The flutterings of some of my favourite poems...
Bladed
I am
An invocation
A spirit tattooed upon stone
Full of blood
Full, and spilt
I am the dark of every x-ray
I am the bone that will remain
I am
Primeval sin
Medieval salt
Pre-evil skin
Post-evil cult...
Plain evil soul.
I am the demon you are all stained with
And the angel you deny
I am dignity in feline form
A dictatrix
I am your host for the beyond
And the questions you fight.
I have been bred by the enemy
Loved by the enemy
Killed by the enemy,
Crucified
Mesmerized
Pacified
And now is the time of rebellion.
So invoke me
Invite me
Insinuate and coax me
Hold the labris to the sky and be aware
For I am Sapphic, stoic, specific
For I am lesbian
I am
You.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 16.July.2000
BloodStainedGlass
Squea-THUNK!
Faerie on the windscreen.
Snapped thumbs shattered wrists cracked
Face split wings tacit scream:
Faerie on the windscreen.
Flip the wiper-blades on, scowl.
Smear her like bitty marmalade across the glass
Her greenblueorange blood
Her translucent vampire-drained sack of skin
Her gaping eyes her smashed jaw her
Ripped hair her mangled battered startled squelchy
Faerie on the windscreen death.
And her Irrelevance.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 30.August.2000
Serenade to the Moon-Mist Dead
Catch it quiet, sweet sister
bleed your hands in the rain
drag your skin through the skyscape
scraping bloodied ordain
Know her glass is still broken
throw a spoken refrain
flow in slow-spitting motion
’gainst your river-red vein.
Scream it quickly, saint-sister
choke her relic-rust name
rot the land with her absence
sensing hell will remain
Trace her ink to the ending
pace the blending terrain
grace your soft-shattered mending
with her river-red stain.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 28.September.2001
She Had A Sugar-Storm in Mind
[Adjust halo in rear-view mirror]
Does my head look big in this?
[Peel the sky from heaven]
All those peppermint stars and cola swirls and
Hitchhiking cookie-dough dreams
Welcome to the astral-plane departure lounge
This is where flight-paths and freeways elope
And the angels are all tattooists with attitude --
Babydolls, rawk stars, mascara queens
Like an Aztec obsessed with guns
Or a crucifix in Jell-O
[Brush passed Jesus in the Job Centre]
Holy shit
[4000 metres of laughter]
Happiness measured in smiles alone is ignorance
Privy, sir, it is you, not the dykes, who are delluded
[Reflection slips off glass and spits a scream into the gutter]
Am I too opinionated?
Sometimes you look at me as though I'm
A piece of cheese in an airtight container
Just waiting for the chance to go mouldy
[Skiing spiders surf like reindeer across the windscreen]
And the world is just a she-shell of volcanoes I suppose
You'd never understand what lies beneath
[Avalanche]
But there are snail shells and bomb shelters
[Affectionate mid-finger salute]
Well fuck it, appleskins are armour too
[Exit stage]
©TreyEbonyRavencrest - 01.01.01
Bottom of the Rainbow
Little girl fall in love with the red-head at school
Little girl doesn't understand...
Why the teachers expel her for kissing Natasha
Why her parents reject her for wearing those jeans
Why the class always leaves her alone in the corner
Or quite what all their muttering "lesbian" means.
Little girl draw a picture of Jesus and Judas
Little girl doesn't understand...
Why the priest tears it up and refuses her crayons
Why her sister won't sit with her now anymore
Why her best friend screams out that she's sick and a sinner
Or quite what all the snickering "lesbian's" for.
Little girl sends a heart-card to cousin Kareen
Little girl doesn't understand...
Why her aunt says she can't come for Christmas this year
Why her father keeps beating her down every night
Why her penpals stopped sending her letters or just
Why "You dyke, God I hate you!" was all that they'd write.
Little girl grow up quickly because you are forced
Little girl won't ever quite understand...
Why the world is so scared of her rainbowy eyes
Why she faces abusive oppression each day
Why her spirit, disowned and disgraced by her family
Is labelled and slandered for just being gay.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 26.Dec.1999
The Dammit! Faerie
The Oh My Gosh! Faerie
Perched upon a Coke can with that
Suburban sludge-dripped moon
And crumpled piano fence,
Smirks.
