Belladonna The slight tremor at the corners of her lips plastered onto the wallpaper, the curve of her spine descending into the netherworld of my fears - but she, she was fearless, she moved with the earthlessness of dolls caught sleepwalking at midnight, in the sickened wake of children who get scolded for lying. She …
A Postcard to Old-fashioned Lovers
Today's poem is brought to you by "late nights in the library" and "way too many liquid excitants". 🙂 I suppose the effect I was going for was "translation of old love poem", but I'll leave it to you to tell me whether or not I managed to achieve it. (Also, apologies for the second …
A Postcard for the Unloved
Pandora Inseparable, these clothes from this skin, these glass slippers from the soles of tiny bisque feet, bound against becoming too human. Fingers forked out through cotton meshes like larvae forced out of their cocoons. Under the wraps, a place so dangerous it could not go unveiled. Rouge brings out the perverse desire to see …
Elegy on a Postcard
Elegy Without a Corpse Embedded in me you were, we were flame lapping at fire, the ruin reaped by the wind. One day you left - or maybe it was I that left, one can never tell entrances from exits - and the whole Earth hollowed out, geological history rewrote itself to accommodate absence. Whoever …
A Postcard for the Forgetful
Today I have once more tried my hand at a triolet, one of my favourite short forms alongside the haiku. 🙂 The Haunting Enrobed in shadows ghosts glide by too lost in thought to think of death and so they never wonder why, enrobed in shadows, ghosts glide by, and how come in their wake …
Late Postcard
Solitaire I remember only that we'd forgotten who we were swept up by the haste to win our game - same pieces, different rules - so lost were we that not even rest came naturally anymore. We only met at the table, our promises sore, our life crises spent, riddled by debts mostly to each …
A Postcard for the Revellers
Today's postcard was a reproduction of an 1887 photograph of Salisbury's own Giant and Hob-Nob, so I felt that called for a more playful approach. 🙂 Pageant Hems gathering dance steps swift curves and folds precipitated in the ritual of street-wise love eyes rigid with festive overload exuberance hidden behind wigs curl over curl of …
An Epitaph-Postcard
The Hourglass She told him, 'I don't want the scraps of time you happen to throw my way, give me your small hours, and your joys enlarged - then I will come.' Alas, he was glass and wood and dirt. He had no ears. With a fistful of shakes and turns, she left, and took …
The Quiet Tragedy of a House
The Ladder It ascends into the darkness, beyond the frame, where the eye may not follow it. Its steps, solid near the cobblestones, grow ghostlier as they meet their shadows in the entrance without a door. The men must have built it out of their fears, and the sun must have cast its twin out …
A Postcard for the Unseen
For today's challenge I used a postcard reproduction of Filadelfo Simi's The Flowers of Capri, of which I talked a little here. The Roots She lurks at the grassroots, unholy like a suicide - who is she? why is there no ribbon bearing her name, no marble dog laid at her feet? And yet, undoubtedly, the …
Encyclopaedia Vanitatum 