I caterwauled with the best of them.
I caterwauled with the worst.
I put myself in a side pocket
And I walked beside my purse
My moans had seen some better days
My woes had seen some worse.
The caterwauls you hear today
Are coming from my purse
The Devil's Hold
Into the devils hands you placed my infant form
with blind eyes and untutored minds you left.
The caterwauls of baby rang like an eerie storm
for the eve's respite you sought was paid a high tariff.
Memory, so kind and long gone, without redress
lays in ashes buried in the wavering wash of time
But, decades of snickering comments coalesce
making the adult children wonder at their crime.
Marred, scarred, scared and one too many times undressed
the ramming cat, the rutting dog, pointed allusions
The negligence of youthful parents never confessed
leaves Magdalene's curse, a cost not of your choosing.
Raise the tarry brush of hell and paint their damned souls,
far too many have fell within the Devil's hold.
Aside from a shipbuilder of renown,
Noah was a hunter of a new kind --
the first to capture and not “put-down”
every land animal he could find.
And he determined the sex of each one
so that when the time came to disembark
none would be consigned to oblivion
but could procreate when they left the ark.
He was the world’s foremost zoologist a
nd surely the first floating-zoo keeper.
He had to be quite an ecologist,
but probably not much of a sleeper;
two of every animal that crawls
must have produced tremendous caterwauls.
Sophie's sweat
landscapes
the claret red horizon
thick serum
trickles
from a Sickroom -
a death ward
where cracked knuckles
spatter the fjords
moistening the planks;
bathing the laths of anxiety
‘neath
marquis de sade stumps
Norwegian expressions of death -
agoraphobia
murdering actuality;
the Dance of Life
rapidly burns
as a funeral pyre of Ashes are
seized from
your tribe’s headstone
the stench of brother’s legacy
replaces
a protected breath
and a Dead Mother can
descry muted
caterwauls
between
the Clock and the Bed
the two guardians of quietus
merely exit
this clotted bridge
contemptuously -
in soured and
staled
delight
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