550: Ode to Spring, Vishnu & Hercules

24 April 2007

Ode to Spring

The grass leaps four inches after the first spring rains
Soon it will reach sky and I sink,
sink – return to the primordial muck, then deeper still
a reverse Persephone descending by choice away
from burning memories of sun. New life is a cruel joke when
Gone ones sing out of ether, through portals like oracles,
and I demand silence.

I past our house – refilled with a circus of bells
of happy hippie party people whom I want to crush – and cringe.
I only returned when I had killed all senses, to move, to escape
to run not far. Ghost or not, it is haunted. Twice
you called into the dungeon; I answered, and for my faith, no reply,
Pleas be damned; you emptied the crawling silence again
like a morning without magpies.

They call to sell you cable services and ask if I am
Mrs. E. Do I make them feel like shit and tell them you’re dead
the hard irrevocable sounds shaming them to silence and stutters?
I want to just hang up. Which is more rude? I don’t care.
They plead through the mail for you to open a credit card
account. Do their powers really extend that far? Will you
purchase sheet music and repay them with arpeggios and chords?
Their fliers attempt enticements for lawn care and mattress
sales. Apparently you can take it with you.
I rip into tiny – invisible, I hope – pieces.

I hate the new me newbie, forced to swim, envious of drowning
Angry, empty, pretending. When my mask slips, I want to
consume Belladonna, drift into night’s shade. But what difference
does it make when I already live eternally with Hades.
Sun and dewy grass bring no pleasure, only shadows and ice.
Frost is softer with its scent of death, the illusion that winter murdered all.

Vishnu and Hercules

The flurry of ideas passes, replaced by a squall of nothingness
a stormy void obliterating all remnant of thought. Vishnu,
god of creation and destruction, creates destruction – truth
beauty melts into ash. Contemplation leads to confusion,
combustion, like crossing iron-spiked fields, leaving a trail of
shredded flesh and entrails. At the edge, the bones fall
and shatter into shrapnel piercing the unsuspecting with
thought fragments. No one embarks on the impossible task,
no Hercules emerges to piece this skeleton together, no god
rushes to breathe spirit into shards.