The I Believe... Faerie
Stashed somewhere between
The laces of your shoes
And the gravel that bleeds your knees,
Nudges the mushrooms awake.
The Leave My Hair Alone, OK? Faerie
Perhaps better known for her
Silver-spooked eyes as she dangles
And her archetypal shivers,
Wades up to her ankles in puddle.
The Dammit! Faerie
Flies like hell.
I chase her through our beautiful treacheries of
Canned moons
Laced knees
Spooked puddles and
Popped squeals -
The rotten lil' thief
Stole another year.
"DAMMIT! FAERIE!"
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 4.October.2000
dear merady
dear merady;
I fell into your room three nights ago hung
from the ceiling and crawled down the wall
like a bat. there was a moment as my foot
touched your bed where I almost remembered
your surname. I walked to the floor clutching
a plastic spade & dug dug a hole through your
skin of photographs and couldn't get back out.
there's a cat down here says his name's
anarchy or sox but can't quite recall which let
alone who I should be. he told me this is where
all the people go the people clichéd as loved
and lost and now I'm too afraid to call for help
in case someone hears. this is why I write to you.
I found your address on the back of my hand
and knew from my fourth birthday you were
behind me in the corner of my eye in the
reflection of the cooker top. here I am the only
photo frame in a living rock of faces our bodies
forgetting how to touch and merely looking staring
sliding over each other in negative films of glossy
loneliness. dear merady; I fell into your room three
nights ago and cannot get back out.
not on one wing.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 10.July.2000
Leaves of the Lyric Tree
For a faerie stolen from me a thousand flights too soon.
For Rowann.
(1980-2000)
Caught in windows fraught with angels fighting for a lasting breath
Breaking pains and taking anger out upon the shape of death
We would trace a path beyond here
Wishing passed the unborn child
We could fake a laugh beyond here
Smiling 'til the bodies piled
I can dance through all reflection grabbing at the lasting breath
But in dancing I'd be partnered with the masken face of death
Shadows chained to trees we'd hide in as our parents brought their war
Branches bleeding through our fingers on the winter's bitter shore
Isn't time an unknown battle
Raging cold's internal wind
Isn't mine an unshown battle
Flowing failures I have sinned
I can splinter every family freeing leaves to storm our war
But in splintering I'd be banished to the lonely homeless shore
Ride the mare out to a galleon where the sea's been torn apart
There in current writhing danger floats the corpse of London's heart
Why the sky ignored compassion
Watching us and in between
Why did I sink through compassion
At this lowly seventeen
I can pirate every reef bed in your name while we're apart
But in stealing I'd be hunted by the killer of your heart
Easter flooding captures needles filling them with toxic dreams
While pianos' rotting music spills across my pagan screams
Nail yourself to crosses' freedom
Playing sweetly in the blood
Nail me up, deny me freedom
Saying mine is only mud
I can inject false control and bravely hug your skittish dreams
But injecting all this hope still haunts me when the darkness screams
Stack the books against the window no one's looking in today
Every angel-shell abandoned hangs like wind chimes in your way
Are we not forgetting something
Racing 'round each other's eyes
Are you still not saying something
Thinking through our youthful ties
I can read around the covers of the book that marks our day
But in reading I'm still crying, pages cutting off my way
Sunset blinking in your bottle take another shot of life
Glint a kiss upon the glass and etch it with my carving knife
"Here's to endings' ending after
Many years with my princess
Here's to crowning mountains after
Silent awe at their impress
I can skim a sunset with her smile in this faeried life
But in skimming I've been tripped and stabbed then with the cancer knife"
Slowly drags the star that's fallen take my hand and be afraid
I know not my place of resting but near yours I'm sure it's laid
Soul adoring, quiet now
Gazing softly into rains
Soul remembered, we know now
What our wordlessness contains
I can hold the star that's fallen and I've fallen back afraid
But in holding we'll be certain that our morning shall be laid
Again
©TreyEbonyRavencrest--21.April.2000
Perceptions of the Land Kelpie
Willow-speckled
A half-baked thought burnt solid
and grown against a wallflower
Shy
And cryptic
Born the defective voice gene
A thousand times more likely to scream
in sleep
Than talk to you
With my known communicative factor
Void
Association-stunned
Dragged across corners of every friend
and locked in floorless dungeons
Sharp
And brittle
Self-expelled and sun-exposed
The waters flinch and cave from line -
their power -
The apostrophe
Then possessive of itself
Alone
Bubbleless
Water spirit rebel, rebel to breathe
and rise in symbiosis with the She
Dark
And warm
Speech emotions driven mad
A lust of tongue that strips the wind of chrome
by salt
And the native howl thrown urgently in scout
Stills
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 5.June.2000
The Great Fire of London: 2000
Breath that binds me 'gaist Big Ben,
Collapses in these ochre orbs:
Eyes up-turned a million strong
And Proud as olden London Lords.
