Lord of Bubbles

Tags

ancient deities, demonology, Elaine Stirling, emotional disorders, mythology, poetry

I

Today they call him Beelzebub,
lord of the flies, high-ranking demon
ward of gluttony and pride, and deemed
the adjutant to Satan, dark lord of us all.

To me, though, he was Baal, sweet
lord of grain and plenitude, of rain and
mighty feats, a Philistine whose way
with words caught hold the ear of
jealous kings. In armour bronze, they
marched to Ekron, to our city fair, they
felled our walls and temples, burned the
olive groves where Baal and his disciples,
I among them, met in secret counsel, his
dispellants we would learn. Repel them he
did not, but let them drag our lord to their
harsh failing lands, demanding that he
use his cursed magic to reverse what
they had made with bubbled,
closed minds.

II

And this he did, my sweet lord
Baal, he popped them, one by one,
restoring clarity to vision scaled by enmity
and self-declared divinity; the people in the
fields they saw him first, their grain replied
with multiple abundancy and next the
merchants found their wares swift
flying from their booths—it’s Bab-El
opened once again, they cried, the
holy Gate of God, praise Baal, aleluia,
all praise to our Lord Baal!

III

Who killed my lord for his
good works, I cannot say,
for jealousy has ears that
stretch across millennia, the
demon vice possessiveness
roams free and undetected
in our bubbled minds today.

They sent his body home to
us in rags; by then the flies
were feasting on his heart
and spleen; the mockers
had their way—oh look, haha,
it’s Baal, lord of the flies!

IV

The demon of the now
and then that calls itself
the dark lord isn’t real;
oppressor of the spirit light,
discourager of words, it offers
up depressive prayers that
medicate but never heal; in
pendulum she swings and
thinks himself both clever
and magnanimous in gloom.
If Baal were here—indeed,
he is—the true beseech to our
kind popper, Lord of Bubbles,
might be said like this:

