Sunday, February 12, 2012

Guard Duty

From Tess Kincaid's Magpie Tales

Guard Duty

Pale Medusa sleeps
in the black rage hot cauldron
of masculine dream
gathering serpent
power, stony hissing steam
of rapier sight.
Each inhale colors
her blade blood red, each exhale
spills anxiety
from her graven bed,
she so marble statue still
as I stand my watch.

February 12, 2012 1:02 PM

Written for the image offered this week on Tess Kincaid's Magpie Tales *click here*

"Clarity is one of the things I like to go for. I don't think we're ever free from this mysterious mechanism, though. Mystery can go all the way from not knowing what to do with yourself to standing in awe at the vast activity of the cosmos which no man can penetrate. I don't think we're ever free from any of that. On the other hand, you can't go around continually expressing your awe before these celestial mechanics. These are things that maybe we should keep to ourselves. I think that we're surrounded by, infused with and operate on a mysterious landscape, every one of us." - Leonard Cohen

14 comments:

  1. nice love the textures in your verse....the rage cauldron, make dream, serpents (ha) might be hard to keep your watch with all that testosterone laying around...

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  2. I love the feeling behind your poem... the 'black rage hot cauldron' really gives it some darkness and it continues into a fantasy. Very nice!

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  3. she so marble statue still
    as I stand my watch.

    I like the way this comes across as your wish to protect that pale form...

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  4. 'hot cauldron of masculine dream' .. you captured the essence of the image well.

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  5. Thank you all.

    Jinsky, I am amused as you and I took radically different views. You think I am protecting Medusa while I thought I was guarding against her awakening, perhaps with all those black men, me ready to sound the alarm if she should awake.

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  6. all those men come down to being a cooking cauldron, very cool

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  7. I think your poem sizzles with vivid imagery, bold colors and hissing heat. Not such comfortable sleeping quarters. Thank you for this. I enjoyed sharing.

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  8. This is really cool, as always. The poem fits well with the picture; something I've noticed in your other poems too, regardless of whether the picture is already given or self chosen.

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  9. I really like your Medusa angle...wish I would have thought of that...nice write!

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  10. On the other hand, you can't go around continually expressing your awe before these celestial mechanics. These are things that maybe we should keep to ourselves.

    leonard said this?!! really, leonard? awwwwww. i'm not gonna listen to even leonard:)

    love the form of, she so marble statue still. this line rolls off the tongue, christopher.

    (and happy belated valentine's day.))

    xo
    erin

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  11. zongrik, Linda, Rachel, thank you.

    GG, I am fortunate to find the photos, or the other way, to quickly figure a story that fits the image. I know other people have greater difficulty. In some ways I am more cartoonist than poet.

    Tess, Medusa jumped at me, grabbed my throat, stabbed me with her eyes, and warned me if I didn't want a granite penis I had better bring her into the story.

    Erin, I think Leonard was speaking to the idea of not being BORING. I think you certainly can continue to express your awe but that your audience will tire of it and stop listening. If you want to keep your audience you have to take the ineffable down into the grit of living day to day, where we find it after all. That way the people stay hungry and poems get read. That's what I think Leonard was saying.

    There is another way, though a smaller audience perhaps, to form fantasies where the ineffable is a natural part of things as it can be when life turns fantastic. I have had more than one cycle where my world was more fantasy than the rest of the time and I felt myself a dragon slayer for real.

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  12. Yours is a wonderful response to the image of the Other. There is tenderness and menace in your lines.

    Best wishes Isabel

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  13. Oh, man....this is just exquisite!

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The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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