Mnemonic
Waking
clammed to
broken
shell
feeling
the
demon incubating
warm-heavy
on milkless breasts
hallucinating the hiss
twist failing
from the
red glowburn pry
of his
eye drilling
through bloodlit dark;
it's
only mnemonic spasms
the paralytic fetus
preternaturally
roiled
in a gulag ultrasound,
twitchtorn
infantile
shadow,
disfigured in smoke.
No
answers but dreams
no one
home now in the shanty
on the
shellmound
or under
the ashes
where we were burned
for being
for being
almost
real.
© Black
Wildflowers blog 2013
All
rights reserved.
16 comments:
dang....gritty, but really well writ....your use of language to set the tone in this as superb....after the day i had i wanted to look away but could not...
where we were burned
for being
almost real....what a wonderful closure and tight images throughout
'preternaturally roiled
in a gulag ultrasound..' - these lines did it for me.
stark write, challenging and soul-stirring. thank you.
Strong images, a good write.
You've got a nice looking poetry blog here. Intriguing poem.
Intense images - nice write.
The imagery is intense - and the effect of your poem is heightened by the clever word-play. YOur use of internal rhymes is particularly enjoyable.
gorgeous darkness. and i love the words you used, "glowburn twitchtorn"
thank you!!
Holy cats, dude. This is freaking awesome. Every single word. But especially the very end: "where we were burned for being almost real"
A very intense sad poem. Witch child of sorts. So sad. k.
...tight images but i like especially the closing lines..."we were burned
for being almost real"... sadly true...
That ending is much the perfectness.
Sent over from jasminecalyx's blog.
Love the poem. The line breaks, the prenatal imagery, the struggle of something to be born but it's broken. And, yes, the ending is superb.
Revisiting. Some wonderful juxtapositions here - the clammed moving into broken shell is very cool as somehow - one moves--or I move almost instantly to egg- I don't think of clam shells as broken shells in the same way though, of course, they do break. The pry is very intriguing because one thinks of it as verb. It is pretty powerful (i.e. awful), but goes with the shells again -
the twist failing a bit hard for me to follow exactly--though I understand it on a musical level.
One issue with the poem is that there's so much immediately powerful on a visceral level, people may not think it through. For example, the meaning of mnemonic--here I'm thinking memory key to earlier time - and maybe a key for how to survive after. So interest. k.
Many thanks, all. Especially to jasmine calyx, who kindly featured this post on her blog.
@manicddaily: yes, bull's-eye on the title word. This is about as a great artist once put it, the persistence of memory. The oyster/clam of course can refer to a lot of things, including the female body, but I meant it also more broadly.
The ancient native americans of Florida, the Calusa, left a great many shellmound burial/ceremonial sites on the southwest Fla. coastal area.They're an unusual tribe, long extinct now, and thought to be related to the Aztecs or Mayans. White settlers often built their homes on these mounds, as they were raised above tide level during hurricanes. That's where the shell symbology originated.
~black wildflowers
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