Dear Baal, If I can’t be
your time and space and
bounce upon your springs
and steal your sexuality, I’ll
tell you what you feel and think,
a copier, opinionate, and if I can’t,
I’ll be the rug, pro bono, ‘neath your
feet, sweet writhing, I shall flatten
like the sole fish bottom feeder
that I sold in market once to you;
just do not leave me here entombed,
I pray, oh Baal, horned deity of plenitude,
inside this bubble head where fend I
must these nasty yapping foul-faced,
screeching, solar/lunar moods!

~~~
©Elaine Stirling, 2012

Advertisement

Barons in the Tea Room

Tags

alignment, brain & body hemispheres, commerce, corpus callosum, Elaine Stirling, Industrial Age

Carnegie and Morgan
strode to my table in the Tea
Room last night, not quite arm
in arm but laughing, top-hatted
with great black coats and
umbrellas. JP pushed my Earl
Grey aside and rolled a blueprint
of some incomprehensible structure
out across the table. We hope
you don’t mind.

Before I could protest, his
Scottish companion jabbed
a solid finger to the center.
D’ya see this steel door,
garage-like, utilitarian, cuttin’
straight down the middle of
your whole self? One of these
gets installed into every one of us,
molten at first and pliable, free
movement left to right,
until we start to listen—

Don’t give it all away, AC,
said the banker to his friend
through blue-green smoky
plumes of a Cuban cigar.
Carnegie rolled blue eyes that
twinkled and scarfed in a single
bite my clotted cream scone.

Andy’s right about the door, the
way it hardens—we watch and
hear one word at a time, one
disapproving gesture after another,
including the ones we can’t make
out; and before you know it, the steel
is set and bolted on three sides.

And you’re telling me this because?

Pay attention, little lady. Questions
later. Each of these bolted edges
has a purpose. Over on the left, this
vertical, we call it Faith, whatever
you believe that will take you
somewhere or meet you at the
end—money, women, God, the
whole bundle tied together, doesn’t
matter. Denying Faith is stupid.
Figure out what you believe, then
give her your full attention. Make sure
it comes from here; he buffed the far side
of the blueprint with a beefy hand. Not
some mealy pap handed down to you
from the upstairs nursery.

The second line of rivets, Carnegie took
over, seal the right edge, we call it Fact—
necessary principles of physics and the
chemical, of pressures, heat and cold. No
use fightin’ the realities of Fact either, but
you mustn’t believe in them. Make them
serve you. I’ve known riveters so beaten
by reality, they’d wall you in for tuppence
if you let them. Never let them.

The barons flanked me at the small
round table like wool-cloaked ravens,
titans of industry and excess, I’d been
less than generous in my assessments
of them and they knew it. JP laughed.
You’d have made a fine Pierpont.
Any questions?

At the moment, no. Tell me,
please, about the third bolted edge.

The producer of steel, founder of
libraries traced a line across the top
of the pock-marked door. Bridge Faith
and Fact and you have Commerce, the
movement of the business of reality.

Investing is not solely about money. He
glanced at JP. Where you park your
slippers and affections at night, these
matter too. Melancholy wives and
mistresses worked well for us, the
billy clubs and briberies to break
the backs of anarchy, but you’ve
a different system now—

and the bolts of 1896 are jammed
and rusting, added Morgan.

The two men fell then to debating
anti-trust, and I ceased to listen,
yet for all their pomposities, they
had somehow turned me
so that I could see the door
in front of me from both sides,
riddled with—who knows?
asteroids or bullets from dissident
realities. On their side worked the
riveters, limiters of labour and of all
I had agreed to know and to believe.

From this side, freedom exuded
virtue and liberty before they
girded bridges, birthed statues
and democracies.

While I gaped at my surroundings
a thin black booklet slipped through
the door’s unbolted base. Title:
Carnegie and Morgan, A Pocket
Companion through the Ages.
I flipped through pages.

Lend no breath to what offends.

The future is yours, never sell it;
lease in increments toward better.

Learn to distinguish between
shiny and the unalloyed.

Freedom of movement, Carnegie
had said…lives on both sides, implied
Morgan. I gazed at the obstruction
I had thought to be impervious,
that was shown to be a door and
saw it was a veil, softly billowing.

Giggling, I glided through the veil,
resumed my place at the table and
summoned the waiter. A round of
drinks, please, for my friends—
whatever they would like. We
have business to discuss.

© Elaine Stirling, 2012

Crosshairs

Tags

duality, Elaine Stirling, perception, poetry, self-importance

He snipes from a corner
visage with a view, from a 
tower not of ivory but of
melancholy hue;

the quadrants of his
crosshairs split the world
in two and two again; I’ve
been the target of his sights
and, lightly grazed, I know
he seeks to right what
can’t be wronged,

and every time he loads
to fire anew, intelligence
sends out a tremor that
alerts brigades and
cavalcades, a blush
of spies report the
movements and
intentionalities that
wholeness does not
see, and while the
sniper feels assured,
his crosshairs tremble.

We are each of us an
infantry, tin soldiers, washer
women, boys and girls, we play
at hide and seek, and as we flush
the grouse and peasantry from all
we fear to lose, our woods deplete
until at last, as integers, we stand
alone reflected in the center of
a crosshairs not our own.
~~~
© Elaine Stirling, 2012

Salacious

Tags

Diego Rivera, Elaine Stirling, Frida Kahlo, Mexican dance, Mexican painters, muralists

“Zandunga in Tehuantepec” by Diego Rivera

Salacious details splashed
across the pages of the press
again of you and me, today.

I yearn to call their spiteful
sting a fiction, feeding as we did
those hungry years our appetites
for juice of pomegranate, melon
twines, sweet seeded prickly
pear, your pair and mine, alas

the frenzy monstrous has
become and overshadows
turned to chiaroscuro talents
of your lusty brush, you stroke
with careless thought the fine-
toned legs that fuel murals of
Tehuantepec, the artsy set,
thick-bushed, they mob you
waving funds supplied by
husbands chasing greenbacks
having burnt the maps
to their cold marriage beds

and now I ask myself, confined
to these four posters and the mirror
where I paint myself in slow decline
how so these jealousies, for have
I not partaken equally, mixed
palettes soft and furious like you,
my sable brush to dip across wet
canvases, intoxicate, while dancing
slow zandungas to the memory
of your name?