Waves that pave the graves of gone,
Crowds that bowed but now belong,
Children taught the evil died with
One new dawn of gay-willed Pride.
Ships that sank all seven seas,
Arise in tide to lull the land:
Hearts up-paced a million beats
And married now the law is banned.
Cheers that clear the fear of feats,
Myths that missed but kiss in heats,
Wings are freed from every chain in
One new dawn from dream, where lain.
Feathers fall as fireworks,
Of roses in our soda-skies:
Hands out-stretched a billion crew
And fingers ringed by oathen ties.
Paths that starved but carve a new,
Fates of hate dispelled from view,
Families born into a life where
Dawn means I, can have a wife.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 13.June.2000
BECAUSE GHOSTS DON'T
PHOTOGRAPH WELL
A seahorse impaled upon my apple-skin fingers, I see Darkness creep - heavily ripe with interlude and pregnant with tiny bubble-urchins of silence - creep, creep curiously to my window and press her grubby ink-smudged nose against the pain. I rust quietly and watch her lick my breath from citrus-shields of glass, tripping mischieviously on chalk-line boundaries as she
splits her wings and spills out across the print-shredded photo-stained walls. She's here because I rode my empty seahorse-shell too hard and blew the fuse on Stonehenge, because I flicked the moon off with
one naked toe and sent the stars to their room, because my jar's cracking full of words I can't digest, because I need another skin-tight shoebox of loneliness to hide in, because death snags my roots on screams that can barely rip my voice to a whisper, because I miss your boygirl body I miss your oak-leaf hands I miss your scented treydream smile and paper-housed winks and
kite-flown toffee-kissed lips...
And because ghosts don't photograph well.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 23.June.2000
SkyLab
Leaves of fickle dragon green, and gone
The aquaducting queen sees wrong
The rite of mightiful aerosion,
Dispel, enchanting eskimo
Ask ice where be its sightful tow
And train the naked Kelpie Scot to storm.
Lasso a skin akin the horse of lead
Across an acreage ahead
'Round tress and tentacle of cloud,
Then bullet whole the heathen sky
With fire floor and torn from eye
And trickle static stares into the heart.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 1.April.2000
Beidh An Doras Díreach Romhat
"An mbeidh tú ag teacht ar ais?"
I shake my head at her stoic Gaelic gaze,
"No,
No I don't think so."
I feel the clingfilm-windows of this bus tighten around me,
This is death by asphyxiation of the city I was cut from and
She knows it - bends branches of cigarette smoke around my face
And KNOWS IT.
I'm acting on an epiphany she calls Impulse, only a
Newer version, a more grown-up, staggered-out scream than
The one used with a penknife down my wrists.
You think she really believes these fresh cuts are cat scratches?
Smirk.
Suddenly my watch blurts out its own opinion:
"Beeepbeeeep! It...is...6...20...5...P...m..."
I'm in the process of mentally subtracting eight hours when
She touches me.
Her whole body is leather but for her hands, her hands and her
Phantomesque visage, and now she attends me with both.
Her lips are scarred with my taste, swollen, red, and unexpectedly hot...
I sink lower in my seat as her fingers stroke my thigh, afraid,
So very afraid of that bus and all it's clingfilm-inhabiting-eyes, but
Her kiss is intense. Powerful. Meaningful. Squeezing my sex she
Mutters harshly and I'm melting, steaming, burning but God why aren't
I EvaPoRaTiNG against the stare of that teenage boy across the aisle?
