Neighbours: A Creepy Little Horror Poem

Tags

a bit of silliness, Elaine Stirling, eleven syllable lines, hendecasyllabic, humour, minding one's business, my crush on Alfred Hitchcock, nosiness, parody, perception, poetic justice, poetry

Those people that keep to themselves, curtains drawn,
have you seen? Never say where they go when they
smile, say hello. Something funny going on,
you can tell ‘cause he walks slow and sneaky, way
after dark, doesn’t smoke—what’s the point? He should
stay in the house, it’s not safe in the park, and
the woman, her arms black and blue with tattoos
so the bruises won’t show, mark my words! No good
ever comes when you let loose your guard. A hand
will reach in, snatch it all. Don’t sing me the blues
when your house crashes down. You heard it here first!
…
Ka-ta-boom!

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image from the 1954 Hitchcock film, “Rear Window”

Advertisement

A Glosa for the Feast of St. James

Tags

culmination, Elaine Stirling, Feast of St. James, form poetry, glosa, grief, July 25, medieval Spanish, nagual, Santiago, the Mysteries, transmigration

We are once more the pair
who lived in barbed places,
in harsh nests in the rock.
This time is difficult. Wait for me.

—Pablo Neruda, “With Her”,
translation by Alastair Reid

~~~

I brought a tub of melons
to the Feast of Santiago, dimpled
flesh and honey ripe, dirt beneath
my nails, red carnation in my hair.
I looked through empty streets;
she said you weren’t there.
The rails have overturned, we
are not feasting, try the hills
and leave us to our sad affair.
We are once more the pair.

I climbed the way they showed
me at the school for disadvantaged,
but the melons grew too heavy
so I left them by the road
and carried on with signals
from the fire in the faces
of the women who have loved you
and the calloused hands of fishermen.
The cod is gone, so little now of traces
who lived in barbed places.

The seagulls nest in trees,
I’m told, the cormorants synonymous
in days gone by with greed,
they screech at me to leave
you be, he is not here, St. James
is not the man who’ll talk
with you at night of stars;
to him, you are the bars between
the space, disimulate, you stalk
in harsh nests in the rock.

I know my old name too.
It’s how we came to recognize
the me and you, but all of that
is gone. The view across Galicia
is clear; I’ve myths aplenty still
to use of Santiago’s mystery.
Those keys you hold may lead you
to some Heaven’s door, but what’s
in store we neither of us see.
This time is difficult. Wait for me.

~~~

My thoughts and prayers go out to the victims, survivors, rescue workers, and all who are affected by the rail disaster at Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image of street at Santiago de Compostela
from Wikimedia Commons

I Know a Love

Tags

abundance, Elaine Stirling, Law of Attraction, love poetry, new love, relationships, romance, sensuality, vibrational reality

I know a love
that doesn’t show
or force his hand
who lifts this weighted
heart to kiss as if
it were a hummingbird
then sets me down
to go my way,
a muscled love
that rises like the mist
across a mountain lake
and feeds the texture
of my dreams with vast
realities to which I wake
and find the evidence
beside me, ever-growing,
in the shape, the touch
and smile, thrust of you.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Castles

Tags

cycles of time and space, friendship, impermanence, movement, perception, poetry, reconciliation, relationships, romance, sand castles

Everything I draw to life
begins with sand, a line
two points from yours to
mine, in waves we reach
and touch or fall apart, the
walls we build in times
between to fortress heights
and castle beauty reach
dividing me and you from
them or worse, my self alone
exiled, throwing stones that
once were bits of coloured
glass through which I saw you
spectral pure, a rose, and now
the grit of stiffened jaw my only
means, it seems, to breach
through walls that once were
lines of poetry we wrote
and read upon the sand.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Photograph by Lisa Bobechko, 2010

imho

Tags

19th century English form poetry, A.C. Swinburne, creativity, discipline, ego, Elaine Stirling, false humility, poetry, rondeau, roundel, variation of medieval French verse

A Roundel

The poet made not born, at any stage
may ripen, burst a shell of competence
and gold dust pour across the barren page,
the poet made.

The poet born with gilded confidence
thinks highly of the praise, is quick to rage
at plodding steps that sow through diligence.

Grow or die, to both! The truest mage
of poesy to art not artful circumstance
must kindly, with humility, engage,
the poet made.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image of John Keats (1795-1821)

A Little Bit, with Everything

Tags

abundance, beauty, beyond appearances, Elaine Stirling, form poetry, innocence, inspiration, Law of Attraction, Medieval French verse, simplicity, triolet, tweets that grow

A Triolet

Be a little bit in love with everything
for anything can be a start

a quiet glance, a broken string
Be a little bit in love with everything

the bellicose, a freshly buttered kugel ring
beyond appearance lives the tender heart

Be a little bit in love with everything
for anything can be a start.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Picasso Man

Tags

abstraction, Costa del Sol, don't make too big a deal out of tags, Elaine Stirling, Live in the Momentum, new definitions, Pablo Picasso, poetry, self-expression, self-worth, vibrational reality

Picasso man strewn
wide across the beaches
of Marbella, built of scraps
of drifting tide and weed
he sells pain sandwiches
and disappointment wine
the lines to buy his art
stretch all the way to El
Castillo where I met you—
no, not you! See, that’s the
sign. Picasso man shares
words, damn good ones too,
you’re not supposed to feel or
claim, he sets them over
there for strays and lures
the likes of me to pedestals
as if I’d ever climb up one
of those! Projected virgins
with a broken neck, what
good are they? Though mostly
I am sure he does not like
me—whether here or there
it matters not. I have no plan
to integrate the fractured
man. They were the seventies,
what did I know? The better
question is, why am I?
After all these years.
Still looking.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image of man by Pablo Picasso

Sufficing

Tags

abundance, desire, Elaine Stirling, happiness, knowing, Live in the Momentum, nagual, poetry, romance, sexuality, socialization of genders, trust, vibrational reality

There is a kiss that reaches
men who carry hopes for happiness
that women dare not speak of
truth that compasses a gilded
agelessness that spins above
our clouded heads, and all
our slings of shot and pot
to puncture to the sun beyond
fall short, the youth that grows
and glows in darklessness cares
nothing for the squabble or
the whip. And so we lie, with
and to each other, reason-clad,
I cling to memories of a kiss
that fell apart, a book I read,
wise man I heard. What
did he say? No clue!

There is a kiss.
There is a kiss.
That’s all I know.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image of Rudbeckia, black-eyed Susans,
from my garden

Piebald: A Toltec Whimsy

Tags

approach to alignment, Aztec and Maya mythology, Carlos Castaneda, cognitive systems, deliberate creation, don Juan Matus, Elaine Stirling, Feathered Serpent, humour, inner silence, light verse, nagual, Quetazalcoatl, quetzal bird, sacred word play, shamanism, sonnet, time/space reality, Toltec wisdom, vibrational reality

Pulling strands of Time and Word, a feathered
snake and quetzal bird met nose to beak, their
first impressions, Hiss! and Cheap! Bad weather
held them in abyss, abasement, nowhere
could they fly or slither without dragging
scale or tail of the other. Get me out,
Time, I’ve nation-states in crises raging,
cried the snake. Word, the bird was heard to shout,
I do not like this freakish serpent’s coil!
The strands of Word and Time between them squirmed;
they braided, grew, a messy lambent toil
silencing both views and scales overturned,
delivered unto Space, Creation’s king.
Well done! From such as these, new worlds must spring.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image of Quetzalcoatl as depicted
in the Codex Barbonicus is from http://www.crystalinks.com