We’ve none to blame though
time’s sweet measure pours us
here again, salacious, into arms
not yours, not mine, for in the end,
if end there be, the myriad of
colours in the mural of infinity
will shine the brightest that
derive from you and me.

© poem, “Salacious”, by Elaine Stirling, 2012

Teasers… Dead Edit Redo/ Dead to Rights

Here is a sneak peek at my upcoming novella Dead Edit Redo and the accompanying book of glosas by my elusive collaborator Alain C. Dexter. I’m grateful to Tim C. Taylor for his unflinching enthusiasm in publishing our work, and I just love how he words things! When your publisher is also a fantasy sci/fi writer, you know your books are in especially good hands.

Teasers… Dead Edit Redo/ Dead to Rights.

My thanks go out also to Gavriel Navarro for his gorgeous cover art for Dead Edit Redo. I remember distinctly my down-to-the-marrow shock at how brilliantly he had rendered the mood and theme of the story.

In Defense of Entropy

Tags

apiary lore, boundaries, Elaine Stirling, humour, life lessons, poetry, self-expression

I have just completed six weeks
of schooling with bees. Don’t quote
me on the time frame. The buzzing
in my head that went on for decades
may have been early language training.

The Queen bee worries that I won’t
get this poem right, since I can’t dance
it for you with my hind end. I told her that
kind of dancing is another form of poetry.

Start with something simple, she said.
Tell them how pre-life hums in hexagonal
thought cells, holding the honeycomb that is
you, only you, safe from fatal buzzings.

But humans, I argued, are far too sizzled
by stress to believe something so six-sided.
Besides, I’d rather say it my own way.
Queen bee sipped her honey. Drone on, she
shrugged, and laid fourteen hundred eggs.

Okay.
What Her Majesty said.
Plus this.

Each of us is a self-containing colony of workers
and drones, baby bees, dying bees, hiving and
thriving an intricate play for the fun of it.

Swarming of people and bees won’t hurt you,
unless you squinch in between them and their
queen who’s looking for a better place to stretch.

If a swarm attacks, state loudly into their whiskery
conformist faces: I Am Not Your Egg Layer. Buzz Off!

Hive invasion is a myth, the untrue kind, drawn
from our tendencies to vibrate in sympathy.

The finest honeys are brewed from a blend of
pollens. Gather what entices, like the bees do,
in parts of your body that were made for the task.

When you have the proper mix of ingredients for
sweetness—and this is the important part:

Spit
It
Out.

~~~
© Elaine Stirling, 2011
(with thanks to poet friends who helped me with edits in the original Facebook post)

A Paragraph I Wish I’d Written–and a Poem I Did

Tags

conflict, D.H. Lawrence, depletion, Elaine Stirling, failure, Lady Chatterley's Lover, poetry, renewal, victim mindset

“Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalize. Set the mind and the reasons to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to criticize, and make a deadness. I say all they can do. It is vastly important. My God, the world needs criticizing today . . . criticizing to death. Therefore let’s live the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But, mind you, it’s like this: while you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You’ve severed the connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connexion. And if you’ve got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple . . . you’ve fallen off the tree. And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it’s a natural necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.”

—D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928

~~~

Denuded

Where the oaks stood
on the crown of a knoll
until they were felled
to timber the trenches of
the war to end all wars
I stand with you now in
silence—what to do,
what to do, I wonder,
with these empty hands?

You’ve never thought
yourself a whittler, I am sure,
or a hewer of hardwood,
hatchet-driven, yet how else
to describe what became of
the foliate lushness of our
beginnings, the time and life
surrrounding us, the acorns
of my words spilling across
the humus of your visions?

You wouldn’t water them,
my words; the cisterns where
you gathered rain, you kept off
limits, saving your moist breath
for sellers of tinsel, masked
with ruby lips.

The silence stretches pink and
taut like a pregnant frog’s belly,
like the gum you used to chew
with intense concentration as
if thoughts beyond where’s the
nearest door were ready to burst.

They never did. Nothing burst
but you and me and nothing’s
changed. We didn’t need to meet
here today where oaks perished
to furnish killing fields to establish
once again that stand-offs cannot
grow stanzas or new stands of trees.