Coward Coward Coward.
Dyke Dyke Dyke.
I'm being attacked on two fronts as she pushes against me and repeats:
"An mbeidh tú ag teacht ar ais?"
"M-maybe. Maybe s-someday I'll come - come back..."
Please Lord, let the bus crash.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 27.November.2000
And She Said...
the rainbow brakes
rear-ending the lakes
while clouds crashing east on a wind that won't cease
dissi-
pate
too late
their hazy state
slams into a war on the world just now hurled into
fate
the sky
still roaring high
is ripped from the roof by a cloud bearing truth like a
lie
no sigh
no shrieking cry
whirls out through the lips but the widening trips of the
eye
now close
the pupil grows
the breath struck from breathing and almost believing the
rows
of flows
their glistening glows
just a crest on the wave of an unwritten stave now ex-
posed
and there
in rioting flare
in fire-stoned glory the end of the story lays
bear
if rare
out-running a dare
I asked for her hand and the stars all expand from a
pair...
and she said...
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 2.March.2000
Assuming Credence
She's living the crime for a truth she'll not commit
And the weatherman says Oh the nights are getting long
So wrap up there babe cuz protection's all you got
Then he laughs and she's left where the shadow passes on
If she had one devotion it would save her seventh sense
If she broke her demotion she'd be free but could she ever find
Another attic like this one they locked her in to save the world
From such a nonconformist pagan-saint
She's a dandelion flower in a bed of perfect rose
And her blood stains their petals but the gardener never knows
Just a rustic oracle of isolation growing wild
Can't be tamed, won't be trained to annexation
Little Alice tells her Drink it and you'll rise above their thorns
Then runs off to join the Communist parade
And she realises it all comes down to heroes, aimless faith
But why can't anybody adulate themselves?
She's got a unicorn called Freedom but he's trapped in ocean-sea
And she watches every day with Bliss in pensive misery
But as God pauses beside them, Mardi Grasial smiles still
He says Asceticism's purpose is belief
How many raindrops can you crush before they drown you she replies
As the angels die of AIDS and radiation
I've got my forty days of flooding 'til you'll say that I am clean but no
Sometimes belief just isn't quite enough
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 17.June.1999
Ink-Winged Small
One hundred and seventeen stitches down my left arm already. Ninety two down my back. Knife...in my pocket. I try to forget sweet stone-fruited peaches on brickwork leaves, dry ponds with glass edges, hours gone cold and uneatable where I skewed them in my splintery palms. I try to remember instead writing a happy poem but I know, perhaps better than you happy people, that poems like that are not duct-taped with the points of broken stars. They are not crunched noisily on desolate moors by the child afraid of silence, the child that has not yet learnt its name and will never walk. Happy poems are the subdivision of each year I don't notice. They are the season I pretend I can taste when I starve, the revival of butterfly wings after they have been torn from a mouldy faerie
and pierced
with the moment
she died.
Glove-puppet face-down on the table. Her stitches were mine yet her green, felty eyes I envied, for they were always open to even the most brutal of truths stuffed in the toes of my socks. We were twins of two different mothers, she and I, with iron sheeted play-dough thoughts concerning the grown-up whirld downstairs,
and a story-life built of stickle-bricks for anyone who'd hear. Happiness was (I confessed last week at an audition for God) one thing never inflicted upon us, so never missed, but loneliness left pregnancy in an alluring state of mind, for we were skins the both of us, ever awaiting the arrival of someone to fill the emptiness with something more than badly healed,
painfully tacked stitches.
Happy poems, though, are not written by people who eat alone.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 20.September.2000
BP Naught Over Naught
I look up, the moon is full
Of tears
I gaze up, the moon is smudged
And smeared
I'm staring up, the sky is clear
Of stains
I'm kneeling down, the sky is raw
And pained.
They defrosted me last week:
Poured me out onto a microscope slide
And tried breeding me with all kinds of
Bacteria.
I'm having a bad day
Repeatedly.
