More Poems

by C L Frost

Jagannatha

How they surge forth - a thousand arms

writhing, dark palms imploring,

wet brows quivering, fat parched lips

wincing, bellies jiggling, toes

pattering forth in a toneless roar,

silk sashes shuddering; brown chests

pulsing, rocking, swaying to ancient beats;

saffron hair-flowers spinning up, up

through buzzing moist air; loosened petals

tumbling, swirling down, down like confetti down

while the thick oak stage with iron

wheels groans steadily towards, over

them; crushes each adorer as the flame

red eye of the Wooden One with steel-

gray cheeks and knotting snake arms gazes

down, mute and unblinking.

**************************************

The Redeemed Don't Fly

Think of it -- Would you really try it at once?

With no instinct for it? The risk of falls?

All Eternity to learn? With your thumb that claws

Baffled across the new gold clasps,

Asking whether hooks fasten here and the straps

Criss-cross in back or drop down straight,

And how these wings of unexpected weight

Can ever zipper snugly into place? Your eyes

Squint against the lancing light while high

Angels swoop and soar above St. Peter's gate.

There's so much for seeing and asking everywhere:

Will you rejoin your ancestors in these parts?

Business-world bullies? Rapscallion schoolmates?

Do dragonflies and blue jays ornament this air?

Does the sun ever set and when? Which way is east?

Are clouds stuffed with down, does the pearl ever chip

Or Peter ever drowse and let an imposter slip

In? Do chihuahuas and parakeets, like men, rise

To here, or to a separately fashioned paradise?

How must you hold a fork at celestial feasts?

Address the elite of the order? Meet an old chum?

Should you flee from, or greet, once-vicious beasts?

You'll need lessons in everything - the new decorum,

Local geography, the use of wings: That's why

You may talk and walk to cloud-cliffs, but that's it;

On this, the first day here, the redeemed don't fly.

**************************************

Have You Heard the Flowers Singing?

Have you heard the flowers singing?

They sing the sky-shattering blues

Of butterflies struggling in the net;

Bellow basso profundo, the red of blood,

Of hollowed housewives who fret

To cut the ties they would once choose

And coffins sinking in the all-embracing mud.

Have you heard the scarred moon singing,

The day lilies snickering, ringing?

Sneering petals, too, shall know the mud.

**************************************

A Photographer's Death

Mad, mad, they cried, and perhaps were right.

For him, to immortalize a nanosecond of flight,

The emotion before it fled, the avalanche in mid-fall

Was not craziness but passion: It meant all

To capture on film the wave's curling tip

The instant of catastrophic plunge, that first dip

Fixed forever - a monument of crescentic jade;

To arrest the moment when froth sprayed

Like lace from snapping emerald jaws

And spewed drops congealed to small ivory balls

Spat from a sculpted dragon's snarling face.

He'd rush to the toppling tidal wave, race

To where tower walls creaked before collapse,

Submitting to risk and trusting in luck perhaps

That he'd record the boulder's first soundless slip,

Sparks spinning before explosion, the fatal flip

Before the acrobat crashed, limp legs splayed

In multiple, forever, in photographic parade.

Perhaps they were right: Mad, mad, they cried

When they read that he in the tidal wave had died,

Clutching camera to make materially immortal

Fleet unstable seconds, the elusive and ineffable.

Target Practice?

An angel, not by evil deed,

Nicked her wings and fell from flight

To a world of courser breed.

Angel wounded, burning white -

Will some poacher shoot her in the night?

**************************************

Shakespeare's Type

The Bard's barbs were all handwrit;

Knowing naught of bytes or bits, his wit

Surged from pen in cursive fits -

Anachronistic, futuristic, a Bard who sits

With eyes on keys and mouse in mits

Seems unfit, a pretender or a counterfeit.

Though he sing lyrical, he'd not be Will

Unless his lines flowed from a chiseled quill.

**************************************

What Floats Through My Mind

Pool, pond or sea without drain?

Bloated guppies float in my brain,

Their glazed, crazed eyes bulge out,

Limp lips pout, baited bodies stout

And waiting. Listen at my ears; today

Can you hear decay beneath the water's slosh

When no scouring rains can wash

Away algae floating as foul scum

Above hoards of diatoms

And skeins of strangling kelp?

Red tide and tentacles block the flow

Of thoughts. What's not yet dead can not grow;

Thrashes, then sinks below

Entanglements and undertow.

**************************************

Alternatives

Not in dewy tears leached from sallow pores

But in great waterfalls, the cliff wept.

In springtime, the tear torrents swept

Away red rocks and lichen spotted shore

Like blood clots from a limestone face.

Near the rock where every emotion flows

In fortissimo cleansing crashes against the stone,

Grass cushions the water's flanks and tendril lace

Dances arabesques around buds with natural grace.

Scorched dry, the desert boulder kept

Starkly silent, couldn't parry with a trace

Of water against the lancing solar flames nor

Ineptly mimic the firestorm's hiss and roar.

It mutely burned in its place.

And so, for centuries, nothing grows

On the desert bleached and stoic as a bone.

**************************************

A Child's Warning

And Henny Penny went to tell the king,

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

"No, Your Highness," royal counsel advises;

"Behead this imp for her impertinent bawling!

The sky stays fixed, never is falling;

But Earth, in progress, steadily rises!"

"But King, oh King!", child tries to impore,

"The sky lifts up, but only so far -

What happens when mountains nick a bright star

And jagged hills scrape the sky's floor?"

"Behead this intruder, she wants only to vex;

Jar us with questions, infect us with fears!

Why startling doubts of what we've known for years?:

The universe hums smoothly, is hardly complex."

The king returns to his wine and no one asks why

The tallest trees bend, bricks drop from the wall,

Why no one can stand, and barely can crawl -

Their heads snugly clamped between ground and the sky.

**************************************

 

Trivial Descent

(As Told By a Bacillus)

I live in the raindrop's cold core; my crystal

World drops through space like yours,

Just faster and with a less opaque constraining skin.

It spins and spirals in the dark, falls

With unconscious haste towards the peat or

What your mythos and metaphor might call

Its inevitable rest in the mire of sin

Where all worlds dissolve, but none new begin.

copyright by writer

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