night
Of pale death’s milky glow
On sun’s life, contingent
Neon-gray you sketch black
Soothe the belligerent
Mystical ghost of night
How you shine subterfuge!
As the captious eye sees,
dead dreams behoove none
Opal wanes on jet seas...
Mystical ghost of night
Wax with light-avarice!
Mock shadowed reflections,
oft morphing as your form,
on nightshade convictions...
Mystical ghost of night
New moon’s temerity
Sacrosanct nothingness
How you foreshadow Earth
as fried out emptiness
(9/17/2021: '85 Bluewater 51 Willow Berm. Was titled Mystical for M contest by Constance la France)
Life is summoned to be a sorrowful joy
Far above the twinkling stars
Near the wrinkling earth
Brighten by variety of life's and void
Giving its parts as a path
For roles of mans draft.
Life is destined by choice
Far beyond the wavering wind
Near the stagnant hills
Gathering images for its love and lust
Where its captious eyes links
Rolling for it needs
Life come and open up
Where thy source is, I plea
It comes like storms of sea
Goes and creak like the night lock
Life! Life! Life! Is
A pointless pin
Total Surrender
By: Tom Wright
3/10/98
An ignominious life I had lived,
my surrender absolute.
I now find no place for cessation,
for Satan is so astute.
A captious person I will not be,
My antipathy toward sin will grow.
Take not umbrage at me, oh Lord,
for what's in my heart you know.
I have a lot of enemies
Who hate me through-and-through:
They dare to disagree with me
On what they ought to do.
They push their narrow ways on me,
And soon it may be you,
By claiming we must tolerate
Their novel point of view.
With such abundant captious foes
You’d think I’m in a fix,
But there’s no need for worrying;
I’m onto all their tricks.
Their argument won’t stand a chance;
They’ll have to take their licks,
For since they disagree with me
I know they’re dumb as bricks.
An unsociable, ill bred, unrefined man.
And his captious, callous, long-suffering, old spirit.
Cadaverous and frail amidst the morning walk of thier land.
Wheezing from the years of cylinder embers burnt in hand.
His quivering digits, gesturing openly to his coat pocket.
As he stops to gaze and take in, the wide open grand.
He pulls out a letter, kept in form by a dark green signet.
And now slowly he begins to unroll the leaflet.
Replaced by the paper now, are the open fields.
His hazel brown eyes, entranced by the letter held so dear.
Its now captured him, as a poem hes revealed,
and his face remarks a wound unhealed.
Brother, have i done wrong?
Am i supposed to feel strong?
Your pendulum stopped by my own hands.
Brother have i done wrong?
Am i supposed to feel strong?
For now im alone, to wonder these lands.
Brother, have i done wrong?
The brightness of the grand now lyes on the mans eyes.
Clouded, blurry, teard up sky, a floating feeling of lost goodbyes.
Now tendered from emotion, there he stood.
To live in the day his brother died.
I see so constantly
the mother I wish not to be
a trainwreck citing meat too lean
malnourished and mis-wed by seventeen
I am the feet that swell and sore
under plum-bruised body and broken back
an assembly line of plastic doors
for plastic cars on plastic tracks
and I breathe the bright ladylike sea;
drown in her Riesling spindrift air
for I am dying words of ennui
so trite and unaware
an impromptu speech
to Father - I've planned for seven years
the words I thought would safely breach
my stiff and stilted fears
and name this ugly rabbit's foot
painted black by years of soot
I am the God of captious rancor
the necrotic rot you've been searching for
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