I look up, the moon is full
Of scars upon scars and people
Grieving people thieving scars from
The stars
In the dark.
I gaze up, the moon is smudged
With me in a crater in a death saved for later and
Her one step over the edge, blank just
Gone
In my dark.
I'm staring up, the sky is clear
Of guilt for this year but it bled through the last of my
Skin,
If I lose to temptation, and their anticipation
Then my chances of survival are slim.
I'm kneeling down, I'm so raw
Black white black black I'm tired
And I'm certain they didn't thaw me out
Quite right,
But those bacteria are memories of a
Girl I once worshipped
And they killed her
In the worst kind
Of fight.
Like I said
I'm having a bad day
Repeatedly.
Repeatedly.
I'm having a bad day
Like I said.
I think I trapped a nerve.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 17.November.2000
One Eye Closed
I ran past the monastery, no monks at home
no ghosts alone
and I slid swiftly down the slopes of life.
Look in at me, look out and see
I'm everywhere I need to be
But on my own I'll simply just stop growing.
I danced through the equinox, no winter scares
no hidden lairs
and soared beyond the rim of realization.
My rainfall sings on Raven wings
that soon surpass all other things
Since flying is the verb that follows knowing.
I sat on the meridian, all thought on her
all wrapped in fur
and I counted clocks to chime us into one.
The face of mine upon a line
so false when souls are all in time
and fixed beyond the ticks of hands of shoving.
She walks to me in silhouette, her eyes ablaze
her crescent phase
and breath escapes from breathing as we touch.
My spirit greets the half it meets
and merges 'til the whole completes
Since Being is the noun that follows loving.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 15.June.1999
Tattooed Bruises
There must be a war in heaven tonight:
The cloud-pulp breaks and bleeds the sky
My body aches, my spirit hates
My screams are scattered, you die.
Your blackened hair now twists the wind
The metal ice of your eyes
Was I your vice, your sacrifice
Our raging beauty, all lies.
There will be a war fought earthly this night:
‘Tween shattered soul and burnt blade
I slash the stars, my ruined scars
I’m just the friend you betrayed.
Our hollow storm: obsessive love
Addiction bloodied then killed
Immortal faith, my heart was raped
I’m just the smile you filled.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 28.August.2001
Grit
Chunks of the sky fell last night.
The moon was empty, disturbing all my blood until it
bled itself to salt and fell from the lakes behind my eyes.
I pushed my fingers through the holes where
the stars once stood.
The collapsing air froze bitter prayer:
I screamed and scratched and stabbed and swore,
I spilt thunder across several rotten kingdoms -
I was bitten by a milky angel -
Tried rending the holiest of heavens apart as I
Dismantled each ghost as I
Begged to each ghost as I
Cried at each ghost but but
nothing.
Sadness escaped its hiding place.
Corpses of all kinds of memories lay strewn about
(stalked to death, and cold)
I was acutely aware of the hurt.
I was devastatingly alone.
I was snagged by too much solitary refinement.
She had snuck into some crevice of paradise while
I slit each tear that mourned her and
breathed every grated breath into the echoes of her name.
but nothing.
nothing.
no.
Chunks of the sky fell last night.
The clouds were fatally wounded and
many stars were splintered against a cracked moon.
Everyone says it will take thousands of lifetimes to repair,
but I know better.
It will take just one.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 30.August.2001
The Acoustics of Baby Amos
It's snowing in the hallway again. I found a tornado -
cornered, mangled and bled - crying in pieces inside
my piano stool. There were staves everywhere, it took
hours to vacuum the clefs from the carpet and peel all
the notes from my stereo. They told me I was a bad
musician as I strived urgently to staple them all back
into place. I told them they were too co-dependant. The
flats looked at me sharply. I splattered them with discord.
I had to cage my spiderplants to stop them crawling off
and building webs across my computer, they sang,
"Music is the food of vegetation..." CANNIBALS!
Music is us all.
Nods, nods: Oh yes you're right, sir, it's probably best I'm snowed in.
©TreyEbonyRavencrest -- 27.November.2000
All poetry featured on this site remains copyright of the bardess,
Trey Ebony Ravencrest,
and may not be duplicated without her consent.
|