My left hand is twitching. I spy
an acorn near your foot and
wonder which of us first spoke
it. Our eyes meet as if you’re
daring me, and with the toe of
your boot you kick dirt over the
lone fetal oak. Resigned, I sigh,
reach out to shake your hand
and from the inky sky falls the
drop that will become the deluge
that washes away you, me, and
every one of us warmongers.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2012

A Circularity of Glosas

A Circularity of Glosas.

The Wakening

Tags

Elaine Stirling, erotic poetry, expanding metaphors, new love, romance

Do you remember
the night we set fire
to the tablecloth in that
swank Marbella restaurant?

How the waiter came
running, only to find you
and me arc-welding iron
sparks of rose and wild grape
wrought filigree o’er plates
of pulpo so fresh caught,
you thought you heard
them still conversing.

Uproariously drunk, we
left Chez What-the-frig to
find that stretch of beach
again where Guardia Civil
had said of us how well we
fit. You do not know the half
of it, I giggled, tipply from your
kisses and the outline of your
hand still pressed upon a place
wherein I rode, for multiple
eternities, the moons of
all the Jupiters.

This talk of memories
would break my heart if I
were not now tracing every
word upon your naked calf
with fingertip, the tangled sheets
and scent of you sweet dreaming
I can tell the way you smile
you are reliving heights of
ecstasy we have yet still to
ride and they are pulling us
like flood gates of a levee
draw the river in to power
mills and factories;

the industry of love
and all its metaphors
wash over me, I straddle
you, a shameless baroness,
to rob you of your sleep. My
breast, erected nipple dips
into your ear, your moan turns
into gasp, you turn your head
and, smiling, reach to greet
this burgeoning, this ever
new awakening.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2012

How to Hold a Vibration and Grow It

Tags

Elaine Stirling, poetry, self-reflection, transformation, vibration

Image by Dean Keller

Spitting mad one night I asked
the rain how, yet again, the good
had dropped away, how pools
once full and fountaining now
gaped, the rusting pipes of nymphs
grown sordid, deaf to majesties
of song perpetual and flow.

We’re good at bringing low,
I said, of angling away
and pulling toward us what
we don’t appear to want, then
shoving it with myriads of
reason for our blame. Where
did we learn this paltry game?

The rain, she did not answer me,
though every drop hit perfectly
upon the rock and spikes of grass
and sparked a connectivity that
didn’t ask of every drip to justify
its time and space, or doubt its
capability to drain the banks
of cloud and never questioned
how her future moistures
would arrive. This I did note.

I visited the woods electric
blue of tamarack and yew
still damp and shivering
with memories of you and
wondered what the chances
were of once again discovering
that life is more, not lessening,
and while I formed these thoughts
a spark of something tremulous
ignited at my ear, and I could
hear the laughter of a worry-free
and blissful creativity. For me?

A plop of gooey sap, it fell upon
my nose; I wiped it off and in
the stickiness opined that what
we think coheres and swiftly
multiplies, the more of same
until we reach a tipping
point, and like the rain,
yes, like the rain…

but then the night grew cold
and bleak, a harshness circled
round me, taunting names and
grudgeries I’d held for aeons
past as if in expectation of a
judge somewhere awaiting my
accounts of who and why
and how and when; and if my
evidence fell short again I’d
fall to someplace lower than
I sought my right to be.

Where lives this judge?
I looked around.

Soaked to the skin, awake,
it mattered not to anyone
how long I stayed, and
though the ghouls they
snapped and frothed at me,
the hellhound tags hung from
their necks aclattering, I smelled
their feebling transparency.

How rank you are, I said with
no great urgency. Those tempting
parts you offer, pull away, then
twist to make the weakness mine
is nothing more than self-occluding
voice, abundancy’s swift measures
to avoid. I shrug you off!

For now that I in lover’s arms
enjoy what grows and bountifies,
I need no longer name the ghosts
of what we tried and failed to grow
in worry’s enervating bitter holds.

Upon that self-affirming thought,
the harshness fell like ebon drapes
and from the east arrayed a sharp,
near blinding brightness, so I turned,
wide-eyed, to greet and saw the
multitudes vibrating, and I walked,
slow smiling, toward the light.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2012