poem: shame to her

Image: "A Sky-Blue Life" (Peter Milton)

[Occupational hazard of the morning trek: poems that bloom without pen or paper. I carried the lines for the morning's five miles, plenty of repetitions to hold onto fairly tight, all blooming from my current momentary obsession - Kimbra's cover of Nina Simone's performance of George Stone's "Plain Gold Ring" on NS's debut album. Kimbra's cover, a skintight homage to Nina's haunted pavane, is on her album Vows. Throw in my Peter Milton obsession of late, too, that's a mighty full blue plate. Mercy.]

[Shame to Her]
Nina lived it in her cloistered misery
KJ rang it pure and mighty to a New World
We the chorus of bloody valentines
dispossessed ourselves on either side
the serrated lines of wounded exile
cattle calls of salted estuaries
catalogs of blue devastation
riddled holocausts of the blasted Heart
Shaman baby in her lil red thing
holds the barbed thorns of Nina's pain
holds the keys to your prison, too
jailbait Delilah
to your ancient woe
blue skies don't get in
dark stars don't get out
this dirge of regret
spirals down the ladders of
goldenmyths in the bleakest wells
only a kiss away kiss away kiss away
your priested gloom
gathers in the eyes
of her spectral charism
Caliban'd shame to
her Miranda'd tomorrows
high priestess of the wastelands
doomed to cry for merciless mercy
the call of a wild beyond
your blasted suns
your vacant moons
the sequin'd desecration of
the storms